north

Arabian terror freaking out says; Lets all panic, it must be true! Moronic theories, created by paranoid wazzucks, posted on the Internet, unsubstantiated by anyone. Even Prince Charles is at it and he is King Wazzuck. If it is on the Internet, it must be true - is that the qualification?

It's a money grab. How else are they going to afford to bail out the banks?

Good point! Maybe it is time to restructure the entire organization at this time? There is no better time to do this than with a change at the top. The only way to proceed in a self-serving operation of this nature, is to hire someone from outside so that it is a legitimate review - independent of self-serving viewpoints or goals. With all the money that gets wasted on legal battles, investment advice and every other type of consultant and advisor, maybe it is the right time for a complete top to bottom review of the entire SIC structure with the ultimate goal of rationalization, value, responsibility and effectiveness. It is already underway with the Charitable Trust, what other opportunities might there be?

Smyril say the Norrona will make its first scheduled stop in Forvik, on the 14th February. It will then stop there weekly in both directions from Faroe. Smyril says that Shetland has never been very important in its plans, but obviously Forvik is essential if the service is to survive!

The same people that can be sold on "guaranteed returns", are equally convinced of the "certainty" of global warming. Both are theoretical concepts based upon modelling; both may be correct, either might be wrong - only time will tell.

Why don't they just boot everyone off Foula and put them all out there? This project is the single worst idea that has ever happened in Shetland; and like so many other great notions in Shetland, it will not be done in moderation - but will have everything that can be mustered thrown into it. The problem with putting all your eggs in one basket, is that when it gets dropped all the eggs break at once. If you look at the history of the Council getting into business, it is littered with with poorly researched, over-funded, half-baked ideas. Look at their investment history and failures. They fire the fund managers, but the same employees and councillors are still around that manage to lose just about every penny that they invest in business. Bit of the pot calling the kettle black there! This is just the latest scheme that will be off the rails in no time flat - except that hopefully it will never get approved anyway.

I think there should be a weekly highlights show, featuring the best of the weeks activities on the street. From what I witness with my own eyes during daylight and earlier hours of the evening, I can only imagine what goes on in the middle of the night. I would imagine that much of it would make great comedy, watching the incapable and inebriated stumbling around town, trying to figure out where they are and where they are going! Maybe a live feed on the net?

Drewie Thompson

What a joke. Every part of this fiasco is so predictable. And now the Director who forgot to register his pay from Smyril is writing letters asking for his money back!

I agree with this point entirely. Conversely, any applicant can only assess themselves against a perceived slate of equally qualified candidates, so what might often appear to be an obvious choice to the applicant may be a wholly different picture to the person making the selection. As I stated above, the HR professional making the first cut, may absolutely miss the outstanding candidate because they really don't understand the role or individual, beyond the requirement to meet a specific qualification criteria that may inadvertently eliminate the best and most qualified applicants. I have run into this a couple of times in my own career. I once applied for a job I was fully qualified and experienced to undertake and was invited for an Interview. The Interviewer told me they were most impressed with me, but the post required a minimum age of 30 (I was 26 at the time), which was neither specified in the original recruitment ad, nor brought up at any time in the Interview. They approached me a number of times after I was 30, but I had moved on to much better opportunities, although I would dearly have loved to work for them. More recently, I was approached by a head-hunting company and offered a Senior Management position in a large publicly listed company. I was interested in the opportunity and we entered into a discussion to look at the position. It worked its way through the process, but eventually just stopped cold, so I just continued in my current position which I was very happy with. Three years later, I was again contacted by a head-hunter and offered a very interesting senior management position in another company ( a competitor of the first) and ultimately accepted and moved into that position. One of the requirements in my contract was that I couldn't accept employment with that specific competitor for 12 months after leaving my current employer - no real issue with that, I mean they never hired me when they had the chance! At a reception around the same time, the CEO of the first company told me he was surprised to hear that I had left my old job and taken my new position - as they would always have been interested in talking to me if I was available. I laughed and told him of the non-recruitment they had entered into with me approximately 3 years prior and I watched him blanche as he listened. He called me the following day and told me that there had been a serious breakdown in their internal selection process (internal rivalry and turf protection), but they would like to talk to me as soon as possible to see if they could (40 months later) get this back in the works. I explained the contractual issues, but assured them that as soon as I was available again, he would be the first to know! These things happen. Life is full of humans and the ways they work - so don't get bent out of shape. Chase the next and greater opportunity. Don't become embittered or disillusioned by the system; make yourself better and more desirable through the experience. Does it happen - yes. Can you beat it, you bet.

Times have changed, yet some things never change. Qualified people are often overlooked for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't write good CV's, or they don't interview well? Maybe they don't have the experience, aptitude or organizational skills required for the position, despite the qualifications? Recruitment and selection of personnel is an art, yet is often left to those most ill-equipped to perform the role - the professional Human Resources manager. They will gauge the qualifications but may well miss the really important skills or experience that would bring in change and performance that might revolutionise the department or post. I recruit based on my own judgement of the individual, the experience and skills and the first hand references from someone I know, who knows you. People are often amazed at how easy it is to get a direct and honest reference if you have been in employment for any length of time. If you are just starting out, I will give you the benefit of my personal judgement - which has rarely let me down! A long list of degrees and other qualifications does not neccessarily automatically qualify ANYONE for any job. A mixture of intelligence, education, experience, personality, productivity and capability are the essential qualification for just about any job, anywhere. If you don't get a job, try for the next one - it may be way better anyway. My cousin, freshly qualified, was turned down for the job of County Architect at the old ZCC because the individuals involved could remember him as a boy growing up in Lerwick and couldn't believe that "Davy's boy could possibly be capable of being an Architect". As a result, he spent his entire career, very successfully, outside Shetland, but he always wanted to come home. As I said, times change, yet some things never change.

Promoters overstated the environmental benefit of wind farms The wind farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed. By Patrick Sawer Last Updated: 8:14AM GMT 21 Dec 2008 The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has agreed to scale down its calculation for the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emission that can be eliminated by using wind turbines to generate electricity instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas. The move is a serious setback for the advocates of wind power, as it will be regarded as a concession that twice as many wind turbines as previously calculated will be needed to provide the same degree of reduction in Britain's carbon emissions. A wind farm industry source admitted: "It's not ideal for us. It's the result of pressure by the anti-wind farm lobby." For several years the BWEA – which lobbies on behalf of wind power firms – claimed that electricity from wind turbines 'displaces' 860 grams of carbon dioxide emission for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated. However it has now halved that figure to 430 grams, following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Hundreds of wind farms are being planned across the country, adding to the 198 onshore and offshore farms - a total of 2,389 turbines - already in operation. Another 40 farms are currently under construction. Experts have previously calculated that to help achieve the Government's aim of saving around 200 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2020 - through generating 15 per cent of the country's electricity from wind power - would require 50,000 wind turbines. But the new figure for carbon displacement means that twice as many turbines would now be needed to save the same amount of CO2 emissions. While their advocates regard wind farms as a key part of Britain's fight against climate change, opponents argue they blight the landscape at great financial cost while bringing little environmental benefit. Dr Mike Hall, an anti-wind farm campaigner from the Friends of Eden, Lakeland and Lunesdale Scenery group in the Lake District, said: "Every wind farm application says it will lead to a big saving in the amount of carbon dioxide produced. This has been greatly exaggerated and the reduction in the carbon displacement figure is a significant admission of this. "As we get cleaner power stations on line, the figure will get even lower. It further backs the argument that wind farms are one of the most inefficient and expensive ways of lowering carbon emissions." Because wind farms burn no fuel, they emit no carbon dioxide during regular running. The revised calculation for the amount of carbon emission they save has come about because the BWEA's earlier figure did not take account of recent improvements to the technology used in conventional, fossil-fuel-burning power stations. The figure of 860 grams dates back to the days of old-style coal-fired power stations. However, since the early 1990s, many of the dirty coal-fired stations have been replaced by cleaner-burning stations, with a consequent reduction in what the industry calls the "grid average mix" figure for carbon dioxide displacement. As a result, a modern 100MW coal or gas power station is now calculated to produce half as many tonnes of carbon dioxide as its predecessor would have done. The BWEA's move follows a number of rulings by the ASA against claims made by individual wind farm promoters about the benefits their schemes would have in reducing carbon emissions. In one key adjudication, the ASA ruled that a claim by Npower Renewables that a wind farm planned for the southern edge of Exmoor National Park, in Devon, would help prevent the release of 33,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was "inaccurate and likely to mislead". This claim was based on the 860-gram figure. The watchdog concluded: "We told Npower to ensure that future carbon savings claims were based on a more representative and rigorous carbon emissions factor." The ASA has now recommended that the BWEA and generating companies use the far lower figure of 430 grams. In a letter to its members, the BWEA's head of onshore, Jan Matthiesen, said: "It was agreed to recommend to all BWEA members to use the single static figure of 430 g CO2/kWh for the time being. The advantage is that it is well accepted and presents little risk as it understates the true figure." This is now the figure given on the BWEA's website. The organisation will also be forced to lower its claim for the total amount of carbon dioxide emission saved by the 2,389 wind turbines currently operating around Britain. But the association denied the change weakened the case for wind farms. Nick Medic, spokesman for the BWEA, said: "Wind farms are still eliminating emissions. The fact is that fossil fuel burning power stations belch out CO2 and wind farms don't. That has not changed. "The fact is we need to reduce carbon emissions, however you account for them. But there are people who just don't like wind farms and will use any argument against them." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/3867232/Promoters-overstated-the-environmental-benefit-of-wind-farms.html

For years we have just cut off one leg at a time. Ensures fresh meat at all times!

We don't have to sacrifice anything. All we have to do is to stop burning fossil fuels. Close down the coal and gas power stations and replace them with nuclear and renewables and change our transport to run on hydrogen. That's it. Job done. So, do you support additional Nuclear powered generation Malachy? I can agree entirely with your comments AT, but there is an overwhelming number of Global Warming subscribers that tie the solution to giving up every advancement in modern life and moving back to a simple, austere, carbon free lifestyle - like Al Gore; who says it, but doesn't live it.

Interesting! The world has never seen such freezing heat By Christopher Booker Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008 A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years. So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year. A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others. If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.) Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s. Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped. Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

Interesting story about David Bellamy and Global warming. http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/69623

I think the boat sinking pulled out the extension cord from the mainland. Or more likely if you are a follower of Mr. Al-Fayed, the royal family and MI6 did it to remove the threat to the throne!

I head some guys in the pub tonight saying that the band are playing a FREE open-air concert on Forvik in December. So it might all work out yet!

If the EU was farmed efficiently instead of for political ends, a vast number of people could be effectively fed - the same goes for many other parts of the world. Then again, there all these morons with their 30 mile diet - the same people who believe this, then buy crap from all over the world - it applies to others but not them. And to see all these solutions involving governments and protectionism! Wow, what an amazing concept - an international agreement to limit the amount of land utilised for raising livestock - gimme a break. An explanation for all this paranoia? Eating veggies shrinks the brain MELBOURNE: Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage. Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin. The link was discovered by Oxford University scientists who used memory tests, physical checks and brain scans to examine 107 people between the ages of 61 and 87. When the volunteers were retested five years later the medics found those with the lowest levels of vitamin B12 were also the most likely to have brain shrinkage. It confirms earlier research showing a link between brain atrophy and low levels of B12. Brain scans of more than 1,800 people found that people who downed 14 drinks or more a week had 1.6% more brain shrinkage than teetotallers. Women in their seventies were the most at risk. Beer does less damage than wine according to a study in Alcohol and Alcoholism. Researchers found that the hippocampus-the part of the brain that stores memories - was 10% smaller in beer drinkers than those who stuck to wine. And being overweight or obese is linked to brain loss, Swedish researchers discovered. Scans of around 300 women found that those with brain shrink had an average body mass index of 27 And for every one point increase in their BMI the loss rose by 13 to 16%.

The appearance from the outside is enough to deter anyone from venturing inside. If they can handle an exterior like that; imagine what the staff, kitchen and food must look like? First impressions are the ones that count. There are two potential solutions. 1. 240 gallons of paint and 10 painters. 2. 5 gallons of petrol and 1 pyromaniac. Didn't someone once try to burn the place down before?

I think it's all the stoners with their unstoppable appetities from smoking all that pot!

http://dietsexplained.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/fat-bastard1.jpg Ha!

Lerwick is an excellent place for Lerwegians to live!

Thanks, MJ. They kept changing the loccation and I couldn't find it anymore. The current player seems to be working much better then the one they were using before. I need to get my daily dose of Jane Moncrieff's fabulous voice!

paulb asks;............ The Council performs a vital role in managing and executing many roles in all aspects of life in Shetland. This does not mean that they are in any capacity qualified or skilled in attempting to run a commercial enterprise - and the results are there for reviewing! In the debate over Mareel, it became apparent that a number of councillors are indeed highly capable of reading a balance sheet, and equally capable of interpreting and questioning a business plan. Those same councillors are the ones who will perhaps take the role of questioning the accountable individuals to substantiate the date they are providing. This is an everyday occurence in any business, to ensure that problems are identified and resolved as soon as they become apparent. The Council could very easily sink itself if they got this investment wrong, as much from the destruction of the tourism business as the mechanics of Viking Energy!