Inside View from Ireland

Best Invention of 2007

THE INVENTION OF 2007 most likely to help people is MammaPrint, a genetic print of a cancerous tumour. By getting a genomic profile, specialists can better determine the kind of spread most likely from the cancer. The 70-gene screen, developed by Amsterdam-based Agendia,  is the first DNA test approved by the Federal Drug Administration to measure genes at work. Cancer occurs when our genetic information mutates. These genetic alterations in turn cause inappropriate growth of the cells and thus lead to proliferation of the cancer cells in the affected tissue. I am highly susceptible to this malady and plan to use genomic profiling to get me through the year 2035. If I don't explore something like MammaPrint, I will be done and dusted within 25 years. My fate is already in my genes and I know that from a battery of tests run in the early 90s by the US military. I thought about these things during Science Week Ireland.

Cross-cultural LinkedIn

IF A BUSINESS NETWORK like LinkedIn has real pulling power, its connectivity will help Irish social media maven Tom Raftery connect to employment in Spain. Tom has tapped into LinkedIn's power to test the waters in Spain, prior to moving from Ireland with his family. Although my immediate LinkedIn network has no Spanish nodes, I've a feeling that some positive energy will flow Tom's way now that he's probing the power of LinkedIn contacts. Like several others, I believe LinkedIn is an effective self-evolving Rolodex.

Moleskine the most helpful invention

THE MOST HELPFUL invention that has allowed me to do my work better is the Moleskine journal. It's something I thought about when considering a question from Science Week Ireland. I carry a Moleskine more often than I carry my mobile phone, mainly because it works without batteries and often gets me free cups of coffee at Irish cafes. I record ideas in it, draw weird pictures in it, and tear out its perforated pages to share giveaway thoughts with others. I believe "words, like eyes, are windows into the soul." My favourite Moleskines are the large 100 page sketchbooks and the watercolour books. I would not fly without my Moleskine.

Next Gadget

BEING A SUCKER for writing instruments, I think the next gadget I will buy is something that won't go walking from my desk, perhaps something that looks alien. I think I'll get a Free Ride pen from Jean Pierre Lepine since it's actually dropped more than 30% in price since we last saw the thing in New York City. This means the pen costs less than €100 today. The Free Ride pen wants to be different, ergonomic, and fun. This push top ballpoint features a soft rubber like material in the vital sections where finger meets pen. The arched hull is held in place by hand drilled screws. As Lepine puts it, "I create tomorrow's writing instruments for today’s men and women". We'll go to Joon Pens the next time we're in New York, checking out shops in Trump Tower and Grand Central Station. I'll definitely get this pen if I win a Wii from Science Week Ireland and can sell it to someone for the money to buy the pen.

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Damien Mulley -- "Science Week Competition Day 3"
Previously: Science Week Ireland Survey and My Favourite Invention

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Most Desired Invention Is A Carsync

UPDATED 21 NOV 07: One week after posting this item, it appears to have received the most links and enjoyed the most number of visitors when compared to all five of the Science Week Ireland questions that I answered during the week-long event.

SCIENCE WEEK IRELAND asks, "What invention would  you like to see most in the future?" I want my car to sync to my house and my workplace. (I don't want a sink in my car, as one of the students attending Science Week Ireland thought.) When I'm at home, I want my car's on-board storage to show up on my home network so I can drag and drop my new playlists into the car for later listening. I want my car to initiate a podcatcher routine whenever it has been motionless for more than three hours. The podcatcher will grab new playlists, the 50 most recent unread email headers, new audio books and updates to speed camera locations, feeding that location into my GPS. When the car gets to work, it needs to tell the Expense Network whether the car should be compensated for its journey. The Expense Network will know this because the car's GPS knows which routes traveled are considered reimburseable. While at work, the car needs to sync with my workspace, automatically receiving a copy of every unzipped and unlocked item that was open on my laptop since the car was motionless outside my workplace. The carsync will receive an upload request from my laptop approximately 45 minutes from the time that the electronic calendar indicates work is finished for the day. When headed away from work, the carsync needs to start audio when the door shuts, citing the top five things related to "don't forget the milk." Then the car needs to verbalise the location of the most recently uncovered speed camera, provide an AA roadwatch summary for the region where the car has been parked, and tell me the title of the last three items grabbed by my podcatcher. On the way home, the carsync needs to say the number of minutes remaining in the journey, the number of kilometers available in the current tank of petrol, and the top billing found in its search of eventful calendar items for my town of Cashel. Within one mile of my house, carsync should tell me the top speed measured by housesync of vehicles traveling outside the front door of my house for the time period when carsync was away from home. Finally, the car should welcome me home and start downloading its newly synced contents to my home network RAID disk 88. When I lock the car, the same process unlocks my front door and turns on the lights in the lower floor of the house.

ScienceWeekIreland

ALONG WITH A DOZEN OTHER programme specialists and technical staff from Tipperary Institute, I am part of a three-day event that complements Science Week Ireland. Our part of the itinerary involves exposing students with an aptitude for mathematics to the science of behind computer games development. During intense two-hour segments, second level students are building parts of a revised Space Invaders game, incorporating their own sound effects, their own graphics and some tweaks to the program code. Within 90 minutes, the new game gets compiled in front of an enthusiastic audience and selected students get to play the game. The resulting computer code can be used by students to exhibit their creation in the XNA Ireland Challenge, an event at Tipperary Institute on 13 March 2008. During the quiet moments this week, we have several manic giveaways--we give prizes to teens who correctly answer technical questions. After the first day, I wish we could offer this kind of activity to teenagers across Ireland. It takes some choreography to make it work.

My fav invention the phone

I BELIEVE THE first piece of technology I encountered as a young child was the family phone. It was an old black rotary thing that tried to ring but sounded pathetic. It served me and my four brothers for nearly a decade before dying in the fish tank. I remember that day well because my two-year-old brother thought fish could talk so he dipped the handset into the 25-gallon aquarium where it remained for nearly half a day. Today, I've got more mobile phones than phone numbers. I have phones that text me automatically with birthday reminders, anniversary dates and days of remembrance because my phones have become smarter through the years. Nonetheless, the emotive power of voice carries the day and propels "the phone" to top of the rankings in a question posed by Science Week Ireland. What's your favourite invention? Damien Mulley has scraped some of the most interesting answers to this question and when spun together, they make some of the best reading you would enjoy to share.

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Previously: "Science Week Ireland Survey"

Bonus Link: Photoset snapped during our work with Science Week Ireland.

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Science Week Ireland Survey

WE HAVE THREE DAYS of Science Week action happening in Tipperary Institute, involving hundreds of school students who are coming to Thurles because they want to see how mathematics relates to “The Science Behind Computer Games” this week. Besides teaching these students in a hands-on environment how maths, art and audio play important parts in making a video game, we're also interviewing audience members about topics arising from Science Week's surveys. The survey complements the theme that science plays an important part in everyday life. As explained on the Science Week website, "We are constantly surrounded by science, technology and engineering in the modern world. We are woken by talking alarm clocks, dress in man-made fibres, check the TV weather, listen to radio news or traffic reports, use electricity to make our breakfast. And all that is before we have even left the house." We are asking students who come to Tipperary Institute to talk about the role science plays in their lives. The questions change from day to day.

Green Consumption Tax

IRELAND HAS ITS first Green coalition government and talk has started about having the polluter pay for environmental decisions. How about wrapping that philosophy around consumer goods? As Tim O'Reilly notes in China, "the environmental impacts of China's growth are not sustainable. We need to think about something like a carbon tax on products imported from China." Like all Western countries, Ireland's addiction to cheap goods, and China's race to catch up to Western standards of living, is putting terrible impacts "off the balance sheet." Ireland often shifts things like pension payments for civil servants and government politicians "off the balance sheet", following a universal tactic that pushes real issues so far into the future than when the day of reckoning comes, you pay much more than ever forecast. A carbon tax or transport tax on imports will not flush among trade delegates. But getting China to adopt international standards for pollution and energy consumption will help the planet. Sounds like a crusade for Sir Bono. The Irish government could start by naming Bono the Honorary Minister for Enterprise and then getting him to comment on the condition of the sky whenever he flies to Chengdu. Just ask him to talk about what he sees during an hour-long internal flight from Beijing. Then after landing in Chengdu, ask him to chat with the locals, posing a simple question, "How long has it been since you have seen the stars?" (Not stars like Bono.) The answers could make a compelling mash-up in a video.

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Tim O'Reilly -- "China Foo Camp"
John Doerr -- "John Doerr: Seeking salvation and profit in greentech"

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Android Developer Challenge

GOOGLE OFFERS $10m in prize money to developers who help create software to be used in the Open Handset Alliance phones (the Android phones). Java developers who look at this prize money will have to work with Google's own core Java virtual machine (JVM) technology called Dalvik. Google believes Dalvik will execute Java programs faster on the constrained hardware of mobile phones. Android isn't part of the Java Community Process (JCP) that Sun established in 1999 to oversee the development of new Java features. People who have used Android to browse recognise its ability to render complex pages but point to its lack of Flash support and believe it is slower than Opera Mini 4.

JCP helps codify new features such as application programming interfaces (APIs), so programmers can have a standard way of calling upon new technology such as Bluetooth support for streaming content. Google believes the JCP would not accommodate the developer freedoms Google thought were important in Android.

"We wanted the platform to be open in a lot of different ways," said Mike Cleron, a Google senior staff engineer working on Android. "The idea is that anybody can come along and replace the pieces of the Android experience on a very fine-grained level. The existing APIs didn't really allow the level of openness we were hoping to achieve in Android."

The Android API allows you to store and retrieve information from (SQLite) databases, and files locally and from the Internet, as well as requesting permissions to make phone calls, read/write contacts, receive SMS texts, and capture images from the phone's camera.