Links - 1st February 2020 (2)

MICKEY MOUSE DAY - November 18, 2019 - "he almost didn’t exist. Mickey Mouse was only created as a replacement for Walt Disney’s original successful creation, Oswald the Rabbit. Oswald was made by the Disney studio for Charles Mintz, a film producer and distributer through Universal Studios. With so much success from Oswald, Disney asked Mintz to increase the studio’s budget, but instead Mintz demanded Walt take a 20 percent cut. He then reminded Disney that Oswald was owned by Universal and that he had already signed most of Disney’s current employees to his new contract. Disney refused to sign the new contract, finished the final Oswald comic of his contract, and ended his work with Universal... The original name for the character was Mortimer Mouse until his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it, ultimately creating Mickey Mouse."

Wanted: Vision of Singapore based on values, not just economic value - "A recent casual chat with a friend turned to emigration, that old chestnut of an issue.She is a 24-year-old law student, and is all set on a legal career when she finishes her studies. Asked if she would consider leaving Singapore to work one day, she responded starkly: "If Singapore doesn't serve your interest, why should you serve hers?"Her bold statement and the way she framed nationality and identity in terms of serving individual interests jolted me.The idealism of "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" clearly did not resonate with my friend... many Singaporeans are attractive global workers with skills well sought after around the world. An annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers Community in 2017 revealed that seven in 10 Singaporean youth aged 18 to 35 were looking to move overseas to pursue opportunities.  Similarly, a study conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies in 2016 showed that 29.2 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they were actively examining the possibility of emigrating in the next five years, an increase from 26.4 per cent in 2010.  Already, 214,700 Singaporeans live overseas as of 2017, compared with 172,000 a decade before that, according to the Department of Statistics. Why do Singaporeans emigrate?  Surveys point to issues such as the high cost of living, high stress of work life and the education system.  Being able to explore opportunities not available in Singapore and living in societies with greater degrees of freedom were also mentioned as pull factors by some friends I spoke with.  I think another important factor contributing to brain drain is the national psyche.  There is no denying that the "Third World to First" story built on pragmatism and meritocracy forms the bulk of Singapore's DNA. But this is the same narrative that can propel emigration.  Pragmatism means one should seek the best life for self and family regardless of obligations or cost and whichever country is offering that life. There is little place for patriotism in that narrative... Singaporeans who choose to move overseas, especially the young generation, may not conform to the traditional viewpoint of a "comfortable" life, but may instead be choosing a lifestyle that allows them greater flexibility and inclusiveness in values and culture."
If the country treats its people like a resource (literally Lee Kuan Yew's strategy was "to develop Singapore's only available natural resource, its people"), why be surprised when they behave like resources and go to where they can get more value>

Spottiswoode condo killer litter: Man charged with ‘religiously aggravated’ act - "Australian national Andrew Gosling, 47, has now been charged with voluntarily causing hurt by means of an instrument — a glass wine bottle that he threw from the seventh floor lift landing of the Spottiswoode 18 condominium towards a table near the barbecue area on the fifth floor on Aug 18. According to court documents, the bottle struck a woman named Ms Manisah while she was at the table, causing bruises to her right shoulder, and that this act was “religiously aggravated”.No other details were given."
Uh

Turkey deserves the blame for what happened in Syria - "Syria would have escaped more than eight years of warfare if Turkey had not intervened militarily and politically when Arab Spring anti-government protests erupted in March 2011. Without Turkey’s early involvement, Damascus’s crackdown would have ended the protests and the government would have initiated promised reforms.Syria would have emerged with a limited number of victims, little damage,few internally displaced and fewer refugees. Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan would have escaped the negative human, economic and political impacts of the war across their borders. While Turkey was not the only external power to intervene it was the first, the most prominent and provided access to others. The result was civil conflict and proxy wars that have drawn in the US, Europe, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states... Ergodan’s intervention began in May 2011, two months after protests erupted in Syria. He convened a meeting in Istanbul of Syrian opposition factions to discuss how to effect regime change. In July, Turkey started recruiting Syrian army deserters for the Syrian Free Army (FSA) with the aim of using force to topple Assad who, Ankara believed would “fall within weeks”.  In August Ankara formed the Istanbul-based Syrian National Council, a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated opposition group comprised of exiles who expected to succeed Assad. In November, Erdogan called for sanctions to be imposed on Syria for its suppression of popular protests... Turkish-trained and armed FSA factions clashed with Syria’s regular army and seized control of several towns around Damascus and its suburbs. Turkey also funnelled thousands of foreign jihadis into Syria. A fraction were recruited by al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra, which entered Syria from Iraq in 2012, while 80 per cent joined Islamic State (originally Isis), a rival al-Qaeda offshoot established in 2013, and other jihadi groups. As Islamic State expanded its holdings in Syria and established the capital of its “caliphate” at Raqqa, reinforcements, funds, and supplies flowed into this area from Turkey. Looted factory equipment from Aleppo and oil from captured Syrian fields were sold in Turkey... Having initially welcomed Syrians fleeing the war, Turkey now wants to get rid of 3.5 million refugees who are a burden on the country’s faltering economy and unpopular with Turks.  Turkey intends to settle refugees in areas it occupies in northern Syria but this involves the ethnic cleansing of local Kurds. Armed Kurds have resisted displacement while the Syrian government has vowed to regain all Syrian territory."
Strange, I thought Western governments were the only ones with any agency

Julia Macfarlane on Twitter - "Where do I see myself in ten years? - Living in Bali, with my dogs. (credit unknown)"

Going to university pays off faster for women than for men, new analysis finds - "men who have taken degrees in Creative Arts, Communications, English, Agriculture, Psychology, Philosophy and Languages at some universities will earn less than the national living wage, on average, five years after their graduation."

The case against DNA - "Defence teams that once seemed helpless before the glossy, hi-tech slide shows presented by prosecutors have become far bolder in challenging the quality of the science. High-profile cases such as that of Amanda Knox — acquitted by an Italian court of murdering her flatmate after a trial that hinged almost solely on DNA evidence — have fed the notion that such evidence, with a little lawyerly ingenuity, can now be fought and discredited...  For some reason, first time around, no matches were found. This time, however, one turned up: a sample recovered from a cigarette butt found in 1998 after a burglary at the defendant’s mother’s house. The police originally believed the butt had been left by the burglar. Instead it led them to Mr Butler who had apparently dropped it during a visit to comfort his mother. After the taking of a full DNA profile, which, again, matched the DNA under the finger nails, the cabbie was charged with murder. This was at the heart of the prosecution’s case.  But Michael Wolkind, Butler’s QC, took the science apart. The testing procedures were unreliable, he told the jury. The analysis of the DNA under Foy’s nails had been done at a time before higher-quality standards for handling samples were established. And, he said, even if the DNA was the defendant’s, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for how it got there.  Butler suffers from a dry skin condition so severe that his nickname in the local cab trade is “flaky”. He could have taken a passenger to the Red Light district, handed over some notes in change and passed on his DNA to the passenger who then met with Foy and later handed the notes, complete with Butler’s DNA, to her.  “The idea that Mr Butler violently attacked her is beyond belief,” Wolkind told the jury. “Mr Butler never met the deceased, and unsafe science cannot change that fact.”... Jamieson’s main concern about the growing use of DNA in court cases is that a number of important factors — human error, contamination, simple accident — can suggest guilt where there is none. Police and prosecutors, he alleges, have come to see DNA evidence as a shortcut to convictions, and juries are ill-equipped to understand the complex scientific data... “Does anyone realise how easy it is to leave a couple of cells of your DNA somewhere?” he asks rhetorically. “You could shake my hand and I could put that hand down hundreds of miles away and leave your cells behind. In many cases, the question is not ‘Is it my DNA?’, but ‘How did it get there?’”... An entire sub-speciality of law has evolved called DNA-rebuttal and dozens of people have either had convictions overturned or secured not-guilty verdicts in trials that looked certain to end with the opposite conclusion.  William Thompson, a criminologist specialising in DNA-based forensics at the University of California, criticises what he calls “the rhetoric of infallibility” surrounding DNA profiling. “We’ve seen images of wrongfully convicted people being freed by this marvellous new technology,” he says, “and guilty ones being brought to justice, and we are invited to believe that this is a gold standard, a truth machine. It isn’t that simple. The fact is while DNA is generally quite reliable, it is not by any means infallible.” Thompson’s argument sounds even more convincing in the light of a recent report by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, which revealed that different DNA laboratories around the country produced wildly differing analyses of the same samples. The confusion is compounded by the realisation that not everyone leaves DNA in the same way. Some people shed cells more easily than others. Five people, for example, could be seated around a table, and only one of them would leave a trace."

The Problems With DNA Evidence and Testing - The Atlantic - "They both had alibis, and neither of them matched the profile from the victim’s original account: She’d described her assailants as short and skinny. Adams was 5 foot 11 and 180 pounds. Sutton was three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier, the captain of his high-school football team.  The DNA evidence was harder to refute... As recognition of DNA’s revelatory power seeped into popular culture, courtroom experts started talking about a “CSI effect,” whereby juries, schooled by television police procedurals, needed only to hear those three magic letters—DNA—to arrive at a guilty verdict. In 2008, Donald E. Shelton, a felony trial judge in Michigan, published a study in which 1,027 randomly summoned jurors in the city of Ann Arbor were polled on what they expected prosecutors to present during a criminal trial. Three-quarters of the jurors said they expected DNA evidence in rape cases, and nearly half said they expected it in murder or attempted-murder cases; 22 percent said they expected DNA evidence in every criminal case. Shelton quotes one district attorney as saying, “They expect us to have the most advanced technology possible, and they expect it to look like it does on television."... today, most large labs have access to cutting-edge extraction kits capable of obtaining usable DNA from the smallest of samples, like so-called touch DNA (a smeared thumbprint on a window or a speck of spit invisible to the eye), and of identifying individual DNA profiles in complex mixtures, which include genetic material from multiple contributors, as was the case with the vaginal swab in the Sutton case.  These advances have greatly expanded the universe of forensic evidence. But they’ve also made the forensic analyst’s job more difficult. To understand how complex mixtures are analyzed—and how easily those analyses can go wrong—it may be helpful to recall a little bit of high-school biology: We share 99.9 percent of our genes with every other human on the planet... Dror and Hampikian quote the early DNA-testing pioneer Peter Gill, who once noted, “If you show 10 colleagues a mixture, you will probably end up with 10 different answers” as to the identity of the contributor... even a trace of DNA can now become the foundation of a case. In 2012, police in California arrested Lukis Anderson, a homeless man with a rap sheet of nonviolent crimes, on charges of murdering the millionaire Raveesh Kumra at his mansion in the foothills outside San Jose. The case against Anderson started when police matched biological matter found under Kumra’s fingernails to Anderson’s DNA in a database. Anderson was held in jail for five months before his lawyer was able to produce records showing that Anderson had been in detox at a local hospital at the time of the killing; it turned out that the same paramedics who responded to the distress call from Kumra’s mansion had treated Anderson earlier that night, and inadvertently transferred his DNA to the crime scene via an oxygen-monitoring device placed on Kumra’s hand... sperm cells from a single stain on one item of clothing made their way onto every other item of clothing in the washer. And because we all shed different amounts of cells, the strongest DNA profile on an object doesn’t always correspond to the person who most recently touched it... some analysts are incentivized to produce inculpatory forensic evidence: A recent study in the journal Criminal Justice Ethics notes that in North Carolina, state and local law-enforcement agencies operating crime labs are compensated $600 for DNA analysis that results in a conviction.

Crime History: Plot to steal Elvis' body gets weirder - "On this day, Aug. 29, in 1977, three men were arrested and charged with trying to steal Elvis Presley's body. As a result the singer's body was moved to Graceland.The thieves' plan was to ransom the corpse for $10 million, but the plot was foiled when one of the thieves, an FBI informant named Ronnie Lee Adkins, tipped Memphis police and a TV reporter to the scheme.The charges were dropped after the prosecutor declared that Adkins was too unreliable.Twenty-five years later, Adkins confessed that a Shelby County deputy Billy Talley staged the corpse-snatching hoax so the Presley family could convince county officials to allow them to move Elvis to Graceland for security reasons.In a bizarre twist, Adkins later helped put away Talley in 1997 for conspiring to murder an FBI agent."