More women in tech

Over the past few days or so, much has been written about the question of egg freezing for women so as not to interrupt their careers. Extensive media reports suggest that Apple and Facebook are offering this to women so that they don’t take a career hit.

There are a lot of ways you can look at it but the first thing that occurs to me is this: this isn’t the most effective way to sort out inequality for the simple reason that it does not sort out the inequality suffered by fathers too much.

Ultimately, when you’re designing a solution for a problem and the question here is, what problem is solved by freezing eggs so that women have (or at least try to have) children much later? Well women take a career hit.

The question is why do mothers take a career hit when fathers do not? The problem to be solved isn’t “get women to try for babies later” but “get parents to have equal rights and and responsibilities”.

The way to do this, however, is not solely to challenge women’s positions in the workplace by keeping them there longer, but to challenge men’s positions in the workplace by keeping them there less time.

Children benefit by this; they benefit by greater contact with both parents, and parents, to be honest, are better equipped to have children at a younger age (ie, when they have more energy) than when they are forty and “established” in their careers for want of a better word.

Ultimately, I think it is good that egg freezing is supported if that is what an individual woman wants; but it should not become a method by which their employers decide when they have children, and when they should wait.

There is no real similarity in terms of paying for contraceptives and paying for egg freezing; contraceptives are not just indicated for preventing babies anyway, and a lot depends on the objective of egg freezing – is it to benefit the woman, or is it to benefit the company paying for it?

Ultimately, the issue I have here is it is not solving the problem; just a symptom of it, and that is the one whereby female parents are discriminated against in the workplace when male parents are not, not to the same extent anyway.

Dave Winer and lock-in

It really is worth having a look at Dave Winer’s comments on lockin in the tech sector at the moment. You can read his piece here.

Way back in the mists of time, when I was studying terminology at college – this was on a language related course – one of the points that came up for discussion was standardisation of terminology, particularly relevant in new fields of technology where translation of terminology was concerned.

We need standards in general terms. Our networks would not hang together if there were not communications and networks standards. If you’ve spent any time on messaging software at all, you know that to get disparate providers to communicate, you need standards of some kind. A lot of work has gone into technical standards over the years; my idea of fun would not involve writing standards for TCP/IP but someone had to do it. Hopefully it was their idea of fun.

Lockin is one of those things you do when you want to be massively controlling about your product. Apple has done it with chargers, for example, which enables them to do a certain amount of planned obsolescence and also, to control their market. It may not, however, be a long term option.

We’ll see what happens. The long term is a bitch, and it has a tendency to plow under get-rich-quick schemes and I know you think it’s idealistic but evolution only builds on open formats and protocols. That’s how technology layers. It’s true some patents hold, and some lock-in gets built on. Look at PDF for example. But there’s a reason HTML took us places PDF never could. The ability of anyone to do anything they wanted to, without having their API key revoked. That’s a big enabler of creativity, to use terminology VCs understand.

The thing is, the tech industry has gone a long way in directions which didn’t exist even 15 years ago. There are very few days on which I don’t read some account of a software patent case, for example. There’s an element of controllery going on in some sectors which focuses more, I think, on financial outcome in the short term rather than the long term and rather on technology impact.

What fascinates me is that for all that, there continues to be pushback against complete control. If you want to learn to program these days, you have several options which don’t rely on you getting an expensive compiler, for example. If you really want to fiddle around with technology, Arduino and Raspberry Pi provide a few open doors. There are services which act as enablers – let’s face it, when I was 25 years old, AWS just didn’t exist. Access to Linux has probably opened up development opportunity to a lot of people as well.

I think ultimately, a lot comes down to a balance of identifying our end objective. Dave is absolutely right to point out that in principle, we move further on open protocols and formats than on closed formats. One of the things which really, really frustrates me these days is that we have so many messaging applications all of which depend on not being interoperable.

Numbers have power

This morning, the front page of the Irish Examiner, which you can see here on Broadsheet (third one down) caught my attention for this headline:

46% back death penalty for child rape

The subheading is “Farmers take hardline on law and order”

The very first line of the the piece underneath is as follows:

The death penalty should be introduced for the crime of raping a child, according to a national opinion poll.

There are several problems with this in my view. I like the Examiner a lot, and the journalist under whose byline this appears, Conall O Fatharta has done quite a lot of interesting reporting in the last few months. But when you’re claiming that a national poll says that the death penalty should be introduced for the crime of raping a child (or, in fact, any crime), then two things are necessary:

the proportion of people (nationally) who support that assertion should be greater than 50% (it’s not in this case, because already, the headline makes it clear that a majority do not); and
the poll should be on the basis of a reasonable sample of the population at large. If you read the piece more closely, however, the poll was limited to farmers.

As such, the headline which the Examiner plonked on top of the story lacks some important detail, and given its position on the front page, that is deeply regrettable.

What do we know about the poll?

The poll was carried out on behalf of (or by) the Irish Examiner and the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association. We do not know (from this report at least) how many farmers were surveyed, and this is important because the journalist has broken down the figures geographically.

Why does this matter?

It matters on several levels, but chief amongst them is that we cannot be certain that a subset of farmers of the ICMSA is representative of the nation as a whole, or, in fact, possibly not even of farmers in general. For example, a simple question we could ask is was it done on the basis of ICMSA membership and in that case, given the that the ICMSA respresents predominantly dairy farmers, is it safe to say the output from a survey of dairy farmers applies to all other farmers.

An additional factor is that the CSO carries out a census of agriculture from time to time and there are a couple of pieces of information which are worth noting. The most recent report which I can find on the CSO’s website is for 2010, so, four years old. The press release is here, on the CSO’s website and it summarises the findings nicely. The full report is here.

There are a couple of key pieces of information in the summary which matter here:

More than half of all farm holders were aged 55 years or more. The number of farmers aged under 35 fell by 53% since 2000
One in eight (12.4%) farms is owned by a female.

Additionally, it is possible that the vast majority of farmers are rural dwellers but a greater proportion of the population are now urban dwellers. I have not found straight figures for that.

These figures are not representative of the population as a whole. If you look at the CSO census figures, only a third of the population of the country is over the age of 45 which means the proportion of the population which is over the age of 55 is less again.

Additionally, in 2011, at the time of the last census, more than 50% of the population were female. You can find the CSO’s population statistics by age from 2011 here.

Both the headline and the first line of the story give the impression initially that the results are nationally representative but as the survey was of farmers, the participants are age and sex skewed away from the shape of the population as a whole.

So, the subheading mentioned farmers; what actually is the problem here?

Three things: we get our news from various sources which means that pieces of information might get cut, such as on a twitter feed which may not necessarily highlight that this is a Farming Spotlight piece. Not everyone might click through beyond the headline. This is particularly important as links get passed around. This by the way was the Examiner’s own tweet of its front page and inline, you will only see the top half.

Secondly, for me, a story which effectively boils down to “a sample of the population skewed by age, gender and urban/rural divide have this opinion which may or may not be representative of the population as a whole” really doesn’t belong as the top front headline on a national newspaper. In short, while it is, in passing, interesting, it isn’t really a major story.

Thirdly: the Irish Examiner has not provided any useful information (that I can find) in terms of the number of respondents, how the survey was carried out and what the estimated margin of error was. If you check any political poll reporting, the number of people surveyed along with the margin of error is always provided, along with an indication of when the poll was carried out. This is news at the moment, possibly because of the National Ploughing Championships but again, the statistical basis for the survey is missing.

Be all and end alls: Natural Language Processing?

I have some doubts about the effectiveness of anything which depends heavily on natural language processing at the moment – I think there’s a lot to interest in the field but I don’t really think it has reached a point of dependability. One of the highest profile – I hesitate to use the word experiment – pieces of work this year, for example, included this comment:

Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC2007) (9) word counting system, which correlates with self-reported and physiological measures of well-being, and has been used in prior research on emotional expression (7, 8, 10)

(Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, otherwise known as the Facebook emotion study)

Anyway, the reason I am writing about this again today was that this piece from Forbes turned up in my twitter feed and the line which caught my eye was this:

Terms like “overhead bin” and “hate” in the same tweet, for example, might drive down an airline’s raking in the luggage category while “wifi” and “love” might drive up the entertainment category.

Basically, the piece is a bit of a puff piece for a company called Luminoso, and it has as its source this piece from Re/Code. Both pieces are talking about some work Luminoso did to rate airlines according to the sentiment they evoke on twitter.

If you look at the quote from the Facebook study above, the first thing that should step out immediately to you is that under their stated criteria, it is clearly possible for a piece of text to be both positive and negative at the same time. All it has to do is feature one word from each of the positive and negative word lists. Without seeing their data, it is hard to make a call on how much or, whether they checked how frequently, that happened, whether they controlled for it, or whether they excluded. The Forbes quote above likewise is worryingly simplistic in terms of understanding what needs to be done.

This is Luminoso’s description of their methodology. It doesn’t give away very much but given that they claim abilities in a number of languages, I really would not mind seeing more about how they are doing this.

Some comments on Apple’s latest PR

I don’t make a habit of blogging about gadgetry per se but there are a couple of comments I want to make about Apple’s latest lot of shenanigans.

Apple has cancelled the iPod Classic.

In all the screaming and howling about the watch and the iPhone 6 and its variants, and the payments ideas and all that, this is not getting anywhere near enough traction and discussion. I do not expect them to reverse this decisions because notoriously, electronics companies do not actually listen to me.

My first Apple product was an iPod nano which proved to be inadequate on the storage front so was replaced with a Classic forthwith. It probably will not make Apple happy to know that I have had that same device for the last six years, particularly as I am on my third iPhone in the same period.

I like the Classic. It has enough storage. It does exactly what I need it to which is play music. And it does not need to be connected to the internet. The alternatives, the iPod Touch and the iPhone, top out at 64gig. Sure, you can access stuff through the cloud and that’s fine if you’re at home with Wifi, pay next to nothing for data and are not roaming. Maybe in the US this is actually a sane way of doing things and of course, the EU is working on getting rid of data roaming charges anyway but…frankly, there’s a stretch of the rail line between Dublin and Cork, around Tipperary, where the mobile signal is fairly limited. I listen to a lot of music and storage matters to me. But I also want to be able to carry that music around with me in my handbag and that means the 128gig iPad isn’t really a replacement option either.

So I am deeply, deeply unhappy with Apple over this move, and unhappy enough with Apple to look at my contact points with Apple (currently an iPhone, an iPad, the aforementioned iPod Classic and iTunes via a Windows machine) and see about replacing them with non-Apple equivalents. It will take a while, but there are likely to be some benefits, key amongst them, Apple will not be able to deliver music to me which I do not want.

I am not really a fan of free stuff that I don’t want and the latest U2 album is on the list of free stuff which I don’t want and which should not have appeared in my library without me asking for it.

The biggest selling U2 album is the Joshua Tree and it, apparently, has sold twenty five million copies. In no version of this universe is it likely that half a billion iTunes users wanted their new one and yet Apple gave it to us and yes, it’s sitting in my library.

You can look at all the technology stuff that Apple does, and then look at this promotional gimmick and wonder why they did it. Why did Apple feel the need to do this?

I really have no idea. You would have to assume that companies do stuff like this to support the bottom line but ultimately, U2’s last album, released in 2009, sold five million copies. Compared to the Joshua Tree, that is not stellar. Compared to half a billion people who suddenly find themselves with the new album…which they probably did not want…it’s pretty pathetic. On U2’s part, it screams of a need to be loved.

On Apple’s part, it screams of a company which finds itself having to do the sort of PR it has not traditionally needed because the cachet of its own brand was enough and which is demonstrating that it just does not know how to do it. U2 are not cutting edge. They’ve been around for 30 years. Classic rockers. Seriously, if Apple wanted someone which was on what I assume was their brand message, I’d have chosen Daft Punk. Of course, if Apple think that U2 is on their brand message, then I’m inclined to wonder what their future holds.

Facebook and that study

Just briefly, given the general response to the Facebook empathy contagion article on PNAS a while back (an hour is a long time on the internet, let’s face it), the question I would have to ask is this: is everyone in Facebook so attached to what they can do with their dataset that they no longer remember to ask whether they should be doing that stuff with their dataset?

A while back, I met a guy doing a PhD in data visualisation or something related and he spoke at length about how amazing it was, what could be done with health data and how the data had to be freed up because it would benefit society so much. I’ve never really bought that idea because the first thing you have to ask is this: do individuals get messed up if we release a whole pile of health data, and if so, to what extent are you willing to have people messed up?

What I’m leading to here is the question of group think and yesmenery. Ultimately, there comes a point where people are so convinced that they should do what they want, that they are unwilling to listen to dissent. The outcry over Facebook’s study has been rather loud and yet, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone who had anything to do with the study that people might find it a bit creepy, to say the least. It’s not even a question of “oh, you know, our terms and conditions” or “oh, you know, we checked with Cornell’s review board”, it’s just straight up “is it creepy that we’re trying to manipulate people’s feelings here? Without telling them?”

I mean, I can’t ever imagine a case in which the answer to that question is anything other than Yes, yes it is creepy and eugh. And yet, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone connected with it that it was kind of creepy and gross.

Once we get past that, what’s being focussed on is the datascience aspect and I have a hard time swallowing that too. This was a psychological experiment, not a datascience on. I mean, if you did a similar study with 40 people, you wouldn’t call it a statistical experiment, would you? In many respects, the datascience aspect is pretty irrelevant; it’s a tool to analyse the data and not the core of the experiment in and of itself. A datascience experiment might involve identifying the differences in outcome between using a dataset with 10,000 records and a dataset with 10 million records for example. Or identifying the the scale of difference in processor speeds between running a data analysis on one machine versus another.

Anyway, the two main issues I want to take away from this is that a) it wasn’t really a datascience experiment and b) sometimes you need to find people who are willing to tell you that what you are doing is ick, and you need to listen to them.

Thing is – and this is where we run into fun – what have they done that they haven’t told us about?

People don’t fear change that enhances their lives

I have spent a lot of the last 24 hours reading discussions on the subject of Ubuntu and Unity in particular. I had (and have again) Linux Mint install but following issues linked to the screen lock with processes running in a Python window, I temporarily switched over to Ubuntu.

In the time that it was installed, I discovered user interface design decisions which appeared to be made with no consideration of users, and it crashed a couple of times. It’s gone and I have gone back to Mint, reconfigured screen savers (ie, switched them and screen sleep completely off) and the issues which I had previously do not appear to have (yet) remanifested themselves.

But Ubuntu…Someone in Canonical thought it was a good idea to a) remove the application menu from the application window and b) put it on the global menu at the top of the screen and c) hide it.

The first time this charade manifested itself was with Sublime Text – my text editor of choice for most serious work – and I could not find the menu. It’s one thing to take it away from the application window – unwise in my view but not unknown and probably tolerable. Hiding it was not.

I know that Canonical have done something about this with 14.04 which released very recently. But this fiasco has been reality for a few years now and a lot of people screamed blue murder about it. It may be a small and cosmetic thing but it interferes with usability. It may seem overdramatic but it is the one single feature of Ubuntu that made me decide that the desktop environment was unusable for me. Its key outcome was to make software I wanted to use and was reasonably familiar with much, much harder to use. The fact that it took nearly 3 years for some sort of a fix isn’t really that edifying to be honest and few people are going to put the very newest version of a piece of software on when a) they know it’s about a week or two in release and b) they need some form of stability.

I’m aware that Ubuntu’s response to criticisms of Unity has been to recommend other distros. When I come to Ubuntu as a new user, that doesn’t really make me feel that Ubuntu is particularly interested in dialogue with your users. No matter how free your stuff is, no one is going to want to use it if they think they are being stomped on.

The other thing which someone decided was that no one really needed any sort of a reasonable hierarchical application menu. Up front, if you wanted to get at your applications, you had to search for them either through the general lens or the application lens. There are some benefits to being able to do a search like this. However, there are wholesale user disadvantages to not having a reasonable hierarchical and catogorisable view of your software as well. For all the world’s complaints about it, even Windows 8’s Metro UI allows you the option of arranging your applications in a logical set of groups. Linux Mint gives you a menu.

Ubuntu gives you a search field. That’s fine for documents and for email in my gmail account. It is utterly frustrating for managing applications and more specifically, launchers for your applications.

There is only so much real estate in the not-movable launcher on the left handside, and anyway, the first thing you have to do on installing Ubuntu is to get rid of the – I was going to say junk – but shall we say “stuff you don’t need” before you can do anything. The default install size of the launcher is too big (but at least that can be customised) and it comes with a lot of Libre Office stuff and a direct link to Amazon.

I remember when Windows machines used to come preloaded with all sorts of commercial launchers on the desktop. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. And yes, I know Ubuntu is free.

And this is its big problem. It’s possible that if it wasn’t free and easily replaceable with other free things, I’d spend two or three days getting rid of Unity, installing a more functional desktop but of course I have to go and test a bunch of them before hoping there are no stability issues. The great beauty of Linux is that you can do a lot of customisation (although some of that is seriously limited within Unity). The great disadvantage for Linux is that sometimes, people don’t have enough time to do this. They have tasks they want to achieve, they know that in theory they are easier to achieve in Linux than they are on Windows (viz some Python related stuff and running a few other open source applications like R). Ultimately, there is a lot to be said for ensuring that when they open a basic, high profile distro, it works.

Most of what I’ve seen written about Unity by users – viz people who comment on blogs as opposed to people who write blogs – is that they’ve gotten used to it. It seems to be more a resigned tolerance than anything. A lot of people have switched over to Linux Mint. A lot have switched back to Debian. A lot have looked for ways of making other desktop environments usable. And a lot complain that it’s only a vocal minority whinging, who don’t like change. Most people, in my experience, don’t mind change which enhances their lives. When it is utterly disruptive and makes their lives harder, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.

I’m not a long term Linux user. It’s unlikely that I will ever again go near Ubuntu. Unity was unusable and when I looked into it any any detail, it was obvious that Canonical didn’t want to take on board any negative feedback, and it took three years for them to fix – sort of – one of the more annoying interface issues. I know some people find the whole keyboard centric search options fine. But I don’t see it as an OS for people who are superuser keyboarders. I see it as an OS to be avoided by people who are interested in structuring the information and assets they have on their computer. It’s all fine having search to find everything for you, except the few things you squash onto the Launcher. Everything I tried to do with it up front was a struggle. It’s possible that tinkering around with Linux is a hobby and a game for some people. Other people actually need it to function.

In my view, if you want to try Linux, Ubuntu really isn’t the best choice. Stick with Mint for now.

If I had your data: Job Bridge

Yesterday I read a piece that suggested that the Department of Social and Family Affairs weren’t about to release the names of companies which used the Job Bridge service. So I decided to have a closer look at it with a view to doing some data analysis on the subject.

There are a couple of things I’d like to have a look at in terms of the current vacancies (around 2500 per the Job Bridge site) but I haven’t yet figured out how I am going to pull down all that data (webscraping isn’t something I am prone to do too often). Having looked at a couple of pages of internships I am struck by a few things.

lot of hairdressing and beauty spa
lot of “administration”
lot of comment about “formal/informal” training
lot of boilerplate text.

And that’s just the start of it.

Job Bridge itself provides “Job Bridge Data“. This is not data. This is a summary of aggregated data. I have seen a claim that 60% of Job Bridge participants go on to obtain work after the program but there is no information on that in the “Job Bridge Data” for example. What would be interesting out of that data is where those participants are getting jobs. Are they getting jobs in their host companies and is it pretty much the case that the state is effectively paying for 6 to 9 months of a probationary period? Having done internships myself in a previous life, my experience regarding full time internships is that if companies tended to need them, they paid for them. I know for example that a few of the technical companies here still do, for example.

I have a couple of data projects on the go at the moment, plus some work for my own college course right now and unfortunately, I don’t see a quick and obvious way of getting the current Job Bridge vacancies down to me, even in an unstructured manner. This is regrettable. I know there is ongoing a lot of controversy about the Job Bridge program and to some extent, understandably so – I saw at least one teaching position “must commit for the nine months” and one farm labourer position. These, in my book, are jobs rather than internships. I’m not really that interested in picking out the odd job here and there, however, to make that point. I’m interested to see what sectors are using the program, whether there’s any way that internships can be classified as jobs rather than internships. Some sort of structured data that I can pull into R would be nice. I’d also like to do some spatial analysis on where these are and again, the structure of the site is not lending itself to that because of the odd things like Tipp North, Tipp South, all the Dublin vacancies dumped into one bucket, but the city and county listings being separate for Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford. What would be nice is a structured dump of the data.

One can wish, I suppose.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

As of yesterday evening sometime, my twitter feed has lit up with claims that a computer has passed the Turing test for the first time. These claims have their roots in this press release from Reading University.

The details of the test and how it was carried out are thin on the ground. We do know from Reading’s press release that one of the judges was an actor and that in 33% of cases, the computer could not be distinguished from a human.

I have a couple of key questions.

What language did the humans interact with the bot in? This is important because the bot is defined as a 13 year old boy from the Ukraine. If the interaction was in English then for me, all bets are off.
Where is the peer reviewed paper?

The Turing Test is, in many respects, iconic. If someone claims to pass it, a press release is going to be nowhere near adequate to support that claim. We need to know a lot more about the system concerned, how it works and how it operates.

University isn’t a finishing school, you know

There has been some discussion lately about Jackie Lavin’s contribution to Prime Time on Tuesday 3 June when the subject under discussion was third level education. Amongst her assertions were that some graduates didn’t have a clue and you could cut a year at least off most university degrees.

I have trouble with those two assertions for various reasons. But I have a much bigger problem with all this and that is, other than seeing her complaints about how her banks have treated her, I really have no idea why Jackie Lavin has the media profile she has in terms of business. I mean, I’m aware there was a hotel in Kerry that may not have been completely successful as it were, but otherwise, apart from being Bill Cullen’s partner, I’m not actually sure what her achievements are, and certainly, cannot see what qualifies her to come on national television and claim that some of the graduates she worked with on The Apprentice didn’t have a clue.

Of course they don’t. Common sense is something you get from experience, from trying and failing. Lavin’s comments on this subject are not common sense, in that respect. They are detached from reality. Not only that, the cohort of graduates which might apply to go on The Apprentice cannot be held to be representative of graduates as a whole. It is a self selecting cohort, and if I had a business idea, I cannot say that I’d necessarily consider The Apprentice the best place to be pitching it. In fact, bearing in mind that television is in the business of entertainment and not in the business of business support (except if you are paying for advertising) arguably, there’s a good reason for staying away from the whole exercise altogether. It probably is even, dare I say it, common sense to focus on the needs of your business which may not, almost certainly won’t, align with the needs of an entertainment medium.

With respect to the idea of chopping the length of undergraduate degrees, again, I’m not sure that you can a) generalise and b) comment if you’re not sure what the purpose of an undergraduate degree is. Brian Lucey has provided some commentary here and it is more detailed than I can provide at this point in time. I recommend reading it. That being said, the breadth of options on the undergraduate degree supply side is such that it would be highly unwise to suggest a generalised change to all of them.

There are other issues of course – Paddy Cosgrave already made rather unpopular comments about the standards of degrees between different awarding institutions, and then there is the ongoing suggestion that universities should act as supplier belts to the employers. In truth, it’s not that simple and never has been. It seems to me that what employers value has changed over time; 20-25 years ago there was less of a specialised focus on particular skillsets such as programming a specific language, and more of a focus on understanding how things worked in general.

There are massive, massive cost issues on the academic and government side to tailoring university courses exactly to what any particular employer wants. A key example of this has floated straight to the top in programming languages; Apple have announced a new one, Swift, which, over time, is near guaranteed to replace Objective-C. So the question is, do you want someone who is an Objective-C expert, or someone who can take the handbook for Swift and hit the ground running? The truth is, you’re more likely to get the latter if you haven’t rammed all your efforts into training Objective-C programmers because that’s what the iOS application market was demanding.

Good employers understand this. Good employers understand that there are generalised skill sets they need, and specialised skill sets they may have to arrange for new hires to get themselves. This is true of most employers and this is why continuing professional development matters. It is a recognition that learning is an ongoing activity and you don’t pop out of university aged 22, finished. University is less a finishing school for employment and more a starting school.

There is a wider debate to be had on identifying what we need to focus our educational efforts on but, as anyone who has ever actually discussed this with me in the real world will know, this is not something that we can discuss in terms of any part of the education system in isolation. When we have issues with language learning and mathematics at leaving certificate level, the problems did not start when those students reached the age of 16, but probably when they were 7 or 8.

So I am in favour of a general reframing of our discussion of education in a coherent manner covering the whole, rather than some little details. When you have someone who is famous for – I’m not exactly sure what – in the business world popping up suggesting that we should shorten undergraduate degrees, I don’t think we get that discussion.

When RTE run these discussions, I would like them to consider their speakers a little more carefully. I am not sure what sector Jackie Lavin was supposed to be representing but if she was representing the employers side, then I don’t think she was the best choice. I would like it if, for example, RTE took a serious look at our middle industry and got senior people in from the likes of Kerry Foods, any of our home grown agri-industrials, any of our home grown pharmaceuticals. They tend to need a broader skillset, in certain cases they tend to need to get people to come to less popular locations with the indirect costs that can bring, but above all, they are dealing with different challenges, different realities.

And they are the sector we need to hear much much more from. I would love to see what, for example, Colm Lyons of Realex or Eoghan McCabe of Intercom, or Edmond Harty of DairyMaster or someone from Perrigo might have had to say about the constraints they work under given the current focuses in the third level education sector. I think it might be a lot more nuanced.