Archive for the 'Current Affairs' Category

General Election 2007 - Waterford!

Published
by
Adam
on May 21, 2007
in Current Affairs
. 4 Comments

Election day is fast approaching - only two days away - and for the first time in my life I’m entitled to vote and having been interested in politics for the better half of my life, I see it as a ripe opportunity that’s not too be missed! The polling day for General Election #30 is taking place on Thursday, May 24th which just so happens to be the day of our school graduation, so time will be of the essence come Thursday morning!

I have already decided on whom I am going to vote for. My decision, I’ll admit, was influenced by personal ties that I have to a particular candidate but I certainly tried to analyse the policies and past performances by the candidates in deciding how to allocate my preference votes. So let’s run through what I think of the 13 candidates that I’ll be seeing on my ballot paper come Thursday.

Outgoing TDs
Waterford, at national level, is currently politically divided as follows: 2 FF members (Martin Cullen and Ollie Wilkinson), 1 FG (John Deasy) and 1 Lab (Brian O’Shea). Of these four candidates, 2 are expected to safely maintain their seats.

The two candidates who are safely expected to maintain their seats are Martin Cullen and John Deasy. Local bookmakers aren’t even accepting bets on them to win seats! Martin Cullen was the poll topper in 2002 (taking 18% of overall first preferences) and the only reason that I can possibly think of as to why he’s seemingly guaranteed a seat is because he’s Waterford’s one and only Minister and the general consensus is that he’s the only candidate who can actually do anything of any significance for the people of Waterford. However, given the realistic chances of the 30th Dáil being formed by an opposition coalition, I very much doubt Martin Cullen’s ability to offer anything to the Waterford people other than more of the controversy that we’ve grown so accustomed to over the past 5 years.

John Deasy is yet another controversial character. He was at one stage one of Fine Gaels finest assets who looked destined for bigger and better things but that all changed once he decided that he was above the law and could smoke inside a pub. Unfortunately for John, his party were alarmed that their spokesperson for Justice would do such a thing and his wrist was well and truly slapped as he was swiftly demoted to the FG backbenches. One of only two other notable things he has done since being elected was marrying the semi-attractive TV3 presenter Maura Derrane. The most recent act that caught the attention of the nation was a surprising act of bridge burning as he questioned the FG leadership. At that time, FG were slipping in the opinion polls so maybe he thought his remark was a shrewd political move aimed at setting himself up for the next election but since then FG have seen a surge in their support and the people seem to want a FG-led coalition. So should FG get into power, Deasy won’t find himself being rewarded for his dedication and faith in his party. The impression I get is that the people of Waterford love a rebel, someone who isn’t afraid to “stand up” (as his election posters claim), but by burning every bridge that had available to him, he merely rubber stamped his useless to Waterford in this election!

The election of Ollie Wilkinson of FF came as a big surprise to many in 2002, probably because he was elected no thanks to a plethora of outrageous claims and promises which, 5 years later, he claims to have delivered. Unfortunately for Ollie, the majority of the Waterford constituents are highly aware that there isn’t public Radiotherapy in Waterford (as he claims), we also know that the sign outside our regional college still refers to “Waterford Institute of Technology” and not the “South East University” which Ollie claims he has been playing a pivotal role in acquiring. Ollie has also sunk to the deepest level with his pre-election gimmick - Text “Ollie” to his phone and be in with a chance to win Oxegen tickets! I hope he doesn’t manage to fool the electorate this time around and if we’re lucky, not even the GAA fans will believe this chancers promise to build a 40,000 seater stadium in Waterford!

It’s been stated in many breakdowns of the Waterford Constituency that Labour’s Brian O’Shea is the candidate who is most likely to lose his seat. It is easy to see why this may be the case as he had the lowest first preference votes of the 4 elected in 2002 but managed to reach the quota on the 7th count thanks to an impressive amount of transfers from eliminated candidates. Whilst I think his first preference vote will be down, the amount of transfers he gets will increase thanks in part to an effective Labour campaign spearheaded by Pat Rabbitte which presents Labour as a viable option for government. He is also a candidate with much political experience but some may argue that as a seasoned veteran, he would be less likely to push the envelope in terms of politics for Waterford. However, I expect his experience to stand to him if the FG/Lab coalition effort is successful.

General Candidates
The rest of the candidates take the form of: 2 FG, 1 FF, 1 WP, 1 SF, 1 Green and 3 Independents. Of these, 5 are presently elected Councillors, 1 is a member of the Senate whilst 3 have had no previous election success!

Political commentators are saying that David Cullinane of Sinn Fein is in the most powerful position to launch an attack on 1 of the 2 seats that are at risk. Sinn Féin have had surprising success in recent years no thanks to their unexplainable new found wealth (I’m going to be cynical and say that the IRA probably has something to do with it). SF have made a lot of noise about Cullinane, especially about his European Election achievement (30,000 votes in Munster), however two thirds of his votes were from Waterford City which was to be expected given that he was the only candidate running from the City (I could have run and expected to have got as many votes!). I’m also not impressed by Cullinanes track record in Waterford City Council. He’s repeatedly said that he isn’t afraid to bring issues to the forefront but time after time after time, he’s shied away from controversial issues like Anti-Social behaviour and other issues within his ward which should be bread and butter! I also recently learned that he’s now living in Kilkenny but is hiding this fact from his voters. Granted, he did move there with his wife and child, but a bit of honesty wouldn’t go astray but maybe I’m being a bit naive now as history has taught us that the words ‘honesty’ and ‘Sinn Féin’ don’t go hand in hand and Cullinane isn’t what he’s billed up to be - he’s about as articulate as a deaf mute and as radical as a bucket of water!

The Workers’ Party base in Waterford has wained in recent years, but their most talented and able candidate nationally is John Halligan whose running in the General Election in Waterford for the second time. In 2002, he earned just shy of 3% of the votes but in the Local Elections of 2004, he won 18% of the vote (1,123), topping the poll - trebling his votes of the 1999 elections! John is a candidate who has gone from strength to strength in this time and is one of the most popular city candidates who has built up a deserved reputation as a fearless and dedicated politician who isn’t afraid to speak out on controversial issues. I can envisage John getting around 3,500 first preference votes, which won’t be enough to get elected this time around but will be enough to inspire him to run in the next General Election where he may very well be in a position to take a seat, depending on how well the Government performs!

In 2002, Brendan Kenneally lost his seat to his supposed party colleague, Ollie Wilkinson. Since then he has been working harder than ever to rebuild his political image and has been one of the most active politicians in the county in recent times. He’s sure to be popular in Dunmore East where he was quick to console the locals during the Pere Charles tragedy and his city vote has always been quite strong. I reckon the real fight in this election will be between Brendan Kenneally and Ollie Wilkinson as they scrap over the second FF seat!

Fine Gael are running 3 candidates in this election. John Deasy (who I have already mentioned), and Jim Darcy, Paudie Coffey both of whom are Councillors in the city and county respectively. I must admit that I don’t know much about the latter, as he is a member of the County Council but I can’t see either himself or Jim Darcy making any kind of impact on the polls.

Of the remaining candidates, Mary Roche, the Independent, has been raising a few eyebrows around the county as Waterford’s only realistic Independent option. She maintains that Independents will hold the balance of power post-election but her profile and reputation in Waterford isn’t high enough to enable her to get the first preference votes that she would need to be in with any kind of a chance.

The other options on our ballot paper will be Greens’ Brendan McCann, a man who has done himself and his party no favours thanks to his reputation of being a serial objector who is out of touch with reality. Francis Hennessy is an Independent running on the premise of abolishing underage gambling and Declan Waters is an anti-abortion Christian Democrat. I expect these candidates to poll less than 500 votes each, with the exception of Brendan McCann who should be lucky to have 1000 eco-friendly individuals vote for him.

Conclusion

Overall, I see the constituency being divided as follows:
01 - John Deasy (FG)
02 - Martin Cullen (FF)
03 - Brendan Kenneally (FF)
04 - Brian O’Shea (Lab)
—-
05 - Ollie Wilkinson (FF)
06 - David Cullinane (SF)
07 - John Halligan (WP)
08 - Jim Darcy (FG)
09 - Mary Roche (Ind)
10 - Paudie Coffey (FG)
11 - Brendan McCann (GP)
12 - Declan Waters (Ind)
13 - Francis Hennessy (Ind)

Of course with politics being politics, I should be preparing myself for any kind of surprise.

Thanks for reading,
Adam

That Thing Called The Leaving Cert.

Published
by
Adam
on January 31, 2007
in Current Affairs, News and School
. 9 Comments

The CAO deadline is fast approaching (about 17 hours away!). The CAO is the small office located in the picturesque city of Galway that handles college applications from about 60,000 students a year. Quite a task for the nine full time members of staff! Thankfully I completed mine online about a week a go and after checking over it a few times, I’m now quite happy with it. Unfortunately, the “ah sure, we’ll do it later” stereotypical attitude of the Irish holds true when it comes to life changing decisions as well and as a result, the CAO website crashed last night - causing widespread panic amongst Irelands procrastinating teens!

Speaking of procrastinating, this day week sees my school commence its mock exams. The idea behind them is that we all get used to examination conditions and are handed out exam papers similar to the ones we’ll be getting come June. The beauty of it all is that we’re being examined on all aspects of all our courses - even the areas that we haven’t covered yet! This means that when we get our corrected tests back, the results should be less than awe-inspiring - inspiring to put in tonnes more study and devoting the next few months of your life to the way of the hermit!

Of course some people won’t be getting bad results in their mocks. These are those who have had the cop on to study over the past year. Am I one of those people? Far from it I’m afraid! Sure the Leaving is ages away… I have plenty of time to study for it! Funny that, I could have swore I said that in September about the mocks…..

The Bebo Killer? The Future Of Social Networking

Published
by
Adam
on July 13, 2006
in Bebo, Current Affairs, Geekiness and Thinking
. 13 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about how Bebo had unleashed its greatest feature yet, Bebo Bands, which is enabling the infamous social networking phenomenon tackle the MySpace giant head on. But as it stands Bebo is currently on the verge of looking cluttered because its interface wasn’t designed to accomodate a full scale social networking site and instead was set up purely as a contact sharing site. This means that there are only so many features that Bebo can add to keep its userbase immersed and eventually users will bore of Bebo in search of the latest social networking site to arrive in town. What will this killer site be though? Well over the past while I’ve been tracking the progress of several up and coming sites which show a lot of promise as well as keeping an eye on the older social networking sites who are looking to reinvent themselves!

Now as you can imagine, it’s difficult to predict what the masses will want 6 months down the line but I reckon there will be an attempt to move away from the current trend of semi-static profiles whereby users enter in information manually and select a video manually. In essence, the future of social networking relies on a degree of automation. Picture this, you download an app which interacts with Winamp alá LastFM which then fetches your most played songs and fills in your favourite bands section and recommends other bands to listen to as well as suggesting other members profiles based on musical taste. I know that LastFM does this and does it very well, but a truly successful social-networking site would have to be much broader than this and not rely on nichés therefore appealing to the largest possible audience. Of course finding users with a similar taste in music to you would grow tiresome after a while and would also result in many false-positive matches being made. You need more diverse fields that can be compared with other users.

This is where I come onto the popular StumbleUpon plugin. Stumble Upon is a very, very promising plugin which is steadily growing in terms of popularity. Like LastFM, StumbleUpon also matches users based on tastes all integrated into a social networking frontend. In this case, the plugin comes in the form of a simple toolbar with several key buttons; “Stumble”, “Like” and “Dislike”. When setting up the plugin, you select what type of websites you like, ’sport’ and ‘movies’ for example. Whenever you click on ‘Stumble’ you will be directed to a site, based on your preferred categories, that someone else liked. After a while of ’stumbling’, the site builds up a profile of sites that you like and dislike and as stated earlier, matches you with other likeminded surfers. If something like this is implemented it opens almost endless possibilities with the ability to check out what sites your friends like being the first idea to spring to mind! Logging data of what sites people like and dislike would also be very useful for potential advertisers.

Advertising is one of the major obstacles that needs to be overcome when operating a social networking site. Advertisers are known to be hesitant to be associated with social networking sites where questionable content often arises which may harm a companies reputation. This means that it’s difficult to monetize these sites. If a feature akin to that provided by StumbleUpon was introduced to a social networking site, webmasters would no longer have to bombard users with ads and instead could simply deliver one ad which is chosen based on that particular members surfing history i.e if I like Sports sites then it could show me one ad relating to a sport which I’m known to like. This would be much more effective than the current systems in place on sites like Bebo which display ads based on popular keywords on the particular page you are viewing. This means that if I view someones profile on Bebo, I’m being delivered ads based on their profile whereas really I should be delivered ads based on my profile! It would result in a much higher CTR (Click Through Rate) and less intrusive ads for the members who are responsible for generating revenue for the website!

New social networking sites spring up almost everyday, some with new and totally out of this world ideas (eg: Zebo) while others just aim at improving on an already tried and tested formula (eg: hi5.com). I feel that the next successful social networking site will be one which strikes a balance between the two. People don’t want to see more MySpace clones but at the same time they don’t quite fancy the idea of having to familiarise themselves with something completely different to what they are used to and given the fierce competition in this sector of the internet, if a site fails to strike that all important balance, then it will almost certainly die off and be forgotten about.

Lets not forget about security though. The issue of security has been well highlighted throughout all forms of media and Bebo and MySpace are often the subject of sensational newspaper headlines or the topic of chat shows. The Bebo phenomenon even warranted an investigation by Primetime! Thanks to this media coverage, most sites have tightened up their security and now employ a dedicated team of moderators to monitor flagged content. Unfortunately, the internet is synonomous with anonymity which means that administrators will always be fighting an uphill battle especially when the intelligence of some members is questionable. Bebo has done an excellent job in making it’s members aware of the dangers of accepting people you do not know and any other large social networking site should aim to follow Bebo as an example. If a site should suceed in surpassing the standards set by Bebo then it will be well on it’s way to large scale domination!

The type of site that I have suggested above would be massive. It would undoubtedly be a massive drain on server resources having to maintain a massive database of popular music and websites - in realtime! One option would be to attempt to integrate the existing services into one site like Bebo has been doing with its Bebo TV option which is integrated with VideoEgg. It may be the quick solution and for now it seems to be working, but it’s main disadvantage is that it’s a closed format with little room for in-house development in the future which would hurt the site in the long-run!

So are there any existing sites which fit the bill? Well one site of particular interest is Orkut.com which is a Google-backed social networking site. It’s current policy is one that promotes organic growth. This means that you can’t sign up yourself, instead you must be invited by someone that is already a member. Given the infamous resources of Google, if they were to prioritize the development of the site, the sky would be the limit to what they could achieve! Until they open it to the general public though, Bebo and Myspace have nothing to worry about!

Lets not forget about Microsofts offering, MSN Spaces which is integrated into MSN Messenger and looks set to be integrated into the delectable looking Live.com. Given it’s current popularity with bloggers, MSN Spaces is not to be ruled out especially with the imminent official launch of Live.com - a Web2.0 portal.

TagWorld is a site that I actually feel sorry for. It’s features far surpass those offered by MySpace.com and lots of money has been spent on advertising its superior customization potential yet it fails to win over the audience of its competitors. I don’t think a reinvention is on the cards with its current owner owing to the fact that everything they’ve tried thusfar has been fruitless!

There are two new players to the social networking scene though and I’m happy to say that they do have the potential to be the future of social networking. GoingOn and PeopleAggregator both started out as one, however in December of 2005, the two creators split having come to two different conclusions as to how the site should operate. The basic ideas of the two sites are very similar. The sites in themselves are social networks where you can write blog posts, create groups, upload media and add friends, but they allow you to create your own social network within the site which offers users the chance to create their own Bebo like site. From what I can gather, the same username and password can be used throughout all of the created social networks. Cross-site compatibility is something which has astronomical potential. GoingOn.com is not open source, but is far more slicker than “PeepAgg”. Whether or not these two sites will indeed surpass Bebo.com and MySpace.com in the future is a tough one to call. PeepAgg and GoingOn have an interesting business model and plenty of new features as well as improving on existing social networking features which could just be what the people need.

Knackers - Deserved of the gas chamber?

Published
by
Adam
on May 11, 2006
in Current Affairs and Local
. 401 Comments
This was initially just a post about an observation I made about an FM104 discussion about knacker fighting around the country but it has since evolved into a discussion, thanks to a high rank in google for the term “knacker”.

Knackers, you either hate them or you despise them and even the term “hate” is one that many would consider to be too generous! Many people see them as being nothing more than ungrateful, tax dodging, nanny bashing, robbing bastards - complete with a smell that’s less pleasant than a month old food bin! In fact, the mere sound of them trying to appeal to the civilized world for equal rights makes us all shudder on the spot! How, they say, can these barbarians even begin to think of being treated equally when they can’t even face up to the responsibilites of your average citizen. Instead they just jump into their caravan at the first sign of trouble - usually trouble that they’ve stirred up in the first place and expect everyone else to pay for the expensive clean-up operation that follows. And here they are, expecting to be treated like one of us, generally law abiding people! The cheek!

Even I think that the gas chamber would be a bit extreme. I mean, with gas prices as they are, it would cost even more money to be rid of them!

“It’s Ireland’s Biggest Free Paper!”

Published
by
Adam
on May 4, 2006
in Current Affairs, Rant and Thinking
. 4 Comments

At 16 pages and measuring the same as a normal tabloid I’d hardly call it the biggest free paper. Unless they are talking about circulation which at 332,000 copies per month is actually quite impressive. What newspaper could I possibly be talking about? Well I can tell you that it offers “news, features and comment from a Catholic perspective.” and was formed at the request of Pope John Paul II who wanted “an evangelisation that is new in its fervour, new in its methods and new in its expression”. I am, of course, talking about Alive!

Ever since the beginning of Transition Year, without fail, this newspaper has been handed out to an eager Religion class once a month for us to browse through and read it’s intellectual and thought provoking articles which just happen to be riddled with ridiculous amounts of Catholic propaganda which appears to make no attempt to attract new people to Catholism but rather act as a tool to retain existing followers during these troublesome times!

Last month’s edition contained, among other things, a large article on how we should all boycott the box office hit Brokeback Mountain on account of it promoting homosexuality. Calling for a widespread boycott like this doesn’t really promote independent thinking now does it? In this month’s edition, in the ‘Media Watch’ section of the newspaper, they talk about a headline that appeared in the Sunday Times. In the original article the journalist clearly gave their opinion on it, however, in this article Alive tell us what the journalist actually meant to say and what they actually mean by it. Once again, the Catholic Church are telling us how we should interpret everything. Some may call it guidance, but I’d be inclined to call it dictation. It’s a pity that the devoted followers don’t know the difference between the two.

This month they are also talking about the Da Vinci Code, the New York Time Bestseller by Dan Brown. In their report they claim that Dan Brown is painting an inaccurate picture of what actually happened and in a multiple part feature will tell us how we are to interpret the novel. The keyword there being ‘novel’. I find it slightly entertaining that they even feel the need to tell us what Dan Brown means in what’s only a work of fiction! It’s like saying that in the Nursery Rhyme where Jack and Jill go up to fetch some water, Jack and Jill actually find Jesus on their way up and are eternally happy for ever and ever!

Alive doesn’t make for insightful reading, instead, it relies on the shock-factor much like other brands of smut do, such as the Sun, Star, Mirror and so on. It’s content merely serves the purpose of instilling fear into the minds of it’s readers, who after years and years of having to put up with this drivel, know of nothing else. They have been moulded into the shape of a brain-washed drone who will actually believe what being written in this monstrosity of a newspaper! Those of us whom who are strong enough to not get caught up in their sensation gay-bashing stories can only look on in amazement at how some people can be so desperate to retain followers that they would resort to writing such stories. The same level of astonishment can be directed at those who are desperate enough to read and actually believe what this newspaper says!