Archive for 'Commentary'
Where is this Greece place you speak of?
Posted on January 6, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary.
BBC online reported an earthquake in Greece. They felt the need to locate it.
3 Comments
Geeky thought about an Irish-English/English-Irish dictionary
Posted on February 7, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Technology.
Our start-up LouderVoice got a nice mention in the Irish-language daily newspaper Lá. We were at an un-conference called BarCamp Ireland South-East in Waterford and Conn Ó Muíneacháin did a nice write up about it. Due to my desperately rusty Irish, I had to make use of this online dictionary to translate some of the words. Whilst it is a great resource, it seems to be lacking a huge number of words and also only seems to handle the roots of of words (or whatever it is called i.e it’ll find léirmheastóir but not léirmheastóireachta).
So the thought struck me this morning that a dictionary is the ideal target for a community effort, like Wikipedia is for encyclopedias. In fact, some sort of custom wiki might be ideal as a base for generating such a dictionary.
It could start very simply with one page per letter of the alphabet and as it grows, new pages are generated to sub-divide it. A wiki is very simply a web-site with pages that anyone can edit. The idea being that if you went to the wiki-dictionary to find the translation of a word and you spotted other ones that were missing, in a few simple clicks you could add them.
Of course it would need an agreed style of entry so it looked consistent but I’m sure there are plenty of language experts who could come up with a few simple rules for that. It would also need moderators to keep it clean and delete spam etc. And the search function would have to be very good.
For the laugh, I’ve just created a sample of what that might look like over at pbWiki. It took all of ten minutes to do and is called focloir.pbwiki.com. When Google makes JotSpot free, that might be the ideal location for such a resource since Jotspot is much easier to use than most wikis.
So what do people think? A bit too techie? A bit too idealistic? No need?
Technorati Tags: foclóir, dictionary, wiki, Irish, Gaeilge, community, UGC, jotspot
32 Comments
Traffic Lights on Food - give me patience.
Posted on January 25, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Cooking, Food, Politics.
It appears the opposition parties have started their campaign to lose the next general election with their latest himbo/bimbo scheme which they picked up from the UK. They want traffic lights on food to indicate the levels of salt, sugar and fat. Not only are the stuck in the 1980’s with the fat obsession, but they show such a basic mis-understanding of human nature that the scheme was obviously devised by a marxist.
If I want to buy fat-laden, carb-laden, salt-laden Tayto, I bloody will and they chances of me looking at some insulting graphics are zero. When I smoked, you could have put pictures of sliced open cancerous lungs on the box and I’d happily have puffed away.
Information is only useful to those seeking it. If we want nutrition information then we’ll use the amazing human ability to read to find out what is in the box. “oh but people don’t know what a safe level of salt is, so our traffic light system will enable them to figure this out without actually ever having to think”. “Next year, we’ll be bringing in a system which does an instant analysis of your blood and won’t let you buy anything with too much salt or sugar”.
I was pleasantly surprised that FF told the opposition to get a clue and that they would not be bringing in such a scheme.
The first political party which starts a campaign to destroy the ever growing nanny state gets my vote.
You want people to eat properly? Then make Home Economics, Social & Scientific, Cooking compulsory in schools for both boys and girls starting around age 7. Hell, you could do a double whammy and teach it through Irish.
Technorati Tags: Traffic+Lights, Food, Labour, Fine+Gael, Marxism, Nanny+State, Nutrition, Intelligence, Cop+On, Information, Knowledge, Cooking, Tayto
11 Comments
Who do they think they are fooling?
Posted on October 29, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Ireland, Motor Cars.
Cork->Rosslare, Rosslare->Cork on a Bank Holiday Weekend. Number of cops encountered? Big fat zero. Number of hard-of-thinking suicidal cretins encountered? 4.
Oh but they did arrest over 100 drunk drivers today. Keep that up for 365 days a year and maybe it’ll be something other than a reflection of their day-to-day incompetence as they waste taxpayers money snaring people doing 45 in 40 zones on bypasses across the country.
Technorati Tags: roadsafetyblog, efficiency, resources, resource+managment, competence, quotas, lip+service
5 Comments
Nurture my ass
Posted on October 29, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Family.
I have 4 kids (soon to be 5), 3 boys and 1 girl. Sibéal gives as good as she gets as far as fight are concerned. She has a very non-girly mother and only a slightly girly Dad. Yet this is what she spent all day yesterday in whilst chasing her cousin Rachel (similarly attired).
Technorati Tags: Kids, High Heels, Jimmy Choos
No Comments
Oh no, can you imagine flying RyanAirLingus to the US?
Posted on October 5, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Ireland.
I love paying €3 to fly to Gatwick but the thought of them running trans-Atlantic flights makes my blood run cold. How many Bullseyes do they think they could sell to the average punter over 5 hours to deaden the headache caused by the yellow everywhere?
On the upside, I’d happily pay €5 an hour to have a PSP embedded in the seat back in front of me. But will he really do that?
Technorati Tags: RyanAir, Aer+Lingus
7 Comments
Looks like the hamster is going to be ok
Posted on September 23, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Entertainment.
All reports seem to indicate that Richard Hammond is well on the mend which is a big relief to any fan of Top Gear.
Related to this, I noticed something very interesting on the BBC web-site over the past few days when checking up on him. All of the headlines are obviously decided by editors and news experts and reflect what they think are the pressing issues of the day e.g. various Iranian or Venezuelan numbskulls embarassing their nations at the UN or the genuinely important Darfur and so on. Nowhere in the headlines, after the first announcement, has Hammond been mentioned.
But if you scrolled down to the section on “most read” or “most emailed”, it is stories about Hammond that have been number one for the past three days! It really highlights the huge difference between what we “should” be interested in and what we actually are interested in.
Those of you familiar with Digg know that it is a news site where the top stories are dictated by how many votes they get from the users. They are sometimes accused by “our betters” as pandering to the mob mentality and you often do get nonsense stories as the top ones of the day but what I have always found interesting about Digg is that it generally is a strong reflection of the important stories of the day as agreed on mainstream tech news sites too. So the mob mentality works a lot of the time. I guess it is a variation of the theme of that book “The Wisdom of Crowds“(which I really should read).
Whilst I’m not saying the BBC should dump their editors (well actually they should fire all the ones who insist on the use of inverted commas around any phrase that might be considered controversial: “terrorist”, “mass murderer”, “totalitarian dictator”, “king”), they might consider making one of the headline boxes a display for the most popular story over a 4/8/12/24 hour period. News for the people by the people.
I guess that is why I am such a fan of blogs and RSS feeds - I can subscribe to sites that feed me information that I am interested in and by taking a reasonable cross-section, I end up with a fairly rich view of certain topics and stories.
My issue with general news sites (not just the BBC) is that I don’t have the tools yet to filter the torrent of stories they push out and I can neither keep up with nor have interest in 90% of that information. A news feed which monitors my reading and filters based on what I have read historically would be a very powerful tool indeed.
Technorati Tags: Richard+Hammond, BBC, News, Digg, Mob+Mentality, Wisdom+Crowds
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Interested in what the papers were saying up to 200 years ago?
Posted on September 6, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Commentary, Entertainment.
Well Google have just released their most impressive service in a long long time. Over at News Archive Search you can search on a bunch of newspapers worldwide going way back. In many cases you have to pay to see the scan of the paper itself but you can read the actual text for free.
As a test I put in the phrase “famine Ireland” and then selected “before 1880″ and found a newspaper article from The Republican Compiler of Gettysburg on March 1st 1847 which mentions the suffering caused by the Irish famine.
This is an incredibly powerful tool for anyone interested in what was really going on at a particular time rather than the interpretation put on things by historians.
As a tool for schoolkids, it really does boggle the mind compared to what I grew up with. I remember our Irish history book in the Inter Cert doing 1922 to 1969 in a couple of pages and then stopping at 1969.
Imagine if the Irish Times, The Indo and whoever owns the rights to The Irish Press were to hand over their archives to Google Ireland? Hell, I’d be happy to see my tax euros spent on paying them to do it.
Next query, “bombing of Dresden”. Dunno why but it was the first thing that popped into my head after the famine. Oh I’m a barrel of laughs today.
tags: Google, News+Archive+Search, The+Irish+Press, The+Irish+Times, The+Irish+Independent
2 Comments
