My heart went out to Brian Goggin today.  He told RTE news that he was taking a “significant” hit on his salary this year compared to last year.  Last year he ‘disclosed’ a salary of 2.8 million and this year he expects his salary to collapse to about 2 million.
Barack Obama has capped bankers salaries […]

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There is an article in Silicon Republic today about the emergence of bioinformatics in Ireland.  I said a few wacky things during the interview and they made it into the article.  Recently there has been an attempt to bring back an extinct species, the Pyrenean Ibex, by nuclear transfer (cloning) and a baby ibex was […]

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OK, so today we have the following bits of news:
1. The high court is expecting an “avalanche” of house repossessions.
2. Irish Life and Permanent lodged €7,000,000,000 (that’s 7 billion Euro) in Anglo Irish Bank last September when the government guarantee scheme came into being.  The cheeky little divils.
3. The former financial regulator Mr. Patrick Neary […]

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This morning I read a great paper on the influence of genetics in social networks.
Anyway, in the course of reading this paper I found out that you can catch a lot of things from your friends.  And I don’t mean diseases.
You can catch obesity.
Yes, folks.
Obesity can spread within a social network.  I find this surprising, […]

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Bill Gates spoke this week at TED.  He spoke about two issues - Malaria and teaching.  While I had heard the first part before and indeed have a pretty good idea about the effects of Malaria from conferences and reading about it, I was surprised at the part of the talk that related to teaching.  […]

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In the world of network mathematics, they have identified a phenomenon known as the ’small world effect’.  Essentially, this is the same as the “six degrees of separation” experiment.  It means that in a network, even one with millions of entities, there is often a very short connection between one entity and another.
The six degrees […]

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In May of last year, I wrote about a book that I had just read called Q+A, by Vikas Swarup.  I thought it was quite a good book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Since then, the film based on the book has come out - though the name has been changed to Slumdog Millionaire.
The film has […]

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Many people credit Darwin with being the very first person in the history of the world to suggest that all the creatures on the planet never changed.  In fact, it was common currency among scientists and thinkers that organisms evolved and indeed that the planet had evolved.  Michelangelo, Plato and Socrates all had thoughts on […]

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Left work at 7:15 pm last night (I’m marking exam scripts) and drove the 25 km home in the snow.
…and it only took me 2 hours.  Spent most of the journey watching the woman in front driving her rear-wheel-drive Alfa Romeo that constantly kicked out the back wheels and threatened to send her flying into […]

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