august
Blue skies
Cyberarchive
Cypex
Access
Sixty six young people whose dreams of a university place drove them through an entire summer of intensive classes, achieved their goal at the University's Access Summer School. This was the seventh access summer school and came at a time coinciding with a government-led drive to encourage more disadvantaged young people to maximise their potential. The Dundee programme was held up as a national model of good practice by the Committee of Chancellors and Vice Principals.
Alumnus Dr Iain Murray of the department of applied computing managed to turn Microsoft's purple sky blue in their best selling Flight Simulator game. Modifying the colours took a bit of detective work and some software development but the new-look programme proved so popular that over 2,500 people downloaded it within the first two days of its launch on the web. As well as the modified blue sky, Dr Murray ensured that Dundee was firmly fixed on the map by enabling players of the game to fly Dundee's local airline, Suckling Airways above Dundee to get a superb bird's eye view of the city.
An ambitious "cyberarchive" project was launched to help preserve Scotland's historic architectural drawings. Using major funding of over £330,000 from SHEFC's Research Support Libraries Programme, the plan is to produce electronic images and mount them on the first ever web site dedicated to this subject. The new digital archive will hold scanned images of some 18,000 important drawings spanning over 200 years of Scottish development. Professor of Architectural History, Charles McKean is principal advisor to the project and believes it could lead to the rewriting of Scotland's cultural history: "While it is difficult to predict the extent of the project's impact, it is likely to be enormous. As the core of Scotland's historic culture is revealed, our perception of the country's cultural development could be transformed."
The latest University spin-out company Cypex was launched to take the results of drug screening research at the University into the commercial world. Co-directors Dr Mike Pritchard and Dr Michael Voice expect to feed a world demand from pharmaceutical companies for their unique genetically engineered products designed to gauge how well drugs are metabolised in the body. Scottish Enterprise Tayside has converted former offices in Prospect Business Centre, Technology Park into laboratories to accommodate the company, which will initially employ five.
