Sex and drug parties in S’pore chalets?

"I don't do drugs, so I would go home when the rest got too 'high' and became violent or started taking their clothes off," said [1] John

 

In such chalet parties, teens as young as 14-In such chalet parties, teens as young as 14-years-old get intoxicated with a mix of pills and alcohol and engage …

While it is usual to see teenagers in Singapore gathering in chalets for barbecues or birthday celebrations, some of their peers get together only to engage in sex and drug parties.

Once intoxicated after a cocktail of alcohol and illegal drugs, some of these teens, which include girls as young as 14, engage in sexual intimacy -- from heavy petting to intercourse.

It is understood that such chalets stays are organised by some members of gangs in Singapore, and that they are getting more common.

An 18-year-old former gangster who wanted to be known as John told The New Paper, "We would tell our parents that we were going for a barbecue, but we didn't even take any charcoal or chicken wings with us."

While he had attended such sex-and-drug orgies twice, John — who left the gang last year after he was arrested for theft — claimed that he has not taken part in such vices.

"I don't do drugs, so I would go home when the rest got too 'high' and became violent or started taking their clothes off," said John, adding that most of the gang members at these parties were in their teens.

Speaking in a mixture of Mandarin and Hokkien, John described the girls who take part in the parties as either "lor kway" (Hokkien for streetwalker) or some of them "ah dai" (fools).

The former are girls considered to have loose morals, while "ah dai" refers to newbies who attend the chalet parties without knowing that drugs and sex are involved.

As they were under the influence of drugs such as ketamine and "ice", some of the teens have no recollection of their experiences the night before.

The parties would usually have more males than females, said former gangsters. Such situations occasionally lead to several men sharing one woman and can even result in gang rape.

When morning comes, they pack their bags and check out of their unit. The guys may go through the same routine a few months later with new girls, or "fresh meat" as they are called.

A 28-year-old former gang member turned social worker, who wanted to be known as Peter, said he has not seen such a gang rape before, but he has heard of four or five such incidents among his former circle of friends.

"It is not just happening in chalets...such activities can also take place in pub shophouses or in the homes of the gang members," he added.

However, John pointed out that not all chalet outings organised by his gangster friends involved sex and drugs.

Parents to be blamed?

Meanwhile, social workers said they have counseled those who have engaged in such vices as part of their gang activities.

Those involved may not necessarily come from broken or low-income families, a common stereotype in the past, they said. But they noted that such teens usually suffer from an emotional emptiness at home.

"Some parents give too little affection and neglect their children because they are busy, while others give too much attention because they are authoritative," said Faith Png, 39, a social worker with YouthReach.

"Both will drive their children to seek freedom and love outside of the family and sometimes, the children befriend gangsters."

Executive director of Singapore Children's Society Alfred Tan, 50, blamed the media's portrayal of casual sex and easy access to pornography as resulting in the country's youth to become more promiscuous than in the past.

"This is a worrying trend as there may be peer pressure to have sex. Instead of being harsh to their children, parents should get to know their friends," he told TNP.

On the other hand, chalet operators said that they have not come across sex-and-drug-parties on their premises.

Manager of Goldkist Beach Resort at East Coast Park Vikas Gupta, 22, said that the management has not encountered any such incidents thus far.

Steven Tang, director of Costa Sands Resort — which has two outlets in Pasir Ris and one in Sentosa — echoed the same thing, adding that it has always been its practice to increase security presence during peak hours.

"It has always been our practice to step up our security presence during our peak periods, such as the June school holidays, to deal with the additional visitors," he said.

The frequency of security patrols in GoldKist Beach Resort will also increase by 50 percent during peak periods, said Vikas.

It is illegal to have sex with children under the age of 16. If the victims are between 12 and 14 years old, it is considered statutory rape and offenders can be jailed up to 20 years and fined or caned.

If the victim is above 14 but below 16, offenders can be jailed up to five years and fined $10,000 for carnal connection. The maximum penalty for rape is 20 years' jail with possible caning.

Udacity and the future of online universities

The most exciting (but also, in a small way, slightly depressing) presentation at DLD this year came from Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google. Or formerly of Stanford, anyway.

Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students. Thrun scrambled to put together a website which could scale and support that enrollment, and succeeded spectacularly well.

Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.

So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.

But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

Udacity looks great, and I can’t wait for it to be a revolutionary success, educating and empowering students around the world, especially in places like Africa and India, and, in those places, especially women.

But I have to say I’m a little sad that it’s happening away from, rather than being part of, Stanford. If any world-class university would embrace this idea, one would hope it would be the one at the heart of Silicon Valley. And surely Udacity would only benefit if it was part of Stanford and carried the Stanford brand name. Instead, Thrun is abandoning Stanford and creating Udacity on its own. (And I’m no great fan of the name, either.)

Stanford was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a new physical campus in New York City — but it isn’t willing, it seems, to help Thrun build a free virtual campus which could reach the whole world. That’s a dereliction of its educational duty. But where Stanford has failed, surely some other elite university will step in. Thrun is taking a bold step here. Let’s hope he soon gets the support, if not of Stanford, then of some other college. Like Harvard, or Yale, or Oxford, or Cambridge. They’re exclusive places now. But they don’t have to be, in the future.

How to grow your own fresh air

Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.

With its air-filtering plants and sustainable architecture, Kamal Meattle’s office park in New Delhi is a model of green business. Meattle himself is a longtime activist for cleaning up India’s air.

This video was issued by TED under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence, from http://www.ted.com

Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi’s air. My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. We’ve also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards.

The three plants are Areca palm (also known as Butterfly Palm), Mother-in-Law’s Tongue (also known asSnake Plant ) and Money plant (also known as Pothos). The botanical names are in front of you. Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. The second plant is Mother-in-law’s Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. The third plant is Money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals.

With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one’s blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it’s available on the government of India website.

Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20% by using these plants. And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15%, because you need less fresh air. We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants.

Why is this important? It is also important for the environment, because the world’s energy requirements are expected to grow by 30% in the next decade. 40% of the world’s energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60% of the world’s population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” said Mahatma Gandhi.

Australian tries to sell stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia on eBay

An ad on eBay for the Costa Concordia cruise ship will be pulled.

"FOR sale, one cruise ship - slight damage to right-hand hull, mainly cosmetic."

This was the description that an Aussie used in his "joke" bid to sell the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship on eBay, which has been pulled from the website.

With a starting price of $1, the seller warned of “some water damage to interior” of the ship and said the carpets may need to be replaced. It also stated the ship had one “careful owner” and must be collected by the buyer.

An eBay spokesperson said the ad, for which bidding reached $1008.88 with six days to go, was taken down as it was not appropriate for the website.

“EBay does not permit listings that attempt to profit from human tragedy or suffering," the spokesperson said.

"As a result, we are immediately removing this listing from eBay.com.au.”

There was a warning on the listing stating it was “obviously a fake and should not be taken seriously”.

The disclaimer is perhaps in response to this question posted on the site:

“I notice that you haven't given the option for insurance with shipping. I've heard of a cruise ship accident in the news recently and it's got me a bit worried. Are there no circumstances under which you would insure the ship while shipping?”

To which the seller responded: “Ahh noo speek englishhh”.

There were a flood of questions about the ship, including one that asked whether the rock he heard the captain tripped on before falling into the lifeboat would be included. According to the seller, yes.

Popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com shut down; founder, others indicted on piracy charges

One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.

A federal indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after sites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.

Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted in the US on leased servers in Ashburn, Virginia, which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Kim Dotcom, 37, and three other employees were arrested in New Zealand on Thursday at the request of US officials.
The four, two of whom are New Zealand residents, are among seven people facing online piracy charges in the US.

Fifteen people, including children, were present when police raided the Auckland property of Megaupload's 37-year-old founder, Kim Dotcom (also known as Kim Schmitz), a German national and New Zealand resident, about 6.45am (0445 AEDT).
Schmitz and two other men were arrested at the property.
Two shotguns were also recovered.
The other three arrested were Megaupload chief marketing officer Finn Batato, chief technical officer and co-founder Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk. Batato and Ortmann are German, while van der Kolk is a Dutch national who holds New Zealand residency.
Police executed 10 search warrants at houses and businesses across Auckland, seizing more than $NZ10 million ($A7.77 million) from financial institutions, and assets, including luxury cars worth $NZ6 million ($A4.66 million) and expensive art works.
In a press conference on Friday, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald said it was 'likely' the men had also breached New Zealand copyright laws, although police had no intention of laying charges in the country.
The men face copyright infringement charges in the US which carry sentences of up to 20 years.
The four men were due to appear on Friday afternoon in North Shore District Court, where an application for them to be extradited to the US will be heard.
The other three sought in relation to the Megaupload piracy charges were still at large and not thought to be in New Zealand.
More than 20 search warrants were executed in the US and eight other countries on Friday.
Officials seized about $NZ50 million ($A38.83 million) in assets, as well as 18 domain names associated with Megaupload.
Two corporations, Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited, are included in the FBI's indictment.
Before Megaupload was taken down, it posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were 'grotesquely overblown'.
'The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch,' the statement said.
The indictment may have prompted a response from the loose affiliation of hackers known as Anonymous, which claimed credit for attacking the Justice Department's website.
The site was inaccessible on Thursday evening.
'The Department of Justice web server hosting justice.gov is currently experiencing a significant increase in activity, resulting in a degradation in service,' the agency said in a statement.
'The department is working to ensure the website is available while we investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.'
A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in an emailed statement on Thursday that the group's site had been hacked, but it appeared to be working later on Thursday evening.
'The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech,' the spokesman said.
'We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals.'
Megaupload was unique not only because of its enormous size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy.
Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.
The company listed Swizz Beatz, a musician who married Keys in 2010, as its CEO.
He was not named in the indictment and declined to comment through a representative.
According to the indictment, Megaupload was estimated at one point to be the 13th most frequently visited website on the internet.
Current estimates by companies that monitor web traffic place it in the top 100.
The five-count indictment, which alleges copyright infringement as well as conspiracy to commit money-laundering and racketeering, described a site designed specifically to reward users who uploaded pirated content for sharing, and turned a blind eye to requests from copyright holders to remove copyright-protected files.
More at:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57362152-261/fbi-charges-megaupload-operators-with-piracy-crimes/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/indictment-charges-megaupload-site-with-piracy.html?_r=1
http://www.neowin.net/news/megaupload-charged-with-piracy-shut-down?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369
http://techland.time.com/2012/01/19/feds-shut-down-megaupload-com-file-sharing-website/

Team Fortress 2 cosplay

Zombie ants: When ants become walking dead

A parasitized ant. Image credit: David P. Hughes.

An ingeniously deadly fungus hijacks the bodies of ants for food and reproduction.

It’s like something out of a horror movie. A parasitic fungus infiltrates the body of a tropical carpenter ant, feeding on it and manipulating its body. The fungus forces the dying ant to the forest understory, an environment more conducive to its growth. The invasion of this fungal body-snatcher culminates with it sprouting a spore-laden fruiting body from the dead ant’s head.

An account of this deadly assault on tropical carpenter ants (Camponotus leonardi) by a parasitic fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) is described in the May 9, 2011 issue of the open access journal BMC Ecology.

Similar incidents of fungi parasitizing insects occur in other parts of the world. This particular case of zombie ants plays out in the forests of Thailand.

It’s a pretty gruesome affair, so if you find movies like The Thing and Night of the Living Dead too scary, now’s a good time to stop reading!

The paper’s lead author, Dr. David Hughes of Penn State University, described the ant-fungus interaction in a press release.

The fungus attacks the ants on two fronts. Firstly by using the ant as a walking food source, and secondly by damaging muscle and the ant’s central nervous system, resulting in zombie walking and the death bite, which place the ant in the cool damp understory. Together these provide the perfect environment for fungal growth and reproduction. This behavior of infected ants is essentially an extended phenotype of the fungus (fungal behaviour through the ant’s body) as non-infected ants never behave in this way.

A dead carpenter ant attached to a leaf in the understory of a forest in Thailand. Before killing the ant, the fungus growing in the ant changed its behavior, causing it to bite into the leaf vein. Image Credit: David Hughes, Penn State University.

Tropical carpenter ants spend most of their time high in the forest canopy. When they venture down to the jungle understory, they follow well-defined trails. It’s during this time that ants could get infected by fungal spores that land on their outer body.

The fungus can only complete its life cycle through the ant. Spores germinate, and the fungus penetrates the ant’s body. It proceeds to infect the entire animal, affecting its central nervous system. You can tell when a carpenter ant has been infected: instead of marching purposefully down a trail, an infected worker ant walks about haphazardly, displaying erratic behavior. Sporadic convulsions set in, causing the infected ant to fall from the canopy to the moist, cool, leafy forest understory, ideal conditions for the fungus to continue its growth.

A carpenter ant attached to a leaf. The ant has been dead for two to three days, and the fungus's fruiting body filled with spores sticks out of its head. Image Credit: David Hughes, Penn State University.

Infected ants on the forest understory are driven by the fungus to select leaves of saplings that are about 25 centimeters (10 inches) above the soil surface. Then, a curious thing happens when the sun shines at its highest intensity of the day, at solar noon when it reaches the highest point in the sky. The fungus commands the ant to sink its mandibles into the leaf’s main vein, on the underside of the leaf. A possible reason for this action is to attach the ant to a stable environment suitable for the fungus’s subsequent development. But this synchronization with solar noon is a mystery, and it will be the subject of follow-up research.

Scientists call this stage, when the ant bites deep into the leaf vein, the “death grip,” because the ant is now locked to the leaf, providing a secure attachment for the fungus growing inside it. At this point, the ant is close to death, usually surviving for another 6 hours following its death grip. Its head is filled with fungal cells growing between muscle fibers, as well as around the brain and postpharyngeal gland^[1]. Following the death grip, the ant’s mandible muscles atrophy, leaving its jaws locked into the leaf long after it’s dead.

This image from the scientific paper shows a micrograph of an infected ant's head. It's the state of the ant's head when it bit down on the leaf, while it was still alive. Small grey blobs filling the head and mandible are the fungus. "PPG" is the postpharyngeal gland, "B" is the brain, "Mu" are muscles, and "Cu" is the cuticle (outer body of the ant). The small image in the lower left shows a close-up of what muscle would look like in a healthy ant. The small image in the lower right shows a close-up of the infected ant's muscle, right after it bit down on the leaf. The blobs between the muscle fibers are fungal cells.

About two to three days after the death grip, a fruiting body emerges from the dead ant’s head. It holds spores, which are released into the air, ready to be picked up by another tropical carpenter ant victim. Eventually, the ant’s remains fall to the ground. Scientists studying the understory where zombie ants are found attached under leaves have also found the remains of dead ants scattered on the ground – graveyards for past victims of the Ophiocordyceps fungus.

A paper in the journal BMC Ecology, published on May 9, 2011, describes the parasitism by a fungus on the tropical carpenter ant in Thailand. It’s a macabre description of how the ant is invaded by the fungus, which takes over its body, commands it to perform actions to ensure the survival and growth of the fungus, then uses its dead body to grow a stalk with spores that are ejected into the surrounding area, ready to infect other passing ants.

A tropical carpenter ant killed by a parasitic fungus in Thailand. The ant had bitten into the leaf in a "death grip," and a fungal fruiting body

philislothical

New drug may keep you sober no matter how much you've had to drink

Chinese tree extract has long been used as a hangover cure. Now it is being turned into a 'sobriety pill' that could cure alcoholism. Imagine a pill that could instantly sober you up no matter how much you've had to drink, or a hangover cure that worked minutes after swallowing it. Hardened drinkers rejoice: researchers are about to begin human trials on an "alcohol antidote" that may soon offer a cure to alcoholism, reports New Scientist. The drug is a chemical called dihydromyricetin, or DHM, and is derived from a Chinese variety of the oriental raisin tree, which has been used for at least 500 years in China as an effective hangover cure. So far the extract has only been tested on boozing rats, but with promising results.

Kanzi, The Bonobo Ape That Lights Fires and Cooks Food

Kanzi, a captive bonobo ape, has taught himself how to light a fire and cook food over it (video). Kanzi lives at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where he is studied by researcher Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.