Group of French journalists visit Donegal on fact finding mission
500,000 French to read about Ireland back home
The group of leading French travel writers flew into Ireland West Airport Knock last week from Paris Beauvais, en route to Donegal, as part of a fact-finding trip to Ireland. The journalists’ visit was organised by Tourism Ireland, in conjunction with Fáilte Ireland and Ryanair.
Representing various print and on-line publications with a combined circulation of over 500,000 readers – or potential French holidaymakers – the journalists were here to experience at first-hand some of the many things to see and do in this part of Ireland for feature stories they are researching about holidays here. It was also a wonderful opportunity to highlight the excellent connectivity between France and the west of Ireland.
As well as a tour of the gardens of Glenveagh Castle, the journalists also paid a visit to Donegal Castle and to the stone fort of Grianán of Aileach. Their itinerary also included a tweed demo in Ardara with local weaver Eddie Doherty and a visit to Rossnowlagh beach. During their time in Donegal, the group stayed at Harvey’s Point in Donegal town and at Castle Grove Country House Hotel in Letterkenny.
Billy Condon, Tourism Ireland’s manager in Southern Europe, said: “Tourism Ireland is delighted to welcome this group of French travel writers to Co. Donegal and to Ireland. Fact-finding visits like this are very important: they are a really effective way for us to get positive exposure for Ireland through the media in France. The articles these journalists will write about Donegal will reach over half a million people around France, helping to inspire them to put Donegal on their holiday ‘wish list’ for 2012.
“It is now easier than ever to get to the island of Ireland from all regions of France and Tourism Ireland, together with our airline and other tourism partners, is pulling out all the stops to convey the message that there has never been a better time to visit.”
While the island of Ireland holds strong appeal in the French market – with over 400,000 French visitors coming here in 2011 – Tourism Ireland plans to deliver even stronger growth in the coming years. More than half of all French visitors stay in Ireland for one to two weeks.
EU fishing compromise deal on the dumping of fish at sea ‘heavily criticised’
EU fisheries ministers have been criticised both by fishing and environmental interests for their latest attempt to eradicate dumping of unwanted catches of fish at sea.
The compromise deal to outlaw discards by 2018 was secured after more than 20 hours of negotiations, ending shortly before 5am yesterday in Luxembourg.
Ireland’s negotiating team said it was the “the most significant EU fisheries council in over a decade”.
Minister for the Marine Simon Coveney said the compromise which he had tabled represented a “progressive and phased approach to ending this unacceptable practice of discarding dead fish”.
However, Killybegs Fishermen’s Organisation chief executive Seán O’Donoghue said the ministers were “pandering to the public-relations interests of celebrity chefs” rather than coming up with a workable solution which would protect fish stocks.
Discarding of edible fish – dumped by vessels under EU quota rules – has been one of the most contentious issues in the current debate on reform of the EU Common Fisheries Policy.
Most of the estimated 1.3 million tonnes of fish dumped in the northeast Atlantic are thrown overboard by EU vessels under EU rules – a symptom of the failure of the heavily bureaucratic policy for managing “blue Europe”.
It is expected that a ban on discarding fish such as mackerel and herring is likely to be implemented from 2014, with bans on dumping of cod, haddock, plaice and sole phased in between 2015 and 2018.
Ireland had originally sought to push back a final ban to 2020, and its compromise formula has been supported by France and Spain, both of which have large fleets working in Irish waters.
EU maritime affairs commissioner Maria Damanaki had made ending discards a priority after the issue was highlighted in Britain by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his “Fish Fight” campaign.
Irish South and East Fish Producers’ Organisation spokeswoman Caitlín Uí Aodha said the problem of discards was “created by bad fishing policy in Europe”.
“We support eradication of discards but we have a vessel down here which has been arrested for refusing to dump fish outside the quota,” she said. “There has to be a realistic look at quotas allocated in the first instance.”
By forcing vessels to land species caught outside quotas, without looking at ways of avoiding netting the species at all, was simply “transferring dumping on sea to land”, Mr O’Donoghue said.
The Ocean 2012 campaign – an umbrella group of environmental organisations formed by the Pew Environment Group, the conservation arm of a US non-profit group known as the Pew Charitable Trusts – expressed disappointment at the compromise.
“EU fisheries ministers have continued their record of mismanagement by delaying the ending of overfishing in the EU and by its fleet globally,” Ocean 2012 spokesman Mike Walker said.
“We are now looking to the European Parliament to support reform that delivers a healthy marine environment and viable fisheries-dependent communities.”
Counting the real cost & benefits of cloud computing
Among the benefits of cloud computing are lower infrastructure costs, reduced time to market and greater flexibility, with no need for enterprises to buy, install and maintain IT infrastructure and software.
It can allow companies to become more agile and entrepreneurial, while the cloud computing vendor can deliver economies of scale by amortising its costs over all its customers.
And we all also know that cloud is catching on in a big way. According to Microsoft, 70 per cent of businesses say they have already moved to the cloud or plan to do so.
SAVING GRACE
The Open Data Center Alliance reports that its 300 enterprise members will triple their cloud deployment in the next two years, an adoption rate five times greater than it previously predicted.
Effective cost control can be a major reason to consider moving to the cloud. Costs become predictable.
Because cloud charges are priced on a flat rate per month basis, some firms have cut IT delivery costs by as much as 90 per cent, according to Microsoft.
Renting applications and infrastructure in the cloud removes the need for upfront capital expenditure. It can all be run out of operational expenditure.
Other arguments in favour of the cloud are that it allows you to focus on the business rather than IT, and that capacity can be scaled up and down to meet demand, reducing risk and improving agility.
Dig deeper and everything gets much more complicated. At Cloud Camp, London 2012 in January – nominally on the subject of big data – there was naturally enough much talk about the economics of the cloud.
MYTHS AND LEGENDS
So much so that Joe Weinman, previously an informal cloud evangelist at AT&T and HP and now at Telx, gave an impromptu run-through of his current thinking.
Weinman is something of a celebrity in the cloud computing community because he attempts to bring some intellectual clarity to the noise and myth-making that surround the topic of cloud costs.
He is also the founder of Cloudonomics, which he describes as a “multidisciplinary analytical approach leveraging economics, behavioural economics, statistics, calculus, computational complexity theory, simulation, and system dynamics to characterise the sometimes counterintuitive multi-dimensional business, financial, and user experience benefits of cloud computing and other on-demand, pay-per-use business models”.
The modelling naturally makes a few assumptions to quantify cloud benefits: common infrastructure, location independence, online connectivity, utility pricing, on-demand resources.
As Weinman commented at Cloud Camp, among the many theories about cloud computing is the idea that moving wholesale to the cloud can deliver huge economies of scale and provide a low-cost alternative to in-house data centres.
He argued that this is not always the case. You have to take peaks and troughs in usage into account, plus the fact that there will always be some applications that organisations want to keep in-house, such as tightly coupled legacy applications.
TOO BIG TO FLY
It is hard, he said, to see why a major airline would want to move its 40-year-old reservation system to the cloud, for example.
Weinman also implied that pay-per-use pricing will supplant fixed-price hosting for all but a few users. So long as cloud develops equivalent services to hosting (or your internal data centre), pay-per-use will be the most economically efficient choice.
An analogy commonly used by the cloud economists is the comparison between buying and renting a car. It makes sense to own your own car for everyday use but it is better to rent when you go on holiday.
Cloud blogger and founder of Israeli software firm Gigaspaces Nati Shalom recently posted the following.
“Many people think that cloud economics starts to pay dividends immediately when you move to an on-demand usage model, paying only for what you use. Cloud can actually be fairly expensive when hosting environments in use are not elastic. I was surprised to see how many startups and SaaS organisations still run their applications in the cloud just as they would in any static hosting environment.
“While the pay-per-use model has a lot of promise for cost-savings if our applications aren’t designed for elasticity the cost of running the application in the cloud may end up costing you more. Most of the mission-critical applications have not been designed for elasticity and on-demand usage.”
COMMODITY PLAY
Shalom also points out that the important difference between private and public cloud is less about cost and more to do with ownership and flexibility.
Heavy Reading senior analyst Caroline Chappell says there is no arguable reason for enterprise commodity functions not to move to the cloud.
“There’s no point putting desktop functions anywhere other than in the cloud,” she says.
“Cloudonomics favours commodity functions provided by service providers in the cloud.
“All those applications like sales management and CRM, which enterprises used to develop themselves and which were packaged up by the likes of SAP, Oracle, Amdocs and Salesforce.com, I see no reason for them not to move to the cloud.”
But she adds that what she calls the “system developer stuff”, or the reports and processes that knit together or live on top of the commodity functions, may well sit better in a hybrid model.
He argues that organisations should approach the cloud like any other technology procurement process. They should fully discuss issues such as personnel, redundancy and risk, rather than just focus on price.
Galway traffic lights are now talking to each other
Director of Services for Transport Ciaran Hayes addresses the local media at the UTMC at City Hall on Monday.
Galway City Councillors may not be speaking to each other or officials every other week, but the traffic lights on the city’s main routes are going to be talking to each other by the minute from now on as Galway City Council’s new traffic management system gets into full swing.
At a media briefing at City Hall on Monday, local media were given a demonstration of the city’s new Urban Traffic Management Centre, which will control the flow of traffic on the city’s main routes by detecting the volume of traffic through the various junctions and altering the sequence of the traffic lights accordingly.
Currently, the Dublin Road from Roscam to Moneenageisha is connected up to the system, while the Bothar na Treabh lights are being switched on and connected up in stages as the roundabouts are taken out and replaced with lighted junctions.
The lights at the Font Junction were switched on last week and the Morris Junction went live on Monday. The cameras on Seamus Quirke Road on the west side of the city will also be switched on this week.
The cameras will be the council’s “eyes and ears” on the ground, giving those manning the UTMC from 7.30am to 7.30pm Monday to Saturday a bird’s eye view of traffic in the city. However, the cameras are not the brains behind the new scheme and Director of Services for Transport Ciaran Hayes told the media briefing on Monday that the detectors leading up to the lights were supplying the real information that was keeping traffic moving in the city.
Taking the Dublin Road as an example, Mr Hayes said the volume of traffic travelling along this route is first being assessed in the lead up to the lights at Roscam, which feeds this information on to the next set of lights at the Coast Road junction, which feeds on to the lights at Galway Crystal and on until the Moneenageisha Junction. The traffic lights all along this route respond in turn to the volume by changing the sequence of lights to provide the best journey times.
Consequently, he said, over the last six weeks, traffic throughput through Moneenageisha at certain times of the day has increased in the region of 25 per cent.
“Essentially, up to now, we have been operating blind. If something happened out on the network we didn’t know it was happening until there was a tailback and somebody called us. We were operating without eyes and ears on the ground and this is where it is going to change.”
Brian Burke, Executive Engineer at the Galway Transport Unit, further explained that detectors on Lough Atalia and at Brothers of Charity on the Dublin Road were telling the controller at the Moneenageisha Junction what traffic was coming towards it. “The algorithm behind the system is then calculated based on all four arms to see what the optimum times are for each stage of the junction… The system is constantly optimising itself in order to give the most efficient amount of green time,” he said.
Mr Burke said that at different times of the day they had already seen massive benefits in terms of throughput through this junction, with a 15 per cent increase in throughput through the junction in the morning since the system went online.
Mr Hayes said that while the problems with Moneenageisha outbound in the evening persisted, the reason behind this was that the Dublin Road does not have the capacity to take the volume of traffic that’s going into it. Getting the traffic lights talking to each other is not the end in itself and Mr Joe Tansey, Assistant Director of Services for Transport, said the council also has plans to work with Bus Eireann to provide priority for public transport, will have VMS signs dotted around the city giving information on parking and traffic congestion and providing real time information at bus shelters in the second half of this year. Mr Hayes said there would also be a seat for Gardaí in the new centre.
“It is light years away from what we had up until now. What we had up until now was individual junctions standing alone, not communicating with each other at all and even the adaptability of each junction was limited as to how it could respond to traffic…Now, each junction knows what is coming at it from different approaches and it can adapt and change its timing on different times of the day, different days of the week to suit traffic demands having regard to the overall network and that is being fed onto the next junction,” said Mr Tansey.
Mr Tansey said that the project, which had been mooted 20 years ago, had been in active consideration for the past five years and was one of the most modern in Europe.
However, Mr Hayes warned that the new system was not going to “solve our problems.”
“This is only a part, albeit a major part, of the solution. Come August, we are still going to have too much traffic, too many cars for a city network to be able to handle and that is the reality. We have a very defined space and when you get too many cars trying to use that space, you have a problem. This will help us manage it, but it won’t solve the problem.”
He said improved infrastructure, a modal shift from cars to public transport, cycling and pedestrianisation were the four elements common across the world for dealing with traffic problems. The only difference is ratio and percentage you apply.
Mr Hayes estimated the cost of the entire project at roughly €10 million, which includes the cost of taking out roundabouts, traffic lights, €1m on centre itself and the VMS signs.
Asked what would happen if there was a power outage across the city, Mr Hayes said we would all be “in the soup”, while Mr Burke said, where possible they had provided back up power supplies.
Gene Map of Body’s Microbes Is a New Health Tool
Researchers said Wednesday they have produced the first comprehensive genetic map of the microbes that live in or on a healthy human body, laying the groundwork for possible new advances in research and in the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
The accomplishment—the result of a five-year, $173 million initiative called the Human Microbiome Project funded by the National Institutes of Health—stems from an effort to better understand bacteria and other organisms that play a critical role in processes ranging from digestion to infection.
United States Department of Agriculture
The bacterium, Enterococcus faecalis, which lives in the human gut, is just one type of microbe that will be studied as part of NIH’s Human Microbiome Project.
Scientists know the body harbors trillions of such microorganisms—indeed, they outnumber human cells 10 to 1. But until now, they didn’t know what the all bacteria were, where they were and how they might differ from person to person, or from site to site on a single body.
“This is really a new vista in biology,” said Phillip Tarr, director of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and one of the leaders of the project, which involved some 200 researchers at 80 institutions.
The new genetic map should bolster research into a number of diseases whose onset is associated with a combination of genetic predisposition and changes to the body’s roster of bacteria.
“It’s likely this work will lead to new treatments for [the inflammatory bowel disorder] Crohn’s disease, new treatments for diabetes and metabolic diseases, new treatments for even other diseases, like eczema,” said Michael Fischbach, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn’t involved in the project.
Dr. Fischbach cautioned that “it’s going to take a long time” before new drugs might be available, because there remains much to sort out—not only the interplay between genetics and bacteria but also the wide variations in the bacteria on different people’s bodies.
Microbes have inhabited people since the beginning of human history, researchers say. “Most of the time we live in harmony” with them,” said Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. They play critical roles in digestion and other processes important for human survival.
But sometimes, the beneficial relationship breaks down, resulting in disease.
“We need to understand better what the normal microbiome is like and what happens to it when it changes to cause or influence disease,” Dr. Green said.
The findings, reported in papers published by Nature and the Public Library of Science, were based on samples from 242 healthy volunteers in the U.S., from such sites as the mouth, nose, skin, intestine and vagina. They were analyzed with advanced versions of the DNA-sequencing machines used to map DNA in the Human Genome Project.
While that effort determined that there are about 22,000 human genes, the new project found more than eight million genes in the human microbiome—the microorganisms living in or on the human body. It identified more than 10,000 species of microbes.
“This gives us a reference set of genes and microbes from healthy individuals,” said James Servalovic, director of the Texas Children’s Microbiome Center at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the researchers on the project.
The plan is to do similar analyses of the microbiomes of children, the elderly and people from continents such as Africa and South America, as well as people with disease, to help unravel the role the microbes play in maintaining health or causing disease.
Future research will look at how the microbiome is “established in infants and maintained throughout life,” said Bruce Birren, co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
How microbes are modified by individual lifestyle, environmental exposure and interaction with human genes and disease is part of an ambitious research agenda scientists hope will lead to new strategies, medicines and foods to maintain health and treat disease.
For instance, learning which microbes in the gut regulate functions such as the digestion of fat or proteins could help in the fight against obesity, researchers said. A better understanding of the bacteria Clostridium difficile, which attacks hospital patients, could provide better tools to treat and prevent hospital infections, they added.
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