NetResults: Almost 14 years ago, the government set a target of upping the representation of women on the boards of directors of State organisations to 40 per cent.
By 1997, women still constituted only 27 per cent of appointees to State science and technology boards.
Seven years on - especially given the increasing number of women who run companies here, or who are in senior management - you'd think things must have improved. But no - that figure has not budged an inch.
Women still make up only 27 per cent of such boards. And on some, such as the Ordnance Survey and the Dublin Transportation Office, not a single woman joins the fellows in the boardroom. As a result, the Republic figures a lowly seventh out of 12 EU countries for the number of women holding such positions.
The excuse that is usually trotted out is that no suitable woman, with the requisite scientific, technological, engineering or business skills, could be found for the position.
But such dithering will be more difficult now that the organisation Women in Technology and Science (WITS) has compiled a directory of women willing and able to serve on advisory, selection and management boards.
More than 150 women scientists, engineers and technologists feature in the Talent Bank publication, also available on CD-Rom from WITS (www.witsireland.com). Each is covered by a CV that lists abilities, professional affiliations and work history.
Although WITS is making a major effort to distribute the Talent Bank widely through Government and State bodies, as well as third-level institutions and trade unions, this is a publication that should find its way into the private sector as well.
There, even fewer women cross the threshold of the boardroom than in the public sector.
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Anyone remotely interested in the debate around electronic voting machines and their potential hardware and software problems will want to have a read through security expert Bruce Schneier's monthly Cryptogram (www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0411.html).
Mr Schneier is one of the famed names in cryptography and security and is also a thoughtful thinker and writer, able to latch onto, and then expose, the social, political and economic consequences of technologies.
His Cryptogram, which generally appears monthly, is one of my favourite newsletters. Even if you disagree with his take on things, you'll come away better informed and - almost always - entertained as well.
In the current issue, Mr Schneier points out something I hadn't known, and which was never discussed by commentators: that India's recent national election, widely touted as a highly successful use of electronic voting machines, had a ballot with only one item on it, requiring a single vote to be cast.
By contrast, Irish, European and US elections are more complicated things, with almost always several candidate elections and ballot measures as well. Once such complexity gets introduced into the balloting, many more things can go wrong with electronic voting.
Interestingly, Mr Schneier notes that inaccuracy in electronic voting, caused by anything from a malfunction to a voter misusing the machine, tends to be an accepted evil - just as it is in old-style voting machines - because if all people use the same machines, the problems will happen equally to supporters of all candidates and, therefore, will cancel each other out.
But because machines varied from district to district in the US, one cannot assume a cancelling effect. Mr Schneier lists a number of examples where machines caused problems in recent elections. "What's important about these problems is not that they resulted in a less accurate tally, but that the errors were not uniformly distributed; they affected one candidate more than the other."
So, take a very close election - we can all think of one recent one - and such glitches could actually throw an election one way or another.
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In yet another of those Q-style breakthroughs (in which real-world technologies converge with unlikely James Bondian technologies), Xerox announced this week that it had developed a technology that enables mobile phones to be used as portable document scanners.
Cool, or what?
Yes, the little mini cameras in our mobiles are all very nice but a bit useless for serious espionage given the quality of most images, and the fact that it would take ages to snap the entirety of even the most basic Evil Plan to Take Over the World.
Thankfully, Xerox's Grenoble research facility has come to the rescue with a technology that makes use of the camera, but operates in the capacity of a copier.
Scanned images can be sent to dastardly cohorts immediately using the phone, or stored or transmitted to another device using Bluetooth.
How does Xerox think this might be used?
The press release reads: "It could revolutionise the roles of employees working remotely in any vertical sector by enabling individuals to capture information and immediately transmit it."
No future in writing spy novels for that publicist.
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