TECHNOLOGY
Nation’s Internet ranked 8th
Internet speeds in Taiwan ranked eighth on a list of the 20 countries with the fastest Internet connections, according to a quarterly State of the Internet report released on Tuesday by US-based Akamai Technologies. Covering the July-to-September period of last year, the rankings were based on average peak connection speeds of traffic flowing through Akamai’s global network. The firm is a provider of cloud services. Hong Kong topped the list, followed by South Korea, Japan and Singapore. Israel was fifth, followed by Romania, Latvia, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Belgium, according to the report. The US ranked 13th in the report. Hong Kong’s average peak connection speed in the third quarter of last year increased 21 percent year-on-year to 65.4 megabits per second (Mbps), the report showed. Taiwan’s average was 42.7Mbps, a 50 percent year-on-year increase. Worldwide, average peak connection speeds declined slightly in the quarter to 17.9Mbps.
SOCIETY
Baristas to be certified
The Taipei City Government is planning a certification system for certain lines of work that add attractiveness to the capital, Department of Labor Affairs Commissioner Chen Yeh-shin (陳業鑫) said. Chen said his department drafted guidelines on recognizing special professional skills and, in accordance with Taipei’s development needs, the city will first promote certification for coffee specialists, or baristas. The department said it hopes the certification for baristas and other skilled professionals would help businesses and the general public learn more about the professions, which it hopes will result in an environment conducive to the development of high-quality skills.
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:
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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