RESEARCH: DURING THE boom years, Ireland witnessed a blitz of building. As well as the supermarkets and housing estates we were also investing in research infrastructure, constructing and kitting out labs.

We also enticed researchers – many of whom had trained here but had to leave due to under-investment – from around the world back to Ireland. When they came home, they brought not only expertise to the new buildings but also networks of contacts and collaborators.

A decade on, it’s time to build on that biomedical research groundwork. We need to reflect and build on what has been achieved, to strengthen those areas where Irish researchers have demonstrated ability to compete on the international stage – such as gastrointestinal disease and immunology – and to convert good ideas into the products and services that are the economic tangibles of State investment and the foundation of future enterprises, especially indigenous companies.

The Wired cover story, "The Web is Dead," has driven a lot of discussion in the tech world this week -- probably due more to the provocative title than anything else. In many ways, it's like the conversation earlier in the year sparked by Steve Jobs' comment that the tablet would eventually supplant the PC, and that the PC was dead. Note that PC sales look likely to grow by 20 percent or so this year.

These kinds of discussions remind me of a PC Magazine Editors' Day we held about a dozen years ago. We had a panel of columnists on stage, and someone asked about OS/2. John C. Dvorak, always one for a quick answer, said, "It's dead." There was a bunch of arguing on stage. The next question asked about Apple, which was then in a very tough period, and Dvorak's reaction was: "It's dead." And so on through the rest of the panel -- whatever the question was, John had the same answer. It was quite amusing.

But in general, such conversations haven't been particularly enlightening. Once you get past the headline, the Wired story points out the growth of Apps on things like the iPad and the iPhone, and how video is now taking up more bandwidth than "Web" content. That's disregarding the fact that most video is accessed through Web sites like YouTube and Hulu. If you add that back in, my guess is you'll find that Web traffic as a percentage of Internet traffic has actually grown in the past couple of years because peer-to-peer client traffic is a somewhat smaller percentage.

I walked along the mud-caked fringe of farmland and tried in vain to make out the profiles of a quarter of a million baby tomato plants. It was hard to believe that in just a few months this perfect rectangle of endless muck would burst into three million pounds of ripe red fruit, and even stranger to think that this vast monoculture just might be leading the world toward agricultural sustainability -- particularly considering that not one of the plants before me was organic, heirloom, or pesticide free.

"When I see my fields, I see a canvas," said Frank Muller, the sunburned avatar of agri-technology who sold 60,000 tons of last year's tomato harvest to transnational food giant Unilever, which subsequently processed the lot into bottles of Cheesy, Chunky, and Robusto-style Ragú spaghetti sauce.

The 918 Spyder will be the world's fastest plug-in hybrid.

For years, as Toyota and Honda toiled away at hybrid-electric vehicles, German manufacturers largely ignored electric-drive technology. But times have changed, and last week, Porsche committed to making a production version of what will likely be the world's fastest plug-in hybrid: a rip-roaring two-seat supercar with a top speed of 198 miles per hour and a zero-to-62-mph acceleration of 3.2 seconds.

The Porsche 918 Spyder was first shown as a concept car at the Geneva Motor Show last March to demonstrate Porsche's research into battery-powered hybrid powertrains. Its racy styling was combined with the greenest of features: a zero-emissions "E-Drive" mode that gives it up to 16 miles of electric-only range. With some European cities expected to institute emissions-based entrance fees or congestion charges, the 918 Spyder will offer a few rich buyers both supercar performance and environmental peace of mind.

Maybe there's something for hippies to love about ecological disaster, after all. Chris Combs, photography editor at National Geographic News, took these amazing shots while on assignment in the Gulf of Mexico. Via Submitterator, he says:

...researcher Ping Wang pointed me towards his grad student's work with UV light. Turns out that the oil glows bright, head-shop fluorescent orange under UV light. Rip Kirby's ultra-powerful $1800 "Klingon Death Ray" ultraviolet spotlight lit up every particle of oil-stained sand, even in seemingly clean areas, and our footprints showed up Day-Glo orange.

British rail hasn’t reached the stature of French, German, Japanese, or Spanish high-speed trains, but if PriestmanGoode’s plans for a new high-speed double-decker train system are any indication, things in the UK will reach a global level soon.

Their pitch:

Introducing an entirely new concept in the way we travel, the train will incorporate a flexible, open plan design allowing for interaction, space and relaxation without compromising privacy. Both commuting and longer haul journeys will be more relaxed, comfortable and akin to modern living, featuring traditional commuter seats (designed to incorporate in-transit entertainment systems) alongside private berths – for families, private parties or business meetings echoing the nostalgia of compartmental train travel. A children’s play area will be integrated into the train and a luxury first class section will mirror the choice offered to air travellers with a luxury lounge and bar.

The exterior of the train, designed to emulate design classics such as Concorde, the Spitfire and Rolls Royce, will be 400 metres long and the extended nose section will be one of the most extreme in the world – vitally important for the aerodynamics of a train which will travel at 225mph.

The slower days of summer seem to have also sparked a discussion of how to best cultivate creativity – and not just in the advertising community. After reading a Newsweek piece on why brainstorming doesn’t work (and what does), we found an ideahive post on provoking serendipity particularly timely – and serendipitous.

The piece defines Serendipity as

“The emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.”

If you’ve had a great career what happens to all your knowledge and experience when you retire?

My wife and I had dinner recently with a friend of hers from high school and Tom, her husband – whom I had never met before. I took one look at his suit and guessed “high-powered lawyer. “ (I was right, the suit probably added another $250 per billable hour.)

Over dinner we got chatting, and I found out that besides the great suit, Tom was actually a pretty remarkable guy. He was a trial litigator – one of the guys that slug it out in court in front of a judge and jury. And Tom wasn’t just any trial lawyer. He was the hired gun that Fortune 100 companies and hedge funds bring in when billions are at stake. Listening to some of his stories over dinner was entertaining enough, but after awhile I realized I was hearing something else – this guy played strategy while his opponents were using tactics.

Yesterday may well be remembered as a turning point in our nation’s technology innovation policy. The Department of Energy announced that a consortium of more than 90 public- and private-sector organizations based in the Philadelphia region will host the first Energy Regional Innovation Cluster or, E-RIC, a new interagency program to accelerate energy innovation and commercialization. The new E-RIC was selected among many applicants to win $129 million dollars in grants and programmatic support from the DOE and six other federal agencies for investment in energy efficiency technology innovation and commercialization.

The award itself is important because buildings directly or indirectly account for approximately 40 percent of national global warming pollution; technology innovation in this sector has the potential to make a big impact on climate change. CAP has documented extensively how energy efficiency is among the best ways to create jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign fuels, and save money.

In my last post, I mapped the projected growth in service jobs across America's metro regions. Today, I look at a subset of those higher-paying, higher-skill jobs for knowledge, professional, and creative workers that make up the creative class. More than 35 million people are currently employed in creative class work in fields like science, technology, and engineering; business, finance, and management; law, health care, and education; and arts, culture, media, and entertainment. The creative class makes up roughly a third of total employment and accounts for more than half of all wages and salaries in America. Creative class employment has seen relatively low rates of unemployment during the course of the economic crisis. Creative class jobs will make up roughly half of all projected U.S. employment growth - adding 6.8 million new jobs by 2018.

Students who left college before graduating may get a second chance at earning their degree.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy and the Lumina Foundation for Education announced a joint program on Wednesday to find formerly enrolled college students whose academic records qualify them to be awarded associate degrees retroactively.

The three-year, $1.3-million effort, called Project Win-Win, also plans to identify former students who are fell just short of an associate degree, by nine or fewer credits, and re-enroll them to earn a degree.

The project has the potential to be a real game-changer in terms of the nation's efforts to achieve the college-completion goals set out by President Obama, the nation's governors, and Lumina. The president has repeatedly called for more Americans to earn college certificates or degrees so that by 2020 the United States can once again have the world's highest proportion of college graduates.

An academic believes he has found evidence to refute the case that increased university provision of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects is needed to aid the economy.

There is “no significant relationship” between a nation’s economic growth rate and the number of STEM students, according to an analysis by Paul Whiteley, professor of politics at the University of Essex.

In January, the then business secretary in Britain, Peter Mandelson, told the House of Lords that STEM skills were "crucial in securing future prosperity," hence the government was "opening up opportunities in universities and beyond."

PUNE, India — Call it India’s engineering paradox.

Despite this nation’s rise as a technology titan with some of the world’s best engineering minds, India’s full economic potential is stifled by potholed roadways, collapsing bridges, rickety railroads and a power grid so unreliable that many modern office buildings run their own diesel generators to make sure the lights and computers stay on.

It is not for want of money. The Indian government aims to spend $500 billion on infrastructure by 2012 and twice that amount in the following five years.

The problem is a dearth of engineers — or at least the civil engineers with the skill and expertise to make sure those ambitious projects are done on time and up to specifications.

Suhas Gopinath is in demand these days. He takes time from his schedule as chief executive officer of the Bangalore-based IT services firm Globals, which he founded in 2000, to speak several days a week at youth entrepreneur events, business schools, and industry conferences. He was in Davos in February for the World Economic Forum and was one of the organizers of the Young Business Leaders conference held in May in Tanzania. After 10 years at the helm of his company, he's looking ahead to new challenges and new ventures.

Not bad for someone 24 years old.

Gopinath gained fame for his precocious success, starting his company in a cybercafé at age 14 and expanding it into a multinational business while his peers were still studying for their high school finals. These days the novelty of Gopinath's youth has worn thin—to him, at least. His ardor for entrepreneurship remains undiminished.

Let's face it - the traditional business plan as we know it (or as we knew it) is slowly slowly going away. Or is it? Startups and small businesses move at such lightning pace these days that a static document quickly becomes outdated, but the principals and lessons involved with its creation could be valuable in a new form. Many young entrepreneurs still think a business plan is a must-have cornerstone of their business, but as many venture capitalists have said recently, the traditional business plan is not the end-all be-all for startup success.

Every day, about 350,000 people are born and 150,000 die. Run this
loop for a few decades, and the United Nations projects that we're on
track to increase global population by about one-third by 2050.

Most of that growth will
happen in the poorest countries on Earth. Despite their poverty, those
two billion people will add to the atmosphere at least three times the
current greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S. This fact alone has given
the efforts to slow population growth new urgency: the U.K.'s Optimum
Population Trust has calculated that paying for contraception in the
developing world is approximately four times more cost-effective per ton of greenhouse gases saved than to fund, for example, renewable energy projects.

Nearly four years ago, I decided to leave a director role at eBay to join a small 4-person team called RockYou.  At the time, a lot of folks told me I was making the wrong decision. Several questioned whether social media was a fad, if we would ever make money at it, and the value of a service that existed as a ‘feature’ for another site.  Four years later, conventional wisdom would argue the opposite.

Six months ago, when I left RockYou to join PeerPong, a startup in the knowledge management/ social Q&A space, I faced the same questions. Looking at my rationale then and now, there were some basic patterns that helped me make the call.  If you’re considering making a leap of faith yourself, here are a couple of basic thresholds I used when jumping into a new opportunity.

Infographic designer Jess Bachman has a new piece of work out, and explains: "There are so many long lists of Goolge's acquisitions out there that I really wanted to take that info further. So I combined tons of variables and data points about each acquisition into a chart which hopefully should provide some prospective on Google's past, where they are going and how they will get there. I also acknowledge that I only know what I have researched, and am certainly looking to improve the chart if viewers had information or corrections about any of the acquisitions." Here's the image—it's pretty large, as is Google's acquisition history.

You’ve perhaps seen the “Nine Minute Sopranos” (all 6 seasons summed up in 9 minutes) or “The Wire Wrap Up” (5 seasons of The Wire recapped in five short minutes). Now you get 11 Great Operas in 10 Minutes along with their plot lines that rival the dark twists and turns of any HBO series. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.) La traviata, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Aida – they’re all covered here. Nice job by Kim Thompson and a big “via” goes to Maria Popova, a.k.a. @brainpicker.

Philips has become anchor investor in a new €200 million healthcare technology fund, Gilde Healthcare III, as it moves to develop new markets in the emerging area of patient-centric healthcare. The Dutch electronics giant says the investment is in line with its policy of open innovation and the company’s belief that the most effective way to deploy venture capital is via an independent fund backed by the expertise of a professional fund manager and the other investors.

Of course, corporate venturing in the healthcare field is nothing new - pharmaceutical and health care companies continue to turn to such vehicles to maintain a pipeline of emerging technologies in their field via captive investment arms or in-house incubators.

Merck Serono, for example, last year established a €40 million VC fund for drug discovery and development, while companies such as Roche and AHV - a fund backed by US-based not-for-profit health facilities owner Ascension Health - have over the past decade been investing in start-up and later stage ventures. Philips’ own healthcare division launched an incubator in 2006, as did its lighting division, to encourage spin-outs of promising business ideas.