Our garden at home tends to be relatively free of interesting birds (unless you consider crows and magpies interesting). Yesterday morning, however, a Robin made an appearance, and thankfully decided to stay around long enough for me to get my camera out and get my long lens set up.

Here are some of the better shots.

SFI Director General, Prof. Frank Gannon has recently announced that he is to leave SFI in the coming months, to take up the position of Director of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research.

Science Magazine has a brief piece about Frank’s announcement, although I think Frank is blaming himself a little too much for the current recession:

The SFI director jokes that Ireland should be happy to see him go. “I came back to Ireland for the first time in 1981, and the economy went way down hill. I left in 1994, the economy recovered. I came back in 2007, the economy is doing well and then immediately goes down. So I thought I had a duty to leave,” he says with a laugh.

There was an excellent sunset over Dublin this evening, but I was just too late out to catch it. Nevertheless, I did manage to catch some of the fading sunlight as the city lights came one.

This image is taken from Cruagh Rd., in the Dublin mountains overlooking the city.

We’re holidaying in beautiful Mulranny, Co. Mayo this year. My wife very kindly bought me a birthday present of a full-day one-on-one workshop with the wonderful Westport-based photographer Eamonn McCarthy (aka Images of Mayo).

Not only is Eamonn an all-round nice guy, he’s also an incredible landscape photographer and a great teacher to boot. There’s no doubt that my photography has taken a step change since my workshop with him.

Here are a few panoramas that I took during the course of the day:

As you can tell from these photos, the scenery was absolutely spectacular. On top of that, the weather was quite challenging, with us having to dash to the car for cover on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, the weather gave rise to the very dramatic skies that you see in these images, so it was well worth it.

While we did some tripod shooting, these pictures were taken handheld, and stitched together with the open-source Hugin application, which seems to have done a pretty good job of it.

John Breslin of NUIG and DERI is hosting the forthcoming BlogTalk social media event being held in NUI Galway on 26-27 August. It has a great line-up of social media speakers and panels.

Keynotes will be given by Stowe Boyd, an authority on social tools and originator of the term advisory capital; Dan Gillmor, a noted Silicon Valley journalist, author of “We the Media”, and director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship; and Don Thibeau, director of OpenID, an easy and safe log-in system for websites used by Yahoo!, Google and many others. Other notable speakers include Blaine Cook, former lead with Twitter; Charles Dowd, Facebook Platform Operations; and Ade Oshineye, Google Social Web.

Irish social media gurus will include Darragh Doyle, boards.ie; Fergus Hurley, VC-funded Silicon Valley startup Clixtr; and Ted Vickey, former director of the White House gym.

Early bird registration is open at www.blogtalk.net until August 18th, and costs €149 for two days (€99 for students and unemployed). There is also a special hotel rate of €89 available for the nights of the 25th and 26th August with The House Hotel; just quote BlogTalk when booking.

One of the major centres that SFI funds is the Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C), based in UCC. 4C investigates the area of constraint technology. Constraint technology is a branch of computer science that is interested in looking at problems where you’re trying to find the optimal allocation of scarce resources, where there are certain rules (constraints) governing how those resources can be deployed.

A typical example is that of timetabling. Imagine you have a school with a certain number of teachers, pupils, classrooms and classes to be taught. You have to figure out how to allocate classes to class-rooms and teachers to classes. You will have obvious constraints such as no pupil or teacher can be present in two different classes at the same time, or two classes cannot use the same classroom at the same time. You will have constraints on the courses that the students take, such as all students must take at least three hours of Maths and English per week. You might have a number of additional constraints on the use of rooms such as Science can only be taught in the science lab, Art in the art studio. You get the idea.

Constraint technologies are techniques aimed at figuring out how to model these problems, and then how to arrive at a solution that (i) satisfies all the rules and (ii) optimises some function, such as minimising the number of teacher hours spent.

One of the 4C researchers, Helmut Simonis has recently started a blog describing various industrial applications of constraint technologies that he has developed during his career in the area. The blog provides a fascinating insight into how constraint and scheduling problems in areas such as manufacturing, oil refining, airport stand allocation and poultry transportation planning are tackled and solved.

The descriptions themselves are written very much for the layman, rather than the constraint technology expert, but do include references to the original academic material for those looking for more technical depth.

Highly recommended: http://hsimonis.wordpress.com/.

The Irish Times is reporting the outcome of the PRTLI 5 funding round. There doesn’t appear to be anything yet on the PRTLI site itself (presumably pending the official launch and announcement). As the heading of the Times article states, UCD and TCD have been the big winners, winning the two largest grants (€50m and €75m respectively) and participating in a good number of the smaller ones.

As an aside, back in January 2009 I mentioned that the PRTLI 5 process had been announced, with the comment that it had been a “long time coming”. Look’s like we’re finally there.

I recently came across an interesting site called “The Google College Rankings”. The premise of the site is to use Google search results to determine the “top” (for some definition of top") universities in a country. This approach is much less methodical than the better known Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

Here’s the page for Irish Universities/Colleges.

Google Scholar is one of the mainstay tools that my colleagues and I use in our day-to-day jobs. I use it for everything from helping me identify potential reviewers, check conflicts of interest and determining the academic standing of an author (through their h-index, for example).

For all its excellence, GS doesn’t get as much attention or new features as many of the better known Google properties. Not least of which is the lack of a Google Data API to the service, which would be immensely useful.

Earlier this week, Google launched the Google Scholar Blog. Hopefully, this heralds a resurgence in development of new features for GS.

Over at the NY Times, Paul Krugman is having another pop at Ireland’s “fiscal austerity”.

The comments both in support of and contradicting his argument are interesting.