EDUCATION
School wins software contest
A high school in Taichung won an international software competition in India last month, the nation’s best-ever performance in the International Schools’ Software Competition, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. Three students from Taichung First Senior High School defeated four other teams at the annual event organized by the South East Asia Regional Computer Confederation. Five countries — India, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan — participated in the competition held in Chennai from Oct. 21 through Oct. 24. The Taiwanese team was chosen from among the winners of a national competition and trained by a group of their teachers, along with D.J. Guan (官大智), a computer science professor at National Sun Yat-sen University and one of his doctoral students, according to a ministry press release.
SOCIETY
Tea party to begin Saturday
Pinglin Township’s (坪林) second Pouchung tea festival of the year will begin on Saturday in Taipei County with various activities, including demonstrations of various tea ceremonies and a cooking contest featuring tea, the county announced yesterday. The local government has held the biannual event since 2006 to promote Pouchung tea — a special kind of oolong produced in Pinglin and some other areas in northern Taiwan — which is harvested in the spring and winter. This year’s Pinglin Bao-Chung Tea Festival, Part II, will take place on the next two weekends at the Pinglin Tea Industry Museum and at Pinglin Junior High School, the organizers said. Free shuttle bus services to Pinglin will be available from the Xindian (Sindian) and Kunyang MRT stations. Further details in Chinese are available at www.pinglin-tea.com.
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