• Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy
  One student in a fraternity at Dartmouth blows the whistle on the hazing activities that took place there, but the result is not exactly what he had hoped. In fact, the article throws into question whether he did it for other nefarious reasons.

  According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the conventional definition of a “binge” is five drinks in a two-hour period for men. Dartmouth frat boys pride themselves on being able to drink six cups of beer in less than 30 seconds – it’s called a “quick six,” and requires a person to literally open their gullet and pour the liquid down. There is a YouTube video in which a Dartmouth student does this in less than 10 seconds, but even this feat may not be a record.

• Are Walmart’s Chinese Factories as Bad as Apple’s
  This article uses Apple in the headline to bring in the hits, but it’s really only about Walmart and their lackadasical approach to being green. Actually, they talk a lot about being green, but they’re not actually doing too much.

  Martin brought up a major Walmart supplier, a network of factories making name-brand products. (He asked that I not reveal the brand, but it’s a household name.) Like Mr. Ou once did, this supplier submitted scorecards on energy and water use to Walmart. The retailer’s response: silence. Martin said the supplier admitted to him that the data was “total crap,” but it never heard from Walmart one way or another. Martin summed up the supplier’s attitude toward Walmart scorecards like this: “Walmart sets a new target, everybody gets all excited, runs around for six months, and then everything kind of slows down and the wheels fall off.”

• Antiviral Drugs Could Blast the Common Cold – Should We Use Them?
  This article talks about 3 new approaches to develop a counteragent to virus in general.
• Just One More Game…
  This article on gaming has been making the rounds – it talks about how we’re spending more time playing stupid games (like Angry Birds etc). But I don’t really know how much more intelligent playing a game like Modern Warfare is. It’s like you’re trying to solve cancer.
• The God of Gamblers
  Would it surprise you that Macau sees five times more money than Las Vegas? Well it does, and at least some of it may not be legal. That hasn’t stopped American companies from opening casinos there, all in the goal of making money while gambling in the US is slumping.

  While the junket industry has many law-abiding members, it has, for decades, been susceptible to the involvement of organized crime. Triads, which grew out of nineteenth-century Chinese political societies, had always been involved in loan-sharking and prostitution, and had made their presence felt on the edges of Macau’s casinos, but in recent years triads had become more business-oriented. Triad violence in Macau and Hong Kong has declined over the past decade, because triads have increasingly set aside squabbles over drugs and petty crime in order to pursue the range of new criminal opportunities associated with a more prosperous China, including money laundering, financial fraud, and gambling.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: gambling, games, instapaper, walmart