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...

Good bye Rocky Mountain News

Good bye Rocky Mtn News.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Galileo at Chamberlin Observatory

Galileo explains how his telescope works.

International Year of Astronomy and Galileo birthday celebration

The year 2009 represents the 400th anniversary since Galileo Galilei first aimed the then new telescope toward the heavens and discovered craters on the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, phases of Venus and even Uranus and Neptune. The UN has declared 2009 to be the International Year of Astronomy ["IYA"].

Astronomers at the University of Denver's historic Chamberlin Observatory are planning an IYA and Galileo birthday party on Sunday February 15th, 2009 starting at 2pm, to celebrate his contributions to astronomy. Celebrities, on hand to explain the importance will be:

• Jack Eastman, Galileo look-alike, along with Dr. Bob Stencel (DU Professor of Astronomy)
• Tim and Cathie Havens (S&S Optika, Littleton telescope store, presenting new product information)
• Tom Bisque (Software Bisque, Golden), who will demonstrate the latest in SKY software, and,
• Members of the Denver Astronomical Society will also be present to help answer your questions about telescopes.

In addition, we plan to unveil a pair of large-size color prints of galaxies obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, provided by NASA, as part of a national program including only 3 other sites in Colorado (Denver Museum, Boulder and Montrose). These dazzling square yard poster prints of of the spiral galaxy Messier 101 combine the views from three NASA space telescopes into an amazing composite. It’s like seeing with your eyes, night vision goggles, and X-ray vision all at once!

Darwin's Birthday Celebration

Charles Darwin would have been 200 years old on February 12th, had he lived this long. I will be celebrating his birthday at the University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus, Health Sciences Library.

From the Darwin Day website -- "Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb. 12, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth."

What did you do to celebrate?

Wiley InterScience Maintenance , February 7th.

"This message is to alert you of an interruption in the online service for Wiley InterScience." Due to site maintenance, access may be significantly interrupted from 7:00am till 7:00pm on Saturday, February 7th, 2009.

Penrose Now Has a Twitter Account

We now have a Twitter account (twitter.com/dupenrose).

Why do we have this? It is an easy way for us to send updates and announcements to our "followers". It is a good way for students, staff and faculty to get Penrose Library news on their cell phones (or any other twitter-enabled device). While we could use something like this for receiving reference questions, we plan to use this more for short outgoing communications. We plan to use another chat service for short reference/research questions in the near future, but we are not ready to implement that yet.

Death by Black Hole

This is a great video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.



Reminds me of another book from Dr. Philip Plait -- Death From the Skies!

Springer E-book Package

The Springer e-book package has now been turned on. This means that we can now access the full text of the Lecture Notes in Mathematics (LNM), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), and lots of other book series' going back to 1997.

For regular monographic works, we have their English language titles from 2005-present. For example, here are some of the 2009 titles we can access. (Ignore the book if it doesn't have little green box next to it.) We will add records to Peak for the individual titles as soon as we can.

Sciencexpress is now active

Our new subscription to Sciencexpress is now active.

"Sciencexpress is a weekly pre-publication service that provides electronic publication of selected Science papers in advance of print. This service provides rapid electronic publication of selected Research Articles and Perspectives that have recently been accepted for publication in Science. Each week we select several papers for online publication in PDF format within two weeks of acceptance. For authors, it is a chance to get their peer-reviewed results in front of the scientific community as much as four to six weeks before they would otherwise appear in print. For readers, it is an opportunity to connect with these pre-published articles immediately."

Obama to pick a physicist for science advisor

Got a tweet from the BadAstronomer that Pres-Elect. Obama may be picking physicist John Holdren as his science advisor. He is currently the director of the Wood Hole Research Center.

The Washington Post also reports on the news.

Peak Beta catalog has been updated

The new Peak Beta catalog has been updated.

• http://lib-lakshmi.cair.du.edu/iii/encore/

Now, you can login to the system using your campus login and password. This is your DUID number and your Passcode. After you login, you can then tag your books. For example, faculty can mark the books they recommend for classes using a class number, such as Chem101 or INTS4999. Students can tag books by genre. Groups of people can mark books relevant for a group project. One can also easily limit by the format that is needed. Looking for a DVD? Easy, just limit your search to DVD/Video using the "refine" area on the left hand side.

Pop quiz -- How many authors are there for this paper?

Take a look at the author list for this IOP journal article -- "The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider." How many authors are there?

Thanks to the folks at the scholarly kitchen for noting...

Another great video

Here is another good video that is about the Creative Commons...



Got this from the Travelin' Librarian.

Science Commons explained in just two minutes

Got a Boing Boing Blog pointer to this HD video via Jambina.

Hubble Image Advent Calendar

This is a really cool Hubble astronomical image advent calendar. Thanks to Charles Early at NASA Goddard for finding this.