'Frontline' tweet 'earth-shattering'

'Frontline' tweet 'earth-shattering'

This article from the Irish Times newspaper looks at a number of issues arising from the chairperson of the final Irish Presidential debate before the election asking a question prompted by a tweet.

Indeed in the creation of liveness, spontaneity and engagement many current affairs programs use twitter and SMS as ways of allowing their audiences to engage with material under discussion. The difference here it seems, is that the production team took a tweet as being from a particular source, but that tweet was not from where it appeared to be from. It was not checked - no one looked at the other tweets from the source, or checked to look at the tweets from the political party it claimed to represent - and the result (we voters in Ireland know) was 'earth shattering'. New media and old media are not the same - the new mimics the old, but is utterly different in many respects. Authenticity is at the heart of this - anonymity and the filters that old media must uphold...

Taking stock of our pooled research

Taking stock of our pooled research

Claire O Connell in today's Irish Times is writing about a group of Medical Research hospitals that have come together to create a shared database, to further research.

Now a new initiative is linking cancer biobanks between hospitals in Dublin, Cork and Galway.

As she says herself: The word “bank” might be somewhat tainted these days, but how about this more altruistic model: depositors donate, the “currency” helps fuel biomedical research and the end results can lead towards improved therapies for patients.

“Biobanking is saving biological samples such as human tissue, blood or urine, for research purposes,” explains Prof Eoin Gaffney, a consultant histopathologist at St James’s Hospital and Trinity College Dublin.

The process looks straightforward on the surface – but “It’s no use just storing samples, you need to have a good annotated database that tells you where the samples are and what types of samples they are, as well as pathological data and clinical data,” he says.

This is another example of how sharing data, but not just raw data, but data that has been made meaningful by researchers in the field, can enrich research for all