SINGAPORE: A law firm’s lover was able to embezzle more than Randomness$ 11 million( US$ 8 million ) of clients’ funds after the lawyer was barred from practice in 2011 for failing to oversee the accounts of the firm. On Tuesday( Sept. 5 ) of twelve years later, Mr. MohdContinue Reading
Following that, the police were informed of two additional reports of trespassing that are thought to be connected to the person. Both incidents took place in residences along Pasir Ris Terrace.
One was reported missing when it was received at 11.10 p.m. on September 1st, with Randomness$ 1, 500 ( US$ 1, 110 ) in money. On September 2, the other was received at 2.20 p.m. with no reported loss.
The gentleman was involved in a third unidentified case of burglary in the area, according to closed-circuit tv footage.
Following broad ground investigations, nbsp, and the use of CCTV images, the man was found.
The man was immediately detained by Bedok Police Division officers with assistance from the Police Operations Command Center, Police Intelligence Department, Special Operations Control, Gurkha Contingent, Airport Police District, and Immigration and Checkpoints Authority.
He was apprehended on September 2 at around 3.30 p.m. at & nbsp, the Changi Airport Terminal 4 departure area, before he could leave Singapore, according to the police.
” Money totaling more than S$ 1,600 in Singapore money and about Sulfur$ 1,900 worth of foreign currency were recovered from the man ,” according to the report.
On Monday, he will face two counts of burglary and burglary in court. He could receive a great and up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
Electrical eyesores going underground
PUBLISHED : 2 Sep 2023 at 05:00
LOEI: The Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) in this northeastern province is set to relocate electric transformers underground in touristy Chiang Khan district to prevent fires in the old community where many wooden houses are over a century old.
Komkrit Siriyutthaseanyakorn, head of the Public Works and Town and Country Planning’s Loei Office, said installing underground transformers in Chiang Khan district will boost safety for those who run businesses and live in wooden houses.
Moving transformers from street power poles underground will also provide more stable power and give the district’s landscape a neater look with power cables no longer visible, he said.
Chiang Khan district is known for its longstanding riverine community next to the Mekong River, which pulls in over 4-5 million visitors per year and makes more than a billion baht in tourism-related revenue.
Praphan Srinuan, deputy governor of the Council of Engineers Thailand, said the PEA has conducted a survey and prepared designs for the underground transformers along Chiang Khan Walking Street.
Also, the Asean Federation of Engineering Organisations and the Engineering Institute of Thailand have proposed making Chiang Khan district the first smart city for low-carbon underground transformers, he added.
The PEA’s deputy director of the transmission system design division, Siriwit Pornpanwatcharadech, said the PEA will adopt a transformer model designed by Chulalongkorn University.
Once the chance of fires destroying the wooden houses in the area is eliminated, safety for residents, tourists and PEA officials will be almost guaranteed.
Mr Siriwit said this will boost local tourism and businesses, cut carbon emissions and increase usable green space.
Sombat Vanichprapa, consultant to the Chula Smart City project, said the move to put transformers and power cables underground was successful in the Siam Square area, helping make Bangkok’s city centre a tourist favourite and providing safety for pedestrians.
The underground transformer model, or low-carbon submersible transformer, has been praised by many state agencies, including the Ministry of Energy, the National Innovation Agency and the Thailand Greenhouse Gas Management Organisation.
The model was recognised at the 2023 Thailand Energy Awards and 2023 Asean Energy Awards.
Electrical eyesores going underground in Chiang Khan, home to many old wooden houses
PUBLISHED : 1 Sep 2023 at 18:28
LOEI — The Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) in this northeastern province is preparing to relocate electric transformers underground in touristy Chiang Khan district to prevent fires in the community where many wooden houses are over a century old.
Moving transformers from concrete power poles will also provide more stable electrical supply and make the landscape neater with power cables no longer visible, said Komkrit Siriyutthaseanyakorn, head of the local office of the Department of Public Works and Town and Country Planning.
Located next to the Mekong River, Chiang Khan draws 4-5 million visitors a year, earning more than a billion baht in tourism-related revenue.
The PEA has conducted a survey and prepared designs for the underground transformers along the Chiang Khan Walking Street, said Praphan Srinuan, deputy governor of the Council of Engineers Thailand.
The Asean Federation of Engineering Organisations and the Engineering Institute of Thailand have proposed making Chiang Khan the first smart city for low-carbon underground transformers, he added.
The PEA will use a transformer model designed by Chulalongkorn University, said Siriwit Pornpanwatcharadech, deputy director of the transmission system design division at the state utility.
With the risk of fires destroying the wooden houses minimised, safety for residents, tourists and PEA staff will be almost guaranteed, he said.
This in turn will spur local tourism and business activity, cut carbon emissions and increase usable green space, he added.
Sombat Vanichprapa, a consultant to the Chula Smart City project, said the move to put transformers and power cables underground was successful in the Siam Square area, helping make Bangkok’s city centre a tourist favourite and providing safety for pedestrians.
The underground transformer model, using a low-carbon submersible transformer, was recognised at the 2023 Thailand Energy Awards and the 2023 Asean Energy Awards.
Mukhtar ZahoorOn 5 April 2022 a sense of joy pervaded the Sultan household in Batamaloo in central Srinagar.
It was a sunny spring day in Indian-administered Kashmir, and after more than three and a half years of visits to courts and police stations, they had received good news – Asif Sultan, a journalist, husband, father and son, had been granted bail.
Relatives gathered waiting for him to return home. When hours turned to days, Asif’s family began to get anxious.
On 10 April, another charge was brought against Asif. He wasn’t released and was moved to a jail outside Kashmir, making visits difficult.
“We are devastated but will keep fighting in court. Everyone knows he’s innocent so we will win eventually,” his father Mohammad Sultan said. His five-year-old granddaughter Areeba ran into the room and sat on his lap – she was six months old when her father was arrested.
Asif Sultan was first charged with aiding militancy in Muslim-majority Kashmir, which has seen an armed insurgency against Indian rule since 1989.
He is charged under an anti-terror law called the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in which it’s extremely difficult to get bail. The second charge against him is under another controversial law – the Public Safety Act (PSA) – which allows detention without charge for up to two years.
Mohammad Sultan rejects the accusations. He believes Asif was targeted for his work, in particular an article about an anti-India militant that Asif wrote a month before he was arrested in August 2018.
“Asif is a professional reporter and he has been jailed for writing about the militancy. He has nothing to do with them [militants],” says his father. “They [the government] wanted to make an example out of him so that no one dares to cover topics the government doesn’t approve of.”
The BBC has spent more than a year investigating accusations against the Indian government that it is running a sinister and systematic campaign to intimidate and silence the press in the region. We had to meet journalists in secret, and they asked for their names to be hidden, fearing reprisals.
Over many trips we spoke to more than two dozen journalists – editors, reporters and photojournalists working independently as well as for regional and national outlets – all of whom see the government’s actions as a warning to them.
Asif has now spent five years in jail. Since 2017, at least seven other Kashmiri journalists have been jailed. Four, including Asif, are still behind bars.
Fahad Shah, who edited a digital magazine, was arrested under anti-terror laws in February 2022, accused of “propagating terror”.
A month before him, freelance journalist Sajad Gul was arrested soon after he posted a video on social media of locals shouting anti-India slogans. Sajad was charged with criminal conspiracy. Both have been re-arrested under new charges, each time they have been granted bail.
The latest journalist arrest was in March this year. Irfan Meraj, whose work has appeared in international outlets, is accused of having links with terror funding.
Many others from the press have had cases registered against them.
The BBC has repeatedly asked the regional administration and police to respond to the allegations against them. We have sought interviews and also sent emails with specific questions. We have not received a reply.
At the G20 meeting in Srinagar in May we asked Manoj Sinha, the region’s top administrator, about allegations of a media crackdown. He said the press “enjoys absolute freedom”. Journalists were “detained and arrested on terror charges and for attempts to disrupt social harmony, not for journalism or for writing stories,” he said.
We have heard multiple accounts which belie the claims.
“It’s very common for a journalist to be summoned by the police here. And dozens of instances where reporters have been detained over their news reports,” one reporter told me.
“I started getting calls from the police about a story I did. They kept asking why I’d done it. Then I was questioned in person. They said they know everything about me and my family which was very scary. I kept thinking about whether I would be arrested or harmed physically.”
More than 90% of the journalists I spoke to said they had been summoned by the police at least once, many of them multiple times over a story. Some said the tone of the police was polite. Others said they were met with anger and threats.
“We live in fear that any story could be our last story. And then you’d be in jail,” one journalist said.
“Journalism is dead and buried in Kashmir,” another reporter told me.
Each of the journalists I spoke to said they had been called by the police numerous times over the past few years for “routine background checks”.
I was witness to one such phone call.
The journalist I was with got a call from the local police station. They put their phone on speaker. The police officer introduced himself and asked the journalist their name, address and where they worked.
When the journalist asked why these details were needed, the officer’s tone remained friendly but he proceeded to read out details of the journalist and their family, including what their parents do, where they live, where their siblings study and work, what degrees their siblings have and the name of the business that one of their siblings runs.
I asked the journalist how they felt after that call.
‘It’s worrying,” they said. “I’m thinking now are they watching me, are they watching my family, what triggered this phone call and what’s going to happen next?”
Other journalists said they have been asked even more personal details including what property they own, what bank accounts they have, what their religious and political beliefs are.
“Journalists in Kashmir are being treated like criminals. We’re labelled as anti-nationals, terror sympathisers, and pro-Pakistan reporters. They don’t understand that it’s our job to reflect all sides,” one journalist said.
All of the Kashmir region is disputed by India and Pakistan, and both countries as well as China control parts of it. Militant groups operating in Indian-administered Kashmir are based in Pakistan and are long believed to have the support of Pakistan’s intelligence services, an allegation Islamabad firmly rejects.
There have also long been accusations of human rights violations by Indian security forces in Kashmir, which have fuelled anger against Indian rule and support for pro-Pakistan insurgent groups in some parts of the region.
Journalists say the Indian government is trying to shut down reporting related to separatist movements and militant groups, but also any coverage critical of the security forces or the administration, even on day-to-day civic issues.
Most journalists I spoke to said they began to feel more scrutiny after Asif Sultan’s arrest in 2018, and things have become drastically more difficult since August 2019. That’s when India revoked the region’s special status and divided the country’s only Muslim majority state into two territories which are now controlled by the national government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Supreme Court of India is currently hearing a case about the legality of these moves.
For five years now, there has been no elected regional government here. And when the chief justice asked the government this week when elections would be held, noting that “restoration of democracy is important”, the government said it could not give an exact timeline.
“Because there’s no elected representative we can approach, the government gets away with acting with impunity,” a journalist said.
At least four Kashmiri journalists have made public that they were stopped from flying out of India, their boarding passes stamped “cancelled” by immigration authorities with no reasons given. One is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who couldn’t attend the awards ceremony.
The BBC has learnt that the list of Kashmiri journalists not allowed to leave India has dozens of names, but it’s not been made public. We asked the police about the legal basis for these “look out circulars”, as they are referred to in official parlance, and have not received a reply.
Journalists have also had fresh passports withheld when they applied to renew expired passports. In recent weeks, passports previously issued to some journalists have also been cancelled. Communication from the government says the journalists are considered a “security threat” to India.
“We feel choked and suffocated,” one journalist said. “All of us are self-censoring. I read my report once as a journalist, then I read it like a policeman would and I start deleting things and watering it down. There’s hardly any journalism being done, it’s mostly just PR for the government.”
Editors have told us they often get directions from the administration on what to cover and what to leave out. They have been instructed to use the word “terrorist” instead of “militant” when referring to armed insurgents.
Regional media outlets depend heavily on government advertising and many have been threatened with the withdrawal of these funds if they don’t fall in line.
“I hate what I do every day, but what about the people I employ? What happens to them if I shut down?” one editor said.
What’s happened to journalism here is evident when you read the local press.
I spent three days comparing dozens of papers published in Kashmir with the daily government press release.
Nearly all had the release on their front pages, some had edited it, others carried it verbatim.
The rest of the front pages were covered with statements from the government or security forces. There were many feature stories but barely any journalism holding the government to account.
In June, allegations surfaced of Indian army personnel entering a mosque in Pulwama in southern Kashmir and shouting “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a Hindu chant.
In normal circumstances, journalists from all outlets would have been in Pulwama speaking to all sides on the ground to verify details and filing reports.
The day after, only a handful of papers carried the story, nearly all reporting it through a quote from regional politician Mehbooba Mufti, who called for an investigation.
Over the next few days, more papers carried it, but only as a story about the Indian army investigating the incident. There was barely any on-the-ground reporting.
While most journalists I spoke to said they fear reprisals by the state, some also said they feel under threat from militants.
There have been instances of militant groups posting statements on their websites threatening journalists.
I spoke to one journalist who received a threat.
“A journalist’s life in Kashmir is like walking on a razor’s edge. You live in fear all the time,” he said.
What are you afraid of, I asked.
“Of a bullet coming at me. When I see a motorcycle stop next to me, I feel terrified that someone is going to pull out a gun and shoot me, and that no one will ever find out who did it,” he said.
In 2018, leading editor Shujaat Bukhari was shot dead outside his Srinagar office, police say by militants. Five years later the trial into his killing is yet to begin.
In a region ridden by conflict, one space where journalists could meet freely, discuss stories and share their anxieties was the Kashmir Press Club in central Srinagar. It was a refuge especially for independent journalists who don’t have offices.
But it wasn’t just that. It was also the main body in the region that defended the rights and freedom of the press.
Last year, the government shut it down. The complex I’ve visited so often to get invaluable local insight into stories, now houses a police office.
Journalists say they have nowhere to turn to when they feel threatened.
Foreign journalists need Ministry of Home Affairs permission to visit Kashmir, and they are rarely given it. The G20 event in May was the first time in the past few years foreign journalists had been allowed to visit Srinagar, but the access was extremely controlled – defining which areas they could visit and what they could cover.
Over the past decade, all of India has witnessed a serious decline in press freedom, which is reflected in global rankings, cases against journalists and raids against media houses. But the degree of the decline in Kashmir is extreme – we have found evidence that press freedom has been all but eroded here.
In the Sultan household, a copy of Kashmir Narrator, the magazine Asif Sultan used to write for, takes pride of place on a shelf in the living room.
His father opened the well-thumbed magazine and pointed to Asif’s photo in a byline. Mohammad asked his granddaughter who the person in the picture was.
“My Papa. He is in jail,” Areeba replied.
Mohammad hopes Asif is released before Areeba gets to an age where she registers what has happened to her father.
“I’m getting old,” he said. “But I’m trying to be both a father and grandfather to her. How long can I do this for?”
Like Creative Technology, many other Singapore brands have similar stories that should be written, filling the current gap in local literature on homegrown brands.
In fact, the Singapore story of how the country got to where it is today, an economic powerhouse that is a hub for many sectors, can be told through the grit and gumption of local enterprises – why they started, challenges confronted, failures faced, and breakthroughs in business
For instance, how did DBS bank, set up to finance the country’s fledgling industries and grow new ones, get involved in the development of Plaza Singapura and Raffles City, and eventually acquire POSB to become Southeast Asia’s largest bank?
How did Singapore Airlines become a great way to fly, earning global accolades such as the best airline in the world awards for consecutive years?
There were many stumbles and sacrifices along the way for each enterprise to scale such heights, and many interesting lessons learnt that should be shared. These stories of success and failures will only strengthen the Singapore brand, encouraging the belief that a small nation can dream big. This will also encourage more entrepreneurial efforts.
Similarly, when we decided to write and publish a book on local household brand FairPrice Group (FairPrice), which runs the ubiquitous NTUC FairPrice supermarkets, among other things, we discovered that it is more than just a supermarket.
The stories that were shared for the book are instrumental in not only understanding the 50-year-old consumer cooperative but Singapore as well.
Younger brands also deserve the spotlight, such as fashion label Charles and Keith, which was founded in 1996 by a pair of brothers with S$100,000 and is now present in more than 30 countries; F&B empire BreadTalk Group whose pork floss buns have gone round the world; or consumer electronics company Prism that is seeking to make premium technology accessible to all.
These stories of local brands not only enrich our sense of history or heritage, but also shape Singapore – creating a unique brand story for the country that is more than just about destination tourism (attractions and food) or the efficiency of governance, which are now well-known traits of the nation.
Ultimately, these stories are a good reminder – contrary to popular belief and even lament – that Singapore has strong local brands that have made a mark at home and abroad. But if nobody writes their stories, who will know?
Sue-Ann Chia is co-founder of content agency The Nutgraf, and co-editor of the book The Price of Being Fair – The FairPrice Group Story.
Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list.
Creativity is wonderfully mysterious – and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings – and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines. Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.
New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic – as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers’ strike.
And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity – along with examples of both its promise and peril – is likely just beginning.
When people are at their most creative, they’re responding to a need, goal or problem by generating something new – a product or solution that didn’t previously exist.
In this sense, creativity is an act of combining existing resources – ideas, materials, knowledge – in a novel way that’s useful or gratifying. Quite often, the result of creative thinking is also surprising, leading to something that the creator did not – and perhaps could not – foresee.
It might involve an invention, an unexpected punchline to a joke or a groundbreaking theory in physics. It might be a unique arrangement of notes, tempo, sounds and lyrics that results in a new song.
So, as a researcher of creative thinking, I immediately noticed something interesting about the content generated by the latest versions of AI, including GPT-4.
When prompted with tasks requiring creative thinking, the novelty and usefulness of GPT-4’s output reminded me of the creative types of ideas submitted by students and colleagues I had worked with as a teacher and entrepreneur.
The ideas were different and surprising, yet relevant and useful. And, when required, quite imaginative.
Consider the following prompt offered to GPT-4: “Suppose all children became giants for one day out of the week. What would happen?” The ideas generated by GPT-4 touched on culture, economics, psychology, politics, interpersonal communication, transportation, recreation and much more – many surprising and unique in terms of the novel connections generated.
This combination of novelty and utility is difficult to pull off, as most scientists, artists, writers, musicians, poets, chefs, founders, engineers and academics can attest.
Yet AI seemed to be doing it – and doing it well.
With researchers in creativity and entrepreneurship Christian Byrge and Christian Gilde, I decided to put AI’s creative abilities to the test by having it take the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, or TTCT.
The TTCT prompts the test-taker to engage in the kinds of creativity required for real-life tasks: asking questions, how to be more resourceful or efficient, guessing cause and effect or improving a product. It might ask a test-taker to suggest ways to improve a children’s toy or imagine the consequences of a hypothetical situation, as the above example demonstrates.
The tests are not designed to measure historical creativity, which is what some researchers use to describe the transformative brilliance of figures like Mozart and Einstein. Rather, it assesses the general creative abilities of individuals, often referred to as psychological or personal creativity.
In addition to running the TTCT through GPT-4 eight times, we also administered the test to 24 of our undergraduate students.
All of the results were evaluated by trained reviewers at Scholastic Testing Service, a private testing company that provides scoring for the TTCT. They didn’t know in advance that some of the tests they’d be scoring had been completed by AI.
Since Scholastic Testing Service is a private company, it does not share its prompts with the public. This ensured that GPT-4 would not have been able to scrape the internet for past prompts and their responses. In addition, the company has a database of thousands of tests completed by college students and adults, providing a large, additional control group with which to compare AI scores.
Our results?
GPT-4 scored in the top 1% of test-takers for the originality of its ideas. From our research, we believe this marks one of the first examples of AI meeting or exceeding the human ability for original thinking.
In short, we believe that AI models like GPT-4 are capable of producing ideas that people see as unexpected, novel and unique. Other researchers are arriving at similar conclusions in their research of AI and creativity.
The emerging creative ability of AI is surprising for a number of reasons.
For one, many outside of the research community continue to believe that creativity cannot be defined, let alone scored. Yet products of human novelty and ingenuity have been prized – and bought and sold – for thousands of years. And creative work has been defined and scored in fields like psychology since at least the 1950s.
The person, product, process, press model of creativity, which researcher Mel Rhodes introduced in 1961, was an attempt to categorize the myriad ways in which creativity had been understood and evaluated until that point. Since then, the understanding of creativity has only grown.
Still others are surprised that the term “creativity” might be applied to nonhuman entities like computers. On this point, we tend to agree with cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, who has argued that the question of whether the term creativity should be applied to AI is a philosophical rather than scientific question.
It’s worth noting that we studied only the output of AI in our research. We didn’t study its creative process, which is likely very different from human thinking processes, or the environment in which the ideas were generated. And had we defined creativity as requiring a human person, then we would have had to conclude, by definition, that AI cannot possibly be creative.
But regardless of the debate over definitions of creativity and the creative process, the products generated by the latest versions of AI are novel and useful. We believe this satisfies the definition of creativity that is now dominant in the fields of psychology and science.
Furthermore, the creative abilities of AI’s current iterations are not entirely unexpected.
In their now famous proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the founders of AI highlighted their desire to simulate “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence” – including creativity.
In this same proposal, computer scientist Nathaniel Rochester revealed his motivation: “How can I make a machine which will exhibit originality in its solution of problems?”
Apparently, AI’s founders believed that creativity, including the originality of ideas, was among the specific forms of human intelligence that machines could emulate.
To me, the surprising creativity scores of GPT-4 and other AI models highlight a more pressing concern: Within US schools, very few official programs and curricula have been implemented to date that specifically target human creativity and cultivate its development.
In this sense, the creative abilities now realized by AI may provide a “Sputnik moment” for educators and others interested in furthering human creative abilities, including those who see creativity as an essential condition of individual, social and economic growth.
Erik Guzik is Assistant Clinical Professor of Management, University of Montana
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
SINGAPORE: Silat exponent Sheik Farhan and table tennis player Feng Tianwei were crowned Singapore’s Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year respectively on Wednesday (Aug 23). The duo were among the winners of the Singapore Sports Awards 2023, held at the Orchard Hotel on Wednesday evening, to celebrate and recognise theContinue Reading
Receives special recognition for ‘Tech Growth Catalyst’
Role seen as enhancing visibility of tech firms beyond Malaysia
The National Tech Association of Malaysia (PIKOM) recently honoured Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) senior vice president Gopi Ganesalingam with a Special Recognition Award for ‘Tech Growth Catalyst’.
“As a prominent figure in Malaysia’s digital economy, Gopi’s…Continue Reading
SINGAPORE: More than 6,000 people are on the National Day Awards list this year, with four individuals getting the Distinguished Service Order (Darjah Utama Bakti Cemerlang). The full list was announced on the Prime Minister’s Office’s website on Wednesday (Aug 9). The four recipients of the Distinguished Service Order areContinue Reading
