November 02, 2003
Boffins
There's a new Irish science magazine on the market, called Science Spin. It's a nice glossy publication, with plenty of interesting articles. The cover story is about a project by the Marine Institute to photograph the entire Irish coastline. The result is 10,000 images on 8 CDs. (Though it's not mentioned in the article, each CD costs 31.50 euro and there's one each for Galway and Mayo. Clare and Limerick on the same CD, as are Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal). In addition to the cover image, there are two pages of photographs showing various parts of the Irish coastline. However, only photograph has a caption that describes what you are actually looking at. Which one ? You guessed it - the Dublin picture (of Sandymount Strand). The rest are labelled simply as "Mayo", "Clare", etc. Looking at photographs without knowing where it is has limited appeal. The pleasure is in seeing something familiar as if for the first time (the images are shot in infra-red, so green objects like grass and trees show as red in the images). Even the cover image of Galway city gets no caption, though you can see the Cathedral, the salmon weir and the university. So is this yet another case of jackeens just not bothering ? Well, probably not. The magazine is published in Foxford, Co. Mayo. The images on the CDs are labelled - it's looks like the magazine just didn't bother. Try a bit harder the next time, lads.
At the back of the magazine is a list of academic projects that received funding from the Science Foundation Ireland. One in particular caught my eye (from the University of Limerick).
…studying the design, deployment and evaluation of novel interactive artifacts and environments in public shared spaces based on a human activity conceptual model.
Eh? This could about two farmers trying to chase sheep back through a gap in a stone wall using new sticks cut from the ditch. Though I doubt it.
Posted by Monasette at November 2, 2003 01:12 PM