YeinJee's Asian blog

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Kingdom of Sweden

Swedish motorist facing world’s biggest speeding fine

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Swede faces biggest speeding fine in SwitzerlandA Swedish motorist is facing the world’s biggest ever speeding fine of £650,000 after being caught driving at 180mph on a Swiss motorway.

In Switzerland speeding fines are based on the income of the motorists and the severity of the speed. In this case the Swede is facing the highest possible penalty of 300 days of fines at £2,166 a day.

Finland (and probably a few other countries) also implement similar system. I remember a Finnish specialist introducing the idea to the Malaysian government a few years ago as a possible solution to reduce our traffic accident rate.

The suggestion was ignored completely though. Rumour is that our government officials are among the biggest traffic law offenders, so it can’t be done lol… thus we are ‘lucky’ to cap our speeding ticket at about £60 max.

Japan has highest industrial robot density

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There are one million industrial robots around the world (as of Dec 2008), and Japan has the highest density with 295 robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers.

Top 10 countries by robot density

Singapore and Korea are second and third respectively on the chart, but significantly behind Japan in numbers. Illustration by Mike Vella, more on IEEE.

Singapore tops Asia in competitiveness report

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Singapore tops the Asian ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009 conducted by the World Economic Forum (and partners) using both publicly available data and the Executive Opinion Survey.

The annual report assesses the ability of countries to provide high levels of prosperity to their citizens, which in turn depends on how productively a country uses available resources. Thus, the index measures the set of institutions, policies, and factors that set the sustainable current and medium-term levels of economic prosperity.

The top 10 overall ranking are USA, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Germany, Japan and Canada.

The top 10 Asian economic entities are Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China and UAE.