businesspeople-from-ireland

"For the past 15 years I bought the Freeman—during 14 years in America, and since my return to this distracted country. Until recently I would give my bottom dollar for the Freeman. Now, as it is a partisan, I can have no part with it. The generation of the wicked cannot inherit the land, and the adulterer shall not possess the kingdom of God."

"J. D. Ryan and James O’Donnell, Esquires, will leave by the steamer Peruvian, the former on a business trip to England, and the latter to reside in Ireland. The Emerald Isle will never want for a bright, witty, whole-souled Irishman, so long as Mr. James O’Donnell is alive, which we hope will be for many long years. Bon Voyage."

"Next door came the store of James O'Donnell, a bachelor, from the Old Country, and a very popular man of his day. He had a rare fund of wit and humor and a good word for all the world. Possessing all these genial and attractive qualities his friends always wondered that he remained a bachelor. He went back to Ireland in his old days and it is said spent his declining years in a monastery. Like Strickland and Rankin he carried on a wholesale and retail trade in wines and spirits. Amongst the clerks, was James Crowdell and the well known Maurice Corcoran, alias "Kidney Feet.""

"I will and bequeath to the College of Rockwell Cashel Co. Tippery my fee simple landed property in Belvidere St. John's N.F.L.D. (value in rent for $102.07) agent James M. Kent Esq Q.C. for the education or part thereof of one of my next akin and should Rockwell College cease to be, the above yearly amount is to be transferred to the College of Mount Millway Co. Waterford Balance of cash remaining to be applied for the education of my next akin in Rockwell or other Institution of Education."

"I was a staunch Parnellite until the Divorce Court disclosures, and the grabbing of United Ireland shook my faith. I collected for the Parnell Testimonial, at St John's, from the bishop, priests, and my friends, £60. You can see in the Freeman of that time how I paid my mite (£5). I would now freely give £10 to depose him, and to stop fighting among families and people who were hitherto more united. The man must be possessed by a bad spirit who goes about sowing evil. He must see, unless blinded by pride, or something worse, that he must go, or Home Rule fall."

"We use AWS Lambda and NodeJS. Our app will have an animated Woebot tied to NLP that can respond to verbal language with animation. We do our analytics in house as we move to HIPAA compliance for our apps. We don’t want a 3rd party looking at data. We built a dashboard over the summer. It’s hard to find really good data scientists and AI people, and Android engineers."

"It was a nice to have a paywall at first to get validation that people would pay for it. We had a decent conversion rate, but I wanted to gather data. Direct to consumer will be the longer term model. People were emailing us saying this is less expensive than our therapist; they were the ones who valued us the most. Convenience was a huge value proposition."

"My background is in clinical psychology research and I reached out to the best in the field. We all agree that our work doesn’t scale. Athena Robinson, a former Stanford psychiatry professor just joined as our Chief Clinical Officer. Other than that, some of my other colleagues or friends have joined too — people who really care about mental health issues. It makes for a really great workplace — this idea is bigger than any of us. When you look at the data and what people share, it’s so personal and you don’t even hear things like this in human therapy."

"Initially it was myself and Pierre building web prototypes and games. We tried to make video games for CBT for 9 months, things like interactive fiction prototypes for dynamics of engagement. They all had so much dialogue it made sense for us to move to chatbots. Pamela Fox stepped in as our head of engineering and helped rebuild the stack."

"I really like ParentSpark — it helps parents with parenting. Their storytelling is great. It’s a mom coaching her kids and they help you as a parent. I also like Jeyant for medical screening; they have over a million users and screen for Zika and other diseases. PullString has done some nice character-based chatbots like Dr. Who. The Mabu chatbot, with eyes that follow you, is neat and I think IDEO designed it."

"We are planning an iOS and Android app so people have extra privacy and to be HIPAA-compliant. There’s a good reason to keep it with text and to NOT do it in voice. You cannot see a negative thought in voice, but in a text chatbot you write it out and this externalization helps you overcome it. Messenger was a great launch platform — they make it easy to create and launch a bot. Users loved our prototypes there and we decided to launch there as it was easy."

"It’s all completely de-identified and anonymized data — nobody in the company can ever see anyone’s Facebook profile. It was to protect the user and to protect us. The guiding principle is transparency. There is no open ended generative conversation — everything is scripted. We want to launch an app to have more privacy."

"The first is to just ask people if they want to converse. I’m not sure if we’ve nailed the invitation. Some of our push navigations were like “beep boop” — we are trying to understand the re-triggering schedule. [Note: Checking in to see what someone’s mental health is is a great reason to re-engage — Woebot naturally does this.]"

"The only strategy that we’ve done is press — that has been reasonably successful. Interestingly, we got far more conversations as a result of blog article reviews than mainstream press. Bloggers just seem to find us. The tongue and cheek name helped and launching with data and the study helped. Some of the other mental health bots are less than useful and possibly dangerous — so having actual data from a study was important."

"Some users want to be served something else. We always issue an invitation to engage in a conversation. There’s no assumption people want help. Some people just want to chat, they don’t want help. So we try not to explicitly ask people what they are looking for. There really isn’t a lot of open chat away from buttons in Woebot. People may want a past video or lesson."

"We learn all the time and have learned to keep track of our learning. If you have two buttons, they should represent genuinely different pathways. If there is no natural response or utterance, we use an emoji as an easy button filler. We’ve learned a lot about images. We used to have a black and white image of a bomb and we found it was triggering for certain people, so we had to remove it. Generally I like the black and white images. Many people really dislike minions. There’s a lot due to personal taste here — some people are into videos, others aren’t into it. We have veered away from videos, but we may make some to help teach people difficult techniques. When people are upset, they can only process a little — so our language and scripts have to be really short. We find it easier to have many chat bubbles with 1 or 2 lines — we try to keep it lean and bouncy. There’s almost a rhythm to it — there are a few flows where we can capture help."

"We also use standard search metrics, like precision and recall. For example, to detect people in crisis, we prefer recall search methods over precision as we want to be overinclusive and to identify anyone who could have a problem so we can refer them to human counselors or a help hotline."

"At the end, we always ask: How are you feeling, better, the same, or worse? We look at the failed transcripts and try to troubleshoot on what went wrong — we try to minimize people feeling worse. It’s hard to figure out what we can do for those feeling the same. When you get it wrong people are not shy about telling you — when a button doesn’t cover everything users want to say, users will tell you."

"They stoked the gaping furnace with the poor wartime anthracite to build up the steam pressure and I was soon enveloped in that delicious childhood cocoon of excitement and terror, the red roaring furnace and the clattering steel and hissing steam and belching smoke coming to confirm my conditioned image of hell. But my father was there with his easy balance and [authority] and hell only could threaten. On the short journey to Goold’s Cross the men put the driver’s cap on my head and pointed out landmarks and the farms of friends and talked about horses and hurlers. They even fried the traditional engine-driver’s breakfast on the long steel shovel, but I was not going to be distracted. I was a train driver. I was going to be one for ever. My grandfather was one. My uncle was a Station Master at Bruree. My family was on the railway. Trains were in my blood. Nothing would change."

"The Railway is the subject of his waking thoughts and nightly dreams. If he thinks of any other subject he thinks of it in connection with the Railway. If his mind is directed towards the recreation of the public, his projects in this respect are in connection with the Railway. If he sees that the amusement of the public can be promoted by any project, he sees it through the Railway glass. If he eats or drinks or sleeps, or provides others with the means of eating, drinking, or sleeping, he does it in connection with the Dublin and Kingstown Railway. He is like the prisoner in ancient Rome, who has a soldier chained to him; the Railway seems to be chained, not to his leg, but to his mind, and it moves when he moves, and he moves where it moves."

"In a TG4 documentary his mother said, "He broke so many windows, we eventually started boarding them up"."

"From the age of eight or nine my mother had me washing dishes on a biscuit tin at the Holyrood."

"Brian was on the phone constantly, even ringing the hotel to make sure I was doing a spot of training."

"They're like the grim reaper when anybody comes [to Croke Park] they just put them away with ruthless efficiency."

"And we could poke fun at them about by-passing the toll gates and 10 shilling notes and driving up on Ferguson tractors and supplying them with maps of Dublin and Nelson's Pillar not being there anymore."

"If they waited a couple of hours they could have commemorated two massacres in Croke Park."

"They always feel a bit isolated up there in the north-west."

"This union, which is dominated by some socialist philosophy, is not fit for purpose."

"I often got a belt from my mother with a wet dish cloth for kicking a ball through a window."

"The Miraculous Medal around his neck is obviously not working all the time anyway."

"I see the Taoiseach keeping a very close eye on the Donegal team, obviously looking for prospective candidates for Donegal in the next election."

"There is no hope for anybody else. You might as well give up the ghost now."

"Did you see last week where he referred to 'the Greek poet Horace', assisting those of us who are too old by translating the Latin quotation into English? ... Horace a Roman citizen, wrote in Latin. Homer was the Greek poet. Good luck to Meath at the weekend."

"I think Colm might need to go to Specsavers, because any big game I've seen, Michael does not go hiding, that's for sure. He has been brilliant, he is a leader on and off the pitch and he goes looking for work anywhere on that pitch."

"Humans have a 3 percent human error, and a lot of companies can't afford to be wrong 3 percent of the time anymore, so we close that 3 percent gap with some of the technologies. The AI we've developed doesn't make mistakes."

"The thinking in the show, the hacker thinking of how do you approach every problem, I think they're hacking life more than they're hacking systems."

"Flying down a tunnel of 1s and 0s is not how hacking is really done. The staff here has been really good about staying away from the cartoony version."

"Everybody fills in forms to say they are doing the right thing, but they don't actually look at the factory to see what is happening inside."

"Serious business people would never get elected in Ireland. You don't get elected in this country if you run around and tell people the truth. You've got to run round and lie to them about 'it will be all right on the night' and then they'll vote for you."

"I don't think there's going to be ten euro flights anymore because oil prices are significantly higher as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our average fare, which last year was 40 euros... we think that 40 euros will need to edge up to 50 euros in the next five years. There's no doubt that at the lower end of the marketplace, our really cheap promotional fares — the one euro fares, the 0.99 euro fares, even the 9.99 euro fares — I think you will not see those fares for the next number of years."

"Ryanair is responsible for the integration of Europe by bringing lots of different cultures to the beaches of Spain, Greece and Italy, where they couple and copulate in the interests of pan-European peace."

"I respect pilots. If you sit in the cockpit of a plane flying at 400 or 500 miles an hour, landing in 40 or 50 feet of visibility, you have untold respect for pilots. That doesn't mean that they don't do a very easy job, and that they are very well paid for doing what is a very easy job. We are in an era now where the computer does most of the flying. They're no longer there doing the flying themselves. But they are skilled professionals, they do a very skilled job... But are they hard-worked? No. Is 900 hours a year, or 18 hours a week on average [of flying] likely to generate fatigue? No. But you could not fail to respect and admire the professionalism of not just Ryanair's pilots but all commercial pilots."

"There will never be a shortage of people who get paid 150,000 bucks a year to work about 18 hours a week."

"Two or three years ago, we decided to do something truly revolutionary in the airline business, and that was not just offer very low fares, but to offer very low fares and be nice to people. And that being nice to people has... been truly transformative of our business. In the last two years of being nice to people, my traffic has gone up from 80 million to 115 million, and my profits have doubled... If I'd only known that being nice to customers was so good for my business I would have done it years ago. But I'm still learning as we go along."

"Human factors are always very important to us. I'm often asked at these kind of lectures, 'How do you motivate your people?' And I think fear works great."

"We have the best customer service in Europe. Our customer service doesn't consist of giving you fine wines and big fat seats for your big fat backside, or giving you frequent flyer points so you can travel again at your employer's expense. Our customer service consists of three things that people really want: a cheap flight, an on-time flight, and we promise not to lose your bags in between. As a result of that formula which seems very simple yet is incredibly revolutionary within the airline industry, we have delivered 27 years of continuous growth and we're now the world's favourite airline: we carry more internationally scheduled passengers than any other airline."

"We charge for checked-in bags not because we want your money, we just don't want your bloody checked-in bag!"

"We're bright, we're well educated, Let's get up off our backsides now and go and create something postive for our kids."

"We're already in honk up to, above our ears. You can't continue to run these fiscal deficits. It has to be eliminated!"

"This is not the bloody potato famine. We're sending people abroad now for a couple of years. These kids will get good experience and they will come back!"