Good news for a change. According to the World Bank, Ireland ranks in the top 10 countries to do business. This, despite the IMF/EU bailout, despite the austerity measures, despite the flight of talent from our shores, despite the increasing taxes, despite many other factors that would give the impression that the country should be struggling to do business. Ireland ranks number 10 overall. It gets better: go to the cited report and use the interactive controls to narrow the range on each ranking to 1-13 and thereby reduce the selection to the overall top 5. Ireland comes in at #5. The others (in ranking order) are Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the USA. If you then compare these [click title to read more…]
The ongoing rise of Internet-mediated social networking is encouraging millions of people to increase their interaction with other people for many reasons, including pleasure, the chance to rekindle old friendships, reaching out to distant relations, curiosity, enhancement of career and much more. It’s likely that each person who participates in social networking is doing so for multiple reasons, and also likely to use different social media services to satisfy each particular motivation. LinkedIn, for example, satisfies career-related motivations, Facebook for friends/family, Twitter for the sense of community and so on. To various extents, these services encourage different amounts and types of contributions from participants. Twitter is more real-time and focussed, while Facebook can be more contemplative. Needless to say that [click title to read more…]
While the advances in communications technology have certainly managed to give us the impression that everything happens everywhere at the same time, the planet is not yet flattened. We do not operate in the same time zone, yet we often behave as if we did.
My morning starts at 6:30am (in Europe) and continues until it is close of business on the US west coast. Or some time after.
It’s a long day on this flat but still spheroid planet.
This is the time of year when the Young Scientist exhibition takes place in Dublin, and my two lads and I spend a few hours going around the exhibits to see what manner of scientific exploration the children of this island have been engaged in for the past several months. It really is a fascinating exhibit, and a lot of credit is deserved by so many people, the organisers, the teachers, the judges and especially the many schoolchildren who participate.
This year, however, the three of us began to notice a common problem. It would seem that quite a lot of our budding scientists cannot illustrate statistics. Very few of the presentations used appropriate charts or diagrams for the types [click title to read more…]
I dismantled a Sony Ericsson phone recently, with the intention of repairing the keypad after my niece had chewed it a little. (She’s a year old, it’s the only way she can comment on build quality…) Expecting a little bit of dampness, I was horrified to find that the internals had turned to a kind of grey/green soup. Absolutely no hope of rescue – the phone is now on its way to the recyclers.
A few months ago I was repairing another mobile device and had to spend a while cleaning the fluff out of the inside. It’s an iPod Touch. There’s only one button, and it’s sealed. Even the speaker hole has a covering. So how did the fluff [click title to read more…]