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Ireland’s “education deficit”

Could write a book about this I’ll keep it to a single rambling post! I was reading this article in today’s Irish Times. The conclusion appears to be that we don’t have a world class education system and that some tech companies are finding recent graduates poor. This was described by Craig Barrett at the Farmleigh conference last year and more recently at the described December 2009 meeting between the management of tech multinationals based in Ireland and the minister for education, Batt O’ Keefe.

Many multinationals, O’Keeffe heard, were reluctant to recruit from certain colleges because of concerns about standards. There were even suggestions that several institutes of technology (ITs) and one university were on an unofficial recruitment “blacklist”. At the core of the problem was grade inflation across the education sector, from Leaving Cert to third-level degrees.

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You can’t keep good tech down

Whenever I hear someone over the age of 30 explaining how some new technology or techno-craze is “useless/ pointless/ stupid/ timewasting/ boring/ foolish” etc. I make a mental note to look up that technology and learn more about it. I’m over 30 myself so I’m accepting a degree of techno-fogeydom has creeped into my outlook. I even dismissed twitter as a distracting waste of time. It _is_ distracting but that isn’t the point.

Twitter fulfills a social need. We’re wired for verbal communication and twitter provides us with a convenient way of filling that need that is different in its brevity and reach from other mechanisms. Few enough people connect to those they don’t know personally on facebook but twitter behavior is different. In many ways this is liberating and innovative. By keeping tweets to short bursts of 140 characters we accept a convention that limits our ability to abuse network trust with long and indulgent messages. That’s what blogs are for. When I look at my friends twitter usage and compare it with my own it’s clear that many of us use it to break dunbar’s number. Our casual twitter relationships greatly outstrip the 150 person friend limit that’s more obvious on facebook. Twitter is nothing less than a social revolution. A quick ideas mart… One that, according to Nielsen ratings, subscribers spend a rapidly increasing amount of time using.

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advertising standards

I find it more than a little surprising that with the UK in an economic crisis neither the advertising standards authority nor the financial regulator seems to have a problem with extremely “short term” credit solutions being advertised with effective APR’s of over 2500%. This may be a perfectly legitimate service but not one without significant risks to the borrower. I think it’s immoral to charge such an interest rate under any circumstances and I doubt I’m the only person who finds it offensive!?

Also, if you’re going to “convert your gold into cash” then check that the gold watch you’re getting melted down isn’t worth significantly more in an auction. Solid gold vintage Jaeger LeCoultre’s and Rolexes (displayed in 2 advertisements) are worth more than the market value of their precious minerals if they’re in reasonable condition. It’s really up to regulators to ensure that customers are adequately informed before availing of new financial services

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Twitter Updates for 2010-01-10