Please don't copy that floppy

Please don't kill commerce on the Internet. Don't copy that floppy.



Thanks to the Next Web for lettimg me know about this classic video... There is a sequel coming out this summer/fall, too.

New LibX edition for Penrose

If you upgrade to the new version of Firefox 3.5, you may also need to get a new version of the LibX toolbar for Firefox as well. What the heck is LibX? Go here to find out more about this great tool. Some Recent reports show that version 3.5 is really fast, and it has HTML 5.0 support.

Here is the new edition for IE 7.0 or 8.0.

Mobile Page for Penrose

Added a link to the Penrose mobile page to the "Cool Tools" page. It is just in beta format right now, and it might not look so good on some cell phones, but it should look ok on iPhones, iPod Touches, and some blackberries. Go ahead and bookmark this on your cell phone. Once we have an official mobile page, we will create a redirect.

New TED talk from Clay Shirky

This is a great new TED talk from Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He has a deep understanding of how the media is transforming, and how that is effecting the world's political structure.

The reason the Rocky Mountain News failed

DU has a YouTube video site

Just learned that DU has a YouTube Channel. Here is one of the 25+ videos -- "Built for Learning".

Another good article -- Tenure and the Future of the University

Science, May 29, 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5931, pp. 1147 - 1148
Education Forum

Tenure and the Future of the University
(Here is the link for non-DU people.)
by Dan Clawson

"The fundamental rationale for the tenure system has been to promote the long-term development of new ideas and to challenge students' thinking. Proponents argued more than 60 years ago that tenure is needed to provide faculty the freedom to pursue long-term risky research agendas and to challenge conventional wisdom (1). Those arguments are still being made today (2) and are still valid. However, a 30-year trend toward privatization is creating a pseudo–market environment within public universities that marginalizes the tenure system. A pseudo–market environment is one in which no actual market is possible, but market-like mechanisms (such as benchmarking and rankings based on research dollars, student evaluations, or similar attributes) are used to approximate a market."

The article goes on to explain the advantages and disadvantages of the tenure system. In the end, the author says that universities shouldn't treat themselves as businesses, but as centers of "knowledge where students are educated (not just trained)."

Great Article -- The importance of stupidity in scientific research

The author, Martin A. Schwartz, does a great job of explaining the importance of being scientifically curious and humble.

From Journal of Cell Science 121, 1771 (2008). "The importance of stupidity in scientific research."

"For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did."

Thanks to @timoreilly via twitter for noting in his feed.

"The Power of Place on Campus"

This is an interesting article in the Chronicle Review -- The Power of Place on Campus. What locations do you think are special places on the DU campus? (Thanks go to Rudy Leon at UIUC for telling me about the article.)

Colleges and universities should never underestimate the power of special, transformational, and even sacred spaces on their campuses....

So how do we create sacred spaces?

In fact they already exist all over campus — but they must be recognized, maintained, and supported. Commuter campuses can also identify and create their own transformational spaces, but administrators must first envision their campus constituencies as "thought communities" — academic villages and places of enculturation.

Over a million records with URLs

Penrose Library now has over 1,000,000 records with URLs in our catalog. We tagged the book (Computers and Education: E-Learning from Theory to Practice) which broke the barrier using the subject tag "millionth url". This is one of the new Springer ebooks -- we have about 3,800 records from SpringerLink. Over 1,000 of them are journals, and the other 2,800 are ebooks.

Scholarly Communication and Open Access Resources

This is a presentation that I gave at the three Library Liaison Advisory Group (LLAG) meetings, May 12-13, 2009.

Scholarly Communication May 12-13, 2009

View more presentations from jokrausdu.

I also created a research guide to go along with this presentation.

The Liaison Connection newsletter is now out

The newsletter for the Library Liaison Advisory Group (LLAG) is now available for your reading pleasure.

The Human Flu

The H1N1 virus has certainly been in the news lately. However, there is a little known new virus that has hit the local Denver community -- the Human Flu. It is a particularly virulent strain that effects farm animals, particularly those of the Suidae family. To protect these animals from the Human Virus, the CDC recommends that they wear surgical masks over their mouths (or snouts) to protect them. Please see the accompanying visual that demonstrates how the mask should be worn.

Thanks to Erin for taking the picture. Here is more info about the sculpture. The mask was provided by an unknown patron. Once the picture was taken, we then removed the mask from the piece of art.

Choice magazine needs reviewers

This publication (Choice) is asking for more reviewers. If you would like to write short reviews and get free books, this is the place. Go here if you would like to review new academic books in your subject area.

Survey of your SciFinder Scholar Connection Method

Please fill out this survey by April 30th.

The University of Denver Provides access to the Chemical Abstracts Service with two "seats" for the database. Right now, one seat is allocated to the client-server software, and the other seat is allocated to the web-server method of access. However, we would like to know if we should continue with this arrangement. Please let us know how you currently access SciFinder Scholar, and how you would like us to proceed.

FIRST Competition this weekend

The Colorado Regional FIRST Competition (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) will be held at DU this weekend, March 26th-28th. I am really looking forward to seeing some of the robots in the event.

They have several good videos showing what you might see this weekend.

One of the 48 teams (give or take) that is competing is the "University of Denver & Standing Ovations for All & Ricks Center Middle School" team.

Senior finds error in supercollider algorithm

A physics undergraduate student at Princeton discovered a discrepancy between her predictions and scientific results at the LHC. Essentially, double images were coming out of the system, so she and her professors recommended an algorithm to remove the double images.

Xiaohang Quan ’09 was working on her senior thesis when she found a miscalculation in the hardware of the world’s largest particle accelerator.

Quan... traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last week with physics professors Christopher Tully GS ’98, Jim Olsen and Daniel Marlow for the annual meeting of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Open science is good for researchers

One of my blogger friends, Bora Zivkovic, did a presentation (see the video) at the Columbia University Libraries Scholarly Communications Program on February 19, 2009.

Open science refers to information-sharing among researchers and encompasses a number of initiatives to remove access barriers to data and published papers, and to use digital technology to more efficiently disseminate research results. Advocates for this approach argue that openly sharing information among researchers is fundamental to good science, speeds the progress of research, and increases recognition of researchers. Panelists: Jean-Claude Bradley, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Coordinator of E-Learning for the School of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University; Barry Canton, founder of Gingko BioWorks and the OpenWetWare wiki, an online community of life science researchers committed to open science that has over 5,300 users; Bora Zivkovic, Online Discussion Expert for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and author of 'A Blog Around the Clock.'

The NIH public access policy will persist

This is very good news for Open Access proponents.
"Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peerreviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised policy the percentage of eligible manuscripts deposited into PMC has increased significantly, with over 3,000 new manuscripts being deposited each month. The PubMed Central database is a part of a valuable set of public database resources at the NIH, which are accessed by more than 2 million users each day."For more information, go to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access website.

Obama Reverses Bush's Embryonic Stem Cell Ban

From the Denver Post this morning -- "President Barack Obama this morning overturned a Bush administration ban on using federal funds for embryonic stem cell research and signed an order intended to restore 'scientific integrity to government decision making.'"

About time...