NEWS
PEOPLE
l Linguamatics has expanded its US-based operations and opened a new North American regional headquarters.
David Keilman has joined
as director of channels and alliances, with responsibility for strategic partner relationships. Linguamatics’ new North American regional headquarters are in Newton, MA.
l Former Interactive Supercomputing VP of sales
David Gibson has joined
AccelerEyes as vice president of sales and marketing.
l Panasas, a provider of high-performance scale-out NAS storage solutions, has
appointed Bob Schoettle
as chief marketing officer and Anthony Yeates as vice president of sales for EMEA.
l RTS Life Science has
appointed Richard Carpenter
as its Mid-Atlantic sales manager.
Maplesoft has announced that Swiss watchmaker Ulysse Nardin is using its Maple software product to lengthen the running time of new watches. Claude Bourgeois, an engineering consultant and former Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM) researcher, used Maple for Ulysse Nardin to model and optimise an oxidised silicon sprung balance resonator that doubles the operating time of watches when they are at rest. Symbolic calculation techniques in Maple enabled simplification of the model and speeding up of the calculations, and facilitated the analysis and optimisation of the system.
The use of silicon as an engineering material in watch- making is a fairly recent development, but the material offers many advantages over steel. This latest application
4
Data analysis software helps reduce animal testing
Lund University in Sweden is using Qlucore’s advanced data analysis software to conduct gene expression studies related to the prediction of hypersensitivity reactions. The research will help support Sens-it-iv, an EU-funded research project aiming to develop and optimise in vitro test strategies that could reduce or replace animal testing for sensitisation studies. The aim of the Sens-it-iv project is to develop in vitro alternatives to animal tests currently used for the risk assessment of potential skin or lung sensitisers. In industries such as cosmetics, animal testing has traditionally
Making watches tick for longer
been used to address the risk of developing products that contain skin (contact) sensitisers. In the UK, just under 3.7 million animal experiments were started in 2008, a rise of nearly 15 per cent from the year before, according to recent Home Office statistics. ‘Worldwide, more and more people are suffering from hypersensitivity reactions, such as allergies, which means that this area has become an important health concern,’ said Professor Carl Borrebaeck, Department of Immunotechnology, Lund University. ‘As a scientist, I am interested to find out why otherwise harmless
compounds can often elicit an adverse immune response in humans, and gene expression studies could provide us with some important insights in this area, while also providing a viable alternative to animal testing.’
The Sens-it-iv project will consider the impact of various compounds on cellular- molecular interactions, which play a central role in the development and elicitation of many allergies. Professor Borrebaeck, a sub-coordinator of Sens-it-iv, and Dr Ann- Sofie Albrekt are both using Qlucore Omics Explorer in order to get maximum value out of the data being produced by research in this area.
Renewable energy company uses risk-management software
aimed to produce a silicon barrel spring, and required the production of several springs which were more than 0.5m long, produced on a silicon wafer limited to a diameter of 15.4cm. Bourgeois developed a modelling and optimisation tool based on Maple, and he used this to design the spring component, with the aim of allowing watches to store more energy and run for longer on a single wind. Maplesoft claims that its product makes it easy for engineers to identify the critical parameters related to the required function and the figures of merit of the system.
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD APRIL/MAY 2010
Tioga Energy, a supplier of renewable energy services to commercial, government, and non-profit institutions, is using @RISK software from Palisade to illustrate to customers in California the potential financial benefits of signing up to a solar power purchase agreement (PPA). Tioga provides project financing through its SurePathSM Solar (PPAs), and maintains and operates solar systems on behalf of its customers. Tioga’s offering delivers predictably priced power and enables organisations to both ‘green’ their operations and reduce energy costs. In order to illustrate the benefits of solar, Tioga needs to estimate future electricity prices and make comparisons by showing
the savings from a new solar system. To forecast possible price increases, Tioga Energy inputs California’s historical electricity rate data into a model developed using Palisade’s risk analysis software, @RISK. This generates a probability distribution for electricity rate rises over the 20-year PPA period, which shows that there is a 25 per cent likelihood that price increases will be less than 4.8 per cent, and a 25 per cent chance that rate rises would be more than 8.7 per cent. @RISK helps Tioga Energy evaluate potential customer savings for a variety of PPA scenarios. Consumers are able to understand the pricing and make a decision about whether to sign up for a PPA.
www.scientific-computing.com
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