Genome Island: An Experiment in Teaching Science at Second Life

I plan to go to this talk on Friday. It sounds really cool.
Genome Island was created at Second Life as a laboratory-intensive environment for teaching genetics online. Students or other visitors to the island will encounter a series of genetic objects. Most of the objects are interactive and will generate a data set according to basic principles of genetics. Genetic models on the island include Mendel’s peas, cats, rabbits, fruit flies and bacteria. One section of the site features the human genome. Data can be analyzed and used to test hypotheses suggested in the background information provided with each object. This semester one of my genetics classes helped me to test the island as a teaching environment. Come and hear about the pleasures and pitfalls of teaching science at Second Life.

Science stays in JSTOR

"We are pleased to announce that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and JSTOR reached an agreement at the end of 2007 under which Science will continue its participation in JSTOR. Science will be available with a 5-year moving wall and new participating organizations will receive Science legacy content as part of the Health & General Sciences collection. In addition, we expect to introduce more opportunities within the JSTOR site for users to link directly to Science's website from Science legacy content located in JSTOR. We are very pleased to be able to continue and extend this relationship and to assure the community that future issues of Science will be preserved in JSTOR."

IOPScience Database for Physics Research

We now have access to all 56 current and backfiled journals available from the Institute of Physics (UK). The content coverage goes back to 1874.

NIH Open Access Mandate

In case you have not heard...

The NIH policy is "an Enormous Step Forward" noted Executive Director Heather Joseph of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

See: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6518133.html?nid=2673#news2 and
http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6518133.html?nid=2673#news3.

New Math Resources

We now have access to the SIAM Locus backfile, and the Project Euclid Prime database. We should be getting access to the complete package of the current SIAM journals pretty soon.

Most Literate U.S. Cities: Denver is 4th...

This in from Yahoo News.

Most Literate U.S. Cities: Minneapolis and Seattle

Residents of Minneapolis and Seattle are the most bookish and well-read, according to results from a new survey released today of the most literate American cities.

The survey focused on 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above. Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University chose six key indicators to rank literacy. These included newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

Overall, the top 10 most literate (and wired) cities included:

1—Minneapolis, Minn.
2—Seattle, Wash.
3—St. Paul, Minn.
4—Denver, Colo.
5—Washington, D.C.
6—St. Louis, Mo.
7—San Francisco, Calif.
8—Atlanta, Ga.
9—Pittsburgh, Pa.
10—Boston, Mass.

Etc., etc., etc....

Norad tracks Santa

See http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.htm.

ARL Report -- Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries

Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/ARL_EScience_final.pdf

From the Executive Summary -- "E-science has the potential to be transformational within research libraries by impacting their operations, functions, and possibly even their mission. Recognizing this potential, the ARL Steering Committees for Scholarly Communication and for Research, Teaching, and Learning jointly appointed a task force in 2006 to address the emergent domain of e-science. The Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science focused its attention on the implications of trends in e-science for research libraries, exploring the dimensions that impact collections, services, research infrastructure, and professional development. Priorities of government funding agencies further shaped the task force’s work."

"Open Access & Science Publishing" report

Open Access & Science Publishing
Results of a Study on Researchers’ Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing
Thomas Hess / Rolf T. Wigand / Florian Mann / Benedikt von Walter

http://www.wim.bwl.uni-muenchen.de/download_free/sonstiges/mreport_2007_01.pdf
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - This Management Report summarizes the main descriptive results of a study on researcher’s acceptance of Open Access publishing. The study was conducted in 2006 by the Ludwig-Maximilans-University Munich, Germany, in cooperation with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The main focus is centered on the question if and why scientists decide or do not decide to publish their work according to the Open Access principle without access barriers and free of cost to readers. With the responses from 688 publishing scientists it could be demonstrated that the general attitude toward the Open Access principle is extremely positive. However, many seem to be rather reluctant to publish their own research work in Open Access outlets. Advantages like increased speed, reach and potentially higher citation rates of Open Access publications are seen alongside insufficient impact factors, lacking long-term availability and the inferior ability to reach the specific target audience of scientists within one’s own discipline. Moreover the low level of use among close colleagues seems to be a barrier towards Open Access publishing.

Two new articles/reports

Here are some new articles/reports from the Open Access Blog.

1) Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship. ("Institutional repositories were the stated topic for a workshop convened in Phoenix, Arizona earlier this year (April 17-19, 2007) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). While in their report on the workshop, Bill Arms and Ron Larsen build out a larger landscape of concern, institutional repositories remain a crucial topic, which, without institutional cyberscholarship, will never approach their full potential.")

2) Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill, Show me the data, Journal of Cell Biology, December 17, 2007. (Excerpt: The integrity of data, and transparency about their acquisition, are vital to science. The impact factor data that are gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI) have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and even salary bonuses. Yet...to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability....)

New report from EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium

The Horizon Report provides a time line of future Web 2.0 technologies. There are many implications for academic libraries."The focus of the Horizon Project centers on the applications of emerging technologies to teaching, learning, and creative expression, and the format of the Horizon Report reflects that focus. Each topic includes an overview to familiarize readers with the concept or technology at hand, a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to those activities, and examples of how the technology is being or could be applied."

More about SCOAP3

Here is some more info about SCOAP3 from Symmetry Magazine.

Free for all -- "Forget about paying for journal subscriptions. If a new proposal takes hold, particle physics journals would get their funding from labs, libraries, and agencies that sponsor research, and readers could peruse them for free." By Glennda Chui

Visit to the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library

After I was done with Ammi Hyde Interviews in Milwaukee, I went to the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library which is housed within the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
"Background -- The AGS Library is one of North America’s foremost geography and map collections. Formerly the library and map collection of the American Geographical Society (AGS) of New York, it was transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries in 1978 following a nationwide selection process by the Society. The Society was formed in the early 1850's to promote the collection and diffusion of geographical and statistical information and to establish and maintain a library with a collection of maps, charts and instruments. By 1870, this library was already recognized as the “largest and most valuable” of its type in the United States."
Neato library -- I am glad I was able to visit for a little while.

Study of social science PhDs recommends changes for 21st century

This just in from PhysOrg.com

"The first multi-disciplinary study to examine the status of doctoral students in the social sciences at least five years after receiving their degree concludes that doctoral programs need to be brought into the 21st century."

For example, they found that "The average graduate student is not an 'unencumbered young man.' Schools need to confront the work-family tension that exists in doctoral careers, both for men and women, more than half of whom are married and in their early to mid 30's by the time they receive their PhD. Women reported making more compromises in juggling work and family than men."

SCOAP3

SCOAP3 is short for the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. It looks like an interesting organization.

"The Open Access (OA) tenets of granting unrestricted access to the results of publicly-funded research are in contrast with current models of scientific publishing, where access is restricted to journal customers. At the same time, subscription costs increase and add considerable strain on libraries, forced to cancel an increasing number of journals subscriptions. This situation is particularly acute in fields like High-Energy Physics (HEP), where pre-prints describing scientific results are timely available online. There is a growing concern within the academic community that the future of high-quality journals, and the peer-review system they administer, is at risk."

GeoScienceWorld

We now have GeoScienceWorld, and the 30+ journals that are contained within it. GSW is an unprecedented collaboration of six leading earth science societies and one institute.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG),
American Geological Institute (AGI),
Geological Society of America (GSA),
The Geological Society of London (GSL),
Mineralogical Society of America (MSA),
Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), and
Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG)

Design News Magazine Article

"Second Life: A Virtual Universe for Real Engineering," By applying SL building tools, engineers are facilitating a paradigm shift in computer-aided design, Matthew J. Traum, Contributing Editor -- Design News, October 22, 2007

"First there was the drafting table and the pencil. Then there was 2-D CAD; next came 3-D drafting utilities like SolidWorks and ProEngineer. Now, San Francisco-based Linden Lab has evolved computer-aided design to its next plateau, offering free access to a computer-generated alternative universe called Second Life (SL) where users can build anything."

ScienceDirect Backfiles

The records for over a thousand new e-journals in the ScienceDirect backfiles collection are now cataloged in Peak.

For example, we now have The Lancet going back to 1823, Physica to 1934, Physics Letters to 1962, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) to 1947 [it then split into 13 sections in 1964], and many, many more.

Here is a list of over 2,000 records for the ScienceDirect journals.

The New Librarians

The New Librarians -- Meet the risk-taking scholars who are shaking things up while they build tomorrow’s academic library.

"With its faded orange carpet, rows and rows of dusty stacks, and old-school study carrels, McMaster University’s H.G Thode Library of Science and Engineering looks like a place purposed with preserving the 1970s."
Bet you thought this was description of Penrose at first, huh? But, this is an interesting article from a Canadian perspective, eh.

Teaching Information Evaluation and Critical Thinking Skills in Physics Classes

This is a good article in The Physics Teacher, Vol. 45, No. 8, pp. 507–510, November 2007, and it is written by Adriana Popescu and James Morgan of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ.

"Not long ago, researching a school paper was a process that involved only one step: visit the library. These days students might not ever walk into a library since they have an immense amount of information at their fingertips (literally). In the end this may turn out to be an even more daunting task than browsing books in the library stacks or going through reels of microfilms of newspapers. There is a lot available, but how do you select, evaluate, and use what you find to best address the research question or to achieve the goal or task at hand? How will the “Millennial” generation (born 1980s–2000s) learn these skills? Can these skills be taught, and if yes, when and how should they be taught?"

Etc., etc., etc.