Sweet and mild-mannered Felicia Chin has made a very bold statement: Local men lack quality.

The 27-year-old actress, who has dated only Singapore men so far, wrote in a column in the April issue of a Chinese magazine: "It’s hard to find mature and steady men of the olden days like my father."

She has also said that (local men) are a little bit arrogant and think too highly of themselves.

She tells The New Paper more about why she thinks this.

Other celebrities, though, don't quite agree.

Read the full report in The New Paper on Monday (May 14)

She is cute. Come on.

And it is so damn true, what she said. Sigh. Sadly, Singaporean men thinks they are gifts from God and are oblivious to reality.

Court weighs graphic warnings on cigarettes

Last updated: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 Print

A US appeals court weighed the constitutionality of requiring large graphic photos on cigarette packs to show that smoking can disfigure and even kill people, with two of the three judges questioning how far the government could go.

Some of America's largest tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynolds, sued to block the mandate. They argued that the governments proposed warnings go beyond factual information into anti-smoking advocacy. The Obama administration responded that the photos of dead and diseased smokers are factual.

In February, US District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the requirement ran afoul of the First Amendment's free speech protections and blocked the requirement. The government appealed.

The nine graphic warnings proposed by the Food and Drug Administration include colour images of a man exhaling cigarette smoke through a tracheotomy hole in his throat, and a plume of cigarette smoke enveloping an infant receiving a mother's kiss. These are accompanied by language that says smoking cause’s cancer and can harm foetuses. The warnings were to cover the entire top half of cigarette packs, front and back.

Are smokers idiots?

At hearing, Judge A. Raymond Randolph, an appointee of Republican President George H.W. Bush, asked if the government could go so far as to require cars to carry a warning that "speed kills," with a graphic illustration. Justice Department attorney Mark B. Stern replied that he didn't think there would be any problem with that.

Another Republican appointee, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, asked if the government could mandate a cigarette warning that said, "Stop! If you buy this product, you are a moron," or "Smokers are idiots."

"No, I don't think saying smokers are idiots are accurate," Stern replied. He said such a warning would be "problematic."

Brown also questioned if the government was on a path to put warnings on other legal products.

"Where does this stop?" asked Brown, who likes District Judge Leon was appointed by Republican George W. Bush.

Government sending a strong message

Lawyers for the tobacco companies made a similar argument in their brief. They superimposed the FDA tobacco image of a cadaver onto a McDonald's bag with the warning that fatty foods may cause heart disease, and the FDA's image of a premature baby in an incubator on a bottle of alcohol with a warning that drinking during pregnancy can cause birth defects.

They also showed a Hershey's chocolate bar with half the wrapper covered by a picture of a mouth of rotting teeth and a warning that candy causes tooth decay.

Stern said those comparisons trivialised an important issue. "Addiction really means addiction," he said, and it was not like eating candy.

The third judge on the panel, Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of Democrat Bill Clinton, didn't ask any questions of the Obama administration, but she grilled Noel J. Francisco, a lawyer for tobacco companies. Rogers asked Francisco if he was challenging the accuracy of the FDA's text warnings, such as smoking causing cancer and heart disease. The lawyer said he was not, but that the government was going beyond mere facts by including a phone number to quit.

"The government is trying to send a powerful message: Quit smoking now," he said. When the message tells people to live a certain way, it crosses the line from facts to advocacy, he argued.

Tobacco companies rely on packaging

But Randolph said he had a hard time finding that line, adding that the judges were in "new territory."

In his ruling, Leon wrote that the graphic images "were neither designed to protect the consumer from confusion or deception, nor to increase consumer awareness of smoking risks; rather, they were crafted to evoke a strong emotional response calculated to provoke the viewer to quit or never start smoking."

"While the line between the constitutionally permissible dissemination of factual information and the impermissible expropriation of a company's advertising space for government advocacy can be frustratingly blurry, here the line seems quite clear," Leon wrote.

Tobacco companies increasingly rely on their packaging to build brand loyalty and grab consumers - one of the few advertising levers left to them after the government curbed their presence in magazines, billboards and TV.

(Sapa, April 2012) 

Read more:

Fight against tobacco gathers steam

What do your cigarettes mean to you?

At the end of last month I attended the Automotive Megatrends 2012 held at The Henry in Dearborn, MI. Though this was a three-day event, I attended the second day only: Connectivity. It was an opportunity for major and minor players in the automotive world to present and discuss their particular visions of the future for passenger cars in a world that is increasingly connected. Particular attention was paid to the Cloud and the continuing trend for infotainment^[1] to be provided via handheld devices rather than proprietary in-vehicle systems. Safety was a hot topic; in particular driver distraction, where legislation tends to hold vehicle manufacturers liable in the event of an accident even though they may have little or no control over the devices that do the distracting (such as smartphones).

The day was split into four main sessions divided by networking opportunities. Each main session took the form of a panel where four or five panelists would present their views on a particular topic with a moderator overseeing the discussion. Each panel would face a round of questions once all had presented. The topic of the first two sessions was "Connected vehicle outlook — the next 10 years" with the following sessions being "Mobile device integration" and "Software and apps" respectively. Repeatedly during the day, speakers would return to the concept of the Connected Vehicle and what that means for consumers and manufacturers alike, but what do they mean by "The Connected Vehicle"?

A Day in the Life

You wake up on a cold, wintry morning to your smartphone alarm obnoxiously wailing. Via the magic of the Internet, the home management app has checked the local weather and adjusted your home heating to give you an extra bit of toasty warmth. It has also instructed your coffee machine to brew up some Joe.

You flip to the appropriate smartphone screen and start your car. A quick swipe and the in-car temperature is set just right. An alert tells you a service is due and shows you local service locations along with their cost. You select your favourite location and choose an appointment time, then you swap over to your home management app and start the shower. By the time you're out of bed, showered, dressed and have your coffee in hand, the car is thawed out and toasty warm.

As you drive to work by way of your children's daycare, information is delivered to you via your smartphone to your in-car video and audio systems, telling you the weather, headlines, social media updates and to-do list for the day. Your favourite music plays in the background as you choose. Perhaps you even queued up some things from the night before. Voice commands and a simple, radio-like interface give you simple, non-distracting control of your information streams. Everything coordinates and cooperates to ensure that you can concentrate on driving.

As you're finishing off a quick check of your e-mail subject lines an alert flashes up warning you of road construction and traffic delays. The satellite navigation app on your smartphone kicks in, offering alternative routes and travel times to get you on your way. As you begin your detour, the directional microphones and image processing systems in the back seat detect that your kid just woke up and has started punching his sibling. In an attempt to keep the peace, the latest, greatest animated movie immediately starts streaming from Netflix, Hulu or Zune in the headrest display. Meanwhile, your satellite navigation is suggesting spots to safely pull over (as well as one or two doughnut shops you might need for the purchase of "behave yourself" bribes).

Having dropped the kids off at daycare, you pull up at work and apply the parking brake. The in-car systems take the opportunity to remind you of your service appointment. You get out of the car and walk to your office – the car automatically turns off and locks itself as you go. When you get to your desk, you computer has already synced with the Cloud, showing your service appointment on your calendar along with a snapshot of your car diagnostics, should you need to discuss the appointment over the phone.

Reality Check

Though embellished with a few ideas of my own, this scenario is similar to many involving the connected vehicle envisaged by those presenting at the conference. It is all so seductively plausible that it's easy to ignore the reality.  Behind all the enthusiastic rhetoric there are so many unresolved problems and challenges that we're just not ready yet to deliver the dream of the connected vehicle. To get an idea of where we are right now, consider the current vehicle to be akin to video-game consoles just over 10 years ago. Before the current generation of consoles (Playstation 3, XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii), pretty much all you could do with a gaming console was play games, now we can not only play games, but also buy games, rent, buy and stream video, listen to Internet radio stations, watch live television (in HD) and interact with social networks.

The problems for the connected vehicle mostly lie in the gap between the old and the new; passenger cars, with a development cycle of 3-4 years and consumer electronics, with a development cycle of 12-18 months. In a world where a smartphone can be out-of-date within a year but a car is expected to last ten or more, bridging the gap becomes a challenge. Not to mention that the world of the connected car relies on the existence of wireless carriers and services that not only support the demands of consumers but also those of the equipment manufacturers, services like OnStar and its soon to be released API, requiring access to vehicle data and systems in a safe and secure manner.

Controlled Openness

To bridge the development cycle gap, there was a call for the end of proprietary infotainment systems and more controlled, open standards across the passenger car industry. The general view was that proprietary systems have to go in favour of smartphone or other smart device apps, a trend that has already begun. This move would help to reign in the growing concerns surrounding driver distraction by providing an in-vehicle delivery platform that allows apps to interact with the car and its passengers in a safe, secure and reliable manner.

In order to make such a platform appealing to app developers, a set of open standards needs to be adopted by the industry, a set of standards that has not yet been defined but that will provide rules and guidance on how an app interacts with a vehicle and its occupants (as with any new technology discussion of 2012, whispers of HTML5 were everywhere). This idea of controlling app delivery within the vehicle while allowing open standards and app development was dubbed "controlled openness" and clear comparisons were drawn with Apple and the way they govern the app marketplace.

Safe and Secure

Just like the API provided by Apple and any other contemporary development platform, security is extremely important. Security is the basis of trust for consumers and without it the full potential of a technology can never be realised as no one will ever immerse themselves fully. Several presenters gave their thoughts on how security might work but there was a lack of convincing argument that this was a simple problem to solve. In fact most speakers on the matter seemed to be plugging a product while skirting around some of the issues that had been raised by others. Issues that have names like "virus", "hacker" and "theft"; the connected vehicle opens up a cornucopia of problems that must be resolved.

• How do you stop someone taking control of your vehicle while allowing you to remote start it from your phone?
• How do you allow an app access to vehicle systems without allowing a bug to cause a vehicle accident?
• How do you ensure that a person's identification is unpaired from a vehicle when they are no longer in possession of that vehicle due to sale, accident or theft?

Given the need to exchange data to and from the vehicle communications network in order to support telematics and other advanced (perhaps premium) apps, which may include the ability to do things like start, stop or even track the vehicle, I'm sure you can think of many other scenarios that highlight how important it is that the connected vehicle be secure.

The Internet and our increasingly connected world has security all over the place with a plethora of approaches to providing identification, authorization and secure access. However, the effects of a hack or security flaw have so far not had such potentially immediate fatal results as they might in the world of the connected vehicle. A security breach that allows someone to take control of some aspect of your car is entirely unacceptable. This is not a case of making sure it should never happen, but rather a case of could never happen. If nothing else, the experience of driving a car must be safe, both actually and perceptually.

The Road Ahead

So where does that leave us? The automotive industry has rightly identified a need to integrate more closely with the consumer electronics world and move away from the proprietary in-car infotainment systems of old, but the consumer electronics industry is racing along at quite a pace. Although the concept of a smartphone existed prior to its announcement, the launch of the iPhone five years ago accelerated smartphone evolution and it shows no signs of slowing down.  However, until the iPhone of the connected vehicle concept appears and focuses consumer expectations, we will have to accept the Windows Mobile-style missteps along the way^[2].

While the connected vehicle is still an uncertain concept, it is becoming a reality and it will change the way we interact with our cars. In fact, they may not be our cars at all^[3]. The speakers at the Automotive Megatrends 2012 event had plenty of statistics, ideas and products to illuminate the target that is the connected vehicle. Now all we need to do is find the road that takes us there.

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This is a follow-on to an editorial that I wrote last year, The universal status indicator.

@verge. @zpower. What are those? They're Twitter handles, of course; but I didn't need to tell you that. You already knew.

Twitter is in that elite circle of web brands — Facebook, Google, Amazon — that have legitimately "crossed over." Your parents, though they may not fully understand it, have certainly heard of it by now. The President of the United States uses it. Oprah uses it. It doesn't get any more mainstream than Oprah.

And along with mainstream success, the "@name" format has become inseparably intertwined with Twitter. It's like an email address or a URL: you don't need to specify what it is, you just need to list it. "Find me at @zpower," you understand what I'm saying. Amazingly, that's something that the $100 billion darling Facebook — with over six times as many active users — doesn't have. There's simply no Facebook equivalent to @zpower: I can tell you to "check me out on Facebook at [some URL]" or I can tell you to search for me by name on Facebook, at which point you may or may not find the correct Chris Ziegler. But there's no single-word handle format that's universally recognized as a link to a unique Facebook profile. (Google's giving it a go with the "+Chris Ziegler" styling, but it doesn't do you much good — you can't zip over to a Google+ profile by typing "plus.google.com/chrisziegler," and regardless, Google+ enjoys a mere shadow of Twitter's mojo.)

It doesn't get any more mainstream than Oprah

Every day, recognition of the @name format grows among web-connected individuals, and that growth continues seemingly unbounded. It's unclear whether Twitter recognizes the power that it has the ability to wield with this. Of course, the company is just as focused on its core business — 140-character broadcasts — as ever, but it'd behoove Dick Costolo and his team to take a hard look at the potential they've fostered.

Last year I wrote an editorial, The universal status indicator, in which I bemoaned the internet's inability to rally around a standard for communicating presence and contact information. It got extraordinarily positive reaction — there's a real need here. And it turns out that Twitter is uniquely positioned to strike: it already has the universally-understood ID format under its belt. People have heard of it; you're not asking for the moon by starting at square one and requiring people to sign up for yet another service that won't be of any benefit without massive buy-in, the classic chicken-and-egg problem for online startups. And unlike every other service on the market — Facebook and IM services included — Twitter has tight integration with every mobile platform that matters. This is deeply critical; the hooks are already there in iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone.

Twitter, you're sitting on my business card

What remains for Twitter is the easiest part: add some fields to its spartan user profile pages and update its mobile applications to take advantage of the richer back end. Allow users to specify whether they're available, how they can be reached, and who should be able to see what information. When a phone number or email address changes, make sure the mobile apps pick up the change and offer to update users' address books.

Not everyone will support the concept of a single service becoming the clearinghouse for this type of information, but guess what? No one has stepped up to fill this gap in a meaningful, broadly-supported way, despite the enormous opportunity. (Go on, ask a non-techie friend or family member if they've heard of about.me.) And furthermore, it's not possible to develop something like this without massive, reliable, scalable database infrastructure to support it. That infrastructure doesn't grow on trees. Twitter's already there, and it's spent years taking its lumps (fail whale, anyone?) and learning lessons while it supports close to half a billion tweets a day.

Twitter: I never want to have to send out an email blast saying my phone number is changing again. You're sitting on my business card — it's @zpower. Please let me use it.

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