Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) yesterday urged the Ministry of Education to reconsider its plan to have replace elementary-school students’ schoolbags with laptop computers, citing health concerns.
“New technology usually has side effects that we are unaware of. Without notebook [computers], our children can still learn,” she said, adding that the policy could leave children and parents with no way to avoid the health threat posed by electromagnetic waves from laptops.
Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華), chairwoman of the Taiwan Electromagnetic Radiation Hazard Protection and Control Association, said children would be exposed to electromagnetic waves of between 3,000 microwatts and 10,000 microwatts when they use laptops or e-schoolbags for wireless study.
The ministry has implemented the e-schoolbag policy at five elementary schools — two in Taipei City, one in Taipei County, one in Kaohsiung and the other in Hualien — on a trial basis since August last year.
The two-year trial is meant to help the ministry understand whether the policy can help reduce the burden of heavy schoolbags and facilitate students’ learning.
Laptops are not the only e-schoolbag option. Tablet PCs, e-book readers and PDAs may also serve as e-schoolbags because of their portability.
Chen said she was concerned about whether e-schoolbags would widen the gap between the rich and the poor as not every family would be able to afford a laptop or similar device.
She said that children might grow used to typing and lose their writing ability because of e-schoolbags.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not