Showing posts with label Singapore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Singapore. Show all posts
20 September 2021
22 August 2020
7 August 2020
Reuters: Spate of suicides among migrant workers in Singapore raises concern
Four months on, some dormitories remain under quarantine, and even migrants who have been declared virus-free have had their movements restricted. They also face uncertainty over the jobs that their families back home depend on.
Rights groups and health officials say this has taken a heavy toll on workers. In some cases migrants have been detained under the mental health act after videos posted on social media showed them teetering on rooftops and high window ledges. [...]
Singapore has recorded over 54,000 COVID-19 cases, mainly from dormitories in which around 300,000 workers from Bangladesh, India and China are housed. Only 27 people have died from the disease.
19 July 2020
Salon: In an upset to Big Pharma, the most promising coronavirus vaccine comes from the public sector
The early-stage human trial data on the new vaccine, known as AZD1222, is expected to be published in the medical journal The Lancet on Monday, according to a Wednesday report from Reuters. The vaccine candidate is already in large-scale Phase III trials, meaning mass inoculations of thousands in multiple countries, although researchers have yet to disclose whether the Phase I trials demonstrated that it will be both safe and trigger an immune response. (Many coronavirus vaccine candidates use parallel processing, meaning multiple phases of trials happen simultaneously to speed research.) [...]
Recently, American news outlets have been fixated on the vaccine efforts of Moderna, a pharmaceutical company with a promising candidate. Yet as a for-profit company, much of the news around Moderna's vaccine is hard to separate from hype; the company's stock value shot up in May after it revealed promising early results from its vaccine candidate. And the Trump administration has a suspect connection to the company: Moncef Slaoui, President Trump's coronavirus "czar," held more than 150,000 stock options in Moderna before selling them off in May and was a former member of the company's board of directors. [...]
"Whether an innovation will be a success is uncertain, and it can take longer than traditional banks or venture capitalists are willing to wait," economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote in New Scientist in 2013. "In countries such as the US, China, Singapore and Denmark the state has provided the kind of patient and long-term finance new technologies need to get off the ground. Investments of this kind have often been driven by big missions, from putting a human on the moon, to solving climate change. This has required not only funding basic research – the typical 'public good' that most economists admit needs state help – but applied research and seed funding too."
15 July 2020
Architectural Digest: The Future of Apartment Towers Is Coming to Singapore
A pair of fascinating 56-story residential towers will soon rise on the western edge of Singapore’s urban core. The addition of more skyscrapers to a densely populated city-state is hardly surprising, but Avenue South Residences will also feature a selling point that will separate the building from all the rest. Slated to be completed in 2026, the towers will be the world’s tallest buildings created with Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) technology—where semi-finished apartment modules are built in factories offsite before being stacked, Lego-like, on top of one another. [...]
Modular homes also require less physical bodies to be present on a building site. This is an asset at a time when the U.S. construction industry—which has struggled to fill open positions—has seen its pool of migrant labor sharply reduced due to closed borders. Lower labor costs, faster construction times, and economies of scale mean that modular housing can produce cost savings of as much as 15% in some cities, experts say. [...]
But PPVC homes aren’t always cheaper: The median price of an apartment at Avenue South Residences is just under $1.1 million. The condominiums cost about 5% more to build than if traditional methods have been used, says Cheng, whose firm recently worked on another 40-story PPVC tower in Singapore. That said, he notes that prices are quickly becoming more competitive as the technology evolves further and more developers and builders achieve expertise in PPVC construction.
15 May 2020
UnHerd: Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?
Around the world, people are dying from Covid-19 in staggering numbers. As of today, there have been more than 250,000 confirmed deaths from the disease, and the emerging data suggests that the suffering disproportionately falls not only on the elderly, but also on ethnic minorities, the poor and marginalised. These groups suffer and die from the coronavirus much more than we would expect given their share of the population.
In Brazil, in India and in the Arabian Gulf, migrants or the native poor have been devastated by the coronavirus. In Sweden, suburbs containing large immigrant populations are believed to be the hardest hit. In New York city, black and Hispanic residents make up a disproportionate number of deaths, and in Singapore, migrant workers living in dorms make up the majority of the country’s cases. [...]
For example, some ethnic groups are much more likely to work in occupations that the Government has deemed essential during the lockdown: 32% of black African and 26% of black Caribbean people of working age are employed in these essential services, compared to 21% of white British individuals. That they come into contact with more people than they would if they were forced to stay at home means they have a higher chance of contracting the infection. [...]
In the US, prisons (which are disproportionately black) have seen an explosion in coronavirus cases. The New York Times estimates that the largest local outbreaks have occurred in jails in several counties and states, and that almost every state prison system has at least one infection among inmates or staff, where social distancing is difficult if not impossible.
22 March 2020
1 March 2020
The American Interest: Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art
But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless. It’s not just a Confucian conclusion either: The ban makes sense as Singapore’s version of James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” insight. [...]
I’m uncomfortable with caning’s implied paternalism, but not with its results. But it’s really none of my business (or yours, fellow American) since I’m not a Singaporean national. As a general rule, Americans should think twice (or as many times as necessary) before tendering judgments about matters in which they are not vested and probably can’t fully understand for lack of metis. A former Singaporean ambassador to the United States complained to me, recently and in the main justifiably, that Americans often just don’t listen to others, especially others from small countries. She was too polite to add that this rarely stops us from speaking out about the supposed moral deficiencies of said others, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. It’s not one of our more endearing traits. [...]
Out of concern to avoid stigmatizing and humiliating the vulnerable, the government publishes no data on the proportions of the country’s ethnic hearth communities that end up in jail and rehab. It’s a sensitive matter, as are all matters intercommunal, and the reason is that the Malay community, which occupies the statistical bottom of the mean income and education scales, also occupies the top of the incarceration, broken families, delinquent youth, and drug-dependency scales. [...]
The resulting food security anxiety has led, for example, to a megadeal with China wherein a chunk of Chinese land is being developed with Singaporean capital for the main purpose of providing foodstuffs to Singapore. The Jilin Project involves 1,450 square miles of land; all of Singapore is only 751.5 square miles. Perhaps sensing belatedly that putting so much leverage in Chinese hands might be unwise, the government subsequently announced the 30/30 challenge, by which Singapore will produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030, largely through advanced vertical hydroponic methods.
15 February 2020
Vox: Why the coronavirus outbreak might be much bigger than we know
“In the last few days,” Lee Hsien Loong said on February 8 in a Facebook video, “we’ve seen some cases which cannot be traced to the source of infection. These worried us because it showed that the virus is probably already circulating in our own population.” If the virus is even more widespread, he added, “it’s futile to try to trace every contact.” Instead of trying to contain the disease, health officials in Singapore will have to accept that it’s gone everywhere and shift to mitigating its impact.[...]
The documented cases of community spread in other countries outside of China have been limited to date, but there’s good reason to believe they’re just the tip of the iceberg. And once more cases are confirmed, the threat of a pandemic (the disease spreading around the world) increases, and so does the number of people the virus will infect and the length of the battle against it. A look at the small outbreaks in five countries — with strong public health systems like the US — helps explain why.[...]
More and more, these include examples of “secondary transmission” of the virus: people who haven’t traveled to China getting sick from someone who has traveled there, or, in the case of Singapore, from an unknown source. Sometimes, these people pass on the virus to others, what’s known as tertiary spread. And, again, this is happening in places with some of the strongest disease surveillance and public health systems in the world.[...]
For now, it’s important to remember that a disease can spread widely, and even become a pandemic, and not be particularly severe. In his Facebook video, Prime Minister Lee repeatedly asked Singaporeans not to panic, reminding them that this virus already appears to behave more like seasonal flu than SARS: While it’s more contagious than SARS, it looks much less deadly — a point Fauci recently reaffirmed.
25 September 2019
The Guardian: The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying an air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.” [...]
What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in 1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes, “Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.” [...]
As the rate and scale of building intensified, traditional architectural methods for mitigating hot temperatures were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor of architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney, told me that in Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of building design – which had dealt with heat through window screens, or facades and brise-soleils – were slowly displaced by American or European styles. “I would say that this international style has a lot to answer for,” she said. Just like the US in the 20th century, but on an even greater scale, homes and offices were increasingly being built in such a way that made air conditioning indispensable. “Developers were building without thinking,” says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture and city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. “The speed of construction that was required created pressure. So they simply built and relied on technology to fix it later.” [...]
One step towards solving the problem presented by air conditioning – and one that doesn’t require a complete overhaul of the modern city – would be to build a better air conditioner. There is plenty of room for improvement. The invention of air conditioning predates both the first aeroplane and the first public radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not changed much since 1902. “Everything is still based on the vapour compression cycle; same as a refrigerator. It’s effectively the same process as a century ago,” says Colin Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services Research and Information Association. “What has happened is we’ve expanded the affordability of the air conditioner, but as far as efficiency, they’ve improved but they haven’t leaped.” [...]
Researchers have also shown that people who live in hotter areas, even for a very short time, are comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human comfort is adaptive, not objective. This is something that seems obvious to many people who live with these temperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning that I attended in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: “If I can work and function at 30C, you could too – believe you me.”
6 July 2019
99 Percent Invisible: Life and Death in Singapore
Singapore is tiny, and today the entire nation is really just one city. It takes less than 45 minutes to drive across the island, with traffic. But in the 1950s there were mainly villages known as kampongs, a local Malay word. Kampong communities were strong and close-knit, but the living conditions weren’t easy. Multiple families might share one toilet or one kitchen. Many of the kampongs relied on gas for lighting and cooking. And most houses were made of super flammable palm leaves or wood with roofs made of sheet metal. [...]
When planning for a growing population, most urban planners expand their cities outward, but in land-limited Singapore, that’s not an option. Today, Singapore’s tallest public housing buildings are 50 stories high –the tallest in the world. Today, Singapore is the third richest nation in the world, and 80% of Singaporeans still live in these tall, cement HDB flats and there are about 10,000 public housing buildings on the island. It’s not the glitzy, futuristic Singapore skyline you see in movies like Crazy Rich Asians. Much of the island is full of tall cement buildings with housing block numbers, painted boldly down the sides, which help Singaporeans locate themselves in the monotonous sea of nearly identical buildings. And new flats are going up all the time. [...]
In Singapore, where land is scarce, it’s not unlikely for apartment buildings to be built on top of land that was graveyards not too long ago. But building on top of a graveyard has its complications, and in one cemetery called Peck San Theng, the new housing development disrupted more than just the dead — it disrupted a way of life. “When I was a kid […] wandering around the hillsides, you know walking through the grass, we [said] prayers. We [made] offerings,” says Kwan, someone who grew up near Peck San Theng cemetery. His father would bring him to the cemetery to pray at the graves of their family and friends. Kwan’s family was Chinese, and they believed that if the dead were well-taken care of, it not only meant peace for the departed, but it could also bring direct benefits to the descendants.
29 January 2019
The New York Times: Too Ugly to Be Saved? Singapore Weighs Fate of Its Brutalist Buildings
Landmarks of so-called Brutalist architecture, like Golden Mile Tower, are emerging havens for the sort of gritty, artsy subcultures that are mostly absent in Singapore, a banking center known for its tidy streets and often-overbearing governance.
Others see them as important markers of national identity because they were designed by a generation of up-and-coming local architects just after the city-state’s founding in 1965, when the area’s growth was fueled by large-scale urban renewal projects. [...]
Brutalist buildings represent Singapore’s early “hopes and aspirations,” said Darren Soh, an architectural photographer. He said destroying them would add to a sense among many residents of this former British colony that buildings of all kinds are being demolished and replaced too quickly.[...]
The city-state is also known for its meticulously restored shophouses and other examples of British Colonial architecture, as well as contemporary green buildings that were designed to look stunning but also save energy in a tropical climate.
5 November 2018
Scientific American: Abortion Is a Problem to Be Solved, Not a Moral Issue (September 1, 2018)
Abstinence would obviate abortions just as starvation would forestall obesity. There is a reason no one has proposed chastity as a solution to overpopulation. Sexual asceticism doesn't work, because physical desire is nearly as fundamental as food to our survival and flourishing. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health entitled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy” found that among American adolescents ages 15 to 19, “abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse” and that “adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.” A 2011 PLOS ONE paper analyzing “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates” in 48 U.S. states concluded that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates,” controlling for socioeconomic status, educational attainment and ethnicity.
Most telling, a 2013 paper entitled “Like a Virgin (Mother): Analysis of Data from a Longitudinal, US Population Representative Sample Survey,” published in BMJ reported that 45 of the 7,870 American women studied between 1995 and 2009 said they become pregnant without sex. Who were these immaculately conceiving parthenogenetic Marys? They were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them.
When women are educated and have access to birth-control technologies, pregnancies and, eventually, abortions decrease. A 2003 study on the “Relationships between Contraception and Abortion,” published in International Family Planning Perspectives, concluded that abortion rates declined as contraceptive use increased in seven countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland). In six other nations (Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.), contraceptive use and abortion rates rose simultaneously, but overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized, contraceptive use continued to increase, and abortion rates fell.
22 June 2018
Al Jazeera: Singapore: The House that Lee Built | People and Power
When the former British colony of Singapore became an independent nation in 1965, there were doubts about its survival.
2 June 2018
The Economist: Singapore’s Brutalist past could soon be gone
The building, which was once called a “vertical slum” by a Singaporean legislator, is a densely packed mix of residential and commercial units. Along with People’s Park in Chinatown (pictured), which has been praised by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, it is among a handful of Brutalist buildings that were built in a surge of architectural confidence after the country became independent in 1965. They are particularly adored by those who love concrete, as well as bold and wacky colours.
Modernist buffs have started to fret that many of these Brutalist buildings will soon be gone. In February one of them, Pearl Bank, once the highest residential tower in Singapore, was sold for S$728m ($544m) to CapitaLand, one of Asia’s largest real-estate developers. The company plans to demolish the yellow horseshoe structure and build a “high-rise residential development” of 800 flats in its place. Since then several of the other buildings—most of which are privately owned in a co-operative-like system with hundreds of owners all having a stake—have started to prepare for sales, too. [...]
In post-independence Singapore, many people understood that such sacrifices needed to be made for the public good, says Joshua Comaroff, an architect. But attitudes are beginning to change. In 1989 the government’s urban redevelopment authority started conserving buildings, particularly pretty colonial-era shophouses and areas such as Little India. But Jerome Lim, who writes a blog about Singapore’s architecture, says the 50th anniversary of independence in 2015 was a turning point. He says that is when people started to think more about the city’s heritage, and to speak out more about conserving it. Before the managers of People’s Park closed the Brutalist building off entirely, couples would sneak onto the roof to take pictures with the Lego-like yellow and green residential units as a backdrop, to post on social media.
15 September 2017
Al Jazeera: Halimah Yacob named Singapore's first female president
Halimah Yacob, a former speaker of parliament from the Muslim Malay minority, did not have to face an election for the largely ceremonial post originally due this month after authorities decided her rivals did not meet strict eligibility criteria. [...]
Authorities had decided to allow only candidates from the Malay community to put themselves forward for the presidency, a bid to foster harmony in the city-state of 5.5 million people which is dominated by ethnic Chinese.
The other two contenders, Salleh Marican and Farid Khan, were both denied eligibility, having fallen short of a constitutional rule that required any candidate from the private sector to have led a company with shareholder equity of at least 500 million Singapore dollars ($372m). [...]
It was not the first time in the affluent city-state - which is tightly controlled and has been ruled by the same political party for decades - that the government has disqualified candidates for the presidency, making an election unnecessary.
16 August 2017
CityLab: How Do You Measure the Value of a Historic Site?
Tiong Bahru is an example of the tension between historic preservation and economic development on the small island of 5 million people. Today, Singapore is the epitome of modernity: the gleaming towers, the multi-color lights illuminating the night sky, and the radical architecture that other cities can only dream of. And the landscape is constantly changing to meet new demands, so much so that there’s barely room for the older buildings. [...]
Indeed, Singapore’s government has never really been enthusiastic about historic preservation, and any efforts to hold on to the physical relics of the nation’s past often become mired in political disputes. As my colleague Mimi Kirk reported in June, even the fate of the estate belonging to the late founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew—himself an outspoken critic of preservation—is embroiled in a bitter and politically charged family feud. [...]
The researchers argue that urban planners and leaders need to evaluate the tangible aspects (the physical buildings or sites), the intangible elements (human-to-human interaction), and the natural surroundings. In fact, it’s these patterns of interactions—and how they spread throughout a city and transform from one generation to the next.
So how do you measure the strength of these interactions over time, and predict how certain development projects might affect them? For starters, look at data that is already abundant and readily available. “What we are trying to measure here is the depth of connection between the people and the [customs] and places,” says Cheong. “If we value this particular building, how much do we value it? The natural way of measuring that would be to see whether people write or paint about this.” Or take lots of Instagram photos (because, you know, Millennials).
27 June 2017
The California Sunday Magazine: Urban Dreams
The officials wanted me to imagine this land replaced by a futuristic megacity called Amaravati. By 2035, they projected, it would be home to 11 million people and cover 3,322 square miles — ten times the area of New York City. The government had already acquired 90 percent of the land they’d need for the first major phase of the project, and as we drove farther, the fields were increasingly brown and fallow, because the government had already started paying the farmers to cease farming. [...]
Gandhi is losing this argument badly. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company has estimated that at its current rate of urbanization, India will need to build the equivalent of “a new Chicago every year.” Most of those Chicagos will materialize by expanding already existing cities. A handful will be built from scratch, and Amaravati is one of them. So why this particular Chicago, at this particular time, in this particular place? The short answer is that in 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh split in two, and the new state, called Telangana, got the capital. So what’s left of Andhra Pradesh needs a new capital city ASAP. [...]
Many have asked why Vijayawada couldn’t just have been refurbished to serve as the capital. The advantages of a “greenfield” project, as cities from scratch are called, are huge. “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness of laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or BrasÃlia,” the American megabuilder Robert Moses once said. “But when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Many Indian cities are currently struggling with the logistical agony of adding critical new metro lines to narrow old streets. [...]
A greenfield plan, though, also comes with no shortage of risks. Critics have pointed out that Amaravati’s chosen site is prone to flooding, unbearably hot for much of the year, and susceptible to earthquakes. These are technical problems with technical solutions. But there are much bigger risks.First is that planned cities often fail to come to life the way their planners hope. They are always a gamble — with the exception of war and space exploration, they are the costliest gamble humans make. South Korea hasn’t even finished building a $40 billion planned city called Songdo — which, like Amaravati, was conceived as a model “smart city” — and it’s already been dismissed, even by some techno-optimists, as a failure. China, despite an urbanization rate faster than India’s, has built several planned cities that are ghost towns. The danger with a planned capital is that it will be strictly administrative, without the spontaneity that makes a city thrive — an accusation that is often levied against the planned capitals India has already built.
26 June 2017
Motherboard: Facebook Celebrates Pride, Except Where Homosexuality Is Illegal
Such measures are important, and can help queer Facebook employees and users of the platform to feel included and seen. One feature, a rainbow "reaction" ("like") button, allows users to express their pride, or solidarity, in response to posts. But as Sarah Kessler pointed out at Quartz, that feature was only rolled out to users in certain markets...namely, "major markets with Pride celebrations." Other users are able to opt in to the feature by liking Facebook's official LGBTQ@Facebook page. [...]
After sending out some messages to friends in other places, I discovered that the feature was unavailable in a number of countries, including Egypt, Palestine, Bahrain, Lebanon, Singapore, Russia, and the UAE. While Facebook admits—in both its press release and in response to a question posed by a Singaporean user on its official LGBTQ page—that the feature isn't available everywhere yet, my testing demonstrated that it's widely available throughout the world...except in places where homosexuality is either illegal or of questionable legal status.
Facebook hasn't said why the feature is restricted to those particular countries, but the company is likely worried about putting users at risk. That's a fair concern, to be sure—gay and bi men are being rounded up and killed in Chechnya, for example—but it's worth noting that Facebook's "authentic name" policy is part of why such users are at risk to begin with. Despite protests from queer users for nearly a decade, Facebook has continued to reaffirm the value of the policy in promoting "civility," despite evidence to the contrary. [...]
"Facebook policies have [contained] a lot of discrimination in so many aspects," Aoun told me. "It's the same when a certain terrorist attack happens in Lebanon, we don't have the safety check. Unfortunately, the world nowadays is built on the priorities of … people who are living in Western countries, especially white people who are living in those countries."
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