As per my last email, you can subscribe to the Ideas/ERC Ireland group by adding your email below. We will review and approve your application as quickly as possible.
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I’ve created a Google Group called Ideas/ERC Ireland to share and disseminate information relating to the national programme of education and assistance in applying for ERC funding within Ireland.
If you’re a member of the Irish research community (either an active researcher or a member of a University/IT staff) and have not received an invite, please feel free to contact me on stephen[dot]flinter[at]sfi[dot]ie to request an invite. If you’re not from within the Irish system at present, but are considering applying for ERC funding through an Irish institution, you’re also welcome to contact me.
There’s not much there at present, but we will be fleshing it out in due course as information and documentation is issued by the ERC.
In their published work programme, the European Research Council has advised that proposals for the first call (Starting Independent Researcher Grants) will be accepted from April 1, 2007. This call will close on April 22, 2007 @ 17:00 EST.
The work programme document, however, allows the Director General the leeway to extend this deadline by up to two months. Presumably, this is to allow for possible start-up difficulties. Nevertheless, potential applicants would be well advised to prepare for April 22, just in case.
A recent entry in the Freakonomics blog points to an insightful piece originally published in the New York Times in 1996. The article poses the question over the ecomonic and environmental value of the recycling programme in the US, and in New York city in particular.
Like much of the Freakonomics work, it tackles issues that seem self-evident, and actually applies some data to try to figure out the real story. Also, like much of the the Freakonomics work, it finds that these self-evident truths are completely bogus. In this case, the article suggests that the entire recycling industry is both wasteful and unnecessary. A particularly interesting quote relates to the specific issue of paper recycling:
“We’re not running out of wood, so why do we worry so much about recycling paper?” asks Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute. “Paper is an agricultural product, made from trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption.”
Two questions strike me: does this analysis still hold water more than 10 years later? Second, has anybody undertaken such an examination of the Irish approach to recycling, given that we’re full swing into the age of the green bin?
New Irish is the term usually given to the recent immigrants to Ireland. According to a recent report by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, the net immigration into Ireland in the years from 1999 to 2004 was 188,800 people. This figure excludes returning Irish who had previously emigrated (and who account for another 139,200 people in the same time period). The New Irish are considered to be one of the key driving forces of the Irish economy, and the of the ability of the Irish economy to continue to prosper despite the relative tupor of our EU euro-zone neighbours.
What does all of this have to do with science and technology? Well, one of the New Irish is a 16-year old called Abdu Salam Abu Bakar. Abdusalam is a 3rd year student in CBS Synge Street, and he has just won the top prize in the 2007 BT Young Scientists Exhibition was held in the RDS from Thursday to Saturday last week.
His project, entitled “An Extension of Wiener’s Attack on RSA”, is based on attacking the famous RSA encryption algorithm.
To quote:
According to the judges, “Abdusalam mastered enormously complex mathematics which limit the security of encrypted digital and internet messages. Encryption means changing the letters of a message into a string of numbers which have meaning only to the person that knows the key. He has developed further conditions restricting the design of safe keys. Security keys are chosen using very large numbers and Abdusalam has increased the security of keys by improving the rigour of the encryption process. For a student still in second level, such command and insight into cutting edge mathematical research is remarkable.”
As an aside, in doing a bit of research for this post, I came across an article announcing the 2004 Young Scientist award, and it was also given in the mathematics field to a student from CBS Synge Street. They must be doing something right there.