A blog about, well, science, society and stuff…
LITERATURE PRIZE
Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.
Who attended the ceremony
[Karolina Lewestam, a Polish citizen and holder of a Polish driver’s license, speaking on behalf of all her fellow Polish licensed drivers, expressed her good wishes to the Irish police service.]
The rate of autism in adults is the same as in children. The MMR jab only became available in the early 1990s and so if it caused autism, the rate of autism in children should be higher.
It isn’t!!
It is time to stop the nonsense being peddled by the anti-MMR crowd.
your name contains the word ‘edible’. Behold the edible dormouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_dormouse
I read this morning that there is another death from swine flu. You can see the report here: http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0818/swineflu.html. The person was in an ‘at risk’ category, but the family do not want any other details released. Curiously, RTE uses the phrase when referring to the first person who died that “She had also been suffering from cystic fibrosis”.
It is very difficult to quantify the risk that this flu presents. It is very difficult to say things like “it is not a really virulent flu strain” simply because the concept of what constitutes a virulent strain is not something we are used to. More people will die in Ireland this year from car accidents. More people will require hospitalisation as a result of car accidents. Car accidents still remain a bigger threat to the population as a whole than the flu.
A virulent strain like H5N1 could have a mortality rate of several percent of the people who are infected (unless we have a good vaccine).
However, people are really worried about this particular strain of flu. Mary Harney has extended her sympathies to the family of the person who has died. This was a nice gesture, but this doesn’t generally happen for the families of car accident victims and each life is equal.
I suspect that, while it is no comfort whatsoever for the family of the people that have died, the H.S.E. have done a pretty impressive job during this flu outbreak. We have had a lot of people in intensive care and they have survived.
This will make one of the biggest differences between this flu and the 1918 flu. We have healthcare that will save lives. We have drugs like Tamiflu and Relenza and soon we will have a vaccine and global vaccination strategy.
What I would like to hear soon is: What is the vaccination strategy? Who will pay the GP bills? Have the GPs agreed to do the extra work? There is talk of setting up clinics in GAA halls, etc. Who will administer the vaccine there?
I’m sure there is a strategy, but I would like to know more.
I am increasingly being asked about the swine flu. Parents are phoning me to ask about sending their children to school in September and in general there is an increased anxiety about the disease. Rather than blogging about it, I think this video says most of what is important to say. The video is sligtly old and a vaccine is now in clinical trials and will be available within weeks.
The conference in Halifax last week is reported on the Sandwalk blog.
I have been at a Tree of Life meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia this week. It is funded (indeed, my travel and accomodation and food is funded by The Leverhulme Trust). Larry Moran is blogging about the meeting on the SandWalk blog.
I deal a lot with the notion of a knowledge economy. A knowledge economy is where we have a well educated bunch of people, that are pretty familiar with, and unafraid of technology, that can see technology opportunities and have a good chance of exploiting them.
In a knowledge economy, we would not be overly-reliant on unskilled labour nor would we depend on trading in commodities like steel or coal or that kind of thing.
We would have a high proportion of graduates with skills in information technology. We would have a relatively high proportion of biotechnologists and pharmaceutical technologists. We would have engineers aplenty.
We would train people in entrepreneurship and have freely-available and accessible information on funding opportunities, angel investors, venture capitalists and the banking sector.
However, these are not really the most important things to consider when we think of Ireland of the future. We are people that live in a society, not statistics that live in an economy.
A knowledge economy? Sure.
A well-educated workforce? Yes, please.
But there must be more.
We need to think about society and the growth of society. The knowledge economy is simply a device to make life easier for the people of the country.
The economy is not the country.
Though, to watch the news, you would think the two were synonymous.
The barbarians are at the gates. It is time to stand up and say that Ireland is a society and not simply an economy. The economy works for us, not the other way around. We are not here to simply keep the banks going. We are not here to bail out the economy when some bankers make a mess of it. I’m not prepared to work for the next decade in order to correct some monumental mess that was made by somebody else.
The taxation commission is about to reccommend where more taxes can be raised and I think it is time to say “this is enough”.
Permanent TSB just raised their variable interest rate. The cheek!!!
I’m a pretty tolerant man but I’ve had enough.
Dear Eamonn,
I am writing to you to suggest where we should be going with the “Smart” economy. First of all, I think we should engage world-class e-commerce, which, in the first instance would drive enterprise functionalities. A key list of objectives include the desire to mesh front-end supply-chains, streamline B2C e-commerce, incentivize vertical interfaces, repurpose front-end functionalities and envisioneer end-to-end deliverables.
When these objectives are met, we can think of ways to reinvent synergistic e-business and maximize proactive paradigms, at least in the near future, going forward.
All of this can be achieved if we take the decision to commit to exploit world-class methodologies and of course, grow cross-media e-markets.
I hope this letter has been useful for you and if you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact me, etc and so on and so forth.
I remain, your friend.
James.
Went to see Leonard Cohen last night in the O2. It was my first time in the O2 - I have been to the Point Theatre a number of times before they put the shed-part on top and renamed it the O2.
Before, I get in to the review of the Cohen concert, I had this premonition once that soon the world would be taken over by Google. O’Connell street bridge in Dublin would be renamed Google Bridge and all along the sides would be LCD screens flashing personalised ads at you, depending on what products or services Google felt you needed - if you were on a bike you would see ads about puncture repair shops and doctors surgeries, if you were on a bus, you would see ads about cheap cars; if you were in a cheap car, you would see ads for cheap haircuts and tracksuits and if you were in an expensive car you would see ads for enlarging your penis.
But I digress.
First of all, the O2 is one of the ugliest buildings in Dublin, consisting in part of the beautiful Point Theatre and in part of an aeroplane hangar that some architect clearly told the Emperor who has the cash was a beautiful new outfit for the building. However, small children can see that it looks like crap.
Inside, the building is much nicer. Definitely much nicer than the point was. The bars are nice, the jam-packed restroom facilities are much nicer and the amphitheatre and its sound is definitely much nicer. However, some of the angled walls are clearly a tribute to the same architect who was given far too much freedom to make the place impractical for large crowds, with lots of corridors leading to small bottleneck junctions etc.
Anyway, to the concert.
The stage was very simple, with some floor-to-ceiling curtains reflecting the lighting. Other than that, there were the instruments and the band.
The band came on first and then Cohen skipped onto the stage (seriously, he skipped onto the stage), where he held court for almost three hours. The band were very tight - arrangments were so well worked out that I have no doubt that any one member of the band could have played their part for the entire concert in a sound-proof room cut off from the others. I guess they have been touring for quite a while now, by for sure they didn’t miss a beat for the entire night.
Cohen sang magnificently and he, like his band, didn’t miss a beat. He started a little cold, his voice took a couple of songs to warm up and for him to get into the swing of things, but when he got going he really had the crowd in the palm of his hand.
We heard all the old classics and Cohen made no attempt to do a Van Morrisson and only play what he wanted to play. We heard everything we went to hear - Suzanne, Dance me to the end of love, ‘Aint no cure for love, First we take Manhattan, Hallelujah and so on - I didn’t write them down.
However, two songs deserve mention. The first is the song Marianne. The crowd that were at the concert last night were overwhelmingly of the “parents of grown-up kids” variety. Indeed, many of the people in the audience were of pensionable age. This meant that for the song Marianne, some of the crowd started to sway in a way that you might expect if you were in the audience of a cruise ship cabaret. Cohen clearly noted this and when it started he had a little laugh at it.
The second song that I felt that deserved mention was “Famous Blue Raincoat”. This - for me - was the best song of the night. He sang it perfectly, the audience were transfixed, he was clearly in the mood for singing it and he gave it everything. I don’t think I was on my own in thinking that he had done a perfect job on that song, because it got the biggest cheer of the evening.
Cohen’s voice is as steady and as strong as ever. He hit every note and although, of course, he has a very different and less energetic show that Britney Spears (or so I am told), there was plenty of energy coming off the stage. I know I already said his band were excellent, but it is worth saying twice. Cohen introduced each band member to the audience twice, so clearly Cohen thinks they are good too.
I’ll hardly see him again, he is 74 now and will be 75 in September. However, it was really a great concert and when he finally skipped off the stage after three hours of performing, I felt that I had seen something pretty special.
