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In the run up to looking at how anyone selects help to build a website or happily goes the DIY route, ComputeScotland takes a look an one site that anyone wanting to keep an eye on their lairs kingdom, will have inevitably stumbled over, that is Scotland archivist,'Scottie' and his comprehensive guide to all thing Scottish at the Rampant Scotland site.

The most joyous conclusion to Robert Edbert's search for a voice 2009, which he lost in 2006 after operations for thyroid cancer, has been answered by delivery of a prototype by CereProc this week. Another Scottish-made program React2 from Propeller Multimedia is providing voice therapy rehabilitation for stroke sufferers, while Affective Media uses tone and pitch of voice as indicators of driver's emotion for use with voice recognition software.

Hightech but eco building technology slowly attracting interest in Scotland is the potential of the J.Pod and Energyflo. The j.Pod is a Scottish-Japanese innovation, conceived and designed by Scottish architect, John Barr and developed in Kyoto University with Japanese construction companies and universities. The Energyflo technology, developed by a research team at Aberdeen University, creates "breathing buildings" through insulation cells which trap and recirculates warm or cool air within a building and trialled in Scotland and Dubai.

Two studies, worth Scottish attention, focus on the physicality of landscape design and how the UK's earlier springs and summers sounds a warning if we do not want that silent spring.The recent trend towards earlier UK springs and summers, accelerating according to one study (alas, inevitably published when Scotland is still having snow in February). The other study constructively finds that rugged, hilly landscapes with a range of different habitat types can help maintain more stable butterfly populations (possibly bees too) thus aiding their conservation. It also highlights that Scotland has a paucity of monitored sites or perhaps we do not feel the need?

Game theory combined with legal knowledge and ‘second order thinking’ provides an effective structure around which to build business strategies advises intellectual property legal expert Alexander Carter-Silk. With a thesis on games theory under his belt, not to mention an economics and a law degree, he expounded his arguments recently to a crowded Scottish Society for Computers & Law meeting in Edinburgh. Barely sixty miles away, the young Institute of Arts Media & Computer Games facility in Dundee should have been logged in. Both their approaches are starting to shift games and game theory, with visuals and data which morph and segue sociology, science, business and politics into quite another dimension.

Cloud vaults with their implication of security are offering various locations, clouds in reality are fairly complex, now there's a Cloud directory and seven business models, with the news that another model has emerged as Microsoft and the US National Foundation are to move research from its ivory towers and into the clouds.

Palaeontologists and microbiologist researchers in the UK and Germany are hunting for our ancestors. From the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester, the palaeontologists have devised a new method for extracting information from 500m year old fossils that indicate some of the earliest fossils from our part of the tree of life may have been more complex than has previously been thought. Over at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, microbiologists discover that the last ancestor we shared with worms, which roamed the seas around 600m years ago, may already have had a sophisticated brain that released hormones into the blood and was connected to various sensory organs. Both researches appear in Nature.

Three state of the art manufacturing research centres have been funded under a £70m Government investment based at the Universities of Southampton, Loughborough and Brunel, to help UK business develop technology products of the future and underpin manufacturing growth. But a potential nano growth sector, the food industry, is accused by the UK's House of Lords Science and Technology Committee of being secretive in its use of nanotechnology, and from the agriculture sector Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report on Food 2030, nano gets a single derisory allusion, that like GM, "nanotechnology, is not a technological panacea for meeting the varied and complex challenges of food security, but could have some potential to help meet future challenges."

Touch sensitive devices, with the new Android, and Synaptics Fuse, predictions of a silicon magnetic market take-off (and signs of increased computer embedded controls with Fusion magnetic ball bearings): infrastructure sensing advocated for water mains diagnosis and for buildings, not to mention US health sensor device startups and a hand-held common pathogens sensor and a Russian DNA bio-hazard device. Add in silicon electronics on silk substrates dissolving for embedded in vivo sensing, and piezo electric MEMS energy harvesting devices for sensors, not to mention movement-assisted sensor deployment in a cluster-based wireless sensor network, and its clear sensors are becoming ubiquitous.

Where will quantum computing fit into the developing grid scope of things? Does it move computing into a fifth paradigm, at a time when researchers are only now beginning to get a handle on the fourth, that of data-intensive scientific discovery? Or does quantum computing introduce a new hybrid paradigm of co-existence with the grid?

Make the most of it with concentrators, when it does and make sure of your inverters too! The Glasgow approach of Professor Colin Stanley’s team working with Instituto de Energía Solar at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, has developed a new type of photovoltaic cell, based on InAs quantum dots grown by molecular beam epitaxy and embedded in (Al,Ga)As. Intermediate Band Solar Cells (IBSC) this work has produced cells with one sun efficiencies in excess of 20% and two patents. Teamed up with players such as Enecys, IBSC could be interesting, just as the EU Energy Council declares its new PV promoting Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.

The world’s premier conference for the presentation of applied research in microelectronic, nanoelectronic and bioelectronic devices will see some 215 papers will be given by researchers from corporations, universities and government labs worldwide.SRAM shrink, nano injection lithography, graphene, bioelectronics, organic solar cells, random telegraph noise and its analysis, inkjet printing and alignment, spintronics and carbon nanotube transistor scaling are just a few of the wonders of the IEDM show.

Anyone who thinks that onyx, the semiprecious chalcedony, comes only in the colour black, will find that there are others shades. The Onyx Group true to form has been quietly growing and acquiring the market ‘impurities’ needed for colour and growth. So not only has it widened its regional distribution in data centres, added to its disaster recovery operations, but is also expanding its markets.

There is one problem in the official UK attitude to manufacturing - an almost blinkered focus on high value. The Technology Strategy Board (all about driving innovation) points out that the UK ranks as the world's 6th largest manufacturer. It's hell bent on promoting this for biosciences, healthcare & special purpose machinery (58% funding) automotive and aerospace (25%) with electrical, nonferrous, construction, agro-chemicals and environment getting the rats and mice remainder (25%). What seems to be missing from its calculations is the way factories and manufacturing are changing globally.

In the light of the Beauly to Denny contretemps, a project, the 'Tres Amigas Superstation' a US AltEnergy’s portfolio company, is the $600m grid interconnection in New Mexico, that, when operational in 2014, will connect the U.S.’ three grid systems. It aims to use superconducting "pipelines" and converter stations to connect US Western, Eastern, and Texas power grids.

Hamish Robertson, MD of Robertson Technogy writes on his solution for finding the 'right' franchisee. His approach, through buying the rights to a CV database could be applicable to many others who need to hand pick their staff, though with LinkedIn and Twitter now interfacing there may be other routes to the right person. And of course a soft sell feature on the web is another good route to the world at large as information scientists are well aware.

The Connect Scotland investment conference at Edinburgh’s Hub, had 15 Scottish entrepreneurs allocated 10 minutes each to pitch their companies for a share of some £45m from venture capitalists that included Pent Tech, UK Steel Enterprises and Dawn. The offerings came from a variety of sectors: renewable energy and clean technology, life sciences:medical (two pitched at consumers) biotechnology and software, manufacturing and the internet. All were established from 2000 to a new 20009 Strathclyde spinoff, and pitching for sums from £500,000 to £2m.

Emerging new business models were at the heart of two seminars in Edinburgh. The Scottish Society for Computers and Law (SSCL) debated copyright law and market economics, while ScotlandIS considered 10Big Things. It turned out that both had one amazingly intriguing common topic, the emerging new business models that IT and High Tech and others too would be advised to ponder.

Three things were blazingly clear at the Glasgow University NanoYard project workshop. The University has the essential, well equipped and specialised laboratory, the multidisciplinary range of skills and expertise, not forgetting £2.5m KT funding in place to help those who could use a nano approach or solution to product or process. Big companies, such as Thales (aka Barr & Stroud) Stephen McGeogh are really highly clued up on their wish list from nano for products such as But less than a fifth of those attending came from the SME sector.

Scotland, Computer News in Scotland, Technology News in Scotland, Computing in Scotland, Web news in Scotland computers, Internet, Communications, advances in communications, communications in Scotland, Energy, Scottish energy, Materials, Biomedicine, Biomedicine in Scotland, articles in Biomedicine, Scottish business, business news in Scotland.

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