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Inspired by the Chinese phrase (chengyu) known as Dotting the Eyes on a Painted Dragon
(Hua long dian jing) describes the key part in any piece of work that contains the essence of the matter and makes the whole work vivid and convincing. The phrase originated in the following folklore: When the Peace and Pleasure Temple in Nanjing was being painted, four dragons were featured but their eyes were left blank. The painter explained that if he painted in the eyes, the dragons would be brought to life. Onlookers, who did not believe him, insisted that he should dot the eyes. No sooner had he painted in the eyes on two dragons, than a great storm broke and those two dragons flew off as the walls blew away. When the storm subsided, the two dragons without eyes had not moved.

The Alzheimer Society of Canada is warning that the number of Canadians living with Alzheimer's disease or dementia is expected to swell to epidemic proportions within a generation. About half a million Canadians - 119,700 of them Quebecers - are affected. But based on a new study made public yesterday, the association predicts that within 25 years, the number of cases of Alzheimer's or a related dementia will more than double, ranging between 1m and 1.3m people.

For those who have long worked with two computer screens on overcrowded desktops, Lenova has emerged with an ergonomic alternative with the Thinkpad W700ds Dual-Screen laptop. The notebook offers not only a large 17-inch main display, but a 10.6-inch secondary display that slides out from the right-hand side.

Bob Muglia, senior VP of Microsoft's server and tools business, has been promoted to president of the division, which with Robbie Bach, head of entertainment and services division, Stephen Elop, runnings the business division, and former Yahoo executive Qi Lu, joined this month as president of Online Services Group, comprises the Group.

First of three half day workshops, support and advice organised by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) the events are free and will be delivered by Upper Quartile, a Scottish based performance and management consultancy with particular expertise in the textile and clothing sector. The second half day workshop on February 25 will cover product and design for different markets and using trade shows and customer information to say ahead of the competition.
The final workshop on March 25th focuses on developing business connections through networking and practical development of marketing and PR strategies, delegates being taken through practice scenarios by an expert facilitator giving them confidence to develop new skills.

One of the joys of examining the honours list, is the revelation of the work that others do, from fruit workers to janitors, from royal and diplomatic affairs at Jaguar Landrover to services to the Campaign for Real Ale and to the brewing Industry, music publishers, literature, arts, services to music and charity. And in sport, the winners were cyclists with some 18 were awarded honours for their services to the sport. By comparison, sadly IT, technology, science & industry don't make a similar gradient and barely scrape up a dozen, between them. But perhaps the honours for IT and technology is strictly financial, as some Scottish MPs have discovered.

Technology developed by Edinburgh based Rapid Mobile, offers graphically rich and highly interactive slot games giving users the chance to win huge progressive jackpots. Its ThinkPhone system allow games such as one with a Deal or No Deal theme, the 1920s themed Diamond Bonanza, and a seasonal release called Christmas Bonanza, delivered on to mobiles by Gamesys.

A hacker got into the computer systems of electronic payment processing services provider RBS WorldPay, compromising more than a million customers' records. Formerly known as RBS Lynk, RBS WorldPay, which claims it has more than 20 years in the business, is the US.payment processing arm of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

Year of homecoming dawns for the Highlands which greets it with optimisim. Unlike Edinburgh, and to a lesser extent Glasgow, we do not have a large financial services sector, where many well-paid jobs will undoubtedly be lost in the coming months. Our largest private employer, LifeScan, is sinking deeper roots in the Highlands by investing in research which, unlike the manufacturing side of its largely recession-proof business of producing blood testing devices for diabetics, cannot easily be relocated to South America.

Cfengine AS the Oslo based support company, has released a major upgrade of the Open Source, self-repairing software cfengine based on its innovative Promise Theory technology after 5 years of R&D under the technical direction of its long time author Mark Burgess (a professor of Network & System Admin at Oslo University College and previously department of physics).

Engineering, a care home, job recruitment and foreign exchange are sectors where five Scottish companies, Balhousie Care Group, recruitment consultancy FPSG, Integrated Subsea Services, No 1 Currency foreign exchange specialists and pipeline engineers STATS Group, made it into the 2008 Fast Track 100 league.The other awesome player is Clyde Blowers, which having rescued Weir Pumps in 2007 for £48m, managed to pull the coup by the year end by acquisition not only of targeted Textron's Union Pump business, but its entire industrial division of David Brown Gear Systems and David Brown Hydraulics, based in Huddersfield and Poole respectively, and Maag Pump Systems of Oberglaat, Switzerland, which makes reciprocating pumps for industries such as plastics and rubber.

The new type of biological camera can trace several different molecules at once in a live animal so doctors and scientists can visualise specific biological processes in living creatures by monitoring radioactive tracer molecules. So far, imaging techniques have largely been limited to seeing a tracer molecule at a time, unlikely to provide the full picture of complex functions or diseases.

Good news was that Chinese courts have convicted 11 in the Microsoft Piracy Case. The bad was the emergence of a Y2K-style computer bug which affected wners of 30GB Zunes which flooded Zune-related Web sites with complaints that players had suddenly stopped working, displaying only a frozen start-up screen.

.The Pioneers conference is intended as a brokerage event for business and industry to connect with the world of academia and to find out about funding opportunities. Itwill be composed of seminars, keynote talks and an exhibition, Pioneers '09 will focus on the importance of research and technology to business.

The occasion will comprise plenary sessions and parallel seminars covering:
- the impact of pioneering research on society and business;
- opportunities for small businesses in working with universities;
- how to build partnerships between business, government and universities;
- training scientists and engineers to tackle the challenges of the 21st century;
- privacy in the digital world.

The current Remote Impact game which won the EIG Award was developed to encourage physical activity and offer sports activities to remote family members and friends. The physical intensity of the game contributes to general fitness, weight loss and stress relief, and could even be used for rehabilitation. At the same time it allows participants to socialise and create new friendships over a distance in a fun way.

High hermeticity polymer based micro-cavity for wafer level MEMS device encapsulation is on offer from Heriot-Watt University, while University of Edinburgh has packaged prototypes for an optical manipulator, which has been built and demonstrated. The technology and know-how is now available under a non-exclusive license agreement from the University of Edinburgh. Both source from the Scottish University Technology database source which has a wide range of sectors and some interesting offers, as in GLOSS (games localisation software) from Abertay and innovative surface engineering of metals and oxides from the University of Edinburgh and University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Well worth a rummage!

Founded mid 2005, TechCrunch, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. Today TechCrunch claims to be the most popular technology weblog on the Internet and is ranked #2 on the Technorati 100. And it is hiring, building a small but intense team of web developers to work on CrunchBase, its online database of startup, investor and entrepreneur information.

Start-up company Tapulous has turned its simple game, Tap Tap Revenge into a mobile stage for musicians, achieving 3m downloads to iPhone, and been declared the most popular free iPhone game of the year by Apple. The game challenges players to keep up with tunes by tapping in the right spots on the phone’s screen, and available in Apple’s iPhone application store in July. Other software companies joining the iPhone bandwagon, include Smule, a start-up that created a program that turns iPhones into flutes, and giant game publishers like Electronic Arts, which recently released a version of the classic SimCity game for the iPhone.

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