Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest Issue No. 478
13-08-2009
by Deirdre McArdle
Facebook gearing up to take on Twitter? | Job done: Zafirovski leaves Nortel
Maths, science results spark concern
The Leaving Certificate results, released Wednesday 12 August, have sparked the now-familiar analysis into the steady decline in the number of students taking higher level maths. In this year's exam, 16 percent of students sat the higher-level maths paper, down from 17 percent last year. Although this is not a dramatic drop, ICT Ireland has said it is still a huge concern and "immediate action is required to encourage more students to take the course". As well as the continuing drop-off in the number who sat the honours papers, there was an increase in the number of students taking the foundation level paper; in 2008 one in ten students took this paper, while this year that figure had risen to one in eight. On the positive side, there was a slight drop in the failure rate of pupils taking ordinary level maths, from 4,367 in 2008 to 3,876 in 2009; this is still nearly 4,000 students who are ineligible to apply to a large proportion of third-level courses. The trends indicate that all is not right when it comes to maths and, indeed, science subjects. This year, approximately 7 percent of higher-level chemistry candidates received a fail grade, with almost 8 percent failing higher-level physics (just 8 percent of those sitting the Leaving Cert opted for higher-level physics and 10 percent chose higher-level chemistry). Opposition parties and industry have said the results are a cause for concern, particularly as Ireland tries to style itself as a smart economy. Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe is pinning his hopes on Project Maths, which is currently being trialled in 24 schools with a view to making the subject more practical. The results of Project Maths -- a curriculum change -- will not come into effect in the Leaving Cert until 2012. "I think the curriculum is the way forward and, while people might say it's not as fast forward as we'd like it to be, we'll have to handle this in a systematic way and in doing that I think we’ll envelop students into an understanding and an appreciation [of maths and science]," he said. As for science, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) will engage with a number of schools in the coming year to trial a range of practical exams for science subjects.
R&D jobs on the way to Galway
Galway got a significant jobs boost this week with the news that security software developer Lumension is to set up a global research and development centre in the area. The move will see 30 highly skilled positions being created immediately, with the possibility of more coming on board down the line. The jobs are exactly the type of positions the Government is so intent on attracting as part of the Knowledge Society push. Specifically, Lumension is looking for software engineers, software testers, technical writers, technical architects and R&D specialists. The new facility will serve as a hub for the firm's product R&D, and fits in with its aims to expand its global "footprint". Lumension has its main headquarters in Arizona with European offices in the UK, Luxembourg and Spain. The firm operates in the endpoint security market, developing security software that protects data across companies' networks and end-user devices. Lumension's decision to locate in Galway is quite a coup for the Government; the company is well-known in the corporate security market and has over 5,000 customers worldwide including NASA, HSBC and ING.
Twitter brought down by web attack...
Last Thursday a massive denial-of-service attack caused an outage on micro-blogging site Twitter for several hours, as well as negatively affecting other social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and blog network LiveJournal. It later emerged that the attack was targeted at a lone pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu who had accounts on the various sites. Essentially, a botnet was directed to request Cyxymu's pages on the affected sites "at such a rate that it impacted service for other users", according to a Facebook spokesperson. The attack is widely believed to have been an attempt to silence the blogger's online criticism of Moscow's role in last year's Georgia-Russia war. On Monday, the attack continued to take its toll on Twitter, although co-founder Biz Stone said the site had gotten better at dealing with the attacks, illustrated by the fact that users were able to access the site. Then on Tuesday the micro-blogging site again suffered an outage, this time for just around 30 minutes, with Twitter developers saying the site was "experiencing another wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against our system". Twitter said it is continuing to investigate the attacks and to shore up its defences against such outages again; the outage has caused many commentators to question the micro-blogging site's stability.
...While Facebook gears up to take on rival?
It looks like Facebook is getting jealous with all the attention micro-blogging site Twitter has been getting recently. The social networking site is reportedly testing Facebook 'Lite', a simplified version of Facebook, which analysts believe is the site's attempt to more directly compete against Twitter's popularity. Facebook is currently trialling the service in India, with plans to roll it out in Russia and China after that. Initial reports suggest that the stripped-down Facebook site has a look of Twitter about it with a linear stream of friends' status updates dominating the page. It's also expected to use smaller pictures and lower-resolution videos as it seeks to speed up the loading of pages, as well as a left-hand navigation bar with four main categories: Friends, Wall, Info and Photos & Videos. According to TechCrunch, the simplified site has been developed to work better on mobile phones and in countries where bandwidth is limited; however, industry consensus is that the social network is getting back to basics to better rival Twitter. Indeed, other moves that the social network has made this week point to the firm's desire to more directly challenge Twitter. On Tuesday it bought FriendFeed, a start-up that allows users to share links and status updates online, for USD50 million in cash and stock, and on Wednesday it rolled out a new version of the search engine on its site that returns real-time results and the status updates of members who have chosen to make their information public.
Job done: Zafirovski leaves Nortel
Nortel Networks, which has been under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the past seven months, posted a 25 percent year-on-year drop in revenue from USD2.62 billion in the second quarter of 2008 to USD1.97 billion in 2009. Though the year-on-year revenue decline was hardly unexpected, it was interesting to note that revenues were up 14 percent from the first quarter of 2009. The telecom equipment maker also posted a quarterly loss of USD274 million, or USD0.55 per share. On announcing the firm's results, CEO Mike Zafirovski also stepped down from his position, along with six other Nortel board members. Their departure means that Nortel is now functioning with a bare-bones management crew. They will report to the firm's chief restructuring officer, Pavi Binning. Nortel's board chairman, Harry Pearce, who was one of the departing executives, said in a statement: "We've reached a logical departure point. Mike [Zafirovski] made a commitment to see the process through the stabilisation of the company, sale of its largest assets and the right plans and people to continue operating our business and service customers. He has done so." Indeed, last month Nortel sold its prized CDMA/LTE unit for USD1.3 billion in an auction of the firm's key assets. Zafirovski has said the deal will protect 80 percent of the jobs associated with Nortel's wireless carrier business. Zafirovski joined Nortel from Motorola in 2005, in an attempt to reinvigorate the firm, which was reeling from a series of accounting scandals and a general downturn in the networking infrastructure business.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 