James Curran is the name of:
James Curran (c. 1962 – 3 April 2005) was the victim of a politically charged murder conspiracy in Ireland.
James Curran was a native of The Liberties, Dublin, an area beset by drugs (both abuse and dealing) since the early 1980s.
Curran had spoken out about local former republicans' involvement in taking "protection" money from well-known drug dealers in the south inner city.
In a Dublin pub just after Christmas 2004, Curran witnessed Bernard Dempsey and "his associates taking an envelope of cash from members of a well-known heroin dealing gang". Dempsey was a local IRA commander and election activist for Sinn Féin's Aengus Ó Snodaigh. In response to this, Curran, "who had personal experience of the damage heroin had done to his local community ... began shouting down the bar at Dempsey - 'Here, I'll buy you a pint. This is not drug money. This is clean money'". This infuriated Dempsey.
On 3 April 2005, Dempsey walked up behind Curran - who was sitting at the bar of the Green Lizard pub - and shot him three times through the back of the head in full view of customers. He then gestured to the crowd of shocked onlookers with his gun, and walked out of the pub as calmly as he had walked up to his victim moments before.
James R. Curran is a computational linguist and senior lecturer at the University of Sydney.
Curran's research focuses on natural language processing , making him one of the few Australian computational linguists. Specifically Curran's research has focused on the area of natural language processing known as combinatory categorial grammar parsing. In addition to his contributions to NLP, Curran has produced a paper on the development of search engines to assist in driving problem based learning.
Within NLP, he has published papers on combinatory categorial grammar parsing as well as question answering systems.
Curran has co-authored software packages such as C&C tools, a CCG parser (with Stephen Clark) .
In addition to his work as a University of Sydney lecturer, Curran directs the National Computer Science School, an annual summer school for technologically talented high school students.
I have a favourite brother
And his Christian name is Paul.
He's lately joined a football club
For he's mad about football.
He's got two black eyes already
And teeth lost from his gob,
Since Paul became a member of
That terrible football club.
(Chorus)
For he's football crazy,
He's football mad,
The football it has taken away
The little bit o' sense he had,
And it would take a dozen servants
To wash his clothes and scrub,
Since Paul became a member of
That terrible football club.
In the middle of the field, one afternoon,
The captain says, "Now Paul,
Would you kindly take this penalty-kick
Since you're mad about football?"
So he took forty paces backwards,
Shot off from the mark.
The ball went sailing over the bar
And landed in New York.
(Chorus)
His wife, she says she'll leave him
If Paulie doesn't keep
Away from football kicking
At night-time in his sleep.
He calls out 'Pass, McGinty!"
And other things so droll
Last night he kicked her out of bed
And swore it was a goal!