Bundestag committee claims Ireland has no plan for growth
GERMAN MPS EMPHASISE a TROUBLING LACK OF CONCERN OVER Ireland's ‘SHADOW BANK’ SECTOR
The Bundestag committee visited Dublin last month and met Ministers Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, officials from the Central Bank, Nama, the IMF, economists and Irish banks.
Germany’s Bundestag finance committee has warned that, beyond tax breaks for multinational concerns, Ireland has no discernible business plan to return the economy to long-term growth.
After a recent visit to Dublin the cross-party committee said there was also a troubling lack of concern about Dublin’s “Schattenbank” or “shadow bank” sector of letterbox finance firms.
The Bundestag committee, headed by Green MP Gerhard Schick, visited Dublin from June 16th to 18th and met Ministers Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin, officials from the Central Bank, Nama, the International Monetary Fund, economists and Irish banks.
In their seven-page report, the visitors wondered if Ireland’s financial sector reform had missed the wood for the trees. Regulation of the domestic financial sector has been “strengthened massively, both in quality and quantity”, they noted, “but what of the rest of the financial sector?”
‘Little awareness’
The Germans noted “little awareness” in Dublin of the potential risk in hosting hundreds of brass-plate companies with no staff or premises yet €1.7 trillion in assets – almost 11 times the State’s gross national product.
“The only admission that this could be a difficulty for such a small country came from one of the bigger insurance companies,” noted the MPs.
Other people they met assured the visitors the “shadow” financial sector “has no connection with the Irish economy”.
“That did little to soothe us because the risks could yet turn up elsewhere, for instance in Germany,” said the MPs in their report.
Turning to Ireland’s reputation as a tax haven, the German MPs went home feeling there is a will for change in Ireland but that external vigilance will be required on the follow- through.
“The Irish Minister for Finance Michael Noonan described the debate over Ireland as a tax haven as a great image problem that has to be solved to not damage Ireland,” they wrote.
ESRI economist John Fitzgerald reportedly told the visitors how the current tax regime was a loss-leader for Ireland.
Summarising his remarks, they wrote: “As the Irish State pays into the EU budget based on GDP, into which the value created by international concerns flows without generating any tax revenue for the state, Ireland is losing money every year through the current tax regime.”
Dependency
In the eyes of the German politicians, Ireland’s tax regime “had failed to reach one of the goals of Irish economic promotion, namely to be less dependent on Britain”.
“Instead [Ireland] has moved from de facto full dependency on Britain to a shared dependency on Britain and the US in developing and securing employment.”
When it comes to modifying its tax code, the visitors from Berlin noted a certain reluctance for the Irish to see themselves as masters of their own fiscal fate. “The Irish insist that they have no control when inventive companies put together a Double Irish-Dutch sandwich,” said the German MPs in their report.
Concerns
The cross-party committee appears to have taken on Irish concerns that long-term austerity-oriented policies would not be conducive to sustainable growth. But just as serious, “given the high unemployment, a high level of loans in default and a tax system that encourages avoidance, the Government and their international advisers have no business model” for the Irish economy.
The loudest critics of Ireland’s tax affairs can be found in Germany’s Social Democratic Party and Greens, but the volume diminishes as you head right on Germany’s political spectrum.
Improved energy from Oilseed rape straw now well advanced
Researchers at the Institute of Food Research in the UK are looking at how to turn straw from oilseed rape into biofuel. Preliminary findings are pointing at ways the process could be made more efficient, as well as how the straw itself could be improved.
Straw from crops such as wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel production. Currently the UK produces around 12 million tonnes of straw. Although much is used for animal bedding, mushroom compost and energy generation, there still exists a vast surplus.
Straw contains a mix of sugars that could be used as a source of biofuels that do not compete with food production but instead represent a sustainable way of utilising waste. However, the sugars are in a form that makes them inaccessible to the enzymes that release them for conversion into biofuels, so pre-treatments are needed. The pre-treatments make the complex carbohydrates more accessible to enzymes that convert them to glucose, in a process called saccharification. This is then fermented by yeast into ethanol.
Professor Keith Waldron and his team have been looking at the steps needed to unlock the sugars tied up in the tough straw structure. In particular, they have looked at the pre-treatment stage, focusing on steam explosion, which involves ‘pressure-cooking’ the biomass, to drive a number of chemical reactions. A rapid pressure-release then causes the material to be ripped open, to further improve accessibility.
They varied the temperature and duration of steam explosion and then used a variety of physical and biochemical techniques to characterise what effects varying the pre-treatments had on the different types of sugars before and after scarification.
The amount of cellulose converted to glucose increased with the severity of the pretreatment. Scarification efficiency is also associated with the loss of specific sugars, and subsequent formation of sugar breakdown products.
In a further study the scientists discovered the key factors that determine the efficiency of scarification. One particular compound, uronic acid, limited the rate at which enzymes worked. The final sugar yield was closely related to the removal of xylan, a common component of plant cell walls. The abundance of lignin, a ‘woody’ cell wall component, was positively related to the amount of available sugars.
These findings will help improve the efficiency by which straw can be converted to biofuels. For example, adding enzymes that more effectively remove xylan should improve yield. Controlling the level of lignin in the material should also help.
It may even be possible to improve the straw itself, for example to reduce the uronic acid content in the biomass, as suggested by these findings. In the main, oilseed rape has been bred to improve oilseed yield and disease resistance, without paying much attention to the straw.
The IFR is working with colleagues at the University of York and the John Innes Centre to see whether there are ways of breeding more “biofuel-ready” varieties of oilseed rape, with the same yields of oilseed but with more amenable straw. In addition, a full understanding of the polysaccharides and other compounds made available during pretreatment may mean other valuable co-products, like platform chemicals, may be viably produced from the surplus straw.
Irish men fall on hard times for the men’s souped up sheds
Nowadays, with the growing popularity of the ‘man shed’, it’s quite likely that prying eyes will never find out exactly what’s inside the shed at the end of their own garden either.
It might not be something nasty but it could be the engine of a 1965 Austin-Healey, a clapped-out wooden boat or an orchid collection – but the garden shed has traditionally been a male retreat from domestic routine which no one is allowed to enter.
But sheds have moved on from the days when men – retired, trainspotting English men in particular – pottered about mysteriously inside. A modern shed is an extension of the house; it’s as likely to have widescreen TV and Wi-Fi as boxes of nails and bags of compost. And a usable outdoor room can add value to your home.
The cult of the ‘sheddie’ has spread from Britain to Ireland. Among the annual entrants for the UK-based Shed of the Year competition, there is always a smattering of Irish sheddies.
One of them is Peter Ellis, whose garden shed near Letterkenny, Co Donegal, is a tribute to the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. It’s made of aluminum framed glass panes between tubular steel posts, and has a tiled roof. Coloured vinyl sheets cover the panes to form the Mondrian-style panels.
Ellis designed and built his own house, and built the shed to use up space in the garden. “I wanted to get rid of a bit of grass because I was fed up of mowing the lawn,” he says. The idea of the Mondrian homage was “a eureka moment”, he adds.
It cost next to nothing to build, being made of mostly recycled materials and whatever Ellis had to hand. The work took about six months in all.
It’s quite a big shed – about four wide by three metres long, and 3.5 metres high. And it’s in Ellis’s front garden. “As you’re driving along past the house, it’s definitely out there!” he says.
Inside is a bench and table, a bog oak sculpture and a water feature, as well as some garden tools. Ellis uses it as a place to unwind.
“I pop up there when I’m doing the gardening and have a little sit-down and a beer and relax. It’s south-facing as well so you get the sun. You can have a little quiet moment.”
The Mondrian shed was first entered in the Shed of the Year competition in 2012, and is an entrant this year again. However, the contest is sponsored by Cuprinol, which makes wood preservatives, so Ellis believes his maintenance-free metal and glass shed is unlikely to win.
Ellis runs a geodesic dome business called Atlantic Domes. Since building the Mondrian shed, he’s also put up a greenhouse and an outdoor barbecue kitchen, and there’s a geodesic dome in the works. But he says he will happily erect a Mondrian shed in other people’s gardens if they ask him to.
Another celebrated Irish sheddie is Conor Keatings in Kilpedder, Co Wicklow, who converted an existing garden shed into a shebeen called the Monkey Bar a couple of years ago. It doubles as a laundry room.
“It’s an old shed that was here when we moved in nine years ago. It was full of junk, but slowly I whittled all the rubbish out to turn it into a man space. But the washing machine was still in there, so I asked my mate who’s a carpenter to build something to hide the washing machine, and he built the bar. It was originally just to be a home for the washing machine and it kind of got out of hand, as two lads over a couple of pints do.”
The shed is 12 feet by eight, with a four-foot verandah at the front. It cost very little to convert, says Keatings – a maximum of €200. While cleaning it out, Keating’s found his old cuddly monkey toy, which gave the bar its name.
The ‘christening’ of the bar was the 2013 New Year’s Eve party, when all the neighbor’s came over. “There were 14 of us in it that night; it was brilliant. It’s still used for a session with all the neighbor’s every couple of months.”
Keatings also goes there to watch sport, and he and his wife Jenny sometimes go out there of an evening, put the fairy lights on and drink wine. “You can get out of the house and do something different without having to get a babysitter in.”
Keatings believes it’s “in the DNA” of men to want a space of their own. “I didn’t necessarily know it would be a bar; it just sort of happened. It can be a private domain for me as well – it does lock from the inside! But I tend not to use it like that – it’s more a social space.”
David Leech, from Mount Merrion in Dublin, built a shed to house a clay pizza oven in the winter of 2012-2013. Then he decided the shed was too good for that, so the pizza oven ended up outside.
“It’s a chalet-style shed made of timber, designed on the back of a fag packet. As I was building it, it was still being designed. It was built between December 1 and January 20 under major pressure. Then the shed was too good to be all taken up with a pizza oven, so I started building that outside – in the Irish weather.”
The shed itself – 11 feet by 14 – has a fourth wall at the front that doubles as a drop-down deck. It was built for around €2,000, The pizza oven, meanwhile, cost little or nothing.
“I dug a load of this clay out of a riverbed in Wicklow for it, which was the perfect clay that I found by accident. And the rest of it is made out of recycled materials. It took hundreds and hundreds of hours to build though. There was much pain in the poor soft office-boy hands in the building of it all.”
The oven is insulated at the bottom by 196 beer bottles on their sides. “Those beer bottles were produced in real time, while I was working out there in the middle of winter, telling the wife to drink faster because I was out of materials.”
The shed is in constant use although, as an employee of Microsoft, Leech doesn’t get much time there himself. “I leave for work and my wife and kids go and have breakfast out there. So it’s not working out all that well as a man shed I have to admit. I do have to share it with other people.”
But while the shed was once seen as a bastion of masculinity, more and more sheddies themselves are female. One Irish contender is a woman in Dingle, Co Kerry, who wanted an outside room of her own, as her husband had a garage and workshop. She built a shed with a bookcase, armchairs, and a stoop outside.
Among the multitudes of different types of sheds, there are pub and nightclub sheds, sound recording sheds, sheds on stilts, sheds with vegetable gardens on their roofs, sheds made to look like pagodas, boats, or hobbit holes, and Tardis sheds … yes, Tardis sheds – modelled on Dr Who’s time machine – are a growing subculture, and constitute a category of their own in the Shed of the Year competition.
Researchers can now predict which teenagers are likely to binge drink
In a new international study, researchers say it is possible to predict which teens will binge-drink. The findings, published in the journal Nature, show that factors such as life experience, personality, and brain structure are strong factors linked to future alcohol misuse.
For the study, data was pulled from the European IMAGEN cohort, whose purpose is to determine the biological and environmental factors that might have an influence on the mental health of teenagers.
The researchers then developed a model that incorporates 40 different risk factors of teen substance abuse, including personality, history/life events, brain physiology and structure, cognitive ability, genetics, and demographics.
“We aimed to develop a ‘gold standard’ model for predicting teenage behavior which can be used as a benchmark for the development of simpler, widely applicable prediction models,” said Professor Gunter Schumann from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and Coordinator of the IMAGEN project.
For the study, IMAGEN recruited over 2,000 teenagers who were 14 years old from England, Ireland, France, and Germany. Follow-ups at age 16 showed that it was indeed possible to predict future alcohol abuse just two years later.
One interesting finding was that even one-to-two instances of alcohol consumption by age 14 was enough to predict if the teenagers would binge-drink at age 16. Prior research has suggested that the odds of adult alcohol dependence can be reduced by 10 percent for each year that alcohol consumption is delayed in the teen years.
Previous studies have found that early teenage binge drinking and progression to alcohol misuse is genetically influenced and is also consistently linked to later risk for substance use disorders.
It is important to determine, however, whether environmental factors can tip the genetic risk. In this study, negative life experiences were found to be a major influence on binge drinking at age 14.
“Our goal was to better understand the relative roles of brain structure and function, personality, environmental influences, and genetics in the development of adolescent abuse of alcohol. This multidimensional risk profile of genes, brain function, and environmental influences can help in the prediction of binge drinking at age 16 years,” said lead author Dr. Robert Whelan, of University College Dublin.
The scientists would like to continue this work by evaluating the participants again at a later age. The factors used in this study will also be applied to predict other types of risk-taking behaviors, such as using drugs and smoking.
New simplified versions of the tests are being developed so that children who are at risk of alcohol misuse can be identified and given help.
Top Physicist Del Monte says machines will rule the world by 2045
AND IT WILL THREATEN HUMAN SURVIVAL
In about 30 year’s time, the top species on Earth will no longer be humans. That is the chilling warning from physicist Louis Del Monte (left picture) who believes that new artificial intelligence (AI) technology will threaten the survival of humankind.
In a world where machines have become part of the way we live, where already artificial limbs replace our own, Del Monte believes we will become cyborgs — part human and part machine.
Our reliance on machines is increasing more than ever as they improve productivity, make breakthroughs in medical technology and improve our quality of life.
But Del Monte is concerned that the future may come down to man versus machine, when machines become more intelligent than humans, and that machines, like robots, may view humans as unpredictable and dangerous.
Speaking to Business Insider , Del Monte said: “Today there’s no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be. If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach the singularity in the time frame most experts predict. From that point on you’re going to see that the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.”
Author of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, Del Monte warns that machines will start to acquire the capabilities to protect themselves and view humans as enemies the way we view harmful insects.
He predicts that between 2040 to 2045 machines will outmatch human intelligence.
“The implication is that they’re also learning self-preservation,” Del Monte told us. “Whether or not they’re conscious is a moot point.”
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