Angeldubba

  STEM courses, as you know, are those in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and maths. Dropout rates in STEM are very high, and that’s across the board and across the world. But why? The Irish Times has reported dropout rates of 80 per cent in some of the rural third-level colleges. The European Union has a  whole program  set up to combat this attrition. In the US it’s been a matter of concern for years, one study showing that “ a total of 48 per cent of bachelor’s degree students …who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009”.* My simple answer to why: the courses are boring and hard. But surely they’re not THAT boring, with modern techniques and awareness of student attention spans. So is this because “the computers” are “the bank” of the 21 st  century? Whereas your mammy in the 1950s, 60s, even 70s, might have wished for you a nice safe job in the bank, are the contemporary parents seeing the same security ...

  Irish country doctor Gerard Waters has, effectively, been struck off the medical register because he will not administer Covid-19 vaccines to his patients. The Irish Medical Council held a hearing and suspended the County Kildare physician,   according to The Irish Times .     Dr Waters is not exactly a Covid denier, but takes issue with how the disease has been handled by Irish officialdom. He also disagrees with the deployment of   messenger RNA vaccines , which are those made by  Pfizer and Moderna.   I’m pro-vaccine, across the board, a position heightened in the pandemic by the lack of any other options to restore society to normal economic functioning. But is the medical profession really a fascist mini-state with no room for individual beliefs? These professionals subscribe to the Hippocratic dictum (not actually the Hippocratic Oath, but we won’t go into the niceties here) to “do no harm”. And here is a mature person — the doctor is 71 — who ...

Interesting the divergence between how the British government is managing perception of ‘the road ahead’  and how it’s being done in Dublin. It could be characterised as bounce versus boohoo, children v adults, or glass half full versus you know what.   On February 22 Boris Johnson   announced the timetable for re-opening Britain , on the back of the rapid vaccination program, with the final Freedom Day set for June 21. The critical cries of ‘data not dates!’ were drowned out by the joyful shouts of the masses longing to have their usual British summer of garden parties, shirt-sleeved groups spilling out of pubs, and flights to Italy and Spain (to get away from the usual British summer rain).   Meanwhile on my side of the Irish Sea we just had the sombre silence that followed Taoiseach Micheal Martin’s warning that  there would be little relaxation  of the Level 5 top lockdown until May. That might be the mature and sensible approach, befitting a mature and...

  Dublin saw a nasty little protest against masks, lockdowns, Covid, whatever you’re having yourself at the weekend. Protesters aimed firework rockets directly at police, three gards were significantly hurt, 23 people arrested. Hardly Tiananmen Square, but disturbing in a largely peaceful and compliant society. News reports quoted some of the demonstrators saying their protest was aimed at organisations such as RTÉ, the national broadcaster, partly because they were, er, killing babies to extract some substance that kept their presenters looking youthful.   Now, anyone who watches RTÉ will be rolling on the floor at this (whatever it is, it’s not working too well). Something called “adrenochrome” is alleged to be extracted from babies and used to juice up those RTÉ complexions. And yes, adrenochrome does exist, a type of oxidated adrenaline. Another statement attributed to the protesters was that “9,000 people went missing in Ireland last year”, with an implication that these ...

  Dublin’s north inner city is not a place you want to be assigned if you are a Deliveroo driver. These (mostly) young men of non-Irish backgrounds are finding it’s a war zone, where they are likely to be attacked, robbed, assaulted as they try, of all innocuous things, to deliver some noodles or a pizza.   The problem has been festering for some time, and appeared on the national news again this weekend. The chief elements are boredom and racism. Youths with nothing to do,  suffering from a large dose of Covid lockdown frustration, appear to have found the cyclists with the grey and green Deliveroo boxes on their backs a tempting target. Rocks are thrown, knives are drawn, money taken.    And now the Deliveroo victims, it seems, are fighting back. Simmering anger was stoked to a dreadful degree by the death of Brazilian man Thiago Cortes in August 2020. Although Cortes was killed by a joyriding car driven by teenagers, the suspicion that he was targeted as...

  Someone close to me has just gone through the obstacle course of a job interview. All the usual ingredients were there – excitement, fear, anxiety, ambition, fury, the agony of what to wear. And as I kept telling her, “everyone hates this. Only weirdoes enjoy job interviews.”   An interview is speaking to an audience, a guaranteed critical audience. Public speaking is close to numero uno in people’s fears –  recent academic studies of whether this is still the case found out it remains true, such as in Dwyer and Davidson’s 2012 paper, ‘Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death?’ (The simple answer was yes, though death won out in the end.)   I wonder what you think out there? Do you enjoy a job interview? The only circumstances I can think for that would be the case where you know it’s your job, one hundred per cent, so the interview is just the opportunity to dress up and tell the panel how really fantastic you are. Oh, and how the organisation should ...

  Because it didn’t happen to me….   It’s not true.   The only conclusion I can come to about people in Ireland (and elsewhere) who are still having house parties, refusing to wear masks, heading to the airport for a weekend in the sun – is that they’ll never believe it till they’re in intensive care with Covid themselves. And as we know, if they’re under 40, that’s a very small chance.    But I somehow don’t think the great unmasked are doing risk analysis or cost-benefit modelling about their behaviour. The Washington Post ran a (long but interesting) opinion piece last week headlined “The March of the American Kook”. The author, David Roth, eventually, got down to describing the actions of a group of people who organised an anti-Covid protest that caused Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, being used for a vaccination centre, to shut down for an afternoon. According to Roth ( defector.com ), the social media post spreading the call to arms for this protest said: “...