Receive our free weekly newsletter - Click here to subscribe now!

Custom Search

Databases

Latest Database News

NetWitness analysts have discovered a dangerous new ZeuS botnet affecting 75,000 systems in 2,500 organizstions around the world. The newly-discovered infestation, dubbed the "Kneber botnet" after the username linking the infected systems worldwide, gathers login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and email systems from infested computers and reports the information to miscreants who can use it to break into accounts, steal corporate and government information, and replicate personal, online and financial identities.

Believed to be one of the largest genetics studies ever an international team of 174 research centres has identified 13 new gene variants associated with blood glucose and insulin, with five linked to Type-2 diabetes. The findings - published in Nature Genetics - raises hopes of better treatments for the condition.

The latest version of what is claimed a revolutionary mobile software development tool MobiForms 5.0 now offers support for Google Android smartphones. MobiForms is the first rapid application development tool in the world specifically designed for Google Android but also supporting multiple mobile platforms.

The latest version of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) Roadmap has been released and has entered the public consultation phase. Among its recommendations are concerns over data intensive science, multicore software crisis and the move to service concepts. The document invites policy makers, service providers and user communities to join in the discussion concerning the future of e-Infrastructures in the public consultation phase until the end of January 2010.

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?

Gaberlunzie is well aware that scientific work can battle to get coverage in prestigious, peer review journals. As scientists need publication for continued grants to follow their work, the whole is considerably stressed, and inevitably ocasionally skewed.The current climate science furore however seems way out of line with publications and their editors being given a hard time for a balanced scenario. Someone needs to get this sorted before editors and scientists reputations, like that of bankers, are swept into the gutter!

Three full-time civilian staff at Lothian and Borders Police headquarters spend almost their entire working day viewing some of the most vile pornography imaginable write John Bynorth and Helen McArdle of The Herald. The force’s computer “boffins” delve into the hard drives and memory cards of computer equipment seized from suspected paedophiles. When they find images of abuse, they must grade them according to how extreme they are. They then pass them on to the police before the Crown Office makes a decision on whether to prosecute.

The database world is watching Sun, its proposed worker layoffs and the EU Competition Commission pronouncements. In the US Data broker ChoicePoint (a Reed Elsevier subsidiary) has failed to implement a comprehensive information security program as required by the Federal Trade Commission, an incurred a second fine of $275,000.

VisitScotland, the national tourism agency, has significantly increased revenues through the use of Portrait Customer Analytics, delivered as a hosted service through Optima Value Group. With the help of Edinburgh based Optima Value Group, VisitScotland has increased the revenue in the Scottish tourism industry by £48m in one year alone.

Sun and Oracle unveil a new database machine built from Sun hardware and Oracle software. The companies claim the Exadata machine works twice as fast as the previous generation of the device. Meantime Autonomy offers its advanced probabilistic technology for unstructured information through IDOL SPE for structured databases, a target $18bn market.

Having just read Paolo Giordano The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Gaberlunzie's attention was caught by another less frivolous offereing. Developments in the last few decades in digital communications have created a close link between mathematics and areas of computer science and electrical engineering. A collaboration between such areas now seems natural, due to problems which require deep knowledge and expertise in each area.

University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) Dr Richard Crowder, whose team proposed a new way for engineers to use the semantic Web has received an award at the CIE (Computers and Information in Engineering) Awards Lunch in San Diego, USA. They were awarded the 2009 Richard E. Fulton SEIKM (Systems, Engineering, Information and Knowledge Management) Best Paper Award for Navigation over a large ontology for industrial web applications in which Dr Crowder was lead author.

If it’s a question of the efficacy of vaccines or the aggressiveness of toxins, researchers must be able to simulate and analyse the molecules involved in three dimensions. What do they look like? What is the three-dimensional structure of a protein? How can this structure be used to predict which molecules the protein interacts with? What function does it have? In the software applications most widely used today, the depiction of the simulated protein and the quality of the graphics leave a great deal to be desired – especially if larger molecules, consisting of thousands of atoms, have to be visualised and examined.

FriendFeed, a Silicon Valley based 12 man Google spinoff that started up real-time search facility with a social networking site that allows users to read updates on their friends activities and share content such as video and pictures has been bought by Facebook. That other search engine, WolframAlpha, has spent its summer http://www.wolframscience.com hard at work on responding to users and polishing the engine.

A national online database that holds information on and images of more than 280,000 of Scotland’s buildings and built archaeology, opens its files so the public can add their own knowledge directly to its archives. As Scotland's early archaeology development owed much to the interested and concerned public, it's a great development that apart from adding to our knowledge, offers the browse and get quietly lost time in the amaze of Scotland's present and past.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues in 30 labs worldwide have released a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information - the biology equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics. Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. Inevitably the new standard is published in Nature Biotechnology.

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.

© Compute Scotland 2009

Website : beachshore