Feng shui man’s hand chopped off

Source: The star.com.my

Vicious attack: Police personnel checking the victim's car for clues after the incident last night. The severed hand is still missing 

 

GEORGE TOWN: A feng shui master had his left hand chopped off in a savage attack outside a restaurant near Jalan Masjid Negeri.

Th’ng Keat Seong, 44, was believed to be walking to his Mercedes-Benz when he was attacked at Jalan Lintang Emas near Jalan Besi at about 8pm last night.

Blood stains were found on the boot of his car which indicated that his assailants could have held his hand there before chopping it off.

Th’ng’s cries attracted the attention of passers-by who rushed him to a private hospital. He managed to call his sister-in-law to seek help after the attack. The number of assailants is not known at press time.

It is learnt that the police are looking for the missing hand. Penang police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Wira Ayub Yaakob said they were investigating the motive for the attack.

It is learnt that police have not ruled out the possibility that someone could have tried to extort money from him.

I never saw it coming, says feng shui master who lost left hand

By ZALINAH NOORDIN
zalinah@thestar.com.my

GEORGE TOWN: Feng shui master Th’ng Keat Seong, whose left hand was chopped off in a vicious attack on Monday, says he really did not see it coming.

Th’ng admitted he did not get any premonition that something bad would happen. “I am a feng shui expert. I don’t predict the future as I’m not a fortune teller,” he said.

Th’ng, 44, offers consultancy services to his clients and has his own shop selling feng shui items in Penang Times Square shopping mall.

He claimed there was someone out there who did not want him in the business due to jealousy.

Th’ng said he was walking to his car after dinner at a restaurant when he was attacked at Jalan Lintang Emas, near Jalan Besi, at about 8pm on Monday night.

Blood stains found on the car boot indicated that his assailants could have held his hand there before chopping it off.

“It all happened so fast and I can’t really recollect what happened, or how the assailants looked like.

“All I can remember is that someone yanked my left arm from behind and I felt a searing pain. The next thing I knew, my left hand was missing and there was a lot of blood,” said Th’ng, who is right handed, when met at the the Gleneagles Medical Centre yesterday.

Feng shui man’s hand still missing

GEORGE TOWN: The left hand of a feng shui master which was chopped off by assailants here on Tuesday is still missing.

Chances are even if the missing hand is found, it would be too late for surgeons to reattach it.

A medical expert, who declined to be named, said under normal circumstances, a severed hand has to be reattached within six hours to have any chance of functioning again.

George Town OCPD Asst Comm Gan Kong Meng believed Th’ng Keat Seong’s assailants had made off with the hand after hacking it off.

“The victim could hardly recall anything as he was in great pain. More than one assailant were involved in the savage attack,” he said yesterday.

ACP Gan said they were investigating the case from all possible angles, including business rivalry as the motive.

“We are appealing to eyewitnesses to furnish us with details of the attack. Those with information can inform the nearest police station,” he said.

Th’ng, 44, offers consultancy services to his clients and has his own shop selling feng shui items at the Penang Times Square shopping mall.

Th’ng, who is reported to be in stable condition, refused to talk to the media yesterday.
He was attacked when he walked to his car after dinner at a restaurant in Jalan Lintang Emas, near Jalan Besi, on Tuesday.

Attackers sever geomancer's hand Click on thumbnail to view

A good fortune teller/fengshui master tell will never read his own life...that is the trick in their trade. Posted by: leechron at Sat Oct 23 10:20:15 SGT 2010 Don't think feng shui master can see his own fortune.....i'd figured he can only see others misfortunes and rectify them before it's too late...:) Posted by: girlgonewild at Sat Oct 23 09:58:44 SGT 2010 MYS style of doing business? Posted by: perceivedtobe at Sat Oct 23 06:52:28 SGT 2010

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China claims supercomputer crown, a threat?

China has claimed the top spot on the list of the world's supercomputers.

 

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer is about 50% faster than its closest rival.

 

The title has gone to China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer that is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.

To reach such high speeds the machine draws on more than 7,000 graphics processors and 14,000 Intel chips.

The claim to be the fastest machine on the planet has been ratified by the Top 500 Organisation which maintains a list of the most powerful machines.

High power
 
China's Tianhe-1A (Milky Way) has taken over the top spot from America's XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee that can carry out only 1.75 petaflops per second. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The news about the machine broke just before the publication of the biennial Top 500 Supercomputer list which ranks the world's most powerful machines.

Prof Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, one of the computer scientists who helps to compile the list, said China's claim was legitimate.

"This is all true," he told BBC News. "I was in China last week and talked with the designers, saw the system, and verified the results."

He added: "I would say it's 47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine, 1.7 Pflops (ORNL system) to 2.5 Pflops (Chinese system)."

Tianhe-1A is unusual in that it unites thousands of Intel processors with thousands of graphics cards made by Nvidia.

The chips inside graphics cards are typically made up of small arithmetical units that can carry out simple sums very quickly. By contrast, Intel chips are typically used to carry out more complicated mathematical operations.

The machine houses its processors in more than 100 fridge-sized cabinets and together these weigh more than 155 tonnes.
Based in China's National Center for Supercomputing in the city of Tianjin, the computer has already started to do work for the local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation.

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Is China a supercomputer threat?

Jack Dongarra, a professor at University of Tennessee's department of electrical engineering. China's supercomputer is a 'wake-up call.'

 

With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence in supercomputing.

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the "Tianhe-1A" Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place...out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it's much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are 120 nodes in the system.

What makes the Chinese supercomputer so fast?
Dongarra: The Chinese designed their own interconnect. It's not commodity. It's based on chips, based on a router, based on a switch that they produce.

Is that in essence the secret sauce?
Dongarra: It's similar to Cray. Cray's contribution, besides the integration and software, is the interconnect network. They have a very fast interconnect that makes that machine perform very well. Though [the Chinese] project is based on U.S. processors, it uses a Chinese interconnect. That's the interesting part. They've put something together that is roughly twice the bandwidth of an InfiniBand interconnect [which is used widely in the U.S.]

Will the Chinese system in fact take the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in November?
Dongarra: Yes. I saw the machine. I saw the output. It's the real thing.

Why doesn't Oak Ridge do what the Chinese are doing?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge doesn't have the ability or technology to develop an interconnect or a router. We don't make computers. We buy computers and use them. It's not within our scope or mission to be in the computer design business.

What's your advice?
Dongarra: You have to remember that you have to not only invest in the hardware. It's like a race car. In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology. The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that's an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It's underfunded. We fund the hardware but we don't fund the other components. The ecosystem tends to get out of balance because the hardware tends to run far ahead of what we can develop in terms of software. We have machines that have a tremendous level of parallelism. We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.

Who would do that?
Dongarra: The research is performed under the auspices of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

Is this a red flag for the U.S.?
Dongarra: Yes, this is a wake-up call. We need to realize that other countries are capable of doing this. We're losing an advantage.

Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.

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Wall St reform architect Frank fights for survival

By Ros Krasny

BOSTON (Reuters) - Representative Barney Frank, the outspoken, witty Democrat closely tied to the 2008 U.S. bank bailout, faces a tough re-election battle after 15 terms in office at a time when incumbency itself is a liability.

Challenging the Massachusetts liberal is Republican Sean Bielat, an Iraq war veteran, and opinion polls suggest Frank has an uncomfortably narrow lead over a political unknown.

In the run-up to Tuesday's congressional elections, Frank has faced a torrent of negative ads and mailings, much of it from groups outside the state who support candidates from the conservative Tea Party movement.

Last week, Frank borrowed $200,000 from his personal savings to prop up his campaign, saying he needed "to defend against outside attacks."

A recent opinion poll showed Frank with 49 percent of likely voters, Bielat at 37 percent and 12 percent undecided. Frank kept his seat in the House of Representatives with 68 percent of the vote in 2008 and ran unopposed in 2006.

Massachusetts has already been the scene of one of the year's biggest upsets, when Republican Scott Brown won a special election for the U.S. Senate seat held for almost five decades by a Democratic Party pillar, the late Edward Kennedy.

"If Barney Frank loses, it would be as significant as Scott Brown's win. You would really begin to see the depths of this anti-government sentiment," said Marc Landy, professor of political science at Boston College.

WALL STREET TIES THAT BIND

American voters are in a surly mood over the weak economy, unemployment near 10 percent and the state of the housing market as banks face scrutiny over how they handled the paperwork in home foreclosures across the country.

Frank, 70, has been chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee for almost four years.
He helped to broker the $700 billion fund to bail out banks at the height of the financial crisis and he promoted legislation to slow foreclosures and keep afloat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally controlled companies that own or guarantee more than half of the $11 trillion in U.S. mortgages.

He was a chief architect of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the Obama administration's plan for tighter regulation of the financial industry.

Bielat's campaign has tagged Frank as a "key player in America's financial collapse" who "has promoted much of what caused the worst economic downturn in decades."

Landy said some see Frank as the "personification of the cozy relationship between the government and irresponsible finance."

Frank's congressional district stretches from the affluent Boston suburbs of Brookline and Newton southward to the working-class towns of Fall River and New Bedford.

 The New Bedford Standard-Times newspaper has backed Frank over Bielat, 35, a political novice, former U.S. Marine and project manager at a company that designs and builds robots.

"Recoil from Barney Frank's gruff manner if you will, but his intellect and effectiveness make him invaluable," it said.

Even if Frank is re-elected, some wonder whether he might retire if Republicans gain control of the House, as most polls suggest, and he loses his committee chair
.
"Being in the minority is not as much fun," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

But Frank has unfinished business -- reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and defense of the Dodd-Frank Act against a Republican assault.

Some veteran lawmakers who lose powerful committee chairs might be tempted to call it a day, especially given the rancor in Washington, but Frank is probably not among them, said Thomas Whalen, a political historian at Boston University.

"He'll never quit," said Whalen. "He'll be taken out of the Capitol on a slab."

(Reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and John O'Callaghan)

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