In my opinion, there’s no better way to break the tension before a major economic decision than to adopt the style of Weird Al and write some song parodies. A few months ago, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah became ‘Board Snip Nua’. Before that, we had Copa-Obama. Today is of course Budget Day and I’d like to [...]
It’s so cold and it’s so broken, Board Snip Nua!
I’ve always had a soft spot for song parodies, as longer established readers of the blog will probably ruefully attest. My last foray into this territory with my economic hat on was “Brother, Can you bail out my bank?” in the midst of our global financial excitement last Autumn (although I did try my hand [...]
Future Focus, recession, Scotland and Cristiano Ronaldo
The slides and a video interview based on my presentation at the Future Focus event, chaired by James Bellini, in Edinburgh on June 11.
New Day, New Website
I’ve been talking about it for a while now, and the day has finally arrived – my new website is live. I hope you like it – the new layout is designed to make navigation easier so there are just 3 main categories now: Irish Economy, World Economy and Property Market. There are now also [...]
From Stalking to Talking: A Beginner's Top Ten Twitter Tips
I’ve been using Twitter for the guts of a hundred days now. In that time, I’ve added about 1 new connection per day and posted about 10 status updates a week. So I’m probably going to have to graduate from beginner to low intermediate status pretty soon, as far as Twitter is concerned. Before I [...]
So long recession (for a day at least): Streamgraphing Ireland's Twitter-news!
Another month, another visualization method!
This time it’s Twitter StreamGraph, which tries to show a river of topics related to a keyword over time. It’s early days for this particular method, I think – having a range of options, such as number of tweets, or a particular time period, etc., would be very handy, but still [...]
Guess the Index: The Daft Report turns fun!
Following on from my recent post about Web2.0, hubdub and guessing Irish unemployment, I think it’s only right that I turn this future prediction market technology on myself. Well, on the Daft Report at any rate.
At this link, you’ll find a market on how much lower rents in Ireland will be in January 2009, compared [...]
Wisdom of the crowds? Web2.0, hubdub & guessing Ireland’s unemployment
I had the rather pleasant task today of going through a range of Web 2.0 / social networking tools and establishing the potential in their application to primary research. Some key things that the new generation of web tools can give include:
Using something like digg or scribd to find key themes and recent developments in [...]
The origins of the Beausang surname I – French Revolution? Try East Cork
All of four months ago – seems about a quarter that long ago – I posted about my Cork Smiddy and Beausang roots. Judging from some of the search terms that direct to my blog, it seems there’s a good bit of demand out there for the Beausang part in particular.
So, I’ve decided to put [...]
400 years on: Forget Southfork & Dallas, for family infighting check out the O'Doynes of the 1600s
Recently, inspired by Irish Culture Night, I bought a copy of the O’Doyne manuscript, published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission in the early 1980s. The manuscript itself is in Marsh’s Library, Ireland’s oldest public library, and is dominated by documents relating to the lengthy legal battle between Charles O’Doyne (Cathaoir Ă“ Duinn) and his older [...]
