Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Full Moon

Full Moon today

- wong chee tat :)

Hillview Terrace residential site put up for sale by tender

 

Hillview Terrace residential site put up for sale by tender
 

By Travis Teo | Posted: 18 May 2010 0014 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Singapore's night skyline

SINGAPORE : A freehold residential site at Hillview Terrace has been placed for sale by tender.

Its marketing agent, DTZ, said owners of the properties there have agreed to put up their units for collective sale.

The Hillview Terrace plot comprises even numbered units of between 12 and 24.

The site occupies a land area of some 49,164 square feet (4,567.5 square metres) and it can be developed into a 10-storey condominium with a gross plot ratio of 1.92.

This translates into total gross floor area of approximately 103,835 square feet, including an additional 10 per cent balcony area. DTZ said that is equivalent to about 100 apartments with an average size of 900 square feet.

The tender exercise for the site will close at 3pm on June 22.

DTZ expects the property to attract developers keen to develop a boutique condominium project.

Meanwhile, DTZ said freehold residential land of this size is hard to come by in popular residential areas.

Nearby amenities like West Mall and Bukit Timah Shopping Centre will also add to the site's appeal.

The area will be served by Bukit Batok and Bukit Gombak MRT stations as well as the Hillview and Beauty World MRT stations, which are slated to open in 2015.

- CNA/al 

- wong chee tat :)

Holy is the Lord

- wong chee tat :)

2,300 DBSS flats in pipeline

2,300 DBSS flats in pipeline
By Mustafa Shafawi | Posted: 24 May 2010 1821 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Artist's impression of Parc Lumiere - SIM LIAN GROUP website

 
SINGAPORE : Flat buyers can look forward to more public housing choices under the Design, Build and Sell Scheme (DBSS).

The Housing and Development Board (HDB) on Monday awarded a tender for a site that could yield about 700 DBSS flats in Yishun to Guthrie (DBP) and SK Land for S$148.9 million.

HDB will tender another three new DBSS sites later this year that could yield about 1,600 flats in Tampines, Bedok Reservoir and Upper Serangoon.

The first site will be launched for sale next month, while the other two will be rolled out in the second half of the year. The combined estimated yield from these three sites is 1,590 units.

The total of 2,300 DBSS flats in the pipeline will further supplement the Build-To-Order (BTO) system, which is the main supply of new HDB flats.

DBSS flats are developed and sold by private developers. They have a 99-year lease and are sold under similar HDB eligibility conditions.

Ninety-five percent of the flat supply for applicants will be set aside for first-timers.

- CNA/al 


- wong chee tat :)

Google sees potential for mobile internet space in Asia

Google sees potential for mobile internet space in Asia
By Desmond Wong | Posted: 20 May 2010 2008 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 The Google logo on the rooftop of the Google China headoffice building in Beijing

 
SINGAPORE: More Asians are accessing online content via their mobile phones rather than their computers and US-based Google wants a slice of the mobile internet market.

Speaking at a conference in Singapore, the internet giant said some issues will need to be addressed before the segment can take off in the region.

Mobile phone penetration is high in Asia and more users are surfing the web or checking emails on their handset.

Asians are also quick to embrace technology and Google said this is an opportunity for companies in the region to create applications and even take their business offshore.

Charles Rim, principal, Corporate Development, Google Inc, said: "In Asia, a lot of these mobile apps have developed a lot quicker than they have in the States. Mobile in the States was pretty rudimentary until about this year or last year.

“So that's an area where I think companies in Asia have an opportunity to do things in the States. We haven't seen a lot of successes yet, but I think it's a question of timing.”

Google said tech savvy economies like South Korea and Japan have a vibrant mobile internet sector.

But some parts of Asia are still lagging when it comes to pricing and infrastructure.

Google added that prohibitive prices for mobile devices and data plans will also hamper the sector's growth.

Mr Charles Rim said: "Today, with very bad speeds, if your broadband experience is still only going to be 150Kbps to 200Kbps and it's going to cost you S$100 a month, no one is going to do it.

“But the other end of the spectrum is Korean, where everyone's doing 5 Mbps and you can do all you can eat data for 40 bucks, then everyone's doing it.”

Google added that firms in emerging markets like Asia have an ace up their sleeve they can exploit.

First movers like Baidu in China are familiar to their domestic users and companies can use this familiarity to secure their gains in their home markets, thus making them much harder for foreign firms to dislodge. 

- CNA/vm 

- wong chee tat :)

BTO in Boon Lay gets strong demand

BTO in Boon Lay gets strong demand
By Mustafa Shafawi | Posted: 19 May 2010 1110 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Artist's impression of BTO project Boon Lay Grove

 

SINGAPORE: The latest Build-To-Order Project, Boon Lay Grove in Jurong West, is receiving heavy interest from home buyers.

Observers say the upcoming Jurong Lake District makes the location more attractive.

Based on latest figures from the HDB website, more than 3,800 people have applied for the 450 units being offered.

That is close to nine times as many applicants as there are units.

Some 2,500 people have applied for the 300 four-room units.

Close to 1,400 people have applied for the 150 five-room units on offer.

The other BTO project, Floral Spring@Yishun, is not seeing as strong a demand. The number of applicants exceeded the number of units available by about five times.

The project offers a mix of studio apartments, as well as four- and five-room units.

Altogether 600 units are being offered at Floral Spring. 

– CNA/jy

- wong chee tat :) 

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

System Updates

Made minor configurations to router settings

- wong chee tat :)

Decoding Our Network Communities

Decoding Our Network Communities

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2010) — A new way of finding community structure within networks -- anything from social networks such as Facebook, to power grids, political voting networks, and protein interaction networks in biology -- could help us understand how people are connected and how connections change over time. The new technique, developed by a team from the University of North Carolina, University of Oxford, and Harvard University, aims to be more realistic than conventional approaches, which only capture one type of connection or a network at only one moment in time.

The new approach captures the totality of connections within a network and could be used to examine the different ways communities form; for example, analysing relationships between University students and staff across many different connections such as Facebook friendship, College affiliation, and subject studied. Alternatively, it could be used to track how one type of connection -- such as Facebook friendship -- changes over time.

The technique is not limited to social networks as community detection has the potential to find important groups in many other applications, such as protein-protein interaction networks, transportation networks, and political voting networks.

A report of the team's work, advancing the theory of community detection, was recently published in the journal Science.

'Capturing the complexity of people's relationships through networks such as Facebook and how these relationships change over time is a huge challenge,' said Dr Mason Porter of Oxford University's Mathematical Institute, an author of the report. 'Our new approach, which can be applied to any type of network, is potentially much better than existing methods at identifying what makes a 'community' within a network and at tracking how such groupings evolve over time.'

Until now, it was only possible to detect communities using computer algorithms in very special cases -- in particular, only in networks that are treated as if they don't change over time and as if they have only one type of connection.

The new computational method can be used with what researchers call 'multislice' networks, in which each 'slice' might represent a social network at one snapshot in time or a different set of connections between the same set of individuals. These 'slices' are combined into a larger mathematical object, which can contain a potentially huge amount of data and is difficult to analyse. Previous community-finding methods could only deal with each slice separately, and it was necessary to compare the results obtained from different slices using ad hoc tools (if it was possible at all) and the new method overcomes this key challenge.

'It's very easy to use 'ad hoc' methods and miss something that is potentially interesting or important in such complex networks,' said Dr Porter. 'Whilst our new approach doesn't dictate what you will find, it does potentially give you a much better chance of finding interesting connections if they're there.'

- wong chee tat :)

New nanoscale electrical phenomenon discovered

New nanoscale electrical phenomenon discovered May 18, 2010

At the scale of the very small, physics can get peculiar. A University of Michigan biomedical engineering professor has discovered a new instance of such a nanoscale phenomenon -- one that could lead to faster, less expensive portable diagnostic devices and push back frontiers in building micro-mechanical and "lab on a chip" devices.

In our macroscale world, materials called conductors effectively transmit electricity and materials called insulators or dielectrics don't, unless they are jolted with an extremely high voltage. Under such "dielectric breakdown" circumstances, as when a bolt of lightening hits a rooftop, the dielectric (the rooftop in this example) suffers irreversible damage.

This isn't the case at the nanoscale, according to a new discovery by Alan Hunt, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Hunt and his research team were able to get an electric current to pass nondestructively through a sliver of glass, which isn't usually a conductor.

A paper on the research is newly published online in Nature Nanotechnology.

"This is a new, truly nanoscale physical phenomenon," Hunt said. "At larger scales, it doesn't work. You get extreme heating and damage.

"What matters is how steep the voltage drop is across the distance of the dielectric. When you get down to the nanoscale and you make your dielectric exceedingly thin, you can achieve the breakdown with modest voltages that batteries can provide. You don't get the damage because you're at such a small scale that heat dissipates extraordinarily quickly."

These conducting nanoscale dielectric slivers are what Hunt calls liquid glass electrodes, fabricated at the U-M Center for Ultrafast Optical Science with a femtosecond laser, which emits light pulses that are only quadrillionths of a second long.

The glass electrodes are ideal for use in lab-on-a-chip devices that integrate multiple laboratory functions onto one chip just millimeters or centimeters in size. The devices could lead to instant home tests for illnesses, food contaminants and toxic gases. But most of them need a power source to operate, and right now they rely on wires to route this power. It's often difficult for engineers to insert these wires into the tiny machines, Hunt said.
 
"The design of microfluidic devices is constrained because of the power problem," Hunt said. "But we can machine electrodes right into the device."

Instead of using wires to route electricity, Hunt's team etches channels through which ionic fluid can transmit electricity. These channels, 10 thousand times thinner than the dot of this "i," physically dead-end at their intersections with the microfluidic or nanofluidic channels in which analysis is being conducted on the lab-on a-chip (this is important to avoid contamination). But the electricity in the ionic channels can zip through the thin glass dead-end without harming the device in the process.

This discovery is the result of an accident. Two channels in an experimental nanofluidic device didn't line up properly, Hunt said, but the researchers found that electricity did pass through the device.

"We were surprised by this, as it runs counter to accepted thinking about the behavior of nonconductive materials," Hunt said. "Upon further study we were able to understand why this could happen, but only at the nanometer scale."

As for electronics applications, Hunt said that the wiring necessary in integrated circuits fundamentally limits their size.

"If you could utilize reversible dielectric breakdown to work for you instead of against you, that might significantly change things," Hunt said.

Provided by University of Michigan (news : web)

- wong chee tat :)

Global Trader Programme enhanced, commodities sector to benefit

Global Trader Programme enhanced, commodities sector to benefit
By Travis Teo | Posted: 21 May 2010 2135 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Motorists travel over the bridge against the view of Singapore skyline.

 
SINGAPORE : Singapore has enhanced its Global Trader Programme (GTP) to boost the commodities trading sector.

With the improvement, structured commodity financing activities will qualify for tax concessions.

Enterprise agency IE Singapore said that structured commodity financing is the latest value-added activity to be included in its GTP.

It will be an area that can enable better credit and performance risk management for the commodities sector.

The move is part of efforts to build up Singapore's trading environment to remain competitive as Asia becomes the centre of the world's trade flow.

The GTP, which was launched in June 2001, is aimed at encouraging companies to use Singapore as their global or regional trading base.

Total revenue for companies under the GTP grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 14 per cent over the last five years to US$465 billion.

However, the total revenue of US$465 billion recorded last year was 30 per cent lower from that of 2008.

IE Singapore added that 35 new entrants also joined the GTP this year while another 37 renewed their (GTP) status for the next five years.

New entrants this year includes South African, Russian, Japanese as well as Singapore companies.

Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang said; "We expect this GTP enhancement to contribute to higher trade volumes and strengthen Singapore's position as an international trading hub.

"This enhancement will also lay the foundation to build intellectual capital in structured financing within commodity houses in Singapore." 

- CNA/ms 

- wong chee tat :)

Younger Singaporeans biggest debt defaulters

Younger Singaporeans biggest debt defaulters
By Mustafa Shafawi | Posted: 20 May 2010 1308 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Singapore youths (file picture)

 

SINGAPORE: Younger Singaporeans are increasingly defaulting on their debts.

Figures released by DP Credit Bureau showed that the percentage of default records of 21 to 29 year olds rose from five per cent (5.07%) in January 2009 to seven per cent (7.16%) in December 2009.

They're the age group with the highest number of defaults.

The figures also show 21 to 29 years that are married have higher rates of default on debts than their single counterparts - a phenomenon unique to this age bracket.

For all other groups, married individuals have a lower rate of default than singles of the same age.

The rate of bad debts of Singaporeans between 21 and 29 years old is more than double (130%) than the average rate for all consumers at 3 per cent (3.11%).

Managing Director of DP Credit Bureau, Chen Yew Nah, said young married Singaporeans need to reassess their spending plans and set themselves more realistic budgets that they can stick to.

She said they also need to be more diligent in making repayments on time.

This is the age when young Singaporeans graduate and enter the workforce, so it the first time they have access to credit.

They may not be experienced at managing their debts and their personal budgets.

Ms Chen said this lack of discipline will hurt them in the long run as it ends up affecting their credit rating and their ability to access credit in the future." 

- CNA/jy

- wong chee tat :) 

Flush Asians splash out on luxuries - survey

Flush Asians splash out on luxuries - survey

Reuters - Tuesday, May 18

SINGAPORE, May 18 - Things are looking up in the Asia Pacific, a new survey shows, with most consumers saying they're confident about their jobs and the economy in the next six months, which is encouraging them to spend on luxury items.

The MasterCard Worldwide Index of Consumer Confidence for the region was higher in eight of the 14 markets surveyed as robust economic growth ignited a sense of optimism.

"The Asia/Pacific region rebounded in economic growth as early as the second half of last year, and regional recovery has continued to gain traction this year," said Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide's economic adviser for the Asia/Pacific.

"While consumers in this region were amongst the first to cut back drastically on discretionary spending 18 months ago, they now seem confident and ready to significantly increase their discretionary expenditures ... thereby contributing to the momentum of recovery," he said in a statement.

The survey, which in the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific involved more than 10,500 people, gave the Asia Pacific an index score of 69.1 compared to 66.3 six months ago.

Leading the uptrend were China, Vietnam and Singapore, which showed the highest levels of consumer confidence in the region.

Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines were the most confident their incomes would increase within the next six months and even pessimism levels in Japan, which is struggling to shake off an economic recession, were declining.

The survey, which was conducted from March to April this year, also found that younger respondents, aged below 30, were more optimistic than their older counterparts.

For more details, click http://www.masterintelligence.com

- wong chee tat :)

S'pore to further open up market for Indian generic drugs

S'pore to further open up market for Indian generic drugs
 

By Channel NewsAsia's India correspondent Damanjeet Kohli | Posted: 12 May 2010 1821 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang (L) and Indian Minister for Trade and Commerce Anand Sharma.
	Video S'pore to further open up market for Indian generic drugs

 

NEW DELHI: Singapore has concluded a deal with Delhi to further open its market to Indian generic drugs.

The deal was sealed by Singapore Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang while on a visit to New Delhi.

He is also there to review the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA).

India is the world's fourth largest maker of generic or off-patent drugs.

In the last two years, drug patents worth an estimated US$40 billion have expired, creating an opportunity for India to produce and sell these drugs at a lower cost.

But to sell to foreign markets, these drugs must be cleared by the importing country.

And Singapore has signed a pact with India, to simplify the process.

Singapore Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang, said: "Basically, whenever Indian companies produce generics, you have to go through a regulatory process, of registering and getting regulatory clearance.

"What we have agreed is that you can do that in the normal way but if your generics have already cleared through one of the five countries - US, Canada, EU, UK or Australia - Singapore would take that as already cleared and we would import it without additional clearance from a generic company."

India has also invited Singapore to invest in its Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor project.

It involves building 24 industrial zones along the 1500 km corridor, and India is hoping to attract more than US$90 billion worth of investments.

India Minister for Trade and Commerce, Anand Sharma, said: "The Delhi-Mumbai corridor we have discussed and the investment nodes and urged Minister Lim to encourage Singapore entities, bringing together on one platform all stakeholders to invest in one of the 24 nodes indentified under the Delhi Mumbai industrial corridor, which will in fact be covering six states in India.

"230 million population and taking in investment of 90 billion dollars, in the corridor which will be 1500 km long."

India and Singapore will review their Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement or CECA over the next 12 months.

They have agreed to meet every quarter to complete their second review of CECA.

India wants to further open up the services sector, and mutual recognition of professionals such as doctors, architects, nurses and accountants.

The two sides have also agreed to strengthen co-operation in science and technology, intellectual property rights, and research and development.

Under the agreement, India and Singapore hope to double their bilateral trade to US$32 billion in the next five years.

With the operationalisation of CECA in 2005, the two countries have opened up their trade in goods and services by reducing and eliminating duties.

While the bilateral trade has been growing at 20 per cent since the implementation of CECA, the second review aimed at improving the trade, services and investment chapters, will further open up the markets of the two countries for investment.

- CNA/jy

- wong chee tat :) 

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Strong demand for private homes with 2,207 units sold in April 2010

Strong demand for private homes with 2,207 units sold in April 2010
By Mok Fei Fei & Georgina Joseph | Posted: 17 May 2010 1330 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1

 

SINGAPORE: Private home sales breached the 2,000-unit mark for the first time in nine months since July 2009.

Figures from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) show that 2,207 units were sold in April on the back of positive sentiment and resilient demand.

While the transaction volume exceeded market expectations, analysts said it is unlikely to be sustainable.

Private home sales in April were also 25.3 per cent higher than the 1,761 units sold in March.

In fact, the number of units sold outpaced the number of units launched in April, with only 2,084 units launched last month.

UOL's Waterbank@Dakota was one of the star performers in April, with 573 units being snapped up at a median price of S$1,178 per square foot.

CapitaLand's The Interlace saw 144 units sold at a median price of S$1,067 per square foot.

The two projects, along with Tree House's 374 units accounted for nearly half or 49.4 per cent of the total sales transactions.

The most expensive unit sold last month was The Orchard Residences at Orchard Boulevard which went for S$4,207 per square foot.

Unlike the trend in recent months, luxury projects were not the most popular among buyers, with mid-priced developments taking over the rein.

"In a way, we can look at it as a second ring, second tee-off compared to the core central region. In terms of pricing, certain pockets are still lower than outlying suburban areas like Ang Mo Kio , Bishan. So there is that attractiveness - near to the city, and yet pricing is still quite affordable," said Chua Yang Liang, head of Research, Southeast Asia, at Jones Lang LaSalle.

Compared to March, home sales in the city fringe jumped 290 per cent with 1,044 units sold last month.

Meanwhile, fewer new homes changed hands in other areas.

392 new homes in the city were sold, down 45 per cent from March, and sales in the mass market segment dipped by 1 per cent to 771 units.

Overall, market players attribute the strong demand to better economic and job prospects.

Some home buyers may also be eager to lock-in their purchases in anticipation of an interest rate hike in the second half of the year.

Despite the positive sentiment, analysts warned that there are uncertainties ahead due to the debt crisis in Europe.

"The last 2 weeks has seen some cooling off. If you were to visit some of the showflats, the attendance has been small,” Colin Tan, director & head of Research & Consultancy at Chesterton Suntec International.

“I think developers recognise this, so when they price their projects, they will have to bear this in mind that they either have to push for sales or push for prices," he added.

Going forward, analysts project quarterly home prices to grow by 1.5 to 2 per cent.

CBRE said it expects demand of new homes to reach 4,000-4,500 units in the second quarter, similar to the 4,380 new homes sold in the first quarter.

They also expect between 13,000 and 16,000 new homes to be sold for the whole of 2010. 

-CNA/vm/ls

- wong chee tat :) 

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Amazing Grace

-

- wong chee tat :)

Mathematicians Solve 140-Year-Old Boltzmann Equation

Mathematicians Solve 140-Year-Old Boltzmann Equation

May 13, 2010
(PhysOrg.com) -- Two University of Pennsylvania mathematicians have found solutions to a 140-year-old, 7-dimensional equation that were not known to exist for more than a century despite its widespread use in modeling the behavior of gases.

The study, part historical journey but mostly mathematical proof, was conducted by Philip T. Gressman and Robert M. Strain of Penn’s Department of Mathematics. The solution of the Boltzmann equation problem was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Solutions of this equation, beyond current computational capabilities, describe the location of gas molecules probabilistically and predict the likelihood that a molecule will reside at any particular location and have a particular momentum at any given time in the future.

During the late 1860s and 1870s, physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann developed this equation to predict how gaseous material distributes itself in space and how it responds to changes in things like temperature, pressure or velocity.

The equation maintains a significant place in history because it modeled gaseous behavior well, and the predictions it led to were backed up by experimentation. Despite its notable leap of faith -- the assumption that gases are made of molecules, a theory yet to achieve public acceptance at the time — it was fully adopted. It provided important predictions, the most fundamental and intuitively natural of which was that gasses naturally settle to an equilibrium state when they are not subject to any sort of external influence. One of the most important physical insights of the equation is that even when a gas appears to be macroscopically at rest, there is a frenzy of molecular activity in the form of collisions. While these collisions cannot be observed, they account for gas temperature.

Gressman and Strain were intrigued by this mysterious equation that illustrated the behavior of the physical world, yet for which its discoverers could only find solutions for gasses in perfect equilibrium.

Using modern mathematical techniques from the fields of partial differential equations and harmonic analysis — many of which were developed during the last five to 50 years, and thus relatively new to mathematics — the Penn mathematicians proved the global existence of classical solutions and rapid time decay to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions. Global existence and rapid decay imply that the equation correctly predicts that the solutions will continue to fit the system’s behavior and not undergo any mathematical catastrophes such as a breakdown of the equation’s integrity caused by a minor change within the equation. Rapid decay to equilibrium means that the effect of an initial small disturbance in the gas is short-lived and quickly becomes unnoticeable.

“Even if one assumes that the equation has solutions, it is possible that the solutions lead to a catastrophe, like how it’s theoretically possible to balance a needle on its tip, but in practice even infinitesimal imperfections cause it to fall over,” Gressman said.

The study also provides a new understanding of the effects due to grazing collisions, when neighboring molecules just glance off one another rather than collide head on. These glancing collisions turn out to be dominant type of collision for the full Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions.

“We consider it remarkable that this equation, derived by Boltzmann and Maxwell in 1867 and 1872, grants a fundamental example where a range of geometric fractional derivatives occur in a physical model of the natural world,” Strain said. “The mathematical techniques needed to study such phenomena were only developed in the modern era.”

Provided by University of Pennsylvania (news : web)

- wong chee tat :)

Unfailing Love - Chris Tomlin

- wong chee tat :)

Your Grace Is Enough by Chris Tomlin

- wong chee tat :)

Experts say there needs to be more dialogue between accounting, auditing standards

Experts say there needs to be more dialogue between accounting, auditing standardscr
By Janice Teo | Posted: 12 May 2010 2208 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 Motorists travel over the bridge against the view of Singapore skyline.

 
SINGAPORE: It's crucial to make financial reporting more relevant to stakeholder needs in the wake of the global financial crisis two years ago. This is the view of accountants attending an industry conference in Singapore.

They said that besides evolving financial reporting standards, it's also important to have consistency between accounting and auditing practices.

For now, they said, auditing practices are still playing catch-up.

The global financial crisis has changed the way many businesses look at their financial health.

For the accounting industry, the crisis has highlighted the disparity between accounting and auditing standards.

Experts said while accounting standards were able to adapt and respond very quickly to the crisis, auditing standards were not keeping pace.

So accounting and auditing professionals should talk more.

Tham Sai Choy, member, Singapore Accounting Standards Council, said: "All the numbers need to go through the auditors before they finally go out as auditor information to the market. So that dialogue between the accounting standard setters and the auditing standard setters is something that we need to go and think about again."

Experts also said that while there is a general awareness within the industry of divergence between the auditor and accountant, there have so far been no specific dialogues to address the issue.

Mr Tham said key areas that need work are fair value accounting and auditing of future cash flows.

And where public money is involved, experts said financial reporting needs to adhere to much higher standards such as having a more robust disclosure regime.

M Faiz Azmi, chairman, Malaysian Accounting Standards Board, said: "There are concerns from the companies itself in terms of commerciality, competitiveness, and so on. But if you are taking money from the public, then in a way you have to give up some of that secrecy."

Going forward, experts said the accounting profession should watch economic cycles and deal better with risk analysis. 

- CNA/vm

- wong chee tat :)

Enya - The River Sings

- wong chee tat :)

Bosses to hire more

May 4, 2010

Bosses to hire more 
 

By Kor Kian Beng

ST FILE PHOTO

MORE Singapore bosses expect to ramp up recruitment between April and June, and the proportion doing so is nearing the pre-recession peaks seen in 2007.

A survey of 564 top executives at multinational corporations in March shows 54 per cent expect to hire, buoyed by the strong economy recovery.

This figure is slightly below the 56 per cent peak between January and June 2007, when the economy was booming, said global recruitment firm Hudson in its latest quarterly report released on Tuesday.

The sectors most keen to recruit are banking and financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and manufacturing and industrial.

Only 3 per cent say they will cut headcount, compared to 19 per cent a year ago. They are from IT and telecommunications, media, public relations and advertising.But the optimism of bosses and strong economy did not lift the morale of Singapore workers as much as their counterparts in other parts of Asia.

In Singapore, 35 per cent say employee morale has improved while 34 per cent say it has declined and 31 per cent report no change, said Hudson, which carried out the survey in March amid a surging economy. But in China, for instance, the corresponding figures are: 45, 17 and 38 per cent.

Read the full report in Wednesday's edition of The Straits Times.

- wong chee tat :)

Leann Rimes - Amazing Grace

- wong chee tat :)

Phone updated

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I will do further testing for a week to see if those cryptic error messages that had surfaced.  I had taken some pictures, played with the settings and used the phone quite extensively and it seemed that after updating it, those issues went away. Wonderful.

Today, I performed another minor update from 2.10.4.22 to 2.10.5.11.

- wong chee tat :)

Warm Nights

These few nights are rather hot.

- wong chee tat :)

Heart Sutra

- wong chee tat :)

Heart Sutra

- wong chee tat :)

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Heart Sutra

- wong chee tat :)

Om Mani Padme Hum

- wong chee tat :)

Chris Tomlin - How Can I Keep From Singing

- wong chee tat :)

Symantec snaps up crypto companies PGP, GuardianEdge

Symantec snaps up crypto companies PGP, GuardianEdge

By Peter Bright

Computer security and backup giant Symantec has bought a pair of encryption companies: GuardianEdge, for $70 million, and PGP, for $300 million. GuardianEdge focuses on endpoint protection, offering a range of products for encryption of hard disks, removable storage, and smartphones. PGP offers both disk encryption and mail encryption software, along with systems for managing PKI. Both companies also have numerous existing government contracts.

Both companies already have OEM partnerships with Symantec, so effective integration into Symantec's existing software line-up is likely to be unproblematic. Symantec CEO Enrique Salem suggested that further integration with the company's existing backup, security, and Software as a Service products will be forthcoming.

Symantec has made many acquisitions in its past, including the record $13.5 billion purchase of backup company Veritas. The PGP and GuardianEdge purchases are the first major acquisitions in the encryption market.

With greater use of mobile devices, and increasing awareness of data loss, robust mobile encryption is of growing importance. Symantec said that integration of these new products will be instrumental in providing policy-driven data protection systems.

The deal is still subject to regulatory approval. If all goes well, it should complete in June.

- wong chee tat :)

Amazing Grace ( My Chains are Gone)

- wong chee tat :)

Laws of Karma

According to the laws of karma, men are born out of sex and will therefore die from sex. Only when one understands this reasoning, will one exercise control and not over indulge one's desires. Restraining one's desires has many benefits including good health and long life, success and auspiciousness.

- www.tbsn.org

- wong chee tat :)

Sexual misconduct

Sexual misconduct is the primary demon and illness bringing degeneration

- www.tbsn.org

- wong chee tat :)