Zeta Dooly

Transition towns

A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway.

The community also recognises two crucial points:

* that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope
* if we collectively plan and act early enough there's every likelihood that we can create a way of living that's significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today.

For more information please look at the Transition Towns WIKI.

There are a group of us in Tramore
that have started to start this intiative ...life evolves ..its time to become active

There are solutions emerging ..educate yourself about this - there are many resources out there including lots on youtube
If you would like to contact the Tramore Transition Initiative directly please email:
transition-town-tramore@googlegroups.com.

Bird tracking system available to public

The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) is a leading conservation organisation saving wetlands for wildlife and people across the world and its got a link for tracking geese, swans etc. iI found this link on the Friday Irish Times which we were still reading on Sunday eveing - value for money! and in particular interest was the Greenland Barnacle Goose where a school in Mayo was responsible for naming these birds - excellent use of technolgy, education and fun usage of the internet

Waterford's foodies

Garden Banquets and Monster Farmers markets coming to Waterford, the Slow Food Ireland group and WIT are coming together for a 4 day event (Terra Madre) on food - should be good!

Peak Oil - Climate Change

Peak Oil - Climate Change - everyone's responsibility, take time to think about your actions and take part in community efforts. This Future Scenarios website is very informative and gives cultural implications. Many communities are beginning to take action such as Transition towns movement these problems won't just disappear!

Asturias - excellent place for doing stuff

Even though the weather wasn't great - a mixture of sun and rain showers just like Ireland really northern Spain Asturias region is an excellent base for exploring the Picos de Europa
mountains and the beaches (empty due to low temperatures) were brilliant, very remote and often difficult to access which just made it more of an adventure.

EU announces Think-Trust RISEPTIS group

Yesterday at the BSA security Awareness day Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media, European Commission announced the creation of an advisory board within the Think-Trust FP7 project named RISEPTIS (Research and Innovation for SEcurity, Privacy and Trustworthiness in the Information Society). the main mission of the RISEPTIS Advisory Board will be to provide visionary guidance on policy and research challenges in the field of security and trust in the Information Society.

]]> It will do so by formulating recommendations on:
• Policy environment – The development of coherent legal and administrative frameworks, operational environments, and human behaviour relating to security, privacy and confidence, in view of the technological changes leading to and arising from the future Information Society,
• Research Agenda – Future European research and development that can facilitate the creation of an Information Society that will be secure, whilst respecting freedom and privacy of its citizens, with due attention given to the ICT infrastructures, networks, services and applications.

Future of the Internet - EU conference

I'm in Bled, Slovenia at Future of the Internet - EU conference it has raised many issues and from a security perspective every area has trust, security and privacy challenges that need to be addressed. It is going to be difficult to get concensus and move this forward as there are many areas deserving research prioritisation. I will try to present some info on this over the next few weeks...some sites worth visiting
-PEW Internet -US views
EU Forum
Projects such as 4WARD wirh some comments from my colleague Miguel

Parenting and the internet

My children are a bit small for worrying about their internet activity but it won't be long so i'm developing an interest in this area see this website for some links and reference to reports and research in this area. Two of the comments surprised my somewhat...Meeting an online contact offline - the least common but arguably most dangerous risk; there is considerable consistency in the figures across Europe at around 8% (1 in 12) online teens going to such meetings; the exceptions are Poland (23%) and, especially, the Czech Republic (65%).
and
It appears that high risk countries are those that, on the one hand, are new to the internet (Poland, Czech Republic) and, on the other hand, are experienced with the internet (UK, The Netherlands).
The next riskiest are Iceland, Ireland and Estonia - all small northern European countries.

Finally we've got broadband!

Fenor gets its broadband from CTM so now i'm pretty happy - its wireless too as he has an transmitter in Ballyscanlon. The CTM website doesn't provide much info and this was debated on some bulletin boards - but my theory is that he has enough work provided by word of mouth that they are too busy or its not a priority to update the website.

Broadband in rural ireland

why oh why don't we have a more technology focussed country - we are being dubbed as a knowledge driven economy whereby companies such as Motorola
are moving out of Cork and rural braodband schemes are failing - report from Silicon Republic

I live in rural Ireland and for the last year the local school and some dedicated farmers in the area have been pursuing the broadband for the area objective to no avail then the government announce that the rural broadband plans are to be abandoned although having just emailed the government region co-ordinator and getting a fast response there are on official announcements from the Dept of Communications on this yet - surprisingly.

OPML and its connection with blogrolls

Not always being an early adopter means that you feel like chasing your tail to a degree when it comes to some technical functionality - like this where the only import function for blogroll that I and Jamie could find was OPML but we didn't have much knowledge in that area and lucky for us its available elsewhere

Chickens and builiding a chicken coop

We've been thinking of getting chickens for some time now - there seems to be arguments for and against it online and even instructions on how to build a chicken coop. I have enough space as i live in the countryside in the South-East of Ireland but am still interested in finding out more about people's experiences...how much care do they need? do they dig up all those plants, trees and flowers that you've spent years minding? do you have to leave them out to roam lots - as working people this will be very limited in the winter months when its often dark wet and windy in our area.

What does ZETA stand for?

At a recent EU-US Summit Series on Cyber Trust: System Dependability & Security that I had the pleasure of being part of the organising committee, one of the very interesting participants told me about the ZETA project, an attempt to reproduce the power of the Sun in a controlled manner on Earth. These experiments, initially in closely guarded secret national programmes, have evolved into the major international collaborations that we see today - more on the history of fusion - so there you go - your name may have more meaning than you initially think.

Using PDF images /text

A common problem where you don't have a full Adobe/pdf license is that you can't edit, copy text to text or search scanned documents or images - this tool available as an evaluation for 1 month can do this and get you out of a fix. Grace here at TSSG found it useful for importing 3000 contact details into excel from PDF files http://www.adlibsys.com/ResourcesAndDownloads.aspx

The beginnings of a reseach journey

Having moved from 9 or so years in industry to the world of research about 14 months ago I am only now starting to develop an appreciation of where I might 'fit in' in this area. Although i stress the 'starting' part as i'm sure its a journey or adventure rather than anything else and thus i tend to tread slowly just like a ridge even though i'm not particularly scared of heights.
So here I am - ICT Security does interest me, links i can relate more easily to are in the testing area from my experience there mainly in databases and applications, from a user-perspective, being one of those in many of my previous professional roles (resilience, performance, trust) and of course a citizen perspective being a parent where privacy, identity, trust issues are paramount along with usability and minimum maintenance. Having also spent some of my professional career looking at knowledge management in organisations and recently completing my masters by research in this area over the last four years part-time i think that there are many issues in this area that complement security. An example of this is where trust of a subsidiary is compromised where workflows and routines are explicitly documented carefully to enhace its knowledge repository only to find that the parent organisation use this as material to assist with a move of services to A) outsourcing B) another 'cheaper' subsidiary. More to come as i now gain confidence of using my own blog to express my interests.