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Saturday, February 27, 2021

On Friday, Wikinews learned Dr John Nathan Shutt, a long-time contributor to both Wikinews and Wikibooks, died on Wednesday. Editing under the name Pi zero, he was at the time the top contributor to Wikinews by edit count, and came third on English Wikibooks. Dr Shutt was 56 years old.

Dr Shutt’s elder sister, Ms Barbara Shutt, informed Wikinews about his death via email on early Friday. His mother Elsie Shutt had called 9-1-1 emergency services after he had trouble breathing. By the time the ambulance came, Dr Shutt was unconscious. Ms Barbara Shutt also added the doctors operated on him for two hours, but at the end, Dr Shutt died either by blood clots or by a series of heart attacks.

Dr Shutt was the most active editor and administrator on this project and had been contributing as Pi zero since September 2008. He was promoted to administrator in July 2010 and became a reviewer in August 2010. Since then, he has peer-reviewed then published over a thousand news articles on-wiki, the most recent being just a day before his death. He made over 160 thousand edits and over 120 thousand log entries on English Wikinews.

He also held reviewer and administrator privileges on English Wikibooks, having contributed to several wikibooks including Conlang, World Religions, Solar System and The Elements; and created Stacks, a mechanism for sorting the project’s content.

Dr Shutt would occasionally write blogs on his blogger called “Structural insight”. Dr Shutt was interested in constructed languages (conlangs). He was an avid reader, and enjoyed J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels.

In a discussion about Tolkien’s works last year, Dr Shutt said, “I read The Hobbit when I was, I think, a teenager. I read it again a few months ago; not sure if I ever read it between those times. It’s a wonderfully written story — by a linguist and, in fact, a conlanger. I’ve got the Lord of the Rings (the books, I mean), which I’ve read at least a couple of times over the years. And the Silmarillion, which covers the earliest part of Tolkien’s legendarium. Christopher Tolkien, his son who was close to his fantasy writing, is his literary executor and has spent the past half century of his life editing and publishing various of his father’s papers. I actually got for christmas… a year ago, I think, The Fall of Gondolin, which Christopher says will be the last of his father’s books that he publishes.”

Dr Shutt was awarded a PhD in Computer Science in 2011 from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Massachusetts. His research interests included Abstraction theory; the Kernel programming language, a Lisp-based language which he created and was his dissertation topic; Recursive Adaptive Grammars, the core of his master’s thesis as well as Self-Modifying Finite Automata which he developed with Roy Rubinstein. He had received his master’s degree in 1993, five years after finishing his bachelor’s degree, both from WPI. Dr John Shutt was also interested in adaptive grammar as well as category theory. He often programmed in Lisp, enjoyed xkcd comics and used Emacs as his choice of text editor.

He had spent one year at the Brown University for his post-graduate academics. Recalling the experience, Dr. Shutt said, “I spent one year at Brown, but it didn’t work. And was a traumatic experience for me; it took me a couple of years to recover enough to make a second try at graduate school.” Dr Shutt shared an office with Paul Howard in the 1988/89 academic year at Brown University. In July 2019, Dr Shutt said, “It saddens me that I forgot to wish Paul Howard a happy birthday this year, and he appears to have forgotten to wish me one either. First time we’ve failed to exchange birthday wishes, even if belatedly, since we were assigned to share an office in the 1988/89 academic year at Brown”.

Andres Navarro and Oto Havle had created an implementation of Kernel programming language, called kernel, which was mentioned in a presentation at BSDCan by Michael MacInnis. Recalling that incident in November, Dr Shutt said, “Two or three years ago, this guy Michael MacInnis emailed me. He was getting ready to give a talk at BSDCan (an annual BSD conference in Canada) about a new UNIX shell he was ready to release, called Oh; and he wanted to know if it was okay if he mentioned my name in regard to fexprs, ’cause my dissertation had come out as he was putting the design together and Kernel-style fexprs fit wonderfully well with his concept so he used them. I assured him I was fine with having my name mentioned. Last night I was watching the video he provides of his talk, which iirc he felt went very well. I’ve been meaning to learn in more detail how the shell works; it was kind of fascinating to me how it very easily does away with most of Lisp’s parentheses despite being fundamentally Lisp. (Cons cells and fexprs. Profoundly Lisp.)”.

Dr Shutt lived with Asperger’s syndrome. In a discussion with one of the Wikimedia volunteers, he said, “As often happens with aspies, I was a hyperlexic kid, some of which has lingered.”

Dr Shutt lived in Massachusetts, US, and is survived by his mother Elsie Shutt, his sister and niece Barbara and Hannah Shutt, his cat Pickles and his brother David Shutt. Dr Shutt would have turned 57 next Friday.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Sweden’s first royal wedding since 1976 took place Saturday when Crown Princess Victoria, 32, married her long-time boyfriend and former personal trainer, Daniel Westling, 36. The ceremony took place at Stockholm Cathedral.

Over 1,200 guests, including many rulers, politicians, royals and other dignitaries from across the world, attended the wedding, which cost an estimated 20 million Swedish kronor. Victoria wore a wedding dress with five-metre long train designed by Pär Engsheden. She wore the same crown that her mother, Queen Silvia, wore on her wedding day 34 years previously, also on June 19. Victoria’s father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, walked Victoria down the aisle, which was deemed untraditional by many. In Sweden, the bride and groom usually walk down the aisle together, emphasising the country’s views on equality. Victoria met with Daniel half-way to the altar, where they exchanged brief kisses, and, to the sounds of the wedding march, made their way to the the silver altar. She was followed by ten bridesmaids. The couple both had tears in their eyes as they said their vows, and apart from fumbling when they exchanged rings, the ceremony went smoothly.

Following the ceremony, the couple headed a fast-paced procession through central Stockholm on a horse-drawn carriage, flanked by police and security. Up to 500,000 people are thought to have lined the streets. They then boarded the Vasaorden, the same royal barge Victoria’s parents used in their wedding, and traveled through Stockholm’s waters, accompanied by flyover of 18 fighter jets near the end of the procession. A wedding banquet followed in the in the Hall of State of the Royal Palace.

Controversy has surrounded the engagement and wedding between the Crown Princess and Westling, a “commoner”. Victoria met Westling as she was recovering from bulemia in 2002. He owned a chain of gymnasiums and was brought in to help bring Victoria back to full health. Westling was raised in a middle-class family in Ockelbo, in central Sweden. His father managed a social services centre, and his mother worked in a post office. When the relationship was made public, Westling was mocked as an outsider and the king was reportedly horrified at the thought of his daughter marrying a “commoner”, even though he did so when he married Silvia. Last year, Westling underwent transplant surgery for a congenital kidney disorder. The Swedish public have been assured that he will be able to have children and that his illness will not be passed on to his offspring.

Westling underwent years of training to prepare for his new role in the royal family, including lessons in etiquette, elocution, and multi-lingual small talk; and a makeover that saw his hair being cropped short, and his plain-looking glasses and clothes being replaced by designer-wear.

Upon marrying the Crown Princess, Westling took his wife’s ducal title and is granted the style “His Royal Highness”. He is now known as HRH Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland. He also has his own coat-of-arms and monogram. When Victoria assumes the throne and becomes Queen, Daniel will not become King, but assume a supportive role, similar to that of Prince Phillip, the husband of the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

London, UK — The Vodafone GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) Mobile Data Network within the UK was off the air for several hours, but Vodafone staff were unable to supply any details as to how or why this had happened. The incident seems to have originated within Southern England, but spread “nationwide” within a short period.

Customers were therefore unable to access data services for a protracted period, including WAP browsing from mobile phones, email from personal devices like Blackberries and Windows Mobile Messengers, and full access over data cards from laptops.

Some criticism has been levelled at the company for failing to provide an easy source of information on the problem, with the only realistic option being to queue for a response from a call centre, as no information could be found on their public-facing website. This practice, whilst far from unique to Vodafone within the telecommunications industry, contrasts poorly with the common practice for most ISPs (Internet Service Providers), who conventionally provide a “system status” page on their website.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

United States President Barack Obama stated Monday that insurance giant AIG is in financial trouble due to “recklessness and greed,” and called for legal action to stop the company from giving out millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives.

“It’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Obama said. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat.”

Obama’s statement comes after reports surfaced last weekend saying the insurance agency, which is in deep financial trouble, had paid US$165 million to executives in bonuses, after receiving $170 billion as part of a government bailout plan.

AIG has said that the bonuses have to be given out, as the company is legally required by contract to do so. A representative with the National Economic Council, Lawrence H. Summers, also said that the bonuses were required to be given out. If AIG had refused to give out the bonuses, employees could file a lawsuit against the company for the money.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” AIG CEO Edward M. Liddy said in a letter addressed to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner on Saturday.

Liddy said that he asked Geithner “to use that leverage and pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”

“I want everybody to be clear that Secretary Geithner’s been on the case,” Obama said. “He’s working to resolve this matter with the new CEO, Edward Liddy, who, by the way, everybody needs to understand, came on board after the contracts that led to these bonuses were agreed to last year.”

If the bonuses cannot be stopped, the U.S. Congress says they want AIG to reimburse the government. Congress is looking to impose stiff new taxes on the pay, or ordering the company to return the money which was originally granted from a government bailout. In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, senator Richard Shelby promised that the treasury will recover all of the money. Several U.S. senators along with Liddy have sent letters to AIG asking for the bonuses to be renegotiated, something AIG agreed to and says they will reduce future bonuses by 30%. Senators state that if Libby does not respond by renegotiating the bonuses, the Senate Finance Committee will propose an excise tax. Not only will an excise tax be proposed on AIG, but all companies receiving bailout money and their employees who receive bonuses.

Numerous House Democrats have introduced legislation which would place a 100% tax on any bonuses of over $100,000 from companies that are receiving government bailout funds. Meanwhile in the Senate, a bipartisan proposal by Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) would levy a special 90% excise tax on AIG’s bonuses. Asked Senator Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee: “What is the highest excise tax we can impose that will stand up in court? Let’s find out.”

Monday, June 5, 2017

Conductor Sir Jeffrey Tate died on Friday. He was born on April 28, 1943 in Salisbury, England with spina bfida and kyphosis.

Tate moved with his family to Farnham, Surrey and attended school there. Despite his disabilities, he achieved a four-decade career conducting operatic and symphonic music, following a medical degree from Cambridge and medical residency at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. He began in London Opera Centre with a scholarship and was a Royal Opera House répétiteur in 1971.

He recorded ten complete operas with director Georg Solti. He also assisted Pierre Boulez with Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1976, and later conducted the complete Ring himself more than twenty times, and the complete Lulu on its premier at the Paris Opera in 1979.

He was knighted six weeks before his death, for his services to music, as part of the 2017 New Year Honours.

He was in Lombardy, Italy when he died, reportedly in rehearsal due to a heart attack, at the age of 74.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

The U.S. space agency NASA called off the launch of Space shuttle Discovery today after a problem with a fuel sensor in the external tank used to detect fuel exhaustion. According to the agency-run NASA TV, the low-fuel sensor was either malfunctioning or damaged. The launch was already facing the threat of a scrub due to thunderstorms in the area.

The sensor is one of four used to trigger the engine cutout after launch. Although only two are required for normal operation, and the Shuttle can be flown with one, NASA elected to maintain full redundancy. Should more of the sensors fail, the engine might burn out due to lack of fuel, a situation that has not been tested.

The problem was detected during a simulation of an empty tank. When placed in a mode simulating an empty tank, three of the sensors correctly registered that the tank was empty, while the faulty sensor stayed in the “full” state. NASA is currently unsure whether the problem relates to the sensor, the instrumentation circuits reporting the sensor’s state, or the simulation circuits.

The problem comes after a separate incident yesterday when a cockpit window cover fell from the Orbiter, damaging thermal protection tiles. A similar problem caused the replacement of the fuel tank in June. NASA described the problem as an “intermittent fault”.

The launch, which was scheduled for 3:51 ET (20:51 UTC), would have been the first launch of a shuttle since Columbia‘s February 2003 crash which killed all crew members aboard.

It is still unknown to NASA officials what caused the sensor to become defective. It is also unknown at the moment whether the issue will be fixed on the launch pad, or in the Vehicle Assembly Building – in which it takes close to a full day’s time to transport a shuttle between the two areas.

In the interim, the crew of the shuttle will stay at KSC unless there are further delays, in which case the crew might be transported back to JSC in Houston for refresher training.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

A study by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs presented to a Congressional panel on November 17, has confirmed that Gulf War Syndrome is a legitimate illness contracted by soldiers who took pyridostigmine bromide pills in order to counter the effects of nerve gas during the First Gulf War in Iraq. Several other factors likely contributed to Gulf War Syndrome, including excessive exposure to pesticides, mainly Permethrin and DEET, and chemical weapons residue caused by the American demolition of the Iraqi munitions depot in Khamisiyah.

The report estimates that about 1 out of every 4 veterans of the Gulf War are affected by this illness; this could mean anywhere between 175,000 and 210,000 soldiers are affected by the syndrome. The report also concluded that veterans exposed to the toxins spread by the destruction of the munitions depot have died of brain cancer at double the rate of other Gulf War veterans. Other problems associated with the condition are: fatigue, headaches, joint pain, rashes, breathing difficulty, forgetfulness, circulation problems, and cardiac troubles.

Gulf War Syndrome has been the focal point of veterans rights groups since the illness first became noticed in the early 1990s. The United States and British governments claimed that the illness was merely psychological trauma from war misinterpreted as an illness, and veterans could not receive medical coverage for the illness.

“I feel vindicated, but I’m angry. This is so long overdue,” said Denise Nichols, an advocate for veterans’ rights and a nurse who served during Operation Desert Storm. The National Gulf Veterans and Families Association (NGVFA) said that many veterans committed suicide after learning that the government did not recognize their illness as real.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Apple have released several re-designs of their popular iPod range. In addition to the iPod Classic, Nano and Shuffle, they have announced the brand new iPod touch, a media player which mimics the iPhone’s touch-screen capabilities.

The new iPod Classic design features a larger memory space of up to 160GB or 40,000 songs, and has a new all-metal design. The iPod nano is now smaller and squarer, adding video playback to its features for the first time. The 4GB model is cheaper than its predecessor at $149/£99, but the 8GB is available in five colours at $199/£129. The iPod Shuffle is identical in design to the previous model, but is now available in a new range of five colours, with the same price of $79/£49.

The iPod touch also features in-built wi-fi technology, enabling users to access the internet and download music from Apple’s market-leading on line iTunes music store to their handset. It was announced that Starbucks would offer free wi-fi access to all users of the iPod touch in its cafes. The screen layout, similar to that of the iPhone, offers access to music, video, photos and the iTunes store. There are currently two models, at 8GB and 16GB of memory capacity.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also announced that the price of Apple’s iPhone, currently only on sale in the US, will be cut by $200 to $399. He described the new iPod range as ‘one of the seven wonders of the world’.