Watch out for those manholes!
Of warnings there was no shortage. Still, the Irish taxpayer should have been told about the lampposts and the manholes. "Each lamppost could be a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer station," said the glamorous visionary. And the manholes? They're spaced at regular intervals throughout a city and could be used for — well, something, he added. With the public footing the bill, it was easy for Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab to go on like that. Now, however, the well has run dry and the same people who were duped into funding the excesses will have to pay for picking up the pieces.
Had you bothered to visit the grandiosely named Media Lab Europe anytime since Christmas, you would have noticed that the "Latest news" section of the homepage was looking decidedly old. Heading up the "breaking-news" list is "Media Lab Europe Teams with Amsterdam New Media Institute, 23 November 2004" and "Google Founders Visit High-Profile Research Facility, Media Lab Europe, 6 October 2004". Bit behind the curve, that, for an entity that boasts itself to be "Leveraging the innovative and entrepreneurial operating model of the world renowned MIT Media Lab".
There was a very good reason why the European scion of fabled MIT was so lethargic with updating its homepage: it was broke. On Friday came the grim announcement that the flagship digital research institute set up in Dublin by the Irish state at a cost of €35 million, was closing after just five years in operation with the loss of 50 research and administration jobs and an unknown number of others in institutions engaged in collaborative work with the lab. Ooops.
So why did it go pear shaped? Put simply: inflated egos on both sides of the Atlantic. The Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern loved the project from day one, despite being warned about the weakness of the business model, and with Negroponte not having to worry about developing commercial products there was no need to care unduly about the bottom line. The taxation pit is, as we know, bottomless. "Negroponte: Tough Times? Go Crazy" was the headline on Karlin Lillington's article in Wired News on 2 October 2003. How crazy? Intimate interfaces crazy.
"A major current theme at Media Lab Europe is Intimate Interfaces: bringing together inter-modal interfaces, biometric sensing, and rich representations to create intimate and personal connections with and through new technologies." Er, yes.
How embarrassing is this for Ireland, which wishes to establish itself at the research end of the IT business? Very. MediaLab Europe was the anchor tenant of the government's "Digital Hub" in the run-down Liberties area of Dublin and the closure is very bad news, and more unpleasant headlines may be on the way. The hub has attracted some 40 companies but half of these are involved in educational software projects and, as we know, the bloom is long gone off the e-learning rose.
Ireland has to focus on R&D if it wants to keep pace with its IT competitors but that does not mean throwing prudence out the window when those slick manhole salesmen come to town. Could this be another case for the lawyers? You know: a tribunal on the misue of public monies?
Comments
There have been some very astute value for money reviews launched by the Public Affairs Committee recently but I doubt MLE's funding will be the subject of such a review.
Posted by: Bernie Goldbach | January 16, 2005 10:32 AM
Some of their research projects seemed more like hobbies for when you got bored of doing actual work; my favourite was the flower that bloomed when one of your instant-messaging buddies logged on. Amusing gimmick you could knock together in a weekend? Sure. Valid use of research funding, let alone publicly-funded research grants? Not in this taxpayer's book. I agree that basic research should be funded, and that it does fall to the public sector to fund it in many cases. But that doesn't justify funding a researcher's every passing whim.
Posted by: Brian Mennell | January 17, 2005 4:11 PM