But here’s another good reason: because, in a few years, mathematics is where the jobs will be.  We just don’t know what those jobs will be.

Mathematics is where the jobs will be

Back in 1995, I had a lovely radio series with RTE, looking at what life would be like in a quarter century’s time, and called appropriately 2020 Vision. One contributor — if memory serves me, ‘futurologist’ Gerard O’Neill, now with Amárach  Research — said that children at school in 1995 would go on to have jobs and careers that hadn’t even been invented then.

Sure enough: my radio producer’s son, then at school, went on to study bio-informatics, not something that had been on the career guidance list at the time.

So what careers await today’s school students? One thing is sure, mathematics will be central.  Because the future is in data, and in data mining.

Just consider, the enormous amount of data accumulating on a daily basis now, across all disciplines, from DNA sequences to twitter tweets.

If we are to make sense of all this data, then we will need people with mathematical skills who can extract meaning from the mess, and make sense of the noise.

Consider: the  many tens of thousands of tweets that circulated last summer sparked by the Iranian elections and riots in Tehran.  But when analysed, those tweets, according to venture capitalist David Blumenstein, speaking  at Innovate Media 09 last December,  actually came from just  five sources.

Not so much news, then, as mostly noise.

(The news:noise ratio is something journalist Mark Little is beginning to explore for Irish media, albeit in a different way:

Meanwhile, reams and reams of data are accumulating, even as I write this, and you read it.

(You know I never knew why we call it Information Technology, when really it should be Data Technology.)

And if the future will be mathematical, then it’s even more important that we in Ireland improve our mathematical ability. As  Dr Craig Barrett, former Intel chairman and “the man credited with bringing Intel to Ireland over 20 years ago”  said, earlier this week in an address to the Royal Irish Academy: Ireland is now distinctly average, and average is not good enough.

There have of course been numerous reports, taskforces and conferences addressing the problem in recent years, and especially the falloff in student interest in mathematics and science subjects at school and third-level.  (Here is Engineers Ireland president, Chris Horn, on the topic – and even mining some economic data, here.)

Just this week, Engineers Ireland launched a survey of mathematics teaching.    Among other things, most people believe mathematics teaching will improve if maths teachers are obliged to have a degree in mathematics.  Tellingly, however, most people also believe that these maths teachers should not be paid a premium.

But will a mathematics degree necessarily produce a better teacher? And will we not need those mathematicians in industry and business?

Myself, I believe the answer lies in incentivising, not the teachers, but the students.  Make it worth their while, and they will follow.  But that argument is for another day.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this fascinating TED talk on the information that can be mined from international health statistics, given by Swedish professor, Hans Rosling.

Rosling invented Trendalyzer, a powerful software tool that allows people to compare and contrast large volumes of data with animated charts,  as you’ll see in his talk.

And see if you can you pass his pre-health test? Pause, and try . . .  and see if you’re better than the chimps and Karolinska profs.

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society in London and, with that, arguably, the start of the modern scientific establishment, including the principle of peer review.

Yet, thanks to the ‘climate gate’ e-mail controversy (see here for the Guardian’s special investigation), that establishment has probably never been more shaky.

Recent days have also seen stem cell researchers accuse some colleagues and journals of blocking publication of some research.  In a New Scientistreport one researcher in the field, Prof Robin Lovell-Badge allowed that:

“It’s all done in secret, so it’s very hard to gather information”

On the plus side, the public now knows that science is just like any other human activity: with egos and jealousies and all that goes with people defending their own little patch.

And today the stakes in science are very high: multi-million-dollar grants that will make (or, if not granted, break) a career; priority for a patent; and of course, prestige.

One of the tenets of peer review is that reviewers remain anonymous.  Yet climate gate and the stem cell research accusations mean this must now be questioned.

Worrying exchanges among climate change reviewers, quoted recently in the Guardian by Fred Pearce, include:

“Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to -support Dave Stahle’s and really as soon as you can. Please.”

And:

“If published as is, this paper could really do some damage . . . It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically . . . “

Given that the authors of papers are identified — and it would be impossible to hide an author’s identity — shouldn’t reviewers be obliged to stand publicly over their opinions?  Over any delay they took in reviewing a paper, that might be construed as obstruction?  Rather than hide behind the cloak of anonymity.

And, if in journal reviewing, should this not also happen in assessing grant applications?  Which are arguably as or more important than publishing.

There are, these days, too many vested and competing interests in research.

Much has been made in recent years about public access to journals, especially for research which is publicly funded.

A more fundamental question is surely researchers’ access to space in those journals, so that the public has something to read.

Answer: a growing realisation of the need to factor the environment into the economy.

Lenihan’s budget today will at last introduce a carbon tax and, with it, the principle of ‘the polluter pays’.

US economist Elinor Ostrom shared this year’s economics Nobel prize for her work on ‘the tragedy of the commons’.

And David McWilliams, in his recent TV series, discovered that all the world’s production of ‘stuff’ is taking its toll on the environment.

Interestingly, for a country averse to taxes, there have been few complaints about the forthcoming carbon tax.  Perhaps the recent floods have brought home to people the stark reality that we need to do something fast about climate change and CO2 levels.

There have however been vociferous calls for a car scrappage deal in today’s budget, mostly from the ‘car industry’, which is to say the car sales industry… who, by their own admission, would not get work in any other industry.

Scrappage schemes are often touted as environmental measures, taking polluting old bangers off the road and replacing them with clean, green fuel-efficient ones.

Yes, new cars may be more fuel-efficient than old ones, but the combined energy and environmental costs of manufacturing a new car outweigh those meagre improvements in efficiency.

Perhaps more importantly, producing new cars, and indeed producing new anything, also uses up ever dwindling resources.

Forget peak oil — that’s only the tip of the (fast-melting) iceberg.  We are also running out of lots of other scarce resources. Or, as David McWilliams put it, we are now facing “peak everything”.

Our best estimates suggest that world reserves of indium – used in LCDs and flat screen TVs – could run out by 2017. Platinum, a vital constituent of catalytic converters and fuel cells, could be exhausted by 2020 (so much so that some researchers are already trying to ‘harvest’ the metal from road dust). Hafnium (used in computer chips) could be gone by 2017.  And terbium (used in fluorescent light bulbs) could be all gone as early as 2012. (Figures from ‘Earth Audit’, by David Coen, New Scientist, issue 2605, 2007)

These are rough estimates, and we may discover new sources for some of the rare elements that buy us a few more years. Landfill mining could yet be the next big thing! But eventually, supplies will run out.

Which is why we need to husband our resources sustainably, not waste them for the sake of a few short term jobs. And which brings me to the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

When something belongs in common to everybody, it belongs to nobody.

So, in the old days, with the village common ground:  it was in every farmer’s interest to graze as many of their livestock as possible on the commons, and conversely, it was in nobody’s interest to apply fertiliser.  Result: overgrazed, and undernourished pasture.

More recently, we have seen the same exploitation of fisheries, to the point where some fish stocks are so overfished that they may now be beyond rescue.

And the same is true of our wasteful and unsustainable use of all the world’s resources.

Biology and medicine has a name for such uncontrolled growth at the expense of the surrounding environment. They call it cancer.

Later today we will know the details of the new carbon tax, and whether Brian Lenihan has yielded to calls for a car scrappage scheme.

It would be nice to think he will say No to the car industry.  That instead he’s  going to introduce new measures to sustainably support the car maintenance industry, perhaps even courses to reskill salespeople as mechanics. After all, if anyone knows about the damage that can be done by a poorly controlled financial sector, it’s the Minister for Finance.

But I’m not holding my breath.

There’s been much talk lately about developing a “smart economy” here.  My friend and fellow science journalist Cormac Sheridan counted no fewer than  27 ‘smart’ references in the recently revised programme for government.

But so far, it seems to be all talk. Gone are the dot.com days when technologists such as Chris Horn would be sure to feature in a survey of public opinion.

And today?

Not one innovator on Village magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in Ireland, for instance.  Not one scientist asked for their “books of the year” by the Irish Times this weekend.

Frank Gannon may head up Science Foundation Ireland, which is spending €1.4 billion on research and development here, yet Village doesn’t register this as influential.

TCD Prof Luke O’Neill recently won the Irish Times/RDS Boyle medal for his research in immunology, yet even the Irish Times wasn’t interested in what he read this year.

The Village list makes for interesting — or should I say, worrying — reading.

From Sr Stanislas and the Pope, to Obama and IFA leader Pádraig Walshe, and several legal types, senior civil servants and politicians (Finance Minister Brian Lenihan tops the list at #1), it’s a veritable selection box.

But an amazing 16% are journalists and media celebrities, from George Hook and Joe Duffy to not one, not two, but three members of RTE’s Morning Ireland editorial team, meaning that one programme makes up 3% of the Village 100.

And that’s not counting the media barons who make the list, including Denis O’Brien, and Tony and Gavin O’Reilly.

The nearest the list gets to technology / innovation is including Intel Ireland’s CEO, Jim O’Hara, at #76.

Over at the Irish Times, where they asked pundits, writers, poets, economists and historians who was reading what this year, it was good to see at least that political historian Tom Garvin has been reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.  While UCD’s professor of economics, Morgan Kelly, has been reading up on human evolution.

For all the talk of Ireland developing a “smart economy”, we still have a long way to go it seems.

Update: thanks to Grace Labanyi for alerting me to Mark Little’s PrimeTime report on the ‘smart economy’ last night (Dec 1), which includes interviews with engineer and WaveBob inventor, William Dick, and immunologist and innovator Luke O’Neill, among others.

A week ago, if you’d asked someone to name a famous woman scientist, chances are they would have said Marie Curie.  Now, they’re more likely to name Brooke Magnanti.

Magnanti, for those who missed the news, is a 34-year-old cancer epidemiologist working in Bristol, who was unmasked last week as ‘Belle de Jour‘, the former prostitute who wrote  Diary of a London Call Girl.

It was while trying to make ends meet, so to speak, as a PhD student, that she worked with an escort agency, earning £200 an hour take-home pay.

Or to be precise, not strictly while as a PhD student: rather, for a year between submitting her thesis in 2003 and being awarded the degree in 2004, which subtlety means that the University of Sheffield is probably cleared of benefiting from the proceeds of prostitution.

In the interview with the Sunday Times, Magnanti is reported as saying:

“I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva; and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would. . . I started to think: what can I do that I can start doing straight away, that doesn’t require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that’s cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in?”

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. Clearly, Magnanti is happy to continue making money off the back of her previous career, with a new book out now. For the moment, her Bristol colleagues (an all-woman team)  remain supportive. But what about the long-term career implications if she wants to stay in research? And what does this all tell us about PhD funding?

Whatever about her personal circumstances and decisions at the time, online comments from numerous other contributors in recent days suggest that many PhD students struggle financially and, depressingly, that several have turned to lap dancing, strip clubs and prostitution.

Hardly the message needed at a time when governments want to increase the number of PhD students.

As I write this, Science Foundation Ireland is about to announce the winners of this year’s Young Women in Engineering awards, aimed at encouraging more women on to engineering courses.  The scheme is one of a number which SFI introduced in response to a  campaign by the Women in Technology & Science network (WITS) to improve women’s participation in science and research — Getting the Balance Right in Irish Science (2004), and which I was actively involved in.

At the time, women made up just 11% of SFI grant recipients.  Today, I’m pleased to see that, based on SFI statistics for its ‘research frontiers programmes’, women made up approximately 23% of recipients in 2008 and 29% in 2009. (With no information on the size of the awards, I’ve not been able to calculate what % of the funding women receive.)

So, there is some good news, and perhaps some stereotypes have been broken.

If young girls are worried about being branded as nerds for choosing science, they now have Dr Brooke Magnanti as a career role model — although, given that she had to strip off her whitecoat to get there, it’s hard to know what kind of  role model she is.

I suspect that, if stereotypes are changing, the main outcome from all this will be that people now realise, not that women scientists can be  sexy, but that call-girls can be smart.

There is much to be said for this: if what we want are jobs (smart or otherwise), then jobs (and entrepreneurs) are what we should encourage. Just as we created a property boom by creating generous incentives for the construction industry, perhaps we now need incentives to encourage an ‘intellectual property boom’.

But for this, it seems to me, we need to be more aware of the fundamental differences between innovation and research, and how one will lead to jobs, but the other may not, or at best indirectly.

Research, it is often said, is a way of turning money into knowledge, where innovation turns knowledge into money.

Research turns money into knowledge.

Innovation turns knowledge into money

Research is: long-term, curiosity driven, disciplinary in nature, and something you do yourself, ‘just in case’.

Innovation, in contrast, is: short term, problem driven — and therefore interdisciplinary — something you do ‘just in time’, but also (significantly) something you don’t have to do yourself, but which you can import.

Ireland, as a relatively small country, might hope to contribute perhaps at most 1% to the world’s research efforts.  But to innovate  — to create those smart jobs — we need access to the full 100% of the world’s research efforts.

The key is to make sure we choose and do that 1% well in the long-term but, in the short term, to make sure we build innovation systems that give us access to the 100%.

Much of our national policy now, and over the past decade, has been to support research. This is fine in the long-term, but won’t necessarily translate into jobs in the short-term. For that, we need innovation systems and supports, and incentives for entrepreneurs and intellectual property developers.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.

If farmers are paid for corncrake-friendly farming, then we get corncrake-friendly farming.  If we want more corncrakes, we need to pay farmers for the number of corncrakes successfully hatched on their land.

Jobs are like corncrakes (and not just because they are both endangered!): if we want jobs, then we should provide direct support for jobs.

And, if we can successfully create innovation systems, entrepreneurs and smart jobs, then more students might be tempted to study science as a route to those jobs.

Can you suggest any uses for an e-voting machine?

I’m thinking we could rent them out for Lisbon Treaty referenda — free for the first 30 minutes — and hope that users wouldn’t return them!

An idea prompted by the fact that Dublin’s new bicycles have hit the streets at last : 450 bright and robust machines in a scheme that provides cheap efficient transport for short journeys.  Fingers crossed that this will be a great success.

Meanwhile, another, ostensibly high-tech machine was also in the news again: the ongoing saga of those e-voting machines. Storing the 7,500 machines this year is going to cost us €800,000, or a little over €100 each.  That’s on top of all the costs to date, not to mention the public’s loss of trust in technology.

So, could we not put them to some use instead?

Maybe give one to every school . . . they could be used for civics lessons in democracy, and technology classes for how not to design an e-voting machine.

Or install them in libraries and public spaces, for local referenda and community surveys (what to call Dingle/An Daingean, for instance) .

Or offer them to artists.  Surely someone out there can come up with a creative idea for an installation using a bank of these?  There’s even a precedent: Dublin City Council gave artists use of the (now vanished) kiosks on Capel Street bridge for a while, when they proved uncommercial.

We could have a competition for suggestions, but no e-voting allowed.

Or, maybe we should rent them out like bicycles.  And if you don’t return the machine within the allocated time, we give you €100!

Cheaper than this long-term storage, and save us all a big headache as well.

We’ve been watching a car crash unfold here over the last few days, as the future of General Motors was decided.  Or at least, the short-term future.

I’m posting this from southern Ontario, where in fairness thousands of jobs currently depend on the American auto industry.

As it happens, this is also the homeland of the Iroquois
people, whose Great Law requires that “in every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations”.

Looking at the long-term, 150-200 year impact of your actions and decisions, is surely the essence of sustainability. Sadly, that’s not how the decisions about General Motors were reached this weekend.

GM, remember, is the company that gave us the Hummer.

The good news is that GM will no longer make Hummers as part of its “reinvention” as a “leaner, greener ([sic], faster and stronger” company.  The bad news is that some other company has bought the brand, and clearly believes there is a future in gas-guzzling tanks.

Time was, people used to say that ‘what is good for General Motors, is good for America ‘. Actually, that’s a misquote. But understandable, given how central the motor car was to the American dream for the last 100 years.

The question now should be, as the Iroquois would ask, what about the next 100 years.

But governments here are looking, at best, to the next couple of years.  They’ve agreed to pump billions into GM in a bid to save jobs, and presumably in the belief that this 20th-century dinosaur can be turned around, and in no time at all. This despite the competition from more efficient Japanese imports, and the competition that will soon be coming from the new Chinese and Indian car industries.

In the run-up to the bankruptcy decision, I wondered if there was any chance that GM might actually be sacrificed?  After all, a number of banks have been let fail over the last couple of years, something that would have been unthinkable a few years before.

But while banks may be essential to the financial system, the American car industry employs far more people, and more voters.

I may not know much about cars, the auto industry and mega restructuring deals, but I do know that North America’s 20th-century car industry is not a sustainable future.