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A leading Canadian psychiatrist who kept accusations of gross human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa hidden has been charged in Calgary with sexually abusing a male patient and is being investigated over dozens of other allegations. Dr Aubrey Levin, who in South Africa was known as Dr Shock for his use of electricity to “cure” gay military conscripts, was arrested after a patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances. Levin, who worked at the University of Calgary’s medical school, has been suspended from practising and is free on bail of C$50,000 (£32,000) on charges of repeatedly indecently assaulting a 36-year-old man.
The police say they are investigating similar claims by nearly 30 other patients. The Alberta justice department is reviewing scores of criminal convictions in which Levin was a prosecution witness.
Levin has worked in Canada for 15 years since leaving South Africa, where he was chief psychiatrist in the apartheid-era military and became notorious for using electric shocks to “cure” gay white conscripts. Levin, who made no secret of his hard rightwing views and was a member of the ruling National party during apartheid, has a long history of homophobia. The treatment consisted of strapping electrodes to the upper arm. Homosexual soldiers were shown pictures of a naked man and encouraged to fantasise, and then the power was ratcheted up. Trudie Grobler, an intern psychologist on ward 22, saw a lesbian subjected to severe shocks. “It was traumatic. I could not believe her body could handle it,” she said later.
Look on the bright side, at least the patients weren’t charged for the “treatments”.
- AT&T going to get aggressive against Verizon.
- Hadron collider did something. But what?
- Google and MSFT worried about privacy laws in the cloud.
- iPad info tightens up.
- Government getting on the idea that electronics in cars needs looking into.
- eBay killing Kajiji. Good!
- Magnetic beams can loosen your morality.
- Twitter fixing site.
- End of iPod era.
- Apple getting sued over multi-touch. How fun!
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and use the code EHTECH for a great discount.
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Have these games just gone too far?
The game begins with a teenage girl on a subway platform. She notices you are looking at her and asks, “Can I help you with something?”
That is when you, the player, can choose your method of assault.
With the click of your mouse, you can grope her and lift her skirt. Then you can follow her aboard the train, assaulting her sister and her mother.
As you continue to play, “friends” join in and in a series of graphic, interactive scenes, you can corner the women, rape them again and again.
The game allows you to even impregnate a girl and urge her to have an abortion. The reason behind your assault, explains the game, is that the teenage girl has accused you of molesting her on the train. The motive is revenge.
“This was a game that had absolutely no place on the market,” said Taina Bien-Aime of women’s rights organization Equality Now which has campaigned for the game to be taken off the shelves.
But the controversy that led to stopping sales of the game instead took it viral.
Hard to believe this game is free and has gone viral. Some people will download anything.
This mash-up is from a couple of years ago and I’d hope someone would update it. We highlight this sort of thing on the No Agenda podcast but this is the topper of toppers.
Found by Helge M. Heggli.
As always, first the military, then civilian use. Combine this with the black boxes in your car and tracking the GPS in your smart phone, eventually you won’t be able to go anywhere without the authorities knowing where you are. But you have nothing to hide, right? Right?!!!
Why jump in a cab to “follow that car” when an airborne drone could do the job for you? The US Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing a radar system which sees around corners and down into “urban canyons”. DARPA hopes to be able to track vehicles across an entire city using just a few uncrewed aircraft.
Traditional radar relies on direct line of sight, so it’s tricky to track a vehicle that keeps nipping behind buildings. But DARPA believes that by using buildings as mirrors, it will be possible to identify a target vehicle from radar reflections. The experimental system is called Multipath Exploitation Radar.
The agency has been exploring how MER might work by driving vehicles around a simulated urban area and collecting returns from an overhead radar. Its researchers are aiming to combine the radar data with a three-dimensional map of the test environment to calculate how the radar reflects off and between vehicles and buildings. This process should highlight which signals in the returning radar data can be used to plot the target vehicle’s path.
MER is expected to be compatible with the radar systems currently used to track vehicles, a DARPA spokesman told New Scientist. The team anticipates that using reflected radar will cover more ground than a line-of-sight system, making it possible to monitor a city of about 1000 square kilometres, such as Baghdad, with just three airborne radars.
The Order of the Glazed Cruller. I wonder if other private firm’s (Blackwater?) employees got medals.
A major overhaul of how the Canadian Forces recognizes overseas service will include the controversial decision to allow Tim Hortons employees at Kandahar Airfield to receive medals from the Afghan war.
The changes involve clarifying the type of support eligible for the military’s General Service Medal, which will now be awarded to both civilian as well as allied and Canadian military personnel deployed outside the country to provide direct support to operations in the “presence of an armed enemy.”
The decision, which has raised eyebrows in the military community, echoes similar methods of recognition applied during the Second World War, according to the Department of Defence.
Medals were awarded during the Second World War to civilians working for Salvation Army, Knights of Columbus, the Canadian Legion and the YMCA.
[…]
“Everyone who goes into theatre and did their days — respective of what they did — they’re part of the defence team and everyone deserves to have their recognition,”
Isn’t this kind of like in some schools where you get a gold star or whatever for showing up? Can’t be hurting anyone’s feelings by leaving them out.
- iPad hype being cranked up above normal.
- Doorway to the afterlife found.
- Verizon online to roll iPhone.
- New DSi XL getting ink.
- Hadron collider to do mega-blast tomorrow.
- Google fiber still getting ink.
- Facebook getting blasted again over more privacy issues.
- Linux on the PS3 Kaput!
- Zune upgraded.
- 1TB 2.5-inch drive. Wow! When will it end?
- Google to stop Android Fragmentation.
Show presented by e-Harmony. Get a date.
Go to www.eharmony.com
and use the code EHTECH for a great discount.
Go to www.eharmony.com
and use the code EHTECH for a great discount.
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
Ah, remember the good old days when only the KGB and the East German Stasi were this interested in watching their citizens with such zeal?
Story 1: The Senate hearings into computer surveillance:
A special U.S. Senate hearing is expected in Philadelphia Monday to discuss the issue of remote computer surveillance.
Senator Arlen Specter, D-Pa., said the subcommittee on crime and drugs will examine federal laws concerning remote tracking software. Specter, the subcommittee chairman, said new legislation may be needed to address webcam surveillance.
The hearing comes in the wake of a laptop spying controversy in the Lower Merion School District.
Story 2: Video Surveillance deployed inside London Public Bathrooms where you have to pay 50p to pee.
You can imagine my surprise after I paid my 50pence to use the public bathroom, walked in and found myself staring at not just one but three ceiling mounted video surveillance cameras. I had to get real close to their enclosures to convince myself that I wasn’t seeing things. Not only was it really there, but it was a Pan-Tilt-Zoom model with a microphone to top it off. Must get some great noises coming from there. It has also been reported that London officials are now installing cameras with speakers to allow them to talk as well as see and listen. Perhaps its just me, but I had absolutely no idea that this was legal anywhere, let alone in downtown London, UK. Sure I knew that London has more cameras per square mile than any other country on the planet, but in bathrooms?! How are they getting away with that one? It is appalling!
Story 3: Warner Bros. Recruits Students to Spy on Pirates
The people who work at the anti-piracy divisions of Warner Bros. and other large media companies have to be experts in file-sharing technology. It is therefore no surprise that Warner Bros. is actively recruiting students for a job as Anti-Piracy Intern, as most students have grown up sharing files.
Warner Bros Entertainment UK is currently offering an internship to “IT literate” students with knowledge of file-sharing networks to assist in the company’s ongoing anti-piracy efforts. The internship deals with both digital and physical piracy and among other things the applicant will have to make trap purchases and maintain accounts at private file-sharing sites.
Don’t you feel much safer?
The Government Accountability Office Punk’d Energy Star recently by submitting fake products and companies for certification. The Environmental Protection Agency’s arbiters of efficiency standards rubber-stamped 15 out of 20 bogus products and a handful of fake firms became Energy Star Partners. Here are three of our favorite fabrications.
1. Tropical Thunder Appliances
To perform this investigation, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) March 26, 2010, report states that it “used four bogus manufacturing firms and fictitious individuals to apply for Energy Star partnership…”
Dummy websites emblazoned with Energy Star Partnerships remain online for each of the four front companies—Cool Rapport (HVAC equipment), Futurizon Solar Innovations (lighting), Spartan Digital Electronics, and Tropical Thunder Appliances.
Read about people who having lost their jobs became full-time Tea Party People.
While there are a number of valid points the Tea Party folks make, there’s a certain level of dishonesty about their furor. One example, the Republicans who vehemently supported nearly identical positions until Democrats supported them. Rosie O’Donnell, of all people, makes a strong case about it.
The hardware is still prohibitive for normal use, but in time, as with all tech, the price comes down. And when it does, expect it to eventually be in every computer which makes one more reason for the government to hack your computer to find out what you’re doing.
Gamers in search of a more thrilling experience look set to get it thanks to interfaces that let them use what are probably the body’s fastest and most fatigue-resistant muscles: the ones that move our eyes.
Gaze-tracking technology has been honed over the years for psychology experiments and to help disabled people. Now it’ s proving capable of providing faster interaction than conventional games controllers, touchscreens or mice – and can lead to trickier gaming challenges to boot. At least one leading manufacturer of eye-tracking systems says it’s likely that the technology will be a part of the computer gaming future.
The trackers uses a small camera to track the movement of the pupil of one eye. Typically the user first calibrates the system by focusing on a series of onscreen targets, after which they can use a glance to control cursor movement.
The potential speed gains over having to find a target and then move a mouse to it are obvious. “With eye tracking, once you’ve discovered the target you are already aiming at it,” says John Paulin Hansen at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
And then there’s this article about improving your reading that includes info on the programming:
Does This Headline Know You’re Reading It? Not yet, but it could.
Ralf Biedert and colleagues at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) are using eye-trackers from Tobii Technology of Sweden along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create a reading enhancement technology called Text 2.0.
Somewhere in Perth’s central business district is a building containing the names, ages, addresses, photographs and unique fingerprint codes of thousands of revellers who danced and drank at Sydney’s Home nightclub last year.
Home, in Darling Harbour, began trialling a biometric ID scanning entry system nine months ago. Patrons lined up before six large terminals to have their photo taken, and their driver’s licence and right index fingerprint scanned. The information was copied and sent to Western Australia, where it is stored on a secured central database by the system developers.
Among them is Hotel Cremorne on the lower north shore. Since November the nightclub has required guests to submit to a photograph and ID scan as they line up on the street to enter on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
”It did kind of creep me out, made me feel like a criminal,” a regular attendee, Julia Robertson, said. ”[But] I think it does make me feel safe. If some creepy guy comes in, they’ve taken their photograph.”
Queensland’s ID-Tect installed its first ID scanning system in NSW in 2006, but now has hundreds in drinking establishments across the country – and thousands of individuals on its centrally stored ”ban list” accessible to any client.
You feel SAFE knowing that a private company associated with nightclubs has your personal details including biometric data? What’s wrong with these people?
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This Episode’s Executive Producer: David Earney
Associate Executive Producers: Charles Walker, Elise Grybos Artwork by: Sir Paul T. Knighthood: Sir David Earney Listen to show by clicking ► Direct link to show. |
Japan is well ahead of the rest of the world in mobile phone technology: handsets that can pick up TV channels have been standard for years and in many shops payments can be made by swiping a phone over a sensor.
But the latest craze is ring tones said to be therapeutic.
Across Japan the arrival of spring is bringing out the cherry blossom but it is also making people reach for their handkerchiefs as, at this time of year, hay fever is rife.
A company called the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory has developed what it claims is a cure.
For relief, sufferers need only wait for a call on their mobile phone. The sound is supposed to dislodge pollen if the user holds the handset up to their nose.
Do they have a version for constipation?
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