Ireland 12th in the world on list of best places to be born
Despite the recession, high levels of emigration and lousy weather, Ireland remains one of the best countries in the world in which to be born, according to a new survey.
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) ranks Ireland 12th among 80 countries in terms of the life chances of a child born in 2013.
The EIU rates Ireland ahead of Germany (joint 16th) and France (26th) while also ranking the country above the UK (27th) and the US (joint 16th), the two most popular destinations for Irish emigrants.
We are rated behind Australia (2nd), New Zealand (7th) and Canada (9th), other favoured destinations for the current generation of Irish emigrants. Switzerland may have a reputation for being dull, but it is also the best country in the world in which to be born, according to the EIU.
The unit used 11 different indicators to rank countries. Prosperity, both present and projected, was the main indicator. Others included life expectancy, quality of family life, trust in public institutions, health, education, crime and contentment as measured in personal satisfaction surveys.
Ireland still scores high on the latter category with high levels of reported satisfaction, but low in terms of climate.
The EIU survey is similar to the one carried out by the Economist magazine which famously ranked Ireland as the best country in the world in which to live in 2004, a decision which was met with pride and derision in equal measure.
Smaller countries
The survey differs in its attempts to measure what life will be like for a child born this year who enters adult life in 2030.
Laza Kekic, the regional director of the EIU and one of the authors of the survey, said the results showed smaller countries are better to live in than big countries.
“There seems to be a positive small country effect,” he said. “Many of the large countries fall down on things like health, life expectancy, while quality of family and community life are not great,” he said citing the examples of the US and the UK, which have high divorce rates.
Mr Kekic said Ireland retained many of its strengths, most notably family and social cohesion, while remaining a prosperous country relatively speaking. “I’ve been asked why Ireland is so high in views of all these troubles, but you have to keep things in perspective,” he said. “When you look at the profile of Ireland and its general economic wealth despite the crisis, it is relatively well placed.”
Born Lucky babies.
1 Switzerland, 2 Australia, 3 Norway, 4 Sweden, 5 Denmark
6 Singapore, 7 New Zealand, 8 Netherlands, 9 Canada
10 Hong Kong, 11 Finland & 12 Ireland
Donegal couty council passes budget after marathon 17-hour meeting
Marathon meeting of Donegal Co Council to agree budget the threat of the council being abolished unless a budget was agreed hung over the meeting.
Donegal County Council passed its budget shortly after 5am this morning following a marathon 17-hour meeting.
There were 20 adjournments in the course of the meeting at County Hall in Lifford, with the budget finally passed by 20 votes to four.
Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and independent councillors voted in favour, with Sinn Féin voting against.
The proposed budget included a drop in county council revenue expenditure from €148m to €133m this year.
Revised proposals were brought forward during the day by the County Manager, but disagreement continued.
The threat of the council being abolished unless a budget was agreed hung over the meeting throughout the day and night.
Eventually, agreement was reached and the budget was passed at 5.11am.
The Irish Government raises €2.5bn in first bond market sale of the year
Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, and John Corrigan, Chief Executive, NTMA
THE Government has raised €2.5bn today after investors offered to lend as much as €7bn to Ireland as the country returns to the bond market for the first time this year.
The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) had been expected to accept €2bn to €2.5bn of the cash offered.
The country is raising money on the markets, through a syndicate of banks rather than the usual bond auction.
The Treasury Bond will matures in October 2017. The funds were raised at yield of 3.316%. Of the amount issued today, 13% was taken up by domestic investors and 87% by overseas investors. The overseas investors were mainly from the UK (35.6%), Nordic countries (12.4%), France (9.5%), and Germany (7.2%). Outside of Europe, the US and Asia together accounted for less than 4%.
The deal means that the National Treasury Management Agency, which manages the country’s debt, cleared 25% of the €10bn it aims to raise this year to fund its 2014 post-bailout needs.
Commmenting on the fund-raising, Finance Minister Michael Noonan said: The NTMA’s syndicated issuance today of €2.5bn of bonds maturing in 2017 is a very welcome and positive development. This auction builds on the successful issuances last year.
“The level of demand for today’s auction with €7bn of orders for €2.5bn of issuance was particularly encouraging and was primarily from foreign investors,” he added.
The NTMA said there was broad investor interest in the issue with over 200 investors submitting bids, including fund managers, banks, pension funds and insurance companies. The total bids received amounted to some €7bn.
Today’s funding accounts for 25% of the NTMA’s total funding target of €10bn for 2013.
Michael Noonan, minister for finance, said: “This issuance has been facilitated by the international recognition of Ireland’s progress in returning our economy to growth and the commitment from the European Heads of State and Government to break the negative link between the sovereign and the banks. Today’s issuance reinforces the need to deliver on this commitment so as to ensure continued and assured market access.
These factors, in tandem with our strong programme implementation are having a very positive impact on financial markets’ perceptions of Ireland.”
House property prices in Ireland could fall another 20%
Property prices in Ireland could fall by another 20 per cent before hitting bottom, ratings agency Fitch has warned – on top of the almost 50 per cent decline to date.
Its outlook for property prices in Ireland is worse that for any other of the 12 countries assessed in its Global Market Outlook for Housing and Mortgages, including the other peripheral states.
However, Fitch states that, in contrast to other markets, it has adopted a conservative approach in its assumptions about the downside risks to the Irish market.
“It is also conceivable that Irish prices stabilise sooner and at a higher level than Fitch’s base case assumption suggests,” the report states.
It also acknowledges the improvement in affordability, especially for first-time buyers not burdened by legacy debt, citing it as “the one bright spot in the Irish housing market” although it adds that constraints on mortgage lending are limiting the impact.
Overall, however, the agency expects prices to continue to decline, worsening by around 20 per cent over the next two to three years, stating that “the consequences of the property market boom may not have fully played out yet”. This compares with a 15 per cent decline for Greece and Spain, and 13 per cent for Portugal and Italy.
Recent data from the residential property price index for November, published by the Central Statistics Office, noted that prices in Ireland had fallen 49 per cent from their early-2007 peak.
The Fitch outlook refers to continuing high vacancy rates and “severe oversupply” in rural areas as drags on the overall market.
“Some signs of stabilisation are taking hold … However, market fundamentals still point to limited improvement in house prices in the near term,” the report states.
“While the pace of deterioration has slowed, Fitch cautiously …assumes a further house price correction over the next 12 months equal to around 10 per cent on a national basis.”
Fitch states that political considerations will increasingly influence the performance of mortgage markets in some countries in 2013.
“Political pressure is evident in those peripheral euro zone countries that have already experienced some of the sharpest housing market corrections and slumps in mortgage performance, namely Ireland and Greece,” Fitch said in a statement. “Along with a continuation of the economic pressures that have also driven rises in arrears, this contributes to our gloomy view on these markets, where we expect significant further deterioration in mortgage performance.
“The continued rise in arrears in Ireland is, in our opinion, to an extent driven by the imminent introduction of policy measures relating to debt forgiveness. Lenders are constrained from, or have been unwilling to undertake, large-scale repossessions.
“Coupled with borrowers in arrears potentially benefitting from debt write-downs this has increased moral hazard.”
Fitch’s interest is largely on the prospect of default and the impact on residential mortgage backed securities, which it rates. Its outlook says the default outlook among the 12 states examined is “most pessimistic” for Ireland.
The states included in the study were: Ireland, the UK, the United States, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Greece.
Meanwhile west of the Shannon
Galway City house prices fell by 10% in 2012 & continue to fall says Daft.ie
House prices in Galway City dropped by ten per cent over the course of last year, according to the latest report from property website Daft.ie.
House prices in Galway City dropped by ten per cent over the course of last year.
That’s according to the annual Daft.ie House Price Report, which was published last week and showed that the freefall of the property market in the West is slowing considerably. While prices in late 2012 were ten per cent lower than a year previously, this was less than half of the 23 per cent drop experienced in 2011. The average house price in the city now stands at €167,000, 57 per cent below peak levels.
This reflected the case in the county also, where house prices are down 57 per cent on the Celtic Tiger boom and the average now stands at €138,000. The survey found that prices in late 2012 were 19 per cent lower than a year previously, compared to a fall of 14 per cent seen in the year to late 2011.
Commenting on the report, Daft.ie economist Ronan Lyons said that the contrast between urban and rural property markets has grown substantially over the last twelve months, led by a recovering Dublin market.
“In the capital, almost two thirds of properties sell within four months currently. In Munster and Connacht-Ulster, the figure is between one in three and one in four, and there has been very little improvement in conditions over the last year,” he explained.
“Ultimately, the differences are due to cities having no significant oversupply from the boom years and also enjoying better employment prospects. Nonetheless, the end of mortgage interest relief may have led to a rush of demand in 2012, so it remains to be seen whether the stabilisation seen in the second half of 2012 continues into the New Year.”
Beta-blockers slow heart rate ‘may lower dementia risk’
Beta-blockers slow heart rate to reduce workload and help the heart pump more efficiently
Taking beta-blocker drugs may cut the risk of dementia, a trial in 774 men suggests.
The medication is used to treat high blood pressure, a known risk factor for dementia.
In the study, which will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in March, men on beta-blockers were less likely to have brain changes suggestive of dementia.
Experts say it is too early to recommend beta-blockers for dementia.
The findings are preliminary and larger studies in men and women from different ethnicities are needed to see what benefit beta-blockers might offer.
These results are exciting, especially since beta blockers are a common treatment for high blood pressure”
People with high blood pressure are advised to see their doctor and get their condition under control to prevent associated complications like heart disease, stroke and vascular dementia.
Brain blood flow: Having high blood pressure may damage the small vessels that supply the brain with blood.
Blood carries essential oxygen and nourishment to the brain and without it, brain cells can die.
Vascular dementia is the second most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease and can occur if blood flow to the brain is reduced.
Other research in a much larger sample of men – 800,000 in all – suggests another type of blood pressure drug known as an angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) may cut dementia risk, including Alzheimer’s disease, by as much as 50%.
The latest work in 774 Japanese-American men found that all types of blood pressure medication were better than no treatment in terms of signs of dementia in the brain – brain shrinkage and tiny areas of brain tissue damage caused by poor blood supply – noted at autopsy after death.
However, men who had received beta-blockers as their only blood pressure medication had fewer abnormalities in their brains than those who had not been treated for their hypertension, or who had received other blood pressure medications, the University of Hawaii team found.
Men on beta-blockers and other medications also had fewer brain abnormalities, but not as big a reduction as that seen in the men on beta-blockers alone.
In the study, 610 of the men had high blood pressure or were being treated for high blood pressure.
Study author Dr Lon White said: “With the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease expected to grow significantly as our population ages, it is increasingly important to identify factors that could delay or prevent the disease.
“These results are exciting, especially since beta-blockers are a common treatment for high blood pressure.”
Dr Simon Ridley, head of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “Hypertension is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other causes of dementia, and keeping high blood pressure in check could be important for preventing these diseases.
“This study suggests a link between the use of beta-blockers and fewer signs of dementia, but as the results of this study have yet to be published in full, it’s not clear what caused this link. It’s important to note that this study only looked at Japanese-American men, and these results may not be applicable to the wider population.
He said a better understanding of the links between high blood pressure and dementia could be crucial for developing new treatments or approaches to prevention.
“With 820,000 people affected by dementia in the UK, and that number increasing, we urgently need to find ways to prevent the diseases that cause it – that requires a massive investment in research,” Dr Ridley added.
15 potential planets in habitable zones found by citizen scientists
Amateurs spot a signal in the Kepler data that is later verified by scientists.
It’s distinctly possible that the first truly Earth-like planet in another star system will be discovered by a non-scientist.
Well, that’s not quite true: the process of discovery is more complicated than that. However, volunteers working with exoplanet data from NASA’s Kepler telescope recently identified 42 planet candidates orbiting relatively nearby stars. Of those, 20 potentially lie within the habitable zone of their systems, meaning the basic conditions could be right for liquid surface water. One of these worlds, known as PH2 b, is definitely a Jupiter-sized planet clearly within its star’s habitable zone. While the planet itself is unlikely to harbor conditions suitable for life, perhaps it has moons that would.
These volunteers were from Planet Hunters, part of the Zooniverse family of citizen science projects. Several Zooniverse efforts have yielded a number of scientific papers, proving that real science can arise from crowdsourcing. The latest Planet Hunter paper, which will be published in the highly rankedAstrophysical Journal, credited more than 40 citizen scientists, a collaboration that does credit both to them and to the professional scientists they worked with.
These projects excel in distributing tasks that cannot be automated with current technology, but which are sufficiently time-consuming that professional scientists (a category including graduate students) aren’t able to devote enough attention to them. Based on the successes of the Zooniverse and related projects, it’s clear that with a simple Web-based tutorial and a well-designed user interface, non-scientists can perform real research-related tasks.
Citizen science, thanks to the number of participants and cross-checking of results, is both efficient and incredibly successful. (In my teaching days, I had my Astronomy 101 students participate in theGalazy Zoo project for identifying galaxy types, and the Ice Hunters, a search for small objects in the outer Solar System.)
Mass transit, citizen-science style
The Kepler telescope locates planets by monitoring a patch of the sky 115 square degrees in extent. (For comparison, the full Moon is about 0.2 square degrees.) The telescope watches for slight variations in the light of stars that could indicate a transit: the small eclipse created when a planet passes in front of the star. The duration and depth (how much light is blocked) of the transit reveals information about the size of the planet and its orbit. This pattern is known as a light curve.
Transits are easiest to spot for large planets orbiting close to their host star. That’s because those planets create the largest eclipses and undergo multiple transits in a short period of observation. By contrast, alien astronomers looking for Earth will only see it transit the Sun once every 365 days, and it will block only a tiny amount of the Sun’s light when it does. Thus, it’s a tricky task to discover planets orbiting sufficiently far from their host star to harbor liquid water.
The Planet Hunters project allows volunteers to look through various light curves, sorting out possible planet transits from other natural variations in starlight. These might arise from dim binary companions, brown dwarfs, or fluctuations in the star’s output due to stellar weather. The premise of Planet Hunters is that human beings can sometimes be better at distinguishing between the different types of light curves than automated computer routines.
As with other citizen science projects, Planet Hunters makes sure multiple sets of eyes look at each candidate light curve. That ensures double- and triple-checking of results, helping to avoid false positives. Finally, professional exoplanet astronomers look at the light curves identified by the citizen scientists and make the ultimate decision. This process allows researchers to have a lot of confidence in the identifications—and the volunteers turn out to be very good at their work.
Looking for the sanctuary moon
The Planet Hunters identified 42 exoplanet candidates, including 33 with at least three transits—the more transits we can observe, the more reliable the identification as a planet, and the better the estimates of orbital characteristics. Forty of the potential exoplanets have orbits longer than 100 days, and 9 may have orbital periods greater than 400 days, placing them farther out than most previously identified worlds.
Based on their light curves, these candidates are mostly giant planets: Neptune-sized or larger. However, 15 out of the 42 could lie in their star’s habitable zone, based on a simple model of planetary temperature. (Five more may also be in the habitable zone, but the observations are only based on two transits, too few to make precise orbital measurements.) If these resemble the giant worlds in our Solar System, then they may have very planet-like moons: an ocean moon like Europa, but with a surface uncovered by ice. That possibility is pleasing to Star Wars fans, as well as scientists.
Of the candidates, one stands out as a definite detection: PH2 b, determined to be a planet to 99.92 percent confidence thanks to follow-up observations using the Keck telescope. (The “PH” in the name is in honor of the Planet Hunters who discovered it.) PH2 b is about 10 times the diameter of Earth, placing it firmly in the giant planet category. It orbits its host star in approximately 282.5 Earth days. The researchers assumed a Jupiter- or Neptune-like atmosphere, and as a result determined it orbits within its system’s habitable zone. If it has moons, they might possess liquid water.
Of course, habitability as we currently understand it is a function both of location and of history. After all, Venus lies within the Solar System’s habitable zone, but harbors no liquid surface water; Mars, which lies outside the habitable zone, has evidence of past surface water, but is dry now. Nevertheless, with larger numbers of exoplanets in the database, we will have better statistics to assess the probability of liquid water in coming years.
Thanks to citizen science projects like Planet Hunters, you could play a significant part in the discovery of habitable worlds.
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