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Latest News for Scotland

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.

Five out of eleven locations in the Highlands and Islands have been identified for their potential to be significant manufacturing sites serving Scotland's burgeoning offshore tide and wind energy industry, as have a swathe of central belt locations. But it highlights that the Scottish southern lands appear to be out in the cold from any renewables calculations.

Scottish government reports that Scotland's hydro power potential is nearly double the amount previously estimated, with small hydro playing a key role in hydro development and job creation. But a major bottleneck is in the amount of skill available in Scotland and the rest of the UK to achieve worthwhile targets.

NHS National Services Scotland could decide that the recent Patient Management System contract should be widened to become a national system to cover all NHS boards in Scotland. NHS NSS, which procures IT software on behalf on Scotland’s 14 health boards and eight special health boards, selected InterSystems with Trakcare as its preferred bidder in November.

BT Business Total Broadband Fibre, offering download speeds of up to 40Mb/s, from as little as £30.00 per month service that gives business traffic priority at times of contention and the UK’s fastest upstream speeds of up to 10Mb/s, allowing users to get more than ever before from the internet. So who might be in line for this in Scotland?

The Scottish Snowdrop Festival initiative was started at Cambo Estate, just south of St Andrews, in Fife where snowdrops, snowflakes and aconites carpet the 70 acres of woodland of the Estate, near St Andrews and are a focus of its renowned 'snowdrops in the green' mail order business. The Festival has now spread to more than 50 Scotland wide participating gardens.

The public is being encouraged by the Scottish government to spend more time outdoors to appreciate the country's spectacular landscapes and its wildlife in the United Nation's International Year of Biodiversity. The government should operhaps have added the warning that granting Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission Ltd (SHETL) consent to install the 400,000V overhead electricity transmission line to replace the 132,000V line between Beauly, near Inverness, and Wharry Burn, near Stirling, some of that stunning scenery as it is seen now, will vanish.

The Honours list makes intriguing reading. For example three awards went to Computer Games industry stars, namely to Paul Stafford Jackson for services, to Rodney Cousens CEO of Codemasters, and to Oliver Charles Collyer, co-founder of Sports Interactive. Equally Dr Andrew James Herbert, MD, Microsoft Research in Cambridge was honoured for services to Computer Science. However,Scotish livewires contributed a host of activities and services, covering science, medical, dance, music, social science and sport.

The Item Club forecasting group, which uses the Treasury's own computer model of the economy, described the performance of the country's financial sector as 'dismal'. Independent, Edinburgh based economic consultant Dougie Adams advisor to the Ernst & Young Scottish ITEM Club said: 'Scotland's financial services sector has been the biggest under-performer since the onset of the recession because of the major fallout from the banking crisis.'

Scottish Water is taking steps to ensure a smooth transition into their 2010-2015 capital investment programme. The utility firm has signed an “early start agreement” with a consortium consisting of Jacobs UK Ltd, Laing O’Rourke Infrastructure Ltd and Veolia Water UK Plc as well as outsourcing to Wessex Water.

Strength of technology entrepreneurship in the East of England (Cambridgeshire) is perceived as above that of almost any other area in the UK from Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 venture. In the regional breakdown Cambridgeshire and the densely populated metropolis of London are the only regions given any distinction in Deloitte's eight categories - the other six including Scotland are given broad brush treatment.

SeaZone is backing a major campaign to establish Marine Protected Areas around the UK. The specialist in marine information and mapping has donated highly detailed coastal maps of the UK to the Marine Conservation Society - a charity dedicated to protecting the seas, shores and wildlife. The SeaZone Chartered Raster maps will be used to build an interactive website promoting marine reserves at the local, regional and national level, encouraging the general public to votes for sites they believe need protection

IllicitEncounters.com, with over 360,000 members across the UK, has created a map that gives an unexpected view of Scotland. Calculating the percentage of its site members in each county ([number of county members/county population] x 100). The outcome is that the Western Isles scored high on the list, just below Dumfries & Galloway, which curiously holds the highest density of IllicitEncounters.com members of any Scottish county.

The University and College Union (UCU) ranks every parliamentary constituency in the UK by the percentage of residents who have a degree, and find higher rates in England. The union, which represents academics, lecturers and researchers, urged the candidates in the Glasgow North-East by-election to make education a priority. Some 25% of the constituency’s residents have no qualifications, the second highest proportion across Scotland's two biggest cities. The figure for Edinburgh South is 3.6%.

In the light of many Scottish Universities having already strengthened ties with India, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote cooperation between higher education institutions of both the countries has now been signed. Doubtless, the Scottish Funding Council has included this development when it laid out it's plans, To begin with, the AIU, a voluntary association of all the Indian universities, will identify areas of cooperation in health and renewable energy with Scottish universities. In the next phase, this collaboration would extend to basic sciences also.

The Scottish Funding Council is proposing, to put it mildly, a rather radical shift in University finances and another radical slant on the subjects that will be financially attractive for Universities to focus on. The critical figures are represented in the two accompanying tables. The Scottish Funding Council consultation only runs until December 4th.

Small businesses are ready to expand Scotland's workforce by creating new apprenticeships but are being hampered by a fragmented system and bureaucratic rules, a major new study commissioned by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) in Scotland finds. The Federation argues for the creation of a brokering service to connect small businesses to potential apprentices and condemns the age restrictions for current apprenticeship funding calling for a drive to inform the small business community about how and why they should take on an apprentice.

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