just noticed the car is covered in a fine black dust #ashtag #iceland


3:42 PM

Reactions from across Europe to the Iceland volcano, via BBC iPlayer http://bit.ly/cSI6uw #ashtag
1:33 PM

Will the Iceland Volcano Change the Climate? | LiveScience http://su.pr/2sKuRQ
1:17 PM

Apparently John Cleese is stuck in Norway, poor guy #iceland #ashtag http://nyti.ms/9bFDVY (video a bit further down)

11:10 PM

Amazing @AP image of the actual ash cloud in the air over iceland http://bit.ly/dm6CBe
11:06 PM

@AP interactive shows how the Iceland volcano is affecting Europe, and how the ash can endanger a plane: http://bit.ly/anNfWa
11:04 PM

Serious question, what is the environmental impact of the volcano (fewer (ie no) planes in the air but lots of ash & toxins)?
10:38 PM

Dublin Airport Arrivals http://bit.ly/ca6TsM and Departures http://bit.ly/aMq7RY for the next 24 hours #ashtag #iceland #volcano
10:19 PM

Live camera trained on Eyjafjallajökull volcano in iceland http://bit.ly/bms7fU #ashtag
10:07 PM

Norwegian Government Run from an iPad During Icelandic Volcano http://su.pr/9B2zvB
3:17 PM

@NASA
FYI: Here’s what this Iceland volcano was doing earlier this month, courtesy NASA’s Earth Observing-1.
4:00 PM

@andrewgerrard Amazing satellite photo of the volcanic ash cloud over northern Europe: RT @juliansaunders
8:48 AM

@camposova Crippled by the awesome… RT @laverneshow RT @HJonesy Wow. Volcanic eruption *and* the Northern Lights. in ONE photo http://bit.ly/bYMKZv
12:56 AM

Over 100 quakes in California in 24hrs,massive one in China, not to mention Haiti & Argentina & now 2 volcanoes erupt in Iceland in a month…
11:50 PM

A good excuse to try out Google’s new twitter search
11:45 PM

Some other live articles on the Iceland Volcano

RTE News,

BBC News,

The Guardian,

The New York Times (excellent) Lede Blog,
11:44 PM

Short Sharp Science: How volcanic ash threatens aircraft http://su.pr/572mwt
11:00 PM

Just listening to the weather on Radio 1-apparently it will be cloudy tomorrow…
10:08 PM

Irish Health Service Executive – Health effects of Icelandic volcanic ash http://bit.ly/cq0GeS #ashtag
7:06 PM

Satellite image of the Iceland volcano ash cloud over Ireland and the UK http://bit.ly/9T0UQP #ashtag
6:55 PM

so who should we sacrifice to the volcano?…I have a few ideas
4:53 PM

@SkyNewsBreak: No non-emergency flights will be allowed in or out of the UK before 6am tomorrow at the earliest – air traffic control

Amazing footage showing how the volcano is affecting Iceland itself http://bit.ly/dfkNeM #ashtag

2:46 PM

Volcano in Iceland is the top search terms on Google http://bit.ly/d7Ratd
2:42 PM

@newscientist : tonight’s sunset will be apocalyptic as a result of the catchily named Eyjafjallajökull-Fimmvörduháls volcano
2:14 PM

Live Google Maps overlay of flights across in Europe- none over UK, Ireland, Norway, Finland or Iceland http://bit.ly/99pmfY
12:48 PM

I don’t think its a volcano at all, it’s just Iceland burning their money for warmth #ashtag
12:36 PM

@qikipedia Some people think that the 1783 #ashcloud caused a famine that in turn caused the French Revolution. #ashtag (via @akadallas)
12:09 PM

Guardian’s live blog of the Icelandic ash eruption http://bit.ly/aA0QeM
11:31 AM

Twitter user @dododan says “Britain hit by giant Icelandic metaphor (by The Guardian): http://bit.ly/9gLkD6”
11:27 AM

I’m just surprised there is a Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre http://bit.ly/b9Zfwl
10:57 AM

@metoffice News Release: Icelandic volcano eruption http://bit.ly/9pOR0X
10:41 AM

Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre – forecast for Icelandic eruption http://bit.ly/cnvKVE
10:12AM

DCU's Hybrid Awards

By Piers Scott
As the awards season finally draws to a close there remains one more event on the calendar, The Hybrids. The Hybrid Awards, DCU’s annual multimedia awards, take place this Wednesday in The Venue.

According to the Media Production Society, who run the awards, this year saw 74 submissions across four categories.

The Hybrids, which are not in the X year, are designed to celebrate the best of DCU’s artistic and creative talents.

So, as our friends in the Media Production Society are busily preparing and decorating we thought we would have a look at some the pieces nominated this year.

There are a smaller number of websites up for Website of the year than usual this year. The MPS themselves have two sites up for nomination; their home site and their new DCU FM subsite. Irish blogger award nominated Steve Conlon is up for the gong for his personal blog while multimedia students Thomas Tennyson and Seamus Redmond are in the running for their Forest Gump minisite.

Style Soc's Fashion Show

DCU’s graphic designers are in out in force contesting the “Poster of the Year.”

Style Soc’s Fashion show continues it successful run with the Hybrids with another nomination this year.

However, under Claire Brown’s tenure Foto Soc has seen a huge improvement of their on campus posters with two nominations this year. Deirdre O’Sullivan, Roseanne Cronly, Diarmuid Hayes are also nominated for their poster designs.

Video

There is renewed interest in the video category with both the College View’s new TV channel and the several MPS members in contention for Entertainment Video of the year.

CVTV’s inaugural edition

Robert Babbington and Kevin Dolan are up for nomination for 10 steps to the perfect baked beans

The MPS are in the running for DCU TV News

Having placed third in the Skerries Solas Film awards Nicola Leddy, a second year communications student, is hoping for a nod this Wednesday.

Audio

DCU FM is hoping to round off its very successful year with few statuettes in the audio broadcasting categories.

Jenny May Finn and Kate Murphy are up for their audio series “Girls aren’t funny.”

While DCU FM's Newswire, which has been nominated for several smedia awards, is up for three awards in the News and Current Affairs Programme of the Year

The Hybrids Awards are on this Wednesday in the Hub from 6pm

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is no fan of netbook laptops. Back in January, when he introduced the Ipad, Jobs made one simple point about netbooks, “They’re slow, have clunky displays, and run clunky old PC software. They’re just cheap laptops.”

When Jobs said this he obviously wasn’t paying attention to Acer’s latest range of mid-priced netbooks. They may be cheap but they are certainly not clunky.

To be fair to Jobs he was right. When the netbook market launched just over two years ago these miniature laptops were certainly clunky. Tech experts derided low resolutions, dull screens, short battery lives and ugly designs.

Using using netbooks was a strain on both the eyes and the back. If indeed you could manage to get one to work for any sufficiant period of time without crashing.

All they had going for them was a cheep price, €300- €800, and their small size. But despite these complaints-or perhaps because of the price- the netbook market flourished.

The Acer Aspire 1810TZ Netbook is a lightweight but powerful rebuttal to to Job’s complaints. This little laptop is not just designed for surfing the web but, most importantly, for working on.

With these models Acer are pushing themselves into the middle of the netbook market and at €640 they are not the cheapest on the market althought they certainly wont break the bank.

The 1810TZ is Acer’s second push into the netbook market and a huge improvement on the first. Gone are the slow processors and headache inducing dull screens to be replaced with rocket-fast duel core processors and impressive high definition displays.

And the display is a simply joy to behold. The image definition and colour depth are pixel perfect. High definition video is as crisp and clear as you would find on any Phillips 2010 range of HD televisions although at 11.6 inches across you probably wont be watching too many films on it.

On our test model we were surprised how the HD display made working with Windows more comfortable; especially when compared to similar sized, standard definition netbooks. Text is easy to read for long stretches- commas and full stops are easily distinguishable at first glance. Using the Acer over a working day we didn’t suffer from the usual eye-fatigue or headaches that are often associated with standard definition screens.

To push the high definition video Acer have package this little laptop with an impressively powerful 1.3 GHz dual core Pentium Processor.

Click on the Acer website and they will bombard you with information about their long life batteries, and rightly so. We conducted a test of the HD video with the laptop fully charged but unplugged. The two hour video barely made an dent in the 6-cell li-on battery, reducing the impressive eight hour life by only ninety-minutes.

This compares well with similarly priced competitors on the market. The same test of Hewlet Packard’s Mini 210-1014sa the laptop lost power half way through the same video.

Sound is funnelled through a miniature sound-bar speaeker on the front of the laptop. As you would expect from laptop speakers bass sounds were muted and drowned by the treble but the we were impressed by the power of the speakers. The sound was clear and audible from a distance. Recorded speech, which is usually difficult to hear on netbook speakers, was clear but a word of warning we had to rack the volume up all the way- be sure to turn the volume down before plugging in earphones.

Of course the battery is not doing all the work. The computer is helped by a dual core 1.3Ghz processor, which is perhaps a little underpowered at only 800Mhz. With that said it holds up well to every day use and doesn’t overheat. . The processor is accompanied by 4GB of DDR Ram, which can be extended to 6GB using a standard SD card.

In terms of the hardware; the keyboard is comfortable to use with surprisingly large keys.

The mouse track-pad, however, is almost unusable. Acer, for no logical reason, have made the track-pad from the same material as the chassis. We found it difficult to identify where the track-pad actually was without looking and when we did use it the cursor slow and, over time, uncomfortable to use. We racked-up the track-pad sensitivity in Windows but this made little difference.

We would strongly recommend buying an external mouse.

Like most modern laptops the 1810TZ comes in a choice of colours, red, blue, white and black and all the these suffer from the same problem- fingerprints.

This is not a laptop for the style conscious, after less than a day’s use our netbook was already grubby with fingerprints and smudges, all of them near impossible to clean. The chassis is made from a dull faux-brushed silver which looks good from a distance but feels flimsy when you actually use it.

Our major complaint about the 1810TZ is the webcamera. Built-in webcameras are nothing new to netbooks, they were one of the selling points of HP’s first slate of netbooks two years ago. But two years later and Acer’s latest batch of webcameras are not much better.

The image quality is grainy and offers none of the functionality you find on any comparably priced netbook. The on-board microphone is even worse, sitting less than a metre from the mic we had to shout to be heard. If you plan on using the microphone we suggest you invest in some Strepsils as well.

If you are planning on using a webcamera for any period of time we would recommend buying a Logitech USB camera. A good Logitech webcamera will set you back about €60 but will save you time (and probably your voice) in the future.

Overall the 1810TZ is a good investment for the overworked business person. If you are looking for a netbook for casual use have a look at the HP Mini series or the Sony Vaio P series. A poor webcamera and microphone and a relatively high price rule this netbook out for casual home use but a long battery life and a comfortable screen make this the perfect netbooks for the workday commute.

While Steve Jobs may be wondering what netbooks are good at, Acer have been figuring it out. With the 1810TZ the netbook has come of age for the business world. this little laptop is workhorse not a show-horse of a machine.

The 1810TZ is a powerful and comfortable machine designed to be actually used as a laptop rather than, as Sony would prefer you call them, a ‘lifestyle’ machine (what ever that actually means).

This little laptop will last you the working day and still have enough battery power to last the commute home.

Some 62 years after they predicted the death of cinema and radio Time reports that rather then new media killing off ‘old’ media the internet is helping to promote its forbearer. It is tempting, if not frightening, to believe that the internet and social media will damage broadcast media. The newspaper industry has been blaming their declining sales on the availability of free online news for a number of years. The BBC’s monthly iPlayer statistics (an exercise in PR as much as transparency) show the power of new and old media together. According to the figures in February 2010 98.7 million TV and Radio shows were watched on the BBC iPlayer website.

We are only now witnessing the beginning of internet TV and just as reporters in the early 20^th century found it difficult to predict the growth of this new medium so to is it equally difficult to predict the possibilities ‘old media’ in the future other than to say it will be multi-modal. The media tracking company Nielsen Wire divides its media reports into what it calls the “Three Screens,” TV, Mobile and Computer (a typically tongue-in-cheek article by The Onion reports that we spend 90% of our time watching glowing rectangles). What makes the web so difficult to predict is that is not just that it is several media but that these media are consumed differently by online societies.

So where does the debate over online journalism leave the broadcast media? The last year in Ireland has seen a growth of online broadcasting applications. For radio Dublin’s 98, News Talk and 2FM all relaunched their websites with state-of-the-art live streaming applications. RTE launched its video catch-up service in April 2009. Ireland has arrived late to online catch-up services RTE is the first allow international audiences have access to its video content.

Some 62 years after they predicted the death of cinema and radio Time reports that rather then new media killing off ‘old’ media the internet is helping to promote its forbearer. It is tempting, if not frightening, to believe that the internet and social media will damage broadcast media. The newspaper industry has been blaming their declining sales on the availability of free online news for a number of years. The BBC’s monthly iPlayer statistics (an exercise in PR as much as transparency) show the power of new and old media together. According to the figures in February 2010 98.7 million TV and Radio shows were watched on the BBC iPlayer website.

We are only now witnessing the beginning of internet TV and just as reporters in the early 20^th century found it difficult to predict the growth of this new medium so to is it equally difficult to predict the possibilities ‘old media’ in the future other than to say it will be multi-modal. The media tracking company Nielsen Wire divides its media reports into what it calls the “Three Screens,” TV, Mobile and Computer (a typically tongue-in-cheek article by The Onion reports that we spend 90% of our time watching glowing rectangles). What makes the web so difficult to predict is that is not just that it is several media but that these media are consumed differently by online societies.

So where does the debate over online journalism leave the broadcast media? The last year in Ireland has seen a growth of online broadcasting applications. For radio Dublin’s 98, News Talk and 2FM all relaunched their websites with state-of-the-art live streaming applications. RTE launched its video catch-up service in April 2009. Ireland has arrived late to online catch-up services RTE is the first allow international audiences have access to its video content.

In this video from 1968 Doug Engelbart gives, what he called, “mother of all Demos” in which he demonstrates the first modern PC-compete with mouse, keyboard, screen and a pre-courser to emails.

JJ (62), a retired postal worker, is among a growing number of older internet users in Ireland.  A recent survey by the Department of Communications shows that nearly 50% of Irish people over the age of 50 have a computer at home.  And about 30% of these older people are eager to learn how to use them.

But can you teach an old dog new tricks?

For those ‘Silver Surfers’ who are willing to learn there are a verity of computer skills courses across the country.  Dublin City University runs an award winning computer skills course specifically for older people.

Called the ‘Intergenerational Learning Project’ the course was set up by Trudy Corrigan, a lecturer in DCU’s School of Educational Studies in 2008.

It has already gained a number of awards.  In 2008 Trudy won The Irish Times ‘Living Dublin Award’ for her work on the project.

The lessons take place every Saturday morning during the university’s 12 week semester.  Each class lasts about three hours.

For the first hour the students are given an informal lecture on subjects such as sending emails or saving to USB.  After a short coffee break they return to the computer labs to put their new skills into practice.

With some students in their early 40’s to others in their mid 90’s it is not hard to see why some students, many of whom may never have used a computer before, may need a little extra help.

Help is readily available.  Despite having a small staff of only 5 paid lecturers the classes are busy with DCU students.

Students in the university are encouraged to volunteer their time to give one-on-one help to their older colleagues.  Trudy believes it is this one-on-one support that has led to the success of the project.

“The [older] students are allowed to go at their own pace, they lead the lesson and the DCU students help them along”, says Trudy.

Joan McGrane, a former student and now a teacher on the course believes this is how adult courses should be taught.  She is keen to point out that older people should not feel they are going to be talked down to, “There is a certain way of dealing with adults because they learn differently from younger people”

But neither, she says, should they be scared of the technology.  “The beginner’s class is like a showcase, it’s like Rumsfelds ‘known knowns and known unknowns.’  A lot of participants know the internet as a vague concept but they mightn’t know what it offers.”

Listening to the student chat before the class it seems that many come to socialise as well as to learn.

Indeed, the aim of the course is not just to teach computer skills but to help the students improve their quality of life.  Unlike other computer skills courses the DCU course emphasises social technologies such as mobile phones, Skype and email rather than more traditional fair such as spreadsheets.

This emphasis is supported by a recent study by Age Action Ireland and the Government.  The study found that digital social skills can have important benefits for older people.

Simple tasks like emailing children and grandchildren or ordering groceries can improve the quality of life for older people.

As Trudy explains the ability to use a mobile phone or online-telephony service like Skype can go some way to reducing social isolation in Ireland’s older population.

These benefits, she says, are especially important for people who housebound, ill or living alone.

JJ agrees, despite having a computer at home he says it never occurred to him to learn how to use it.  It was only with the encouragement of his adult children that he decided to take the course.

“It never occurred to me before this year to learn to use computers.  But now that I am I wonder why I didn’t start sooner.”

JJ, who has been attending the course for three weeks, says this focus on social technologies is the course’s strength.

At the moment however he is eager to learn how to use his new email account.  He wants to tell his son in Scotland he has joined the information revolution.

So, has it been worth it?  Yes, says JJ, “At the start of the year I was homeless and illiterate.  I was homeless because I didn’t have an email address and I was illiterate because I didn’t know how to use the internet.  That’s how important it is.”