The common lizard, as its name suggests, is common. Its range begins to the west in Ireland and stretches as far east as Japan, with an expanse that reaches as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far South as northern Italy. With so much of its range unoccupied by humans it's no surprise that Zootoca vivipara is a species of "least concern". But humans don't actually have to encroach upon the common lizard's habitat to cause the critter harm. We just have to turn up the heat.
Saint Patrick may not have driven the snakes from Ireland, but a pair of warships named for Irish novelists are keeping them out. Prefaced with “Long Éireannach,” meaning “Irish Ship”, the patrol vessel L.E. Samuel Beckett will be joined by its sister ship the L.E. James Joyce this May, if commissioning goes ahead as planned. And when Joyce goes to war, he'll bring along a host of robots.
At Paddy Power - Ireland's largest bookmaker - teams of quants and risk analysts set the odds on 12,000 to 15,000 events a week - everything from horse races and other sporting events to speculation on the name of Beyoncé's unborn child. Within these events, there are 60,000-70,000 individual bets, or "markets," to be made. And every market needs a set of odds - some kind of calculation of the probability that a specific outcome might occur, based on available data. But how does a bookmaker know what data is good and what data is bad? How can it build safeguards into predictive systems so it doesn't get burned?
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