How accurate are wind forecasts for Dublin?

In my last post I analysed temperature forecasts for Dublin and today I will turn my attention to wind.

At first glance, the wind readings seemed less consistent with each other than the temperature readings. In particular, the readings from OpenWeatherMap and WeatherUnderground (WU) were consistently lower than the others. However, when I investigated, I found:

1. I had been interpreting the readings from OpenWeatherMap as kilometres per hour while in fact they were in meters per second. Once I corrected this error, their readings lined up well with other services.
2. There was no similar simple explanation for the wind speed readings from WU not matching the other services. It was just a problem with their actual data from Dublin - the forecast data for Dublin and the actual readings from other cities lined up with other services. Since weather underground is built upon data from amateur weather stations, I suspect that the weather station they were using for wind speed readings from Dublin was badly positioned e.g. see  the picture of a weather station of mine which used to report to WU before it broke - initially the readings were reasonable, but then the neighbour's hedge grew taller and began to block wind from reaching the station. As a result, I chose to exclude the WU from the calculation of averages and to compare the WU forecasts with the actual reading from other stations rather than their own readings.

The raw data about wind forecasts is available here and a summary table is given below.

Provider	Decimal Places	Ave Err	Fcst1 Err	Fcst3 Err	Fcst7 Err
weatheronline	0	4.30	6.13	7.37
openweathermap	2	4.30	10.22	11.10
weatherunderground	1	15.83	4.19	4.02	6.04
darksky	2	4.89	3.31	4.64	7.07
BlueMix	0	4.28	4.67	5.37	8.07
yr.no	2	5.97	3.62	4.31	7.97
	Average excl WU	4.75	5.59	6.56	7.70
	Average incl WU	6.59	5.36	6.13	7.29

A few observations about this table:

• In general, the accuracy of the wind forecasts is worse than the accuracy of the temperature forecasts. Although you can't compare Celsius readings with km/h readings, if I transformed the data into % error the same conclusion would be reached. This is probably a reflection of the fact that the wind speed in Dublin varies more from day to day than the temperature.
• On balance DarkSky is probably the overall winner for accuracy, but BlueMix and yr.no are both very close.
• Surprisingly the wind forecasts from weather underground are almost as accurate as the best services, but their historical reports are so inaccurate that they could not be considered good.
• In contrast, the wind forecasts from open weather map are noticeably worse than the other services (and weather online is not much better).

While I was writing this post, I found out about an organisation called Forecast Watch who did a much more detailed analysis of weather forecast accuracy. You can read their conclusions here but the quick summary is that most years the winner for the most accurate forecasts was The Weather Channel (which is now an IBM subsidiary and I refer to a BlueMix), but in a few cases the winner was the Weather Underground (also an IBM company) or MeteoGroup (which was not one of the services I analysed). They analysed forecasts for several cities and they found that the best performing service varies significantly from city to city.

How accurate are temperature forecasts for Dublin

I got a very positive reaction to my presentation about my weather forecast tracking application on Bluemix. Most people who saw this presentation asked which weather forecast service was best. Unfortunately I had to reply to them that I didn't know because I had only just built the app and never used it yet to do any detailed analysis. This post is an attempt start rectifying that error by looking at the accuracy of the various services for forecasting temperature in Dublin over the last month.

At the innovation showcase event a number of people spoke highly of  the Norwegian forecast service yr.no and claimed that it was the most accurate in their experience. Therefore, I decided to add this service into my data collection service (it is a testament to the flexible architecture that this was a relatively easy task) and wait until a month had passed before beginning analysis so that we had  enough data from them to compare.

I chose to initially analyse data from Dublin since this is where I live. I analysed temperature readings and forecasts for the period from 22nd of November to 21st of December 2016. I looked at the actual weather reported as well as the forecast for next day and the forecast for 3 days time. Some of the services offered forecasts for further into the future, but I chose to pick the 3 day forecast because this was supported by all services. If you want, you can see the actual data here.

The thing that most people commented upon at the innovation showcase was the fact that actual temperature data reported by each service did not match up exactly. When I analysed this, I noticed that some of this difference was down to data rounding. The temperature data reported by OpenWeatherMap  and DarkSky is given in celcius with 2 decimal places, in contrast WeatherUnderground and yr.no only give a single decimal place and both WeatherOnline and the BlueMix weather data are reported in whole numbers.

People asked me which service was actually correct, but the truth is that I have no way to tell. What I decided to do was to compute the average of the temperature reported by all services and then comparing the number reported by each service to this average. As you can see from the table below, the average error was actually quite small - not much more  than the average of 0.25 degrees which would be expected from rounding error. Interestingly, the yr.no service has the greatest level of difference from the average.

For assessing the forecasts I looked at the difference between the temperature that was forecast 1 or 3 days earlier and the actual temperature reported on the date in question. I also looked at the forecasts for one week ahead, although this could only be done for 4 of the 6 services since WeatherOnline and OpenWeatherMap don't supply 1 week forecasts.

The average level of error was slightly higher for 3 days in advance  (1.74 degrees) than it was for 1 day in advance (1.41 degrees) and higher again (1.95 degrees) for 7 day forecasts. The most accurate forecasts were from the BlueMix weather service across all 3 timespans. The second most accurate 1 daya forecasts were from the yr.no service although the 3 day and 7 forecasts from yr.no were definitely worse - the 7 day forecasts from yr.no were the worst of all services..


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Provider	Decimal Places	Ave Err	Fcst1 Err	Fcst3 Err	Fcst7 Err
weatheronline	0	0.39	1.20	1.37
openweathermap	2	0.37	1.93	2.21
weatherunderground	1	0.58	1.96	2.01	2.30
darksky	2	0.52	1.59	1.79	1.30
BlueMix	0	0.52	0.80	0.80	1.30
yr.no	1	0.75	0.96	2.28	2.90
	Average	0.52	1.41	1.74	1.95

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Overall, I think the conclusion is that the temperature forecasts are actually quite close to the  actual values, but the details might vary if I looked at a longer time period and/or more cities.

In reality temperature forecasts are relatively easy since temperature doesn't vary widely from day to day in this part of the world. Next I will look at wind speed forecasts since these might be more variable and also because I have been told that they are closely watched by insurance companies since wind speed correlates with weather damage,



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New cycle route beside Royal Canal

The towpath of the Royal Canal between Castleknock and Finglas has recently been upgraded to form a beautiful cycling route. I cycled along there one day recently and was delighted to see four separate families of swans with cygnets. All credit is due to whoever was behind this project.

FixMyStreet.ie really works!

I am a big fan of the idea of applications that allow citizens to directly communicate with their local council. As a result I installed the FixMyStreet Ireland app on my phone which is a convenient interface to the FixmyStreet.ie web site which can be used to report issues to your local council. In common with similar services in other countries this is a deceptively simple application that automatically directs your problem reports to the appropriate council. Whenever, citizens spot a problem the most common reason given for not reporting it is that the person doesn't know whom to report it to. The beautiy of FixMyStreet is that it knows where to forward your report based upon what type of problem it is and where you are (it can use the location from your GPS to figure out which council is responsible for solving the issue).

My inner geek was keen to try out the app. However, I was reluctant to divert valuable council resources into fixing minor issues just so I could see whether or not the app works properly. For the last few months I have been searching for a real problem that I could report (there is never a pothole available when you need one).

There is a bridge that I needs to cycle across on my route to work each morning.  A few weeks ago I noticed a minor blemish in the road where somebody had dug up the road to lay a cable and had not repaired the road properly. Initially the problem was very minor, but the recent cold weather seemed to cause the material used to repair the road to crack and come loose. Gradually the problem became worse until there was a sizable hole in the road which made one entire lane impassable on a bike.

For a few days I got off my bike and carried it past the hole, until I suddenly remembered that this was an ideal opportunity to try out the app. Yesterday morning, I filed my first problem report describing the issue. Unfortunately I didn't properly save the picture. I suspected that the council officials would think I was exaggerating about the size of the hole so I decided to stop again this morning and update my problem report with a picture.  To my amazement I saw that the problem was already fixed.

I must publicly applaud Fingal County Council - even in this tough economic climate they are doing a great job of responding to complaints,

Gathering of amateur and professional weather fans shows Dublin City of Science 2012 at its best

Today I spent a really fun day attending a conference entitled "The Science of Weather Forecasting" which was organised by the Irish Met Society. The talks were very interesting and educational, but what was really enjoyable was that during the breaks I got to chat with several enthusiastic amateur weather fans. It was an added bonus that the event was held in the beautiful Botanic Gardens and the day was one of the few Irish days with unbroken sunshine.

I suppose that all Irish people are interested in collecting weather data. The most common conversation opener for phone conversations in Ireland is "what is the weather like where you are?". Now that professional quality weather monitoring equipment has become available and affordable, we can now turn these informal weather observations into proper scientific measurements which can be used to improve forecasting. I met several people who had their own weather stations in their back gardens like me. I also found out that there is even a site dedicated to collecting this data from Irish amateur weather monitoring stations. I plan to connect my existing monitoring station to this site within the next few days.

This is an excellent example of the type of event which is being organised as part of Dublin City of Science 2012. It encouraged my existing interest in meteorology and I promptly joined the Irish Met Society and I have every intention of being an active member.

Fingal Library Service add eBooks to their range of offerings

I was excited to see the new eBook lending service from Fingal Libraries service so I thought I would write a short review. I am a big reader and am normally in the middle of reading at least 2 or 3 books in a variety of different genres at any one time. Although I buy quite a few books, my reading habit would be unaffordable if I had to buy all of the books I read - therefore I am a big user of the Fingal Library service (in fact I am the long serving mayor of Blanchardstown Library on Foursquare).

The library is really great service and amazingly it is free. People who complain about the level of taxes we pay should at least ensure that they take advantage of the services that these taxes fund.  As well as providing a large selection of books available for loan, they also have a large selection of DVDs, Music CDs and audio-books to choose from. They even provide a facility to borrow paintings for a period of up to 3 months (although I have never availed of this service myself).

Some people dismiss the library as an institution from the past which is doomed to fade away in the internet age. I disagree very strongly with this view and I feel that the concept of a public lending library is an important one that we ought not to forget in the debate about the balance between the rights of creators and consumers of content. It is important that we maintain public lending libraries if we want to ensure that everyone in society has an affordable opportunity to access the educational materials they need. In fact the free internet access in the Library can be a vital service to people who might otherwise have  access.

Although I am a big fan of technology, many people are surprised to find that I have not yet embraced eBooks. I thought I would use an Android tablet that I received as a present for reading eBooks. Although I initially read a few eBooks on the device, I found myself in the situation where I could easily gain free access to paper books, but I had to pay substantial costs to have the slightly less convenient experience of reading the electronic version  those books.


Therefore I was very excited to learn a few weeks ago that Fingal library had added eBooks to their range of offerings. To access the eBook lending service you go to their eBook portal and sign in with your library card number and PIN number (this is the same PIN number you use to log into the regular library web page). If you don't have a PIN number then you can get one by calling in to your local library.

When you start using this service you could be initially a bit confused because this is not a web site run by Fingal Library service as such, instead you are accessing a global web site OverDrive but the cost of your access is being covered by Fingal county council. I am not sure exactly how the financial details work, but luckily I don't need to. I suspect that the books on offer to me are a selection bought by Fingal library service rather than a global selection because there seems to be an unusually large number of books with themes of Irish interest. The service is quite easy to use and any problems I did encounter were easily solved with assistance provided by the operators of the Fingal Library page on Facebook.

The eBooks in the library are available in two different formats. One format is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions which is usable on your computer. The other format is compatible with the OverDrive reader application which is available for a wide variety of mobile platforms. I used the OverDrive Android version on a miScroll tablet and found the reading experience to be very pleasant. I also installed the application on my phone - while the software worked perfectly, I can't imagine I would read an entire novel on the small screen of my phone.

There is a version of the OverDrive application which works on Amazon Kindle devices, but apparently the OverDrive site has placed restrictions which stop books borrowed from libraries outside the USA from being read on the Kindle. I can't see the logic behind this unfair regional restriction, but I guess I would get more worked up about it if I actually owned a Kindle.

When you borrow a book from the library you are free to read it on any compatible device you own, but you can't simply transfer the file from one device to another (which I initially tried to do). Instead you must download the book directly from the web site by selecting the "Get Books" option from within the application. I am not sure why this is necessary, but I assume it is something to do with ensuring you are not trying to bypass the usage limitations.

Each user is allowed to borrow up to three books at a time. When you borrow a book you can choose between a borrowing period of 14 days or 21 days. If you choose the OverDrive format you can return the book as soon as you are finished reading it, but with the Adobe format of the book you can't. This means that you would probably best to choose the shorter loan period because the book will be counting against your loan limit even though you have finished reading it. If one of your borrowed books has expired you can always download it again (unless someone else had borrowed it in the meantime). If you have not deleted the book from your library your stored bookmarks will be maintained.

What did I borrow:

	Decider by Dick Francis I picked this first because I expected the content to be undemanding. I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable I found the  experience of reading the book, both in terms of the physical experience of reading an eBook and the fact that Dick Frances is clearly a very skilled writer. I did not know what the ending was going to be until I reached it, but I knew from experience that it was going to be a happy ending.
	Breakfast with Anglo by Simon Kelly The second book I chose was an account of the recent Irish property bubble as told by a property developer who was personally involved in the centre of the action. It was different from the previous book in that I knew in advance what the ending was going to be and that it was not going to be happy. Nevertheless I found it educational to see how things looked from the point of view of someone who was personally involved. The last chapter was devoted to what lessons he learned from the experience. I know that hindsight is always 20:20 vision, but anyone considering getting involved in property speculation would be well advised to read this chapter.
	If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name News from Small-Town Alaska by Heather Lende The third book I chose was different again. It was an account of what it is like to live in a small isolated town in Alaska. The author worked as an obituary writer for the local paper and the stories in the book seemed to be mainly derived from the information she learned while researching these obituaries. Irish papers tend to only publish obituaries for prominent people, but it seems that in Alaska they publish obituaries for all people who die. This meant that the stories described an eclectic selection of people who lived very different lives.  It was ironic to be reading a modern format eBook about people leading an austere life with little access to modern technology, but overall I found it enjoyable.

In short, I really like this new eBook service. I don't think I will give up reading paper books yet, but I will definitely supplement my reading materials with regular borrowing from the eBook library.

Fantastic Dublin Science Hackday event indicates that ireland has a bright future

Crochet model of a red Blood Cell

The first ever Dublin Science Hackday was held this weekend in Dublin City University. The event was part of the Dublin City of Science 2012 celebration. This event involved teams of amateur completing challenging projects over a grueling 36 hours. I say amateurs as a compliment because although many of the participants are professionals, they completed in this event purely out of their love of science and technology.

I initially planned to take part in the event myself, but as I got closer to the event the reality of spending 36 hours of my weekend working on a hack began to scare me and I chickened out. Instead I attended the kick-off talks on the Saturday and then gave a few words of encouragement to the participants before I went back to my normal weekend activities. Luckily there was lots of status updates posted to the #dubscihack hashtag on Twitter so I could follow along with the excitement from home. I then returned to DCU on Sunday afternoon to see what had been accomplished. I found the participants very much more subdued (not surprising after 36 hours without sleep), but the projects were very impressive.

You can see all of the details of the projects completed here, of even watch the project presentations on Ustream, but the prize winners were:

• Best use of Government Data went to the YPath project which developed an application for children to track their physical activity.
• Most interesting Use of Data went to the Financial Market Sonification project which produced an audio stream which provides an audio stream that represents a summary of the activity in the market so that traders can have ambient awareness.
• The Hardware Award went to the Aurora Lamp  which used LEDs to project information about the level of the Aurora Borealis activity.
• The Design Award went to Open Stats Wiki developed a cool mobile application to allow fans to use their smartphone record statistics of a match the attended live as the action unfolds. This hack will have a bright future because there are many people who share an obsession with sport and an obsession with technology.
• The People's Choice Award went to The Aurora Orrery project build a visualization of from where on the globe the Aurora activity can be seen.
• Last but not least, the hBest in Show Award went to the Elements Trail project which built an augmented reality layer using Layar. to build a treasure hunt game based upon the periodic table

It is also worth giving honorable mention to:

• Tríona (@triploidtree) completed who the CIYbio project (crochet it yourself biology) which involved  using crochet to build models of things to do with biology (to help teaching). I am not sure if it was useful, but the models were certainly cute.
• μsic developed a cool application that mixed music listening with social networking.
• The intermeter project projected the level of Network activity from the science hackday into a simple amp meter.

I think that Ireland has a very bright future when we have bright hackers like this. Well done to everyone who contributed to the event.

Less than a week to go until Dublin Science Hackday

There is only a few more days left until the start of Dublin Science Hackday that its happening in Dublin City University this weekend (3rd/4th of March). This is one of the first in a series of exciting events planned for Dublin City of Science 2012 celebration. I have very good experiences of being involved in Hackday events inside IBM and so I expect that getting involved with an even wider public audience should provide even more innovation and excitement.

Initially I was planning to organise for a team comprised of IBM employees to compete in this event, but the reaction to this suggestion was not very positive. On the one hand, employees who had spend a busy week from Monday to Friday working hard on their technology projects, did not relish the prospect of spending a 36 hour stretch of their weekend working on another demanding project. Also some of the organisers felt that it might not set the right tone to have a team of experienced professionals competing against teams that are mainly comprised of enthusiastic students with little practical experience.

Instead I think I will be arranging for some IBM employees to attend the event as advisers either giving training talks on technology topics that would be useful to hackers and/or informally offering practical help to the project teams as they complete their projects.

In any case I am looking forward to an exciting weekend of technology. I saw the great projects completed at previous Hackdays held in cities such as London, San Francisco and cape Town and I know that the Dublin hackers will be just as good (if not even a little better).

Dublin's public transport leaps forward into the information age

Users of public transport in Dublin will have been delighted to see that Dublin bus have recently been putting display signs on some of their busier bus stops to tell potential travelers how long they will need to wait for the arrival of the next bus on each of the routes service this particular stop. These display systems are connected to GPS sensors on their buses so apparently the predictions for the bus arrival time is very accurate.

Unfortunately it is not feasible to put one of these fancy displays on all bus stops. However, this does not mean that people who are not lucky enough to have a display on their local bus stop cannot benefit from the GPS data because the data behind the system is also published in the form of a feed to. There are several smartphone applications that use this data, but my favorite is Next Dublin Bus, which allows you to see the expected arrival times of the next buses on each of the routes serving your favorite stops.  You don't even have to know the stop numbers when you are out and about because it uses the GPS sensor in your phone to help it draw a map of stops near to where you are at the moment. This application could be very handy if the weather turns nasty, because it will allow people go to the bus stop at the last possible moment instead of waiting for a long time in the cold and rain.

We also benefited from the recent launch of the LeapCard system which allows us to pay for our journey on any of the forms of public transport in the city with a single electronic card. I know that several cities have had this for years (e.g. London's Oyster card), but is exciting for us poor Dubliners to finally have this system which was long promised. As far as I understand, the factors delaying the launch were not technical issues, but political in-fighting between the various transport providers. In any case, I am glad that it is finally operational and seems to work very smoothly.

These technology updates are highly appropriate for Dublin, now that it has been officially declared European City of Science for 2012.

Why can't Dublin Bikes facilitate casual use by tourists?

As many of you know I am a keen cyclist. Because, I have my own bike. I don't have a lot of cause to use the Dublin Bikes rental scheme, but I have been very impressed with the scheme whenever I do have a cause to use it. The only gripe I have about the system is that it is cumbersome to sign up and it typically takes several days to get a membership card. Unfortunately this means that the scheme can't be used by tourists visiting Dublin.

There is a similar scheme in many other cities. I see that the London cycle system recently added a facility for casual users to rent a bike without having to have an annual subscription. I wonder why Dublin bikes don't introduce a similar facility? I am sure tourists would love to use it to cycle around the city centre.

Is Linux an operating system for computer savvy geeks?

Many people assume that Linux is an operating system which is only really used by computer savvy geeks. However, this reputation is no longer really justified - especially since Ubuntu have started living up to their slogan of "Linux for human beings".

The most interesting talk at last weekend's OSS Bar Camp event in UCD was a talk entitled Mumbuntu where Alan Pope (a.ka. Popey) describes his experiences in teaching his elderly mother to use an Ubuntu based machine. His siblings told her she was crazy to follow Alan's advice since they thought that it would be difficult for someone who has no prior computing experience to learn how to use Linux. But Popey was happy to report that his brother admitted they were wrong and overall her experiences were very happy.

Here is a video recording of Alan's very entertaining talk in which he honestly describes all of the issues he encountered and how he overcame them (mostly they were unrelated to the operating system):


Mumbuntu from Brian O'Donovan on Vimeo.

We have video recordings of quite a few of the OSS Bar Camp sessions and I will be posting them on line gradually over the next few weeks as I get around to doing the various processing steps required.

Review of the IBM stand at the Young Scientist and using social software for connecting with children #ibm4btyse

Last week I was involved in helping run the IBM stand at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. One of the areas that I focused on was using social software to help publicize what we were doing on this stand. This was a hectic week. Now that I have had time to digest what happened, I decided to write this blog post which  will review how effective the stand itself was and how/if the various social software channels we used helped connect with the young people attending the exhibition.

In common with many other exhibitions there is a tradition that companies running stands at the Young Scientist will attempt to attract visitors by giving gifts to the people who visit their stand.  IBM followed that tradition with 4 diiffernt things we were giving away to our visitors. This was very sucessful - at one stage on Friday it was not physically possible for anymore people to enter our stand. However, I was surprised that the popularity of the different gifts did not relate to what they cost:

1. Anyone who visited the stand and made a token attempt to appear interested in our stand was given a YoYo with the IBM logo. We had a total of 10,000 YoYos were available in a variety of colours and they were all distributed over the 3 days. They were  hugely popular with the students and were probably responsible for a huge percentage of the visitors to the stand. A typical interaction with a student almost always sarted with the question "is it true you are giving out YoYos?". Of course we relied "yes, but not that you are year would you like me to tell you about IBM ..." The students felt morally obliged to feign interest in our messages in return for their valued prize.
2. Each visitor to the stand was asked to enter an idea on our web site for how technology could be used to make the world smarter. Most students were enthused by the competition and put a lot of thought into their entry. This was a good way of ensuring they really understood the Smarter Planet theme we had for our stand. We were giving out a prize fof a laptop for the best idea, but very few of the students showed any interest in the prospect of winning a laptop.
   
3. Each day we held a draw for a Nintendo Wii. All they had to do to enter the draw was write their name on a ticket. There was some interest in the chance of winning a Wii - but the scramble to enter this was much less than the scramble for free YoYos. I think the mood was captured by one young boy (I would guess aged about 8-10) - when asked if he wanted to enter the draw he said "I already have a Wii, but I suppose I could always sell it on eBay" - clearly a youngster with business acumen :-)
   
4. We were also giving out Ubuntu Live CDs and copies of the "IBM Open Client for Smart Work" at the pedestal where we were demonstrating Open Source software. There was very little interest in this from the younger kids, but some of the older students and their parents did show an interest. Some of the visitors to the stand were already using Ubuntu, but were fascinated to learn why IBM was promoting it. In fact a large number of the CDs were given to the IBM volunteers who planned to install it on their own PCs.
   

The communications team were keen to use social software tools to promote the stand to students since they heard that the students would all be keen users of these tools. I was asked to advise them as an expert in social software. I don't consider myself of an expert (expertise is relative), but I found that Laura Cowen and Sacha Chua were only to happy to fill in for the gaps in my knowledge.

The social software tools we chose to use were:

1. We created a Wordpress blog and we planned out a schedule for which of the team members would post each day so that it would not be forgotten. Much to my surprise we kept to the schedule and even posted a few additional blog posts when ideas occured to us during the week. We managed to get IBM employees to comment on the blog by using subtle pressure on them, but I don't think only 2 of our commenters were not IBM employees (of course I could be wrong because am not 100% certain of the identity of all of the commenters).
   
2. We used the existing IBM Twitter account @IBMIrelandEvent and also the hashtag #ibmbtyse - the reaction to this was good, but again I suspect we were more successful in letting adults know about the stand than in attracting youngsters. The young people did use Twitter, but generrally were more intersted in interacting with their own social social circle than in interacting with IBM. A few students who were keen ubuntu fans did send us messages via Twitter so I guess it was high quality interactions even if not high quantity.
   
3. The people manning the stand took lots of pictures and posted them to Flickr (e.g. my photos), Picasa (e.g. Donnacha's photos) and other web sites, but we did not organise them in a way that allowed people view all the content together. The communications team did produce some fairly professional looking videos and posted them to the YouTube channel. Speaking to IBM people they were very impressed, but I am not sure how many others viewed them.
   
5. We created an identica/StatusNet account @IBMIrelandEvent but did not really use it. The communications team were using HootSuite for managing all of the social media channels and since we never connected the identica account with HootSuite nobody remembered to manually cross post. In any case I don't think many students would use identica so our omission was not noticed.
   
6. We created a Facebook event page, since we were advised that most of the students would be very keen users of Facebook. We didn't hook this up with HootSuite either since it seems that HootSuite will only post to a person's Facebook home page and not to an event page (maybe we don't fully understand HootSuite). Nevertheless I manually posted links to most of our content as it appeared and also posted links to articles about the event in the mainstream media. I think that this pages was also used more by IBMers than by the target audience - 15 of the 19 confirmed guests and 9 of the 15 people who said they were "maybe attending" were IBM employees. I think the problem is that Facebook invites can only be sent to your friends and the people at the exhibition were not our friends on Facebook. Indeed the common wisdom is that the students would be advised against interacting with us on Facebook since we are all dangerous adults.
   

In summary it was a great experience and I think people attending got a good impresssion of IBM. This video gives you a quick flavour:

Update 23/Jan: I forgot to mention the Facebook page in the initial post so I added a paragraph about that.

SmartPower as applied to the lights in the Phoenix Park

SmartPower as applied to the lights in the Phoenix Park
Originally uploaded by Brian O'Donovan

As I needed to travel into the City Center this morning I was pleased to see that the roadworks in the Phoenix Park have been completed and the road is now open. It is always a pleasure to travel through the park. As well as being the fastest and shortest route from Castleknock to the city center, it is always nice to pass through an environment (rural, relaxed and old fashioned) which is in stark contrast from the surrounding city (urban, busy and modern).

I was surprised to see that the old fashioned gas lights have been supplemented with some very modern looking lights. At first I was disappointed with the fact that they were not in keeping with the general ambiance of the park. However, when I reflected some more I realized that they are an excellent example of Smart Power in action.

The new lights apparently generate power for themselves from a combination of wind and solar sources. Anyone who knows Irish weather will realize that we tend to get wind and solar energy at different times of the year - unfortunately we tend to get more wind than sunshine, but there is not much that can be done about that :-(

How rapidly is Dublin Changing

People often remark how quickly Dublin is changing. A common complaint is that if you come back to Dublin after a gap of only 5-10 years you no longer know your way around due the number of new roads which have been built in the meantime.

South County Dublin County Council put together this interesting site to help people get a quick visual view of how the area has changed over the years. Users can start with a current map and zoom/pan to the area that interests them. With a single click of the mouse they can then switch to see one of many maps of the area produced since 1760.

As I clicked on various parts of the area and I was struck by the huge change in the map between the current day and the most recent historical map in 1942. For example Tallaght which now features a large built up urban area was only a small rural village surrounded by farms in 1942. It would be really interesting to see the changes in increments of every 5 years so that the detailed timeline of this change could be seen.

I was also struck by how little the map changed between 1760 and 1942. You can see that the style of map changed over the centuries as the practice of map making evolved, but the features on the ground seemed to change very little.