Jamie’s Weblog

Doogle, the Irish Search Engine [via Karlin]

Caution: unprocessed brain dump in progress… The future will be made by those who succeed in content routing. That is, getting content (high-level, atomic pieces of information such as documents, photos, videos etc) from one place to another. The problem with routing content is that you first need to figure out where the content is, [...]

I’ll be attending the PLAN workshop on the 1st February and the UK-UbiNet workshop where I shall give a brief presentation talk ramble about my PhD and, in particular, my position paper, Communities of Collocation [pdf].

The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn’t. Hard means worry: if you’re not worrying that something you’re making will come out badly, or that you won’t be able to understand something you’re studying, then it isn’t hard enough. — Paul Graham, What You’ll Wish [...]

Consider the following… Yesterday was apparently the most depressing day of the year Hilary was a little down when she’d left for work in the morning I was feeling incredibly in love with her I’d heard some news about interflora on the news in the morning The price of flowers is bound to rise between [...]

“In total, the core of our team has invested something like 80 man years on this experiment, 18 of which are mine,” Atkinson wrote. “I think right now the key lesson is this — if you’re looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn’t it.” — David Atkinson, who’s experiment onboard the [...]

Karlin Lillington has a short opinion piece in the Guardian about MLE. She asks: What is the role of a technology-based research lab? And how do you quantify its success? [...] a big problem was mismatched expectations between government and MIT. MLE, a commercialising research partner to fledgling Irish industry? Please. That veers away from [...]

If you’ve heard of, or are interested in, two recent books about our decision-making processes, then you’ll want to read this column over at Slate where the authors provide a critical discussion of the theories. Blink argues that snap decisions are better than the deeply researched and apparently well-considered. The Wisdom of Crowds argues that [...]

It seems that the J1 visa programme, which allows Irish students to spend a summer in the U.S., is being hit by the recent security restrictions. The Irish Times is reporting thatJ1 applications fell from 6,500 to 2,800 because students must now attend a 5min interview at the U.S. embassy in Dublin. Perhaps this is [...]

On Friday, Mike broke the news to me that Media Lab Europe (MLE) is to close down. My brother informed me that there’s an Irish Times article on the closure (sub required) and various ex-MLE’ers have blogged about it. Tears did not form in my eyes. As I’ve written before, my 2 years at MLE [...]