Livewire

Livewire

Gaberlunzie was delighted to discover that a cartoon for programmers exists in the US, and in his ignorance wonders why this has never developed in the UK. This was an article in the New York Times, slightly shortened. For a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife ... please.” Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analysing a joke is like dissecting a frog — it can be done, but the frog dies.

Margaret Clarke has been promoted from acting principal to the new principal of Hamilton College. Prior to joining in August 2006 she held several education sector senior posts. A mathematics teacherin Dundee in 1978, she subsequently added a teaching qualification in computing to her CV in 1983. Over the next 20 years, she was involved in developing new material and courses with the Scottish CCC, Scottish Examinations Board, and latterly with the SQA.

Fife teenager Alasdair Campbell who played water polo for the Great Britain youth team in Slovenia, has just completed his first year as a sports scholarship student at Lindenwood University in America. "I seriously considered trying for the 2012 Olympics, and it would have been great," he admitted in an interview with Elspeth Burnside of The Scotsman. "But it would have meant moving to the GB training base in Manchester and living and training there full-time and, to be honest, I had to accept that water polo is never going to provide me with a decent living.

Virtual Learning Angus from Angus College in collaboration with Robert Gordon University involves using the very latest online technology to help deliver virtual tuition in management, computing, administration, care and engineering. It is being funded by one of the biggest awards yet from the European Social Fund which will provide Â£214,000 to support Â£725,000 worth of new educational programmes split in two projects.

Dr Bernd Fischer at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has received £300,000 funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop systematic techniques and supporting tools that will allow application developers to customise automatically generated code efficiently and reliably without needing to modify either the code generator or the generated code, improving the safety and usability of automatically generated software code commonly used in the space and automotive industries.

The Kyoto Prize, an international award that honours those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of humankind is awarded annually to recipients working in advanced technology, basic sciences, and arts and philosophy. Life sciences is honoured once every four years.

Leading epilepsy charity, The National Society for Epilepsy (NSE), warns that people with photosensitive epilepsy to exercise caution when using the internet. With download speeds getting faster, companies are increasingly using more and more sophisticated ways of advertising their products, such as flashing images, which may lead to those with photosensitive epilepsy to have a seizure. Online users, sensitive to images should change browser settings :-
Internet Explorer: Go to Tools: Internet Options, choose Advanced, scroll to Multimedia, deselect Play animations in web pages.
Firefox: Go to about:config and set image.animation_mode to none.
* Opera: Press F12 and deselect Enable GIF animation.

Five young entrepreneurs from Edinburgh have been recognised for their outstanding achievements in business in the face of personal and social adversity. The John Connor Awards, now in their second year and are run by the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT), together with The Capital City Partnership. The awards were founded through a £150,000 donation from Scottish businessman, John Connor, owner of Kilsyth-based Stirling Fibre Ltd, one of the UK's largest independent waste paper processors.

Ecologists have developed a new "tool" that could in future help prevent costly and acrimonious environmental conflicts such as campaigns against culling problem populations of charismatic animals and arguments over genetically modified organisms. The tool, published online this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, involves a novel use of computer-aided content analysis and is based on the recent environmental conflict surrounding hedgehog culling on the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The findings indicate that hedgehog defenders with no need for political correctness appealed to the media by speaking in ordinary language. The bird defenders alas, fell back on heavy, correct science statements which lacks any emotive appeal at all.

A Scottish university has launched a postgraduate degree that, in being a mix of the traditional and modern, is designed to meet the demands of the fast-changing world of journalism. Sign of the times, options in sport, arts or fashion, but nothing about manufacturing, science and technology. Hang in there all B2B writers and educators, you are still really needed. This is all 'face.'

There it was, sitting in Gaberlunzie's GoogleMail inbox, which is a bit like Pandora's box, too many things fly out of it! The one line simply read Electrical Engineer Job - www.glasgowareag51.com
World class Electrical Engineer job at Thales Optronics Glasgow. Perhaps the link should also be on their Scottish Technology Prize website.

The Royal Northern Countryside Initiative has had the livewire idea to invite fifth and sixth year pupils from 10 schools in Moray and Aberdeenshire to a day on the farm showing them an insight into
links between science, agriculture and the countryside. It's an approach that manufacturing and business would do well to consider an emulate if Scotland is to attract its young into the science and technology side of work.

Trying to extract the Scottish livewires from the great and the good is hard work. Gaberlunzie tried finding Scotland and Scottish, then realised that the whole needed inhalation to extract places like Orkney and Cupar, Fife. In the hopes that no-one got missed out, congratulations to all. But especially from Compute Scotland congratulation to Professor Richard Donovan Kenway, FRSE. Vice- Principal, High Performance Computing and e-Science, Tait Professor of Mathematical Physics, University of Edinburgh. For services to Science. (Edinburgh) and Duncan Mitchell. Senior VP Cisco Systems UK and Ireland. For services to Business, which one must suppose includes Scotland for keeping computing, hardware and software worthy of public praise. As Gaberlunzie has a soft spot for poets his picture is included too.

Back in 2001 London's National Portrait Gallery unveiled its first entirely conceptual portrait - a "DNA image" of the leading genetic scientist Sir John Sulston by artist Mark Quinn. Now seven years later US based DNA 11, focused on DNA art announce that they have created the GenePak that allows customers to identify specific genetic traits in their custom DNA-portraits.

Children's Universities which have been known as innovative science communication events in many European countries are to become truly European when the European Commission signs a grant agreement to support the formation of a European network of Children's Universities - of which the University of Tubingen is a part. Founded in 2002 as the first of its kind, it is a cooperative project of the University of Tubingen with the newspaper Schwabisches Tagblattâ. In 2005 it was awarded the Descartes Prize for Science Communication of the European Community.

Two surveys from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG predictably indicate that employers are using temporary workers and contractors as a risk management strategy in the face of economic uncertainty . But IT and computing fell to fifth place, down from fourth place and now only coming after nursing and medical, engineering and construction,hotel and cateering, and blue collar workers in the comparable survey a year ago.

"With the group in good shape, now is the right time to make the break," said Tim Pearson, head of the Oxford based RM Group. This autumn he gave the school ICT world a jolt when RM announced its Asus miniBook. It retails to schools for only £169 and runs Open Source software throughout. The miniBook has preceded an avalanche of new products and new thinking.

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