Last Decade Was Ireland's Wettest On Record

Any doubts climate-change deniers may have had about the effect global warming is having on Irish weather should be washed away after new data has proved that the country’s meteorology is being rapidly transformed.

Researchers at Maynooth University have found that the Irish climate is now at its wettest in over 300 years.

Analysis of historical rainfall statistics lead to the conclusion that in the decade from 2006 to 2015, the country experienced the highest rate of rainfall since since record keeping began in 1711.

In that decade an average annual rainfall figure of 1,990 millimetres was recorded, in stark contrast to the overall average of 1,080 millimetres over the entire 305 year span.

The research team was lead by Dr. Conor Murphy, a Senior Lecturer in Geography at Maynooth University. Dr. Murphy says the unprecedented rainfalls are most likely due to human-driven factors.

 “The most recent decade was our wettest on record,” says Dr. Murphy. “When we look at the long-term context, we see a continuous rise in annual and winter rainfall.

“This is consistent with expectations of human-driven climate change.”

Much of the data used only existed thanks to the efforts of the United Kingdom’s Met Office in the 1970s. This data had not seen much use or publication previously, but by combining it with Ireland’s own rainfall figures a clearer picture emerged.

“We were able to merge that Met Office record with another, quality-assured dataset, which we recently compiled for Ireland for the period of 1850 to present.” explained Dr. Murphy.

“When combined, the derived record gives us an unprecedented picture of rainfall variations for every month from 1711 to 2016.”

The research also showed that when it comes to seasonal changes, Ireland’s winters are becoming much wetter than previously while its summers are getting drier.

The winters of 2015/2016 and 2013/2014 are the wettest and second wettest recorded since 1711 respectively, a statistic that is probably unsurprising to anyone affected by the severe flooding seen across the country in recent years.

RCSI Researchers Make Breast Cancer Breakthrough

Researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland say that they have developed a mathematical model which could help identify if chemotherapy will work on individual patient’s cancers.

The model has been created in order to predict how the chemotherapy process will affect triple-negative breast cancer cells. It’s hoped that by using this method, patients who will not respond well to chemotherapy will avoid the treatment and its harmful side effects.

Over 250 people in Ireland are diagnosed with the particular strain of breast cancer each year.

Dr Federico Lucantoni is the lead researcher for the project and he hopes the model can help sufferers.

"We hope that in the future clinicians by using these models will be able to tailor the therapy."

“"It works quite well on in-vitro models on cancer cell lines,” he says, “we tested it on different triple negative breast cancer cells."

The study was funding by the Irish Cancer Society as part of its Breast-Predict collaborative project between researchers at RCSI, UCC, NUIG, TCD, UCD and DCU. 

"This paper highlights vital work being undertaken to identify new ways to improve the treatment of cancer.” said Dr Robert O’Connor, the head of cancer research for the ICS.

"This research is in quite early stages and it will be many more years until any potential benefits reach cancer patients.

"But it does show the building blocks required to lay the foundations for life-saving cancer research.”

Gamers Unite Against Homelessness

Ireland’s gamers will band together this Saturday, April 14th to yet again raise much needed funds for the Dublin Simon Community and Inner-City Helping Homeless to assist in their fight against homelessness.

8-Bit, a collection of Irish retro gamers, will be holding Gamers Unite For The Homeless, a free event, in Griffith College where attendees will be able to try their hands at old consoles, experience a Virtual Reality simulation and participate in tournaments.

As of February 2018 there were 9,807 homeless people in Ireland, more than double the figure from the same period in 2015. Volunteer groups such as the Simon Community and ICHH are battling hard to ensure that none of these people go forgotten.

It’s not the first time that 8-Bit have fundraised for the homeless. Back in December the group raised €1,500 by hosting a 24 hour international live stream, which even featured a head-shaving all in the name of charity. They’ll be hoping to surpass that target this time around.

Much of the money they hope to raise will come from vendors, who will donate 20% of their profits to the cause.

“On behalf of the Dublin Simon Community and the people who rely on our services each day, we would like to thank everyone involved for their support.” said Jonathan Beatty of the Simon Community.

“The proceeds raised from the event will help provide people with life changing outreach, treatment, housing, homelessness prevention and education services. We are very humbled to be chosen as beneficiaries for this fantastic fundraiser … the supporters of this event will make a vital difference and enable people to move to a safe and secure place they can call home.”

One of the highlights of the day will surely be the Mario Kart and Street Fighter tournaments, always popular in the extremely competitive gaming community. Entry into the tournaments will have a small cover charge, with all proceeds going to the charity partners.

The National Computer & Video Game Museum will also be attendance to showcase their range of retro games and consoles, including a large-screen Saturn Bomberman experience for up to 10 players at a time.

Although entrance is free, the event is ticketed due to the limited size of the space available. Tickets can be gotten through the event’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/events/131617344316545

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Opinion: Facebook Is Becoming A Threat To Global Democracy

The fall of western democracy is often pictured as an apocalyptic event of nuclear destruction, a military power grab by a malevolent tyrant or a willing majority opting for autocratic rule. These variations all share a theme of being immediate and noticeable, however one of the most direct threats to democracy is something much slower and much more subtle.

This threat is the control of information.

In Ireland, there have long been worries about Denis O’Brien’s monopolisation of the country’s media outlets. More recently Leo Varadkar’s notorious Strategic Communications Unit has been lambasted for its attempts to direct regional newspapers not to label government sponsored articles as such.

A larger threat is looming though, one with huge potential for damage across the globe. Facebook has again become embroiled in scandal for its complete disregard of ethical responsibility and moderation.

The social media giant was caught up in the Cambridge Analytica embarrassment last week when it emerged that the platform knew about the harvesting of roughly 50 million users’ information, carried out in order to personalise political advertisements. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager was a key player in the company.

Facebook knew about this activity as far back as 2015, yet took the choice not to inform its users. The purpose of the information collection was clearly in contradiction to the company’s own platform policy, which forbids the transfer of data to “any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service”.

These revelations came to light when whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed the scope of the data-leak. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.” Wylie told The Observer, who broke the story along with The New York Times. “That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

In a statement released on Friday, Facebook said that when it learned of the violation in 2015 it ordered Cambridge Analytica to delete the user information. It’s emerged though that the data was never destroyed, it seems it wasn’t enough of an issue for Zuckerberg & Co. to do a thorough check.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. Facebook has information of literally billions of people around the globe and it doesn’t seem too concerned about how that information is used. A large chunk of this data was misused in order to influence voters in the US election and yet the company didn’t feel the need to tell anyone.

We already know that the social media site is highly addictive and is having a damaging impact on our youth. We know that its tax avoidance policy is spectacularly brash (the company paid only £2.5m tax on nearly £850m revenue in the UK last year). We know that its lack of action on hate speech has created a platform where pretty much anything can be said without consequences.

What we need to realise is that Facebook has risen to become the number one source of information for many people around the world and yet it does not care if this information is true, it does not care if this information is being used to manipulate voters and it certainly does not seem to care that its methods are creating a political environment where citizens are systematically targeted with things they already want to hear.

The company claims that it is taking steps to remedy these problems, but that in itself might as well be labelled as fake news. Profits are determined by clicks and anything the site does to remove controversy will also remove some of its profits.

As long as you allow the corporate giant to control what you see and ‘control’ what happens with your personal information then our democracies will collapse into polarised extremes fueled only by the biggest headlines and the biggest paychecks.

You need only look across the Atlantic for proof that it’s already begun.

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The World Is Ready for Electronic Voting, But It's Not Ready For Us

Ireland has a bit of a storied past when it comes to its relationship with electronic voting, managing to spend over €50m of public money on the scheme before it was scrapped in 2009.

The early 2000’s were a heyday for e-voting proposals as the wonders of technology had yet to be tainted by the now constant worry of being hacked. Taoiseach at the time Bertie Ahern was a strong backer of implementing the system, even going so far as to say it was an improvement on “stupid old pencils”.

31 countries around the world have used electronic voting machines in an election at one point or another, some with success and some with glaring failures, such as the UK’s trial of an e-voting system in 2007 where security was described as “catastrophically weak”.

“Electronic voting is not inherently insecure, but the organisations operating them often don’t implement the very necessary and sometimes basic cyber security measures in order to make them as secure as possible."

Fears over election security have heightened recently with the FBI’s indictments of 13 Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Election. Add to this the links to Russian hackers gaining access to State voter registration systems and suddenly the integrity of future democratic elections across the world have been thrown into doubt.

Large-scale cyberattacks such as the WannaCry and Petya bugs in 2017 have demonstrated the weaknesses in governmental security systems and highlight why moving elections away from the tried and tested pen and paper looks like an increasingly bad idea.

“Electronic voting is not inherently insecure,” says Shane Chambers from Irish cyber security firm techguard.ie, “but the organisations operating them often don’t implement the very necessary and sometimes basic cyber security measures in order to make them as secure as possible.

“You’d be amazed how often companies and even government organisations skip basic cyber security measures. For one, they often don’t have a system in place to ensure all machines are patched and up-to-date. End-to-end encryption is another very important tool, as opposed to sending data over insecure means such as email.”

This issue of poor security raised its head again when the organisers of DEF CON, one of the world’s largest conventions for hackers, ran into trouble last month when attempting to purchase disused voting machines for their Voting Village, a part of the event where competitors attempt to exploit flaws in e-voting systems.

“It's important that individuals like us have time with these machines so that we can truly understand and tell everyone about the brokenness of these things."

The event has gone ahead before, with the 2017 contest even producing one machine that was hacked into playing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. More worrying results included the takeover of a system by simply uncovering the machine’s USB port and another by gaining access through a Wi-Fi connection.

All of these examples show deeply flawed systems at work and explain why there’s been so much trouble obtaining old machines for this year’s competition. The companies who build them don’t want their weaknesses exposed.

Some manufacturers have even sent letters to sellers of the machines insisting that they stop and that their actions were illegal, despite this being untrue.

TJ Horner, one of the convention attendees, spoke about the need for events like this to demonstrate the poor quality of the systems that elections have relied on.

“It's important that individuals like us have time with these machines so that we can truly understand and tell everyone [about] the brokenness of these things."

Chris Gallizzi, another DEF CON hacker who specialises in hardware, found that the voting machines were worryingly easy to reproduce.

“I would think that they would hire manufacturers to custom-build these chips, but they're all standard, off the shelf. For hardcore copyists it would probably take them about three months and maybe $4,000 or $5,000 to make an imposter machine. You could easily make a prototype."

"There are choices that we need to make now.”

All of the issues that have been uncovered so far have used fairly conventional computing methods, however the quickening pace at which AI technology is progressing has some experts worried about the potential harm it could do.

A new report, titled The Malicious Use Of Artificial Intelligence, raises concerns about the effect AIs could have not only in influencing voters through social media, but that previously secure systems may become more vulnerable to hacking.

“We live in a world that could become fraught with day-to-day hazards from the misuse of AI and we need to take ownership of the problems – because the risks are real,” says one of the reports authors, Dr Sean Ó hEigeartaigh, an researcher at Cambridge.

"There are choices that we need to make now.”

The topic has not been on the agenda in Ireland since the disastrous results of the first implementation attempt. With e-voting on the rise around the world however it will surely rear its head again before too long.

Technological advances are almost always seen as necessary to progress society but in the case of voting a question needs to be asked, what’s the issue with a pencil and some paper?

It’s worked pretty well so far.