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Dexmet Corporation develops corrugated expanded material to provide a wider choice of expanded material to developers of high-performance applications.
SINGAPORE - Organ trading over the Dark Web was in the spotlight at the ninth edition of The Straits Times (ST) Book Club on Wednesday (Nov 28). About 205 attended the session at the National Library Building, where author Raju Chellam discussed his novel, Organ Gold.
He spoke of the hidden dangers of the Dark Web, the part of the Internet used by activists and illegal traders alike in order to escape surveillance. "There are people who will give you a heart for $130,000. They will kill a man to give you his heart," said the 60-year-old author, warning readers to stay off the Dark Web for their own safety.
In response to questions about whether his research into the Dark Web had led him into trouble, he laughed and said: "I won't answer that question."
Organ Gold was published in August by Straits Times Press and has sold close to 600 copies so far. The author is donating all his royalties to the National Kidney Foundation.
The plot involves an American teen savant, who falls into a coma after an accident in Singapore. His parents are approached by an illicit broker, who offers them a lot of money for their son's organs.
Mr Chellam wants his novel to reignite the debate on legalising organ trading in Singapore. At the book club, he spoke about how his novel was inspired by the real-life experience of a friend who had tried buying a kidney on the Dark Web when his wife was in the end stages of renal failure. The transaction was not completed and she died.
Organ failure is a complication of diabetes, a disease for which Singapore has the second-highest proportion of sufferers among all developed nations, lagging behind only the United States, according to a 2015 report by the International Diabetes Federation. "When your organs fail, what will you do?" the author asked the audience.
Vice-president of new technologies for Fusionex International, an IT software group that specialises in analytics and big data, Mr Chellam has been in the information and communication technology industry for more than 35 years. His former roles included IT editor of The Business Times and head of big data & cloud practice for Dell South Asia.
For his novel, he spent three years researching the organ trade, surfing the Dark Web and speaking with donors, brokers, doctors, transplant patients and even Interpol, to understand the dangers and rewards.
He is in favour of legalising the organ trade, he said in response to questions at the book club.
Law graduate Charlotte Lim, 22, attended the book club and said she was planning to read Organ Gold. "It was an eye-opener," she said. "I didn't expect the author to be an advocate for legalising such transactions. It's not the most correct answer but it's a very practical view of things."
Mr Chellam's 11-year-old god-daughter Corrinne Chua was also in the audience. She was the book's first reader. "I think the book is great. I'm going to recommend it to all my friends," said the Primary 5 pupil at Alexandra Primary School. She is a fan of horror tales and darkNetflix series like Stranger Things. "The book wasn't scary," she added.
"I wrote it for her. It's a family-friendly book," Mr Chellam told his audience at the book club. "It's also for your children to read because if a parent has kidney failure, who suffers the most? It's the children."
This was the ninth edition of the ST Book Club, which has featured other writers published by ST Press, including plastic surgeon Woffles Wu, author of Life In Plastic, in September and last month's discussion of Dr Delinquent: A Guide To Decoding The Teenage Years by Dr Carol Balhetchet and Fieldnotes Of A Psychiatrist by Professor Chong Siow Ann.
The book club takes a break next month and returns on Jan 30 with a discussion of Changi Airport Group chairman Liew Mun Leong's Sunday Emails From A Chairman.
Karl Fulton said the dumper, who he believed to be a man, intentionally put the rubbish in the water so it would be taken out to sea.
A Castlecliff man was devastated to come across a pile of rubbish including razor blades and plastic bottles he believed had been intentionally dumped in the water at the beach.
Karl Fulton and his wife Nicky and their 2-year-old daughter Ivy, who moved to Castlecliff about 10 months ago from Tauranga, were walking along the beach on the weekend when they were passed by an SUV.
"It was going quite quick. Only moments later he was gone again ... back the other way past us.
"It was only not long after that we drove down a bit further in our vehicle to have a nosey.
"We didn't expect to see the rubbish there," Fulton said, adding the vehicle that passed was likely an older style Isuzu SUV.
"It had fresh wheel marks where he'd been taking it all from the back of the wagon and dragging it down to the actual water. It was that fresh that the tide was taking it away as we stood there clearing the rubbish up bringing it up further to the top of the beach."
After the Fultons carried the rubbish away from the tide, Karl went home to get his trailer to load the rubbish.
The items strewn along the beach and in the water included razor blades, old steel handrails and a lot of plastic Coca-Cola bottles.
"We bought a house here about 9, 10 months ago," Karl Fulton said. "We love the beach down here. It's just totally different having driftwood everywhere."
"It's hard to think what people think when they go and do that sort of thing. But going down there and seeing it ourselves, it's actually quite devastating to see.
"You see it over Facebook all the time of other countries getting rubbish dumped all over the place and you look at it and you're quite horrified but you never think it's on your own doorstep."
Fulton said people were possibly cutting the cost of paying to dump rubbish legally by leaving it at the beach.
He said the council should offer one day a year where it was free to take rubbish to the dump.
The self-appointed guardian of Castlecliff Beach is 80-year-old Potonga Neilson.
"It's still a very sad situation ... I don't know what we can do about it. I have taken [dumped] cars off the beach, dragged them with my 4-wheel-drive and taken them to the scrap dealer."
Neilson remembered the beach when it wasn't treated so badly.
"We are not being very nice to our environment.
"I've spent all my life up and down this beach on and off and there was a time when you could sit on the sea shore and watch the kahawai in the surf chasing sprats and that. You don't see that anymore.
"On a nice calm day when the surf rises up you could actually see through the wave and see the kahawai. When I was really young [1950s] you couldn't walk into the water without treading on a flounder."
Whanganui District councillor Jenny Duncan said illegal dumping was a common problem all over the region and Castlecliff was no exception.
"But we certainly need more education on the issue not to mention rego [registration] numbers and photos if people spot someone doing it," she said.
Duncan believed when council litter teams carried out a quick clean up after illegal dumping it sent a message that it wasn't acceptable to dump.
While incorporating the MELT method book (not included; often sold where books are sold) is recommended to guide you in proper usage, this roller is great for simple muscle-rolling techniques as well.
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Never before have businesses and technology enjoyed such a symbiotic relationship. In today’s world, a technology change can shake up a company as much as a market shift. Your enterprise must stay agile to be successful, and it achieves agility in three ways: readily adopting new technologies, recruiting people who are willing to pivot, and developing strategies in real time.
The buzzword for the 20th century was efficiency. From the moment Henry Ford invented the assembly line, our country became obsessed with how to achieve maximum efficiency at minimal cost. But as technology replaced workers and consumers became increasingly disillusioned with modern business models, being successful became more about pivoting in the direction markets are facing. Success today is all about dexterity.
And an essential tenet of this dexterity is staying up to date with the latest technology. I’ve discussed the complicated relationship between technology and strategy during digital transformations before, but once you’re there, keeping up is crucial.
Modern businesses can’t afford to be technology laggards. The move rental chain, Blockbuster, is a perfect example. It saw a looming threat in Netflix, but by the time it adopted its own streaming service, the damage was done. In this case, catching up with the latest technology wasn’t enough.
Bridging the gap between today’s technology and tomorrow’s innovations is essential to transitioning seamlessly. Businesses tend to invest in technology every five years, but they must constantly be on the lookout for new innovations. Staying abreast of the latest trends allows a business to pivot before competitors can react.
Technology doesn’t drive success: people using technology do. People who thrive in agile business environments are the engine; finding and keeping that talent your commercial fuel.
How do you hire and retain flexible talent? The short answer: company culture. This may seem paradoxical because your company’s culture is a fairly stable component; it takes a long time to build a healthy culture, and even longer to change it. Your core capabilities, your human capital, your market niche—these don’t pivot easily. But a key characteristic of agile companies is their ability to attract talent.
You can’t talk about recruiting flexible people without mentioning your system of governance. We sometimes operate on the erroneous belief that this only applies to high-tech industries, but agility is a top-down process—and even the most traditional industries benefit from a little shapeshifting.
In interviews, we’re often asked about our 5- to 10-year plans. In business, that model is becoming less relevant than ever. The future of business? Real-time data and analysis for constant course correction. Achieving agility requires taking a hard look at your organizational approach. In business, we’re often boxed in by our top-down strategy: top-level executives make goals that are realized in a downward process in the value chain. But agile companies tend to distribute key performance metrics across all levels of the value chain. Team-based targets, regular performance discussions, and peer reviews all play a role in improving your company’s dexterity.
Focus less on what your enterprise hopes to accomplish in the future and more on what’s right in front of you. By maximizing your agility through key performance indicators, you’re creating a more stable tomorrow.
All these ideas must be developed in real-time. Flexible businesses are better positioned to keep up with the rate of change in technology and markets. Success in technology adoption, talent recruitment and retention, and strategy development creates agile companies. Craft an organizational culture that encourages adaptation through distributed decision-making and to-the-minute integration. Enterprises can no longer afford to think only in terms of efficiency and the 10-year plan. The new business model relies on fluidity: a company poised to pivot is one that’s best prepared for the future.
SINGAPORE stocks opened weaker as trading resumed on Thursday, with the Straits Times Index slipping 0.01 per cent or 0.42 points to 3,207.24 as at 1.05pm.
Gainers outnumbered losers 154 to 119, or about nine securities up for every seven down, after 523.8 million securities worth S$460.2 million changed hands.
Among the most heavily traded by volume, Rex International Holding increased 3.7 per cent or S$0.003 to S$0.084 with 31.0 million shares traded. Keppel Infrastructure Trust retreated 7.0 per cent or S$0.035 to S$0.465 with 25.9 million shares traded.
Active index stocks included CapitaLand, up 0.9 per cent or S$0.03 to S$3.50; and DBS Group Holdings, up 0.3 per cent or S$0.08 to S$25.43.
Join us as we welcome you back to campus & help you plan for a fun and successful summer. We?ll have a focus on time & energy management and planning out your research schedules, budgets & diets for the summer. We?ll also help you schedule in some fun.
Former Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says women sometimes take CEO jobs that men turn down.
The woman once tapped to revive a flagging internet company says female CEOs are often “happy” to take over struggling companies — but for a depressing reason.
Carol Bartz, who helmed Yahoo! AABA, -0.17% from 2009 to 2011, said it’s “absolutely true” that women have a better chance of getting a CEO job or senior position at a troubled company. She made the comments on the podcast “Freakonomics” earlier this month.
Women currently hold 5.2% (26) of the CEO positions at companies in the S&P 500, according to data gathered by Catalyst, a nonprofit whose mission is to foster women-friendly workplaces.
Flailing companies may sometimes choose women leaders because they’re desperate for something new — and a female CEO is an outside-the-box choice, Ariane Hegewisch, program director of employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told MarketWatch recently.
But often those companies are too far gone to save, and female CEOs ends up taking the blame for their inevitable downfalls. It’s a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “the glass cliff.” Americans donate more than $1 billion a day. Here's howDonor-advised funds, a form of charitable fund investing, are the fastest growing philanthropic vehicle, growing at about 6% annually. Here's what you need to know.
Bartz was fired from Yahoo! in 2011 after just 2.5 years at the once-popular search engine.
She was initially replaced by CFO Tim Morse, but in 2012 Marissa Mayer was hired as CEO, once again with a mandate to save the company. Mayer announced that she would step down in 2017. After Verizon VZ, +0.45% acquired most of Yahoo! and rebranded the company, Thomas McInerney became the new entity’s CEO — at twice Mayer’s $1 million annual salary, Newsweek reported.
And we’re back with episode two of our Road To Disrupt video series, which shows the good, the bad, and the ugly moments startups go through when competing in the Disrupt Battlefield competition.
After enduring a few too many run-ins with the slow service at Applebee’s, the founders of Monsieur set out to shake up the bartending industry. In case you missed our coverage of the company’s launch at Disrupt SF 2013, Monsieur is a robotic bartender. With remote ordering, varying drink strength and consumption tracking, Monsieur is quite possibly the world’s smartest bartender.
Monsieur is brought to you by a group of Georgia Tech mechanical engineers and computer scientists. In true startup fashion, when Monsieur launched, the company was completely bootstrapped and running operations out of founder Barry Givens‘ parent’s garage. To prototype the device, the team got creative and used plywood, spray paint and duct tape to figure out the mechanics behind creating the perfect drink.
Monsieur has gone through many iterations since then and completed a successful Kickstarter campaign following Disrupt last fall. The company raised $140,000 to bring the device to clubs, sports venue boxes, and other VIP venues.
In a phone call this week, Monsieur’s chairman Paul Judge told TechCrunch that the company has completed a pilot at Philips Arena in Atlanta, and has been showcased by the National Restaurant Association, which has led to a surge in orders from restaurants and hotels. At the moment, Monsieur has several million dollars of orders in the pipeline in addition to the Kickstarter orders, and is on track to ship upwards of 1,000 units.
As we get more comfortable with smarter devices and using robots in our day-to-day lives, it’s not a huge leap to think a gizmo like Monsieur could take the place of self-service cocktail setups found at bottle service tables in nightclubs. Just this spring, we’ve seen the launch of drone rental program for photographers and Google Ventures invested in a “services industry” robot.
Watch the video above to hear the behind-the-scenes story of how Monsieur got its start and what it was like for the founders as they competed in the startup Battlefield.
Tickets for Disrupt SF 2014 are currently available. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, reach out to our sponsorship team for more info.
The White House evidently believes it can kill us in secret and never own up to the fact.
Imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin had used remote-controlled drones armed with missiles to kill thousands of “enemies” (and plenty of civilians) throughout Asia and Eastern Europe. Imagine, further, that Putin refused to acknowledge any of the killings and simply asserted in general terms that he had the right to kill anyone he secretly determined was a leader of the Chechen rebels or “associated forces,” even if they posed no immediate threat of attack on Russia. How would the State Department treat such a practice in its annual reports on human rights compliance?
”enemies,” and lots of civilians, many of them far from any battlefield. But as citizens in whose name the president is exercising this power, we need to pass judgment. The challenge is that Obama has kept so much of the policy and practice under wraps that it is almost impossible to do this. The leak of a Justice Department white paper defending the legality of killing even US citizens provides the most detailed look yet at this disturbing practice. The more we learn, the more troubling the practice is.
Some critics indiscriminately decry all drone strikes as “extrajudicial assassinations,” arguing that killing is never lawful beyond the battlefield and even comparing the practice to former President George W. Bush’s authorization of torture. But those criticisms are exaggerated and misguided. Killing and torture are fundamentally different. Governments have always killed the enemy during wars, and it is not unlawful to do so. No one accuses Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt of “extrajudicial assassinations” because their troops killed tens of thousands of enemy soldiers without charges or trials. That the Confederate soldiers were American citizens doesn’t change that fact. And even in the absence of an existing war, and therefore outside any battlefield, states are permitted to use lethal force to respond to an imminent armed attack.
Thus, drone strikes against enemy fighters in Afghanistan, or even in the border regions of Pakistan that have become part of the battlefield, are not inherently illegal, so long as the latter are done with Pakistan’s consent. Nor is it wrong or unlawful to deploy a drone where there is no other way to halt an imminent attack.
But the white paper does not limit the president’s authority to kill to members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, or to those planning an immediate attack. It maintains that the president can kill an American citizen who is not a member of Al Qaeda, not on a battlefield, not participating in hostilities and not engaged in or planning an attack against the United States when he is killed. What’s more, the White House evidently believes it can kill us in secret and never own up to the fact. It has steadfastly refused to officially acknowledge that it has killed anyone with a drone outside Afghanistan.
1. The power to kill with drones should be governed by clear, transparent rules, not by a secret playbook. In the early days of the Obama administration, the drone program was entirely secret. Over time, administration officials have spoken in general terms about the legal standards they employ. But even after the white paper’s disclosure, much remains unclear. We don’t know, for example, what procedures are used to determine whether a person is properly placed on the “kill list,” nor even what standard of proof is required. Does anyone, for example, play the role of devil’s advocate, defending the absent target and questioning the government’s case? Surely if the president claims the power to kill any of us without trial, we have a right to know the standards and procedures he will use.
2. Killing in self-defense should always be a last resort. The white paper concedes, at least as to citizens, that a drone strike off the battlefield is appropriate only if the target poses an imminent threat and capture is not feasible—the traditional requisites for self-defense. But it then says a threat can be imminent even if it is not immediate. It presumptively treats all operational leaders of Al Qaeda or its undefined “associated forces” as “continually” planning attacks and therefore always posing an imminent threat—even if they are sleeping. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen killed by a drone in Yemen in September 2011, was reportedly on the kill list for more than a year before he was killed. How could he have posed an imminent threat for more than a year? The imminence requirement is designed to ensure that lethal force is a last resort; if no attack is on the horizon, there may be time to address the threat by less extreme means, such as capture and trial.
3. At least when it comes to American citizens, it cannot be constitutional for the president to deliberately kill and then refuse to acknowledge doing so. Unacknowledged detentions and killings were condemned as “disappearances” when Argentina’s military junta employed them in its “dirty war” in the 1970s. How can a government that is supposed to be of, by and for the people have the power to kill its own while keeping secret the fact that it has done so? Accountable and limited government begins with transparency.
4. The power to kill by remote control anywhere in the world should not unilaterally reside in the executive branch. The white paper dismissively claims that courts cannot second-guess the executive’s “predictive” judgments about national security. But courts already do this. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, composed of federal judges, reviews requests for search and wiretap warrants based on national security concerns. Those warrants by definition rest on predictive judgments about whether evidence relating to national security will be found. If we demand that a court authorize even a temporary wiretap, shouldn’t we also demand that a court review a decision to end a human life? Some have questioned the utility of a necessarily one-sided and secret warrant process, but warrants have served us well for centuries by interposing an independent decision-maker between the executive and the citizenry. Due process may require advance notice to the target in some instances and/or judicial review after the fact, as the Israeli Supreme Court requires. But we can’t leave this awesome power exclusively in executive hands.
Some object that since ordinary uses of armed force in wartime do not require this sort of public accountability, judicial review and due process, those requirements ought not to apply to drone strikes. During World War II, FDR did not have to issue criteria for a kill list, involve courts or publish his officers’ specific rules of engagement. But the technology of drones, coupled with the murky scope of this “war,” make those features essential now. Because they permit the killing of people without putting boots on the ground or risking American lives, and because they are, at least in theory, surgically precise, drones reduce the considerable practical disincentives to lethal force.
Al Qaeda? If so, has President Obama resurrected the “global war on terror” that he previously rejected?
Much like transnational wars against nonstate actors, drones challenge traditional legal and ethical categories. The root of the problem is that they make it too easy to kill. We need not and cannot forswear their use. We should not confuse them with assassinations and torture. But we must insist on clear restrictions, transparent practices, independent oversight and accountability—in short, the rule of law. In his only major presidential speech on national security, in May 2009, President Obama promised that he would fight terror within the confines of our values and the rule of law. What happened to that promise?
Even if we like President Obama, do we want him to be a one-man death panel? asks Katha Pollitt.
BERLIN (MarketWatch) -- The quality of the European Central Bank's balance sheet is "alarming," former European Central Bank Executive Board Member Juergen Stark told Thursday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
"The Eurosystem's balance sheet is not only gigantic in its dimension but also alarming in its quality," Stark was quoted as saying. He added the structure of the balance sheet is a cause for concern because increasingly short-term debt claims are being replaced by long-term ones and this will make it more difficult for the bank to reverse its loose monetary policy.
With his comments, the bank's former hawk Stark is backing Germany's central bank president Jens Weidmann. The head of the Bundesbank told Der Spiegel weekly magazine over the weekend that requirements for banks' cheap loans have been "very generous" and the program calms the situation in the short term, but this calm could be deceptive. He was concerned about the collateral requirements that the banks had to provide.
The ECB's balance sheet soared past the EUR3 trillion level last week partly because the bank has flooded markets with over EUR500 billion in cheap loans for banks.
Before lunchtime Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump said he would expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, upending a reduction course set by presidents of both parties over the past four decades, and called for the United States to veto a pending U.N. resolution that criticized Israel’s settlements policy.
The policy prescriptions, communicated in morning tweets, followed calls since last month’s election to reconsider the arms-length U.S. relationship with Taiwan and to let China keep an underwater U.S. vessel seized by its navy. Trump declared within hours of this week’s Berlin terrorist attack that it was part of a global Islamic State campaign to “slaughter Christians” and later said it reaffirmed the wisdom of his plans to bar Muslim immigrants.
With weeks to go before he becomes president, Trump has not hesitated to voice his opinions on national security issues of the day and to publicly advise the current president on what to do about them.
Ultimately, the nuclear statement was tempered by a Trump spokesman. And the likely fallout from a tentative decision by the Obama administration to break years of precedent and abstain on the Israel resolution was avoided when Egypt, its sponsor, abruptly postponed it just hours before a scheduled Security Council vote.
But the president-elect’s pronouncements have privately riled a White House that has repeatedly insisted in public that the transition has been smooth sailing.
Even as the White House has held its tongue, however, others have not.
In Manhattan, the setting for Donald Trump’s reality TV show and campaign headquarters now serves as the president-elect’s base of operations.
In Manhattan, the setting for Donald Trump’s reality-TV show and campaign headquarters now serves as the president-elect’s base of operations.

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