Dr Mauro Dragone leads a European team of robotics experts in the quest for organic robotic intelligence. We may never worry about doing domestic duties again. By John Holden.

There is a Simpsons Halloween episode where the family get a new robotic home that automatically does all domestic duties and chores in the home. Marge chooses the voice of Irish actor Pearse Brosnan for the robot’s human response system. Then the house falls in love with Marge and tries to kill Homer.

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Nobel Prize winner Professor James Heckman is working with the UCD Geary Institute studying the complex links between biology and disadvantage. Interview by John Holden.

 

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Professor James Heckman is an economist of human development. As such, his work brings in the expertise of anthropologists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists and any other ‘ists’ you can think of.

 

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Do rich kids go to college more often than poor kids because they’re rich? Or are there personality, genetic and environmental issues at play? A groundbreaking new research project at the UCD Geary Institute attempts to tackle large socio-economic questions through an inter-disciplinary approach that will draw in expertise from economics, biology, neuroscience and psychology. By John Holden.

At a government level, tackling educational disadvantage has always been “solved” by throwing money at the problem through grants and scholarships. But research suggests there are greater forces at play than simply just money.

“Traditionally, going back over 50 years of research, economics has approached big policy questions such as educational decision-making in a way which only gave us partial answers, and we then built our economic models around those datasets,” explains Colm Harmon of the UCD Geary Institute. “We have had data available on what people earn and how much education they have achieved over their lives for decades. Coupled with computer power, there has been an explosion of this type of data analysis.

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With a meagre investment of 3 million euro, Ireland could join the European-wide LOFAR radio telescope network that hopes to find, among other things, evidence for one of science’s most studied theoretical periods: the time just after the Big Bang. By John Holden.

What can you get for three million euro these days? A very fine house in leafy south Dublin? A golden handshake from AIB? Or maybe the opportunity to assist in proving the origins of the universe?

Low Frequency Array telescopes or LOFAR are a low cost form of radio telescope that has several uses. A normal optical telescope aids in the observation of objects seen with visible light. If you point a regular telescope at something – anything - you should be able to see that object’s surface up close. A radio telescope is different in that it operates in the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is a much lower frequency than visible light and enables the viewing of naturally occurring radio emission from stars, galaxies, and other astronomical objects. In short, it shows us a different portion of space.

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Science communication is a field fraught with difficulty, and one which the media has a poor track record on. On 20 April Dr Brian Hughes of NUI Galway gave a talk to the Irish Sceptics Society on the problems faced in communicating scientific research in a way that's both accurate and comprehensible. By John Holden.

Here’s the dilemma: how do you communicate complex information fraught with jargon in a straightforward way to a scientifically illiterate audience without losing relevant or crucial parts of the story? Or, how do you explain something difficult in an easy way? This question has dogged the relationship between science and the media for a long time. Biological psychologist Dr Brian Hughes of NUI Galway came to Dublin on 20 April for a talk organised by the Irish Sceptics Society to try and make sense of it all.

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The Hack and Hackers Hack Day event took place yesterday at the Wood Quay Venue as part of the Dublin Innovation Festival. Hosted by ScraperWiki, it aimed to get journalists and bloggers working together with programmers to produce projects based on public data. By Alison Spillane.

Created by Julian Todd, ScraperWiki is an online tool that allows programmers to scrape data from multiple sources and copy it into a database. It lets users link data that may be spread over various different formats such as spreadsheets, tables, and PDFs. This data can then be easily accessed by journalists and researchers.

Many interesting ideas emerged during yesterday's event and the five groups tackled a wide range of subjects; from environmental protection to eTenders. At the end of the day, each group gave a three-minute presentation outlining where they had sourced their data and the project they envisaged.

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Ireland requires an overhaul of its education system and a shift in mindsets to embrace the knowledge economy. So heard the audience at a discussion in the Royal Irish Academy this evening entitled 'What's smart about Ireland' Smart Economy in 2010?'. By Malachy Browne.

The panel included Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor at the Irish Times, Karlin Lillington, technology journalist with the Irish Times, Sean O'Driscoll, CEO at Glen Dimplex, Brian Kelly, CEO of Celtic Catalysts and John Fitzgerald of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Michael Cronin of Dublin City University introduced the discussion. An audio recording of the complete discussion and Q&A is available below.

(Pictured left to right: Dick Ahlstrom, Sean O'Driscoll, John Fitzgerald)

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The three choices we have on food ethics, outlined by Joseph Mahon.

Eating doesn't usually give us cause for moral concern; stealing, lying, and hurting people all do. Other practices, such as capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia and war are morally suspect, and we argue endlessly about their correct moral status. But eating, as Peter Singer and Jim Mason observe in their book The Way We Eat:Why Our Food Choices Matter [ Rodale, 2006 ], "is generally seen quite differently. Try to think of a politician whose prospects have been damaged by what he or she eats."1

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