Donie's daily Ireland news BLOG Friday

Irish Medical Organisation rejects motion on abortion provisions

 

Heated debate on abortion best attended at annual conference

IMO doctors vote against an abortion motion at their annual conference in The Europe Hotel, Killarney today.

The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) has rejected a motion calling for regulation in relation to the provision of abortion where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.

In a heated and occasionally bad-tempered debate at the organisation’s annual conference in Killarney, doctors also voted against a motion calling for legislation to allow abortion in Ireland in cases of rape or incest. They also voted against a motion calling on the Government to legislate for the provision of abortion for women with non-viable foetal abnormalities.

The session on the abortion motions was the best attended at the conference.

The three motions on abortion were proposed by Cork GP Dr Mary Favier.

Speaking on the motion calling for regulation on abortion where there is real and substantive risk to the life of the mother, she said the lives of Irish womenwere being compromised by the failure to address the need for abortion where a woman’s life was being threatened by an on-going pregnancy.

Dr Peter Quinn, a retired GP from Cork, said Ireland was long known as one of the safest places in the world to have a baby and he wanted to take issue with Dr Favier on the issue of safety.

The motion was defeated by 42 votes to 32.

Dr Mark Murphy, a GP from Sligo who seconded the three motions, said women in Ireland who had cancer and were pregnant had to get on a flight to go the UK. He said obstetricians had asked for clarity. He said it was not opening the floodgates but rather was aimed at helping women who were extremely vulnerable and who had extreme ill health.

Dublin GP Dr Cyril Daly said he was reminded of German doctors before the second world war who decided that young children with conditions such as blindness or deafness had lives that were not worth living and who were subsequently killed with cynanide.

Dr Eleanor Corcoran, a consultant psychiatrist, said if the motion was passed there would be abortion on demand in no time.

On the issue of abortion in cases of rape and incest , Dr Favier said she wanted to ask doctors what they would do if they came across cases such as the girl in the “X” case who was raped at the age of 14 and became pregnant.

Dr Peter O’Sullivan, a GP from Dublin, said he could not remember a case where a patient wanted an abortion following a criminal act.

Dr John Keogh of Kildare said the motion brought the abortion debate to another level. “We are now talking about, despite the traumatic and dreadful situation regarding the conception, aborting normal healthy babies”. He said conception should not be a criteria for abortion.

Dr Peadar O’Grady said that to reject the motion, doctors would be saying that they believed a a 14 year-old girl who was raped and who had made an informed choice to have an abortion should be forced to carry the pregnancy through. “It would put us as some of the most backward doctors in Europe. ”

On the motion regarding foetal abnormalities, Dr Favier said the current situation was that women must continue until labour even when there was no prospect of a health surviving infant. “That is just cruel”.

Trade union urges Irish people to not go along with Revenue threats on Property Tax

       

The trade union Unite is calling for an Irish public boycott of the Property Tax which, it said, is causing huge distress and despair in society.
The trade union, which is one of the country’s largest, is urging the public to hold firm and start by not engaging with Revenue.

Unite has joined forces with the Campaign against Household and Water Taxes and will be participating in a day of protest on April 13.

The Revenue Commissioners have said they have sent more than a million letters to homeowners in recent weeks, and €1.3m has already been collected.

Regional Secretary of Unite Jimmy Kelly maintains they can still win the fight against the tax.

Mr Kelly said: “We want to build a campaign as strong as possible based on a boycott. The Government is just threatening people imposing a further austerity tax, calling it a property tax and threatening people by telling them they will take it out of their wages or social welfare or farm payments.

“We are saying ‘Don’t just go with those threats, you can resist this and we can have a victory on this campaign’.

“But it will take a long organising campaign to get to where it’ll need to be.”

Gay Irish school staff ‘are being bullied by their pupils’

         

Gay Irish teachers are being bullied by students in secondary schools, a teachers’ conference has heard.

A motion proposed and carried on the final day of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) annual conference urged the eduction department to better protect gay and lesbian secondary school teachers.

Patrick Hogan, of the Limerick city school branch, spoke to the 400 TUI delegates in Galway yesterday and highlighted “the fear being suffered by so many of our colleagues”.

He said action was needed immediately.

“Our LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) colleagues fight to overcome the huge fears they face in their schools every day.

“These fears are not just of losing their jobs, but fears of homophobic bullying they face on the corridors of their schools,” Mr Hogan said.

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Mr Hogan added that management in some schools was turning a blind eye to homophobic bullying of teachers by students.

“These may be colleagues who are already under strain within a school and this is allowed to be tolerated,” he said.

“They would be isolated incidents around the country.

“In one part of the country, there is a teacher who is under severe strain at the moment, and was transferred into a particular school – she was not happy with this.

“She was transferred out of there and has since been transferred back in there and faces this (homophobic bullying) on a daily basis,” Mr Hogan added.

Without identifying the school or teacher, Mr Hogan said management at her school were aware of what was happening to her, but said the bullying of the staff member was still occurring.

“It is being dealt with locally by the branch there,” Mr Hogan said.

Tax: Separately, TUI delegates have overwhelmingly agreed to oppose the contentious property tax.

In recent weeks, homeowners across the country have received correspondence from Revenue Commissioners instructing them to pay property tax rates in accordance with the value of their property.

Kenneth Sloane, of Dundalk IT, said the tax was part of an austerity policy that had failed the country.

Mr Sloane said teachers had “paid considerable amounts of stamp duty” on homes, including many bought at the peak of the construction boom.

He described the property tax as “another attack” on trade union members such as the TUI.

The TUI represents over 14,000 second-level teachers and third-level lecturers.

Walking may be just as effective as running for bringing heart benefits

  

If you’re a runner, a new study suggests you may be able to slow down and still gain the same health benefits.

A study of almost 50,000 Americans finds brisk walking can be just as effective at reducing heart health risks like high blood pressure and cholesterol as going on a full-speed run.

“People are always looking for an excuse not to exercise, but now they have a straightforward choice to run or to walk and invest in their future health,” study author Dr. Paul T. Williams, a principal author and staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Life Science Division in Berkeley, Calif., said in apress release.

For the study, published April 4 in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, researchers compared the cardiovascular health of participants enrolled in two ongoing studies: The National Runners’ Health Study, with a pool of more than 33,000 runners, and the National Walker’s Health Study that contains more than 15,000 Americans. All runners were between the ages of 18 and 80 (with many clustered in their 40s and 50s), with men representing about 20 percent of walkers and more than 50 percent of runners.

The researchers were comparing the total running expenditure based on amount of time participants were running or walking. They compared these self-reported cardio exercise times with rates of hypertension (high blood pressure), hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol), diabetes and coronary heart disease, as diagnosed by a doctor.

The researchers found walking reduced risk to be diagnosed with either hypertension or hypercholesterolemia by 7 percent each, compared with about a 4 percent risk reduction for both seen in the runners.

•          CDC: Less than half of Americans get enough physical activity

•          Key to cancer prevention may be keeping your heart healthy

Runners were 12.1 percent less likely to be diagnosed with diabetes, compared to 12.3 percent in walkers. Walking reduced heart disease risk by more than 9 percent, compared with 4.5 percent in the runners.

The more people exercised, the better their health, the researchers found.

“The more the runners ran and the walkers walked, the better off they were in health benefits. If the amount of energy expended was the same between the two groups, then the health benefits were comparable,” said Williams.

Though the study found benefits regardless of exercise intensity, the researchers noted runners are likely to cover more ground when they exercise, which could lead to more health benefits.

“Walking may be a more sustainable activity for some people when compared to running, however, those who choose running end up exercising twice as much as those that choose walking. This is probably because they can do twice as much in an hour,” he added.

Williams hopes his study provides a message that exercise is an investment in future health.

Less than one-half of Americans engage in the minimum-recommended amount of physical activity of 2.5 hours a week, a 2012 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found. The report, however, did show 62 percent of Americans went on a 10-minute walk each week, up from 56 percent five years ago.

Dr. Charles Platkin, a distinguished lecturer at CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College in New York City who researchers exercise and calorie expenditure, told CBSNews.com that previous studies have shown working out, regardless of intensity, can lead to another health benefit — a reduced risk for obesity.

What’s great about the new study, said Platkin, who was not involved in the research, is that it showed the same is true for cardiovascular health. He thinks the aging population could especially benefit from this advice, because running can impact the joints and present other challenges for seniors.

“It’s going against what you’d think would be the best thing (for your health)” said Platkin, “which is really good news for those who are not so active.”

His suggestion for those who say they don’t have enough time to exercise? Make walking a utility in your life, meaning don’t think of it as exercise, but attach a necessary activity to your walk. For example, he recommended every time you go to the post office, walk there instead of driving.

Cloud computing now surging ahead in the Irish market place

  

Some 85% of Irish businesses are clamouring for cloud options from their IT providers, finds an Irish Computer survey. Is the channel ready to serve?

Cloud computing has been variously described as the greatest opportunity for the channel in recent years and a threat to the very business of selling ICT. As with so many issues, the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes.

Irish Computer, in association with Let’s Operate, surveyed its readership in the channel to see how cloud computing is perceived and ultimately, whether it is an opportunity or a threat.

The survey was conducted in February and March of this year with 110 respondents, and began by asking if resellers had received enquiries from their customers for cloud services.

Customer demand
The vast majority (85%) said that they had received such enquiries within the last 12 months. While respondents were not asked to specify the scale ranges of their customers, it is probably safe to speculate that the 15% who had not received cloud enquiries in the last 12 months are dealing with smaller companies who may have a limited IT infrastructure and relatively unsophisticated needs when it comes to IT.

“Cloud computing has been around for a long time but Irish businesses are now seriously investigating implementation and asking their IT support companies about it,” said David Owens, managing director, Let’s Operate.

Increasing questions
This issue of interest and demand was expanded by asking whether there was an expectation for an increase in cloud offering enquiries. Again, overwhelmingly (87%), the respondents indicated that they expected increases in enquiries for cloud services from their customers in the next 12 months. Curiously however, just over 8% said that they did not expect an increase while an unenlightening 4% said they didn’t know.

This level of enquiries from customers, when combined with the expectation for a rise in same, contrasts somewhat with 25% of respondents who say that they do not currently have a cloud option for customers. The implication, warns Owens, is that “interest and demand for cloud computing is out pacing the channels’ preparedness to service it”. It is even more curious, given the range of cloud services on offer in the market, from pure email to cloud-hosted enterprise resource planning (ERP), that there are IT service companies that still do not offer their clients cloud services.

Cloud offerings
Delving further, respondents were asked if they did not currently have a cloud option to offer customers, were they exploring the possibility of providing one. Oddly, 45% said that they were not.

This lack of exploration of cloud options for customers does not tally with the results that indicated the vast majority (78%) do not view cloud computing as a threat to their core business, with almost 80% indicating that they saw cloud computing as an opportunity. There must surely be an overlap among those who see cloud as an opportunity but do not yet offer their customers a cloud option.

Of those who did see it as a threat (15%), by far the greatest element of that threat was that it would cannibalise existing business. Loss of control or relationship with customers and lower margins were closely ranked in second and third, and difficulty in incentivising sales people was a distant fourth.

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Irish economic crisis among the world’s worst for developed countries, say researchers

  

Ireland has suffered one of the worst financial and economic crises ever experienced in a developed country, according to a new research paper by two central bank economists.

The pair, Maria Woods and Siobhán O’Connell, compare Ireland’s economic/financial crisis with four others crashes, all of which began 20 years ago. The crises took place in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Japan. More recent crises, such as those of Iceland and the Baltic economies are not included.

The research finds the decline in Irish house prices has been bigger than those experienced in any of these four economies studied. Following the crises in the Nordic three and Japan, residential property prices took 11-22 years to return to peak levels. If prices in Ireland follow the pattern in the worst-affected of the four countries (Japan), they will return to 2007 levels only in 2028.

Ireland’s jobs crisis is similar in magnitude to Finland’s in the 1990s, and much more serious than the three other economies.

Although not discussed by the authors, the long-run effects on employment of large financial crises are illustrated by Finland’s experience in the decades since its crisis. In 2011, the numbers at work in the Nordic economy were below levels in 1989.

Irish share prices also suffered the largest peak-to-trough fall among the five. A decline of more than three-quarters over a three-year period was marginally bigger than the fall in Japanese equity prices, whose fall took place over a period of 14 years.

  Comparing the worst year for loan losses in the banking sector, the authors find Ireland’s crisis by far the worst. While losses in the other four economies averaged 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product,Irish banks loan losses in 2010 stood at 23 per cent of GDP.

They find credit growth before the crisis was higher in Ireland. Ominously, the average decline in peak-to-trough bank lending among the four comparator economies was more than one-fifth. Bank lending in Ireland peaked just three years ago and has fallen by only 8.5 per cent. This suggests the credit contraction could remain severe for some time.

The study finds that Irish banks’ proportion of non-performing loans is higher than the peaks recorded in any of the Nordic economies but lower than the worst point in Japan’s crisis. The paper is titled Ireland’s Financial Crisis: A Comparative Context.

A pensions supermarket’ to offer workers low-cost options for retirement funds

   

Workers saving for a pension are set to get a new low-cost option to help them put money aside for their retirement.

Stockbroker Davy is aiming to become the ‘Ryanair of pensions’ with the launch of what is being called a supermarket for pension funds — with the company saying people will be able to start a retirement fund for as little as €500.

The wealth management company is aiming for mass appeal with an online offering of 10,000 investments that pension savers can choose from.

There will be no set-up fees, no dealing fees and no exit fees — although there will be a management charge.

Pensions experts said the new offering had the potential to shake up the pensions industry, which has been heavily criticised for high charges and poor investment returns.

The new Davy Select pensions option will allow consumers to switch between hundreds of funds with no switching fees and no exit charges.

The launch came as a new survey revealed that members of pension schemes have been besieging their employers over fears their pension will not be what they had expected and are also complaining about high charges.

The survey — by pension advisers and administrators IFG Corporate Pensions — found that 87pc of firms say their staff have criticised the performance of the company pension and the lack of visibility on charges.

It asked human resources and finance professionals in charge of corporate pension schemes to indicate the change in the behaviour of pension savers.

Fionan O’Sullivan, of IFG Corporate Pensions, said: “Employees are finally realising that with the growing levels of negative equity, their pension represents their primary and, in some cases, their only asset.”

Davy’s new online pensions supermarket is a change of direction for the stockbroker, which until recently only ever targeted the very wealthy.

For the first time, people investing in a pension will have access to a range of investments run by highly-regarded US money manager Blackrock.

Davy’s Ciaran O’Donoghue said the new offering will be available from brokers.

His firm would give back all the normal fees charged by pension fund providers. The annual management charge would be 0.75pc of the assets in the retirement, compared to a more usual 1.5pc to 2pc charge. Some fees for Davy Select funds would be higher. People using the new service would have the choice of paying slightly more to get financial advice.

Chief executive of Davy Stockbrokers Tony Garry said pensions were under huge pressure in this country.

One in two people did not have a private pension, while eight out of 10 defined-benefit schemes were in deficit.

Traditionally, defined-benefit funds promise to pay out a pension based on the final salary and the number of years the member was in the scheme.

And Mr Garry said the Government was not helping matters because of a lack of leadership and direction on pensions policy.

Minister Reilly still under pressure and still defending his strokes of primary care sites choices

   

Right photo, James Reilly with businessman Seamus Murphy at the Balbriggan Chamber of Commerce Gala Ball in the City North Hotel in Stamullen, Co Meath in December 2010.

 

Health Minister James Reilly has again denied any impropriety on his part in the circumstances surrounding the selection of a site in his constituency for a primray healthcare centre.

Dr Reilly’s position is under renewed pressure after today’s media relevelations that a political supporter, developer Seamus Murphy, owns the land on which the centre in Skerries is to be built.

Dr Reilly said the site was under the control of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) and therefore NAMA and not the developer would gain from the project if there was any gain.

The Minister said NAMA represented the people as regards trying to get back the monies that were lost.

He said the Balbriggan site was chosen by the HSE around 2008.  “Both it and Swords were brought to the board of the HSE in 2008, and both were approved,” he added.

However, the Minister said said the lease for the site may have been signed during his tenure as Minister.

Dr Reilly said he had no business connection with Mr Murphy, had had no discussions with him about the primary care centre, and had no role in the selection of the site.

However, responding to Minster Reilly’s statement, Fianna Fáil Health Spokesperson Billy Kelleher called on the Minister to clarify when exactly the Balbriggan site featuring in press reports today was actually chosen.

“Despite our best efforts this afternoon, the truth behind this primary care centre debacle remains elusive. In the opening remarks of a performance that was at times evasive and at times bizarre, Minister Reilly appeared to suggest that contrary to everyone’s understanding, the site in Balbriggan was not chosen by the former Minister for Health, but by him.”

He claimed this this contradicted the Minister’s own account on the Pat Kenny Show earlier today and Education Minister Ruairi Quinn’s contention that the previous Health Minister Mary Harney chose the site.

Mr Kelleher said that he had asked Dr Reilly him twice in the Dáil to spell out when the site in Balbriggan was chosen.

“Twice he refused to answer. Rather than clear up the issue, Minister Reilly’s performance today has further confused matters.”

The protracted political row over the choosing of primary care centre sites led to the resignation of junior helath minister Roisin Shortall last week.

Irish companies using cloud computing are more engaging and innovative with customers

   

Irish companies that are operating and using cloud technology are more innovative and are more likely to work collaboratively, both internally and with customers, a new study has shown.

According to research from the Irish National Software Engineering Research Centre Lero, firms that have moved to the cloud are more likely to engage closely with their customers and listen to their feedback, and have core team engagement in-house.

An international study on cloud computing and its benefits is “badly needed”, researchers said, and the Lero study is the first empirical evidence of claims surrounding the technology.

“You can find lots of web articles out there, but real academic papers with empirical data is lacking,” said Dr Lorraine Morgan, senior researcher with Lero at NUI Galway.

The study looked at both providers and customers, spanning 12 companies. It found that companies who use cloud computing are not only more transparent and open on an internal level, but also are more involved with customers.

“Even with those companies who are only dipping their toe in water, this is what they’re saying they want,” Dr Morgan said.

  The use of cloud technology can also save on time taken to roll out new applications, and administration time when the systems are operational.

The study, which is ongoing, is also looking at the challenges of the technology. A follow-up study is looking at the barriers to adoption of the technology.

The cloud sector is growing globally, and figures from Gartner estimate that the worldwide market for public cloud services will increase by 19 per cent to $109 billion this year, before increasing by more than 100 per cent to $207 billion by 2016. That outstrips the overall global IT market, which is forecast to grow by only 3 per cent.

Scientists say there is no proof that vitamin D stops colds

  

Supplements may help if you are deficient in the vitamin or nutrient, Scientists say they can find no convincing evidence to show that taking vitamin D supplements will fend off a cold.

A New Zealand team did the “gold standard” of tests – a randomised placebo-controlled trial – to see what impact the supplements would have.

The 161 people who took daily vitamin D for 18 months caught as many colds as the 161 who took fake pills.

The study was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But a leading UK cold expert said vitamin D was useful.

Prof Ronald Eccles, of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, said it can give the immune system a much-needed boost during winter when vitamin D reserves may be low.

Supplements do not work for everybody because people’s immune systems are different”

He said he takes it every year as a precaution.

“There is sufficient information to indicate that vitamin D is a vital vitamin for the immune system.

“Supplementation might help to support the immune system over the winter when we are short of vitamin D.”

He said echinacea supplements may also help ward off coughs and colds, but added: “Supplements do not work for everybody because people’s immune systems are different. It’s not a case of one size fits all.”

They are pointless unless you are deficient, he said.

We get most of our vitamin D from sunlight on our skin, but it is also found in certain foods like oily fish, eggs and breakfast cereals.

Most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need by eating a healthy balanced diet and by getting some summer sun.

The study, carried out in New Zealand, which gets more sunshine annually than the UK, found the vitamin D supplements increased blood levels of the vitamin.

But this had no significant impact on the rate or severity of colds.

The vitamin D group caught an average 3.7 colds per person compared with 3.8 colds per person for the placebo group.

There was no significant difference between the two groups in the number of days missed off work as a result of cold symptoms or duration of symptoms.

Adults catch between two to four colds a year and children up to 10 a year.

Digital TV switch over surge as 50,000 Irish update their system

   

There has been a late surge in those switching to digital TV, with 50,000 making the changeover in recent weeks before the old analogue signal is switched off.

New figures show one-quarter of those who still had an analogue TV service this summer have now switched to a digital service in advance of the October 24 move to digital-only broadcasts.

However, this leaves 150,000 people who still have to make the switch before the analogue signal is switched off. And TV installers yesterday predicted many of those would leave it till after the deadline of October 24.

Tony Moore, of installation service satellite.ie, said he expected it to be “like Christmas shopping” after the changeover.

“I spoke to a colleague in Germany who told me they were actually busier after their switchover a few months ago, because so many people didn’t do it in time,” he said.

Digital switchover packages, including installation of an aerial and Saorview box, are available from €219, and viewers then have no ongoing monthly costs as the Irish stations are received free of charge.

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Group of French journalists visit Donegal on fact finding mission

500,000 French to read about Ireland back home

    

 A group of leading French travel writers flew over and visited Donegal, as part of a fact-finding trip to Ireland. Their visit was organised by Tourism Ireland, in conjunction with Ryanair.

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.