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Mary Mulvihill

January 24, 2011

Mary Mulvihill is an award-winning science writer, and one of Ireland’s foremost science editors and broadcasters. Recent books include a new guide to sustainable living, Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man (New Island, 2009), and Lab Coats and Lace, a collection of biographies of inspiring Irish women scientists, which she edited for WITS (2009). Over the past 20 years Mary has had numerous popular science series on RTE radio and Lyric FM, including The Quantum Leap, the Goldilocks World and Left Brain, Right Brain.  She has also written frequently for The Irish Times and numerous other publications, and edited Technology Ireland for a decade. Each month she publishes a guide to what’s on and what’s worth reading and seeing. The Science@Culture bulletin has been on the go for over a dozen years now, and is widely read by a vast cross-section of people interested in science and related events.  Read the latest edition, and subscribe to the bulletin here...

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Guide to buying a washing machine in 2012

Let’s face it; there are a mass range of options out there when it comes to buying a new washing machine. In fact, there are some many obscure brands and models out there it becomes hard to wade through all the ‘marketing guff’ to actually find a reliable and efficient machine.

I hope this post will offer you some value in how to go about looking for a new one.

Efficiently

The first thing you need to know is that whoever classified washing machine efficiency was a short sited idiot. Which is why efficiency ratings range from G to A – simple enough I hear you say?

No.

Because due to the limits of the western alphabet the powers that be of the white goods world have bolted not 1 but 5 pluses on the end, which means the most efficient of washing machines gets a slick looking A+++++ rating (I am looking forward to the year 2020 when the best machine could look like this A +30 .)

So, you need to take into consideration the energy rating and the more pluses the better, good washing machines from large brands like Comet will allow you to refine your search to filter out low efficiency ratings.

Reviews

It is important to consider both the specs and the user experience, you don’t want to buy the best looking machine on paper, later to find out it breaks after 3 months, and guess what? 1000s of others broke after 3 months too! Look online, you can get a good idea of what might happen.

Spend as much money as you can

I am not saying get robbed blind by some acne ridden salesman working the Saturday shift, but what I am saying is that you get what you pay for. I am talking warranty, insurance, free replacement and repair packages, just do it! Not to mention that the more you spend on a machine upfront the better it will be and the more money on the utility bills it will save.

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iPad 3 – Cutting Edge Technology for Me

I’m one of those people that love to stay on top of new technology. I was one of the first people in this city to have an ipad. As soon as I bought it and took it home, I knew that it was like a child to me. There is so much that can be done on these machines. I still have a desktop for all of my work and a laptop that I hardly ever use. But when it comes to having fun in my spare time, you will always find me on my ipad. This year the latest one was released and I haven’t been able to find one yet. I know it may sound trivial to most but I feel like a child at Christmas waiting to get my own. I talked to a few places but none seemed very promising

A lot of my friends have the new ipad and I have been really envious of their new purchase. That has made me seriously consider to buy new ipad 3 because of all of the hype that has been around this device. After all, the new ipad is supposed to have this amazing display on it that will make pictures look almost real. I could save up my money and buy the tablet online which would help me to be sure I got the best deal. When you buy something like this, it is really important to get a device that has newer technology. Since they just announced the new ipad recently, I feel confident that my purchase would not be out of date for a very long time. It will be fun to use all of the applications on this device as soon as I place the order and have it delivered.

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Ways to Stay Warm and Save Money

This winter has been particularly, enduringly cold, and as such it’s become a daily necessity to wrap in as many layers as possible (even if you’re just popping outside to do the bins). While it’s not quite multiple scarves and thermals weather, it’s definitely pretty damn cold. With the credit crunch still looming, however, we often think twice before turning the heating on (or at least wince slightly as we close the boiler cupboard). So what can we do to stave off the cold without breaking the bank?

As previously mentioned, the heating – and the turning on or off thereof – tends to be a point of anxiety for many. While it’s true that heating bills can rack up over time (and if so you may want to look into some cheap heating oil), if you’re careful and judicious with its use then you can be both warm and better off. Boiler timers really are your friend here; make sure the heating goes off when you’re asleep (or even a little before since by then you’ll be tucked up in bed), and if you must have it on the mornings – which, admittedly, can be a little chilly – then make sure it goes off again as soon as you no longer need it. Assuming you keep your windows closed, your house should retain accumulated heat quite well, meaning that if you have your heating on for a short time then it should keep the place warm for a fair while afterwards.

Arguably the easiest way to get – and stay – warm without the aid of heating is, of course, loading up with layers of clothing (although hopefully not as many as you’d need to wear outside). You’d be surprised how much making sure your arms are covered contributes to your overall body temperature, and sometimes simply wearing a scarf can deter you from having to turn on the radiator. Hot water bottles are also another great way to create localised warmth, and if it comes to it you can wrap yourself up in a duvet on the sofa (or at your desk).

The kitchen can also provide you with a number of ways to stay warm. The obvious is, of course, using the oven; cooking or baking creates both warmth (which, if you live somewhere small, often radiates throughout the entire house) and delicious smells, and hot food and drinks are great are keeping your core temperature up.

In short, there’s really no reason to keep frantically checking heating oil prices; a little thinking ahead and you’ll be fine and, most importantly, warm.

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Spice Up Your Life With These Cooking Tips, According to TVs leading Show

I was watching Masterchef (a re-run) the other day and some wonderful cooking tips came on. Not only is it the best of the cooking TV shows, but it the most entertaining too.

You would not believe how good the food looked in HD on my new Sony TV too! It was amazing, here is what I learned.

In an era of many restaurants, processed foods, microwaves, delivery pizza and Chinese take-out, the art form of cooking is becoming a lost art. Yet anyone who wants to eat healthily, cheaply or just at home can learn the science of food preparation. This article has some pointers for anyone who wants to better in the kitchen.

It is a good idea for you to make sure that you do not overcook vegetables because that will lead to them losing the majority of their important nutrients. Another reason not to overcook them is because they can get very mushy, which would make them unappealing to eat.

To reduce prep time as well as wear and tear on your blender, freeze your smoothie fruit instead of using ice. Not only does using ice water down the flavour of your smoothie, but if you freeze your fruit first the step is entirely unnecessary. As an added bonus, frozen fruit blends much easier than ice.

Store your lettuce and celery in paper bags and not plastic ones. Do not clean the vegetables or take off the leaves on the stalk or on the outside, until you are ready to cook them. This will ensure that it stays fresh inside of the refrigerator and you can cook with them.

Keep some simple already prepared dishes frozen in the freezer. These dinners are very handy for either a quick dinner on those hectic days when you just don’t feel like cooking or on that Sunday morning when you have to get something together for the church social.

Are you looking for an easy way to peel chestnuts? Cut an x in the flat side of the chestnut and place them in a shallow pan. Cover the pan tightly with foil and roast for 20 to 30 minutes on 450 shake the pan twice. Remove and peel while hot. If they become to cool to peel place them back in the oven for a minute

Have you ever had to eat a cauliflower that was more off white then actually white? It can make people turn away from this wonderful vegetable. To keep that white colour in your produce, add some milk to the water when cooking. This will not change the taste, just the look.

It is important to test the heat of oil before using it to pan fry your food. Pouring the oil into the pan and then sprinkling it with water should give you a series of cracks or sparkles. If it does not, then the pan isn’t currently up to frying or heating capacity and dumping the food in it will act closer to an oil sponge than a frying pan.

Preparing delicious, healthy dishes and meals for one’s self or guests and loved ones does not have to be troublesome. Apply the advice in this piece for success in the kitchen. Use the knowledge here to feed yourself and those around you with delightful meals sure to bring full bellies and smiles to faces.

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Avoid Falling Prey To Supermarket Tactics

One of the most tongue-chewingly embarrassing moments in life is when we are presented with a bill we know we cannot really afford, but grudgingly have to pay anyway. You’d expect to find yourself in this position at a posh restaurant perhaps, or maybe some swanky jewellery shop where you can just about bring yourself to pay the asking price to wipe the disdainful smirk off the arrogant shop assistant’s face.

Yet how many of us are regularly facing this situation at the supermarket? Quite a few I’ll bet, and I’ll happily admit to being one of them. On the face of it, they have everything going for them; supermarkets have long wooed us with the convenience of having everything we could possibly need in an aircraft hangar-sized warehouse, a short trundle from the car park (where we can even top up with petrol too!). By the time we finally get to the checkout, we cannot face the prospect of returning empty-handed after fighting our way through the other shoppers and queuing for a till, and we don’t want to create a fuss or delay for the people lining up behind us.

But buyer beware! The supermarkets are crafty and do a lot of customer and behavioural research in order to get consumers to purchase more. You cannot have helped notice that the regular grocery bill is climbing sky-high, and much as though the retail giants commiserate with the poor shoppers, they are raking in enormous profits. Here’s how you can keep your credit card bill manageable and avoid becoming a dupe of the supermarket chains.

  1. Make a list. Stick to it
    It takes ten minutes to run through the house and check what you need or are intending to cook/use/eat until your next shop. This stops you buying additional items of things you already have, and stops you falling prey for the countless little distractions supermarkets set up. Doughnuts and cookies as you walk in. Sweets by the checkouts. Piles of items on special offers. It’s all designed to get you to buy in addition to what you have planned.
  2. Compare prices
    Supermarkets often introduce “loss leaders”. These are items at heavily discounted prices which are such good value the supplier doesn’t actually make a profit from them. How can they continue in business doing that? Well , they can’t, obviously. The special price will only run for a period of time after which it will go back up top the normal price . . . hopefully when that item is in your regular list of groceries. I’ve seen some items jump by as much as 30%, so it’s worth keeping an old receipt just to keep tabs on how much you are paying.
  3. Multi-deals
    These can sometimes be good value if you are going to be using two of the item in question. However, this sort of deal is designed to get you to up your spend by targeting items that you usually buy, so ask yourself if you really need two if you only put down one on your list. If the item is perishable, check you will be consuming that additional items within the sell-by date or simply paying a bit extra just to throw it out. Also check that you won’t be paying less just by getting a larger size of the item you want. I’ve seen instant cappuccino coffee sachets in a multibuy deal, when actually it was cheaper to buy a single item that held twice the amount of the individual multibuy packs. Just because the shelf sticker says it’s a bargain, don’t assume that it is. Do the math or take a calculator (or smartphone app, or digital watch if you have that 80′s one with the built in calculator).
  4. Own brands
    Most supermarkets tend to have their own budget range of leading products in their own, rather drab marketing livery. These are nearly always placed above or below the pricier leading brand versions, which will always be in your direct eye-line as you shop. If you fancy being experimental and saving a few pounds, whenever you reach out for a product on your list, look up or down and see what other versions are available. Often these are produced by exactly the same people who produce the “nice” versions, and in some cases I actually prefer the generic versions.
  5. Go round the store backwards
    Not literally, but think about this: how many supermarkets do you go to where the fruit and vegetable section is the first thing you see? This is to give the impression of a market place, which some clever research piece has found positively affects our impression and willingness to spend. I don’t know to what level this actively affects your spending, but being a bit of a rebel I resent being pigeon-holed by some behavioural study and so I deliberately take my trolley to the end of the shop and work my way back to the start. It’s a small gesture for the revolution, but what the heck.
  6. Store loyalty deals
    You can often find some good deals with loyalty schemes. I get points on a credit card I use exclusively for groceries which gives me money off my groceries. I pay it off in full each month and in return for buying my shopping I get a few quid few every month in vouchers I can spend on luxuries. Where you need to be careful is when they start issuing time limited vouchers or offers based on a certain threshold of spending. I don’t know what the average spend per supermarket visit is, but I’m willing to bet they all know and when they start pimping up to 10% off a spend of £70 or more, I’m guessing it’s quite high.

Given their mastery of the art of up-selling and impulse buying, it’s very difficult to walk into a supermarket and “just” get what you need. A £10 spend rapidly becomes £20, and a £70 minimum spend would, I imagine, very easily climb above £100. Yes, you feel good because that voucher offer hasn’t been “wasted”, but if you over-spent when you really didn’t need to, what have you saved? There will always be more offers and discounts . . . think of it as saving an entire shopping trip rather than having to shop for the sake of 10% off an additional bill.

A classic example of this was over Christmas. A “budget-orientated” retailer was offering £25 in vouchers, provided the customer spent over £60 per week in four out of the six weeks in the run-up to Christmas. Quick bit of maths results in a minimum spend of £240, which seems quite a hefty bill, even for celebrating the silly season. Factor in the usual overspend, and that a lot of the party food bought at the beginning of the deal won’t last to Christmas anyway, and the retailer is effectively offering much less than 10% reward on a guaranteed income for those who stick out the deal.

This isn’t to say you can’t find good deals in supermarkets, just be wary of the gimmicks and upselling tactics and you can get yourself a bargain shop without having paid more than you needed to!

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Common Sense for the Credit Crunch

With the UK economy teetering on “double-dip” and the global stock market acting like a nervous horse at a fireworks party, the overbearing message from successive governments has been to “spend our way” out of recession. This has led to the tritely comforting but rather short-sighted excuse of treating ourselves to expensive good and services as “we’re doing out bit”.

Sadly, as with most financial smoke-and-mirror acts, the final reckoning never misses a curtain call. All the shiny things purchased with credit cards and on purchase agreements need to be met with payments and for consumers more hard pressed than ever with inflationary costs, this is proving difficult. Secured loan repossessions are increasing, and a boom industry in selling these on is slowly gathering pace. For those with a number of store credit and other credit cards, the potential to miss a repayment and get into a spiral of bad credit is increasingly likely.

What’s required is not a “fiscal stimulus” (printing more cash and debasing the raw currency on which it is based), but an injection of something closer to home: common sense. Ignore what the shiny Whitehall suits are telling you. These are people on a salary at least twice the national average and that’s not counting what they have running on directorship positions and executive committees on the side. These are not the kind of people who will be worrying about whether they can stretch their budget to a family roast at the weekend and, if they ever did, would end up charging it on taxpayer’s expenses anyway. The financial masterminds at Number 11, the bear pit stock traders and bank mandarins have all shown that they are no more capable of soundly running the nation’s finances as any other person, so it’s down to you to ensure that you can emerge from the financial crisis with your balance intact.

Firstly, assess your current outgoings. Take an overview of your last three months bank statements and list all the money going out of the account, including standing orders, direct debits and cash withdrawals to fund day-to-day expenses and entertainment.

Next, add up the money going into the account from wages, bonuses, benefits or whatever else gains you an income. Subtract the outgoings from this amount.

Ideally you should be left with a positive number. This is the amount of disposable income you have left at the end of the month. It may be depressingly small, in which case you can look at the incidental expenses, especially meals out, shopping bills or cash withdrawals to see if you can scale back on the outgoings. Unless you have already factored in savings and pension, you will also need to find an amount from this total to put away for savings too.

If you end up with a negative figure, you are likely in a position where you will be attracting an increasing amount of debt. Although you may be keeping things within the limits of your existing credit arrangements (such as an overdraft), be wary that an extended period of debt will still trash your credit score and lenders can always change the terms and conditions of the facilities they offer: as the financial situation hurts their profits, they are less likely to extend favours to you.

The first step is to take action. No debt problem ever disappeared on its own, and with the odds of winning the lottery approximately eight times less likely than being hit by lightning, no solution will be had by ignoring things and hoping for the best.

Assuming that you cannot influence the income side of the equation (although improving your income to above its current level is a definite plus if you possibly can), then a serious look needs to be taken at your outgoings.

It’s a lie that it isn’t fun to be frugal. A great deal of satisfaction can be had knowing that that heroic self-sacrifice you just made is going to be one less creditors sending you nasty letters or phone calls. By living within your means and cutting out luxuries and unnecessary extravagances, you can start clawing back that negative column and paying off your debts. True, you will have to spend less, which will involve cutting back on favourite treats, or going out so much, or buying so many nice things. However this doesn’t mean that you will never have another treat, meal out or new jacket again . . . you are simply putting in an action plan to deal with the current financial situation.

Meeting scheduled repayments is a must, especially loans secured on your property. If you have a loan on your car and this is essential for you to earn an income, then make sure this is repaid on time too. It can often be a good step to take a consolidation loan; this is an amount that covers individual outstanding debts into one repayment, often at a lower interest rate than many of the smaller debts will be charging. If you are considering this, go through the calculations with a qualified debt advisor or Citizen’s Advice Bureau . . . you don’t want to be paying more interest off than you need to.

Attack your debts first: the longer you have outstanding debt, the more of your actual cash goes on to covering interest than paying off the loan sum itself. See if you can overpay wherever possible. On a mortgage this will save you thousands of pounds over the typical term of the loan (25 years), but it’s also useful on smaller loans or credit card bills too as this will clear the outstanding balance faster and help improve your credit rating.

If the scheduled repayments are in excess of your income, then you need to make the creditors and your bank aware of this. They will often offer help, or plan out a series of repayments so that you can still provide some sort of payment without bankrupting yourself. If they are not informed of difficulties they will simply see a delinquent account missing repayments; if you make an appointment to inform them of the situation they are usually more understanding. Be aware though, that they will still require repayment and that your debts will not simply vanish. You will still need to make some lifestyle adjustments in order free up the required cash to meet the repayment plan.

Once your debts are cleared or under control, you can then make a better decision about what to do with your disposable income. Planning a weekly or monthly budget will help and will help you keep in control of your daily balance. You will then be able to make a more informed decision as to whether an emergency or indulgence will be within your financial means or require additional funds.

Mary Mulvihill

Mary Mulvihill is an award-winning science writer, and one of Ireland’s foremost science editors and broadcasters.

Recent books include a new guide to sustainable living, Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man (New Island, 2009), and Lab Coats and Lace, a collection of biographies of inspiring Irish women scientists, which she edited for WITS (2009).

Over the past 20 years Mary has had numerous popular science series on RTE radio and Lyric FM, including The Quantum Leap, the Goldilocks World and Left Brain, Right Brain.  She has also written frequently for The Irish Times and numerous other publications, and edited Technology Ireland for a decade.

Each month she publishes a guide to what’s on and what’s worth reading and seeing. The Science@Culture bulletin has been on the go for over a dozen years now, and is widely read by a vast cross-section of people interested in science and related events.  Read the latest edition, and subscribe to the bulletin here.

Ingenious Ireland (2002), her guide to Ireland’s fascinating scientific heritage and curiosities won a number of awards. She also edited two collections of biographies of Irish women scientists and pioneers – Stars, Shells and Bluebells (1997), and Lab Coats and Lace (March 2009).

Before all that, she was a statistical geneticist with the agricultural research agency (An Foras Talúntais, now Teagasc) . . . but that’s another story!

And way before that there was a degree in genetics, followed by an MSc in statistics (both at Trinity College, Dublin), and somewhere along the way a graduate diploma in journalism.

Affiliations, memberships:

Irish Science & Technology Journalists Association: member, former president

WITS:  founding member, first chairperson

RIA Committee for the History of Irish Science: member

Irish Council for Bioethics: former member of the first council

Industrial Heritage Association of Ireland: member, former council member

Association of Independent Radio Producers Ireland: member

NUJ & Irish Writers Union: member