South African mayor giving scholarships to virgins

A mayor in South Africa has awarded college scholarships to 16 teens for maintaining their virginity through high school, the mayor’s office has announced.

Mayor Dudu Mazibuko of the town of Uthukela tried something new this year and offered scholarships to young women in the district for remaining virgins. The program is an attempt to stem the tide of teenage pregnancy and give incentive to girls to be “pure and focus on school,” the mayor’s office said. Almost six percent of teen girls in South Africa became pregnant in 2013.

But the girls who applied for the scholarships have to prove they are maintaining their virginity by agreeing to be regularly tested.

“To us, it’s just to say thank you for keeping yourself and you can still keep yourself for the next three years until you get your degree or certificate,” Mazibuko told a local South African talk radio station.

The mayor’s office awards 100 scholarships each year to the most promising students from the district, but it’s this new category that has stirred controversy. “It infringes on the constitutional right to privacy, said Palesa Mpapa, legal manager for People Opposing Women Abuse, in a statement. Mpapa also decried the program as a “patriachal mechanism of controlling women’s sexuality for marriage and it does not link to educational success.”

(UPI)

Dog escapes surgery with a vet riding on its back

This massive dog was not about to be beaten by a mere three veterinary staff trying to give him his (or possibly her) jabs.

Although they hold him down, they can’t keep him down. Within a few moments of a struggle, he’s out the door with a vet on his back, still holding on like she’s riding a rodeo bull at the fairground.

The whole video represents a triumph of the canine spirit, but this is the crucial moment, around 33 seconds in.

We particularly love the lead trailing on the ground as everyone looks around thinking, ‘What just happenedIJ’

It’s not just dogs staging ‘Great Escape’ style bids for escape from the vet.

(Metro)

Man uses computer to generate new episodes of Friends

A Scottish artist has rigged a computer programme to automatically generate new scripts for the 90s’ television sitcom Friends.

Andy Herd of Dundee, Scotland put every script in the show’s history into his computer as part of an experiment to learn about machine learning.The computer learned to recognize sequences in the scripts and eventually began to create its own.

“I fed a recurrent neural network with the scripts for every episode of friends and it learned to generate new scenes,” Herd wrote on Twitter as he shared examples of the computer’s work.

Herd told the Daily Beast that the computer generates scenes by predicting the next letter in a sequence based on the information provided by the Friends scripts.

The computer can quickly recreate the structure of a television script through this process, but the content likely wouldn’t be suitable for the upcoming Friends reunion.

“It can generate stuff within minutes, but it’s barely English,” he said. “A lot of it is still nonsense.”

The computer generated scripts contain some minor oddities including a scene that opens with Monica and Phoebe dancing in Monica and Rachel's apartment.

(UPI)

Designer makes gowns out of car interior material

One auto supplier is taking the term “ready to wear” to a whole new level.

Inteva Products llC commissioned a fashion designer to produce four gowns using the same thermoplastic material the maker of engineered components and systems places in the instrument panel surface of a number of General Motors Co. vehicles. The results were on display during a recent pop-up fashion show in Detroit.

Four models outfitted with formal dresses made from Inteva’s Inteather material strutted up and down a carpeted area, passing by dumbfounded auto show attendees as well as the GMC Yukon and Sierra, both of which feature instrument panel exteriors made of Inteather, a thermoplastic olefin material.

(AP)

Robots could soon read your mind    

Robots could soon be able to read your mind — and we won’t be able to stop them because there are no laws against it, experts claim.

If expert predictions come true, by 2030 smartphones, tablets and computers will be able to examine our brain activity to see what we are thinking.

Initially this will be used for security as a kind of ‘pass thought’ — the user thinks of a specific song or thought which the device recognises and then unlocks itself.

But a panel at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, warned of the terrifying possibility of hackers reading people’s innermost thoughts.

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, said: “Beyond two-factor idenitification...is using neural signatures — ‘pass thoughts’.

(Mirror)