Smithsonian Education Online Conference on Climate Change

The "Smithsonian Education Online Conference on Climate Change" is three-day, free, education online conference taking place September 29 through October 1, 2009.

"Climate Change" sessions will be of special interest to educators, entire classrooms of engaged students, and to the general public. Throughout the conference, participants will explore Smithsonian research and collections related to the evidence, impact, and response to climate change. Alongside Smithsonian scientists and curators, you will look at the issues surrounding climate change from the perspectives of science, history, and art.

American Institute of Physics UniPHY

This is a literature-based professional social networking site for physical science researchers.

The site allows physicists, engineers, and other scientists to directly connect with and explore their professional contacts and to identify researchers with the expertise needed for future collaborations.

AIP UniPHY, powered by Collexis High Definition Search, enables fast, accurate and extraordinary knowledge retrieval and discovery, and empowers individuals to search for and identify documents, researchers, trends, and new discoveries more quickly, precisely –- and thoroughly –- than ever before. AIP UniPHY provides intuitive interfaces through which researchers can network and share data –- all with the goal of advancing physics research worldwide.

This press release also has more info on the product.

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).

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!

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.

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...

Information Resources in High-Energy Physics

This is an interesting article -- Information Resources in High-Energy Physics: Surveying the Present Landscape and Charting the Future Course by Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, Annette Holtkamp, Heath B. O'Connell, Travis C. Brooks Abstract: Access to previous results is of paramount importance in the scientific process. Recent progress in information management focuses on building e-infrastructures for the optimization of the research workflow, through both policy-driven and user-pulled dynamics. For decades, High-Energy Physics (HEP) has pioneered innovative solutions in the field of information management and dissemination. In light of a transforming information environment, it is important to assess the current usage of information resources by researchers and HEP provides a unique test-bed for this assessment. A survey of about 10% of practitioners in the field reveals usage trends and information needs. Community-based services, such as the pioneering arXiv and SPIRES systems, largely answer the need of the scientists, with a limited but increasing fraction of younger users relying on Google. Commercial services offered by publishers or database vendors are essentially unused in the field. The survey offers an insight into the most important features that users require to optimize their research workflow. These results inform the future evolution of information management in HEP and, as these researchers are traditionally "early adopters" of innovation in scholarly communication, can inspire developments of disciplinary repositories serving other communities.
The PDF of the preprint is here.

Generation Y and NASA

This blog links to an interesting presentation given to NASA "bigwigs" trying to convince them that NASA needs to market to younger people in more relevant ways."A few months ago a few of us had a chance to participate on a 'strategic communications committee' at Johnson Space Center that was convened to discuss NASA’s strategic communications strategy released in ‘07. After a few meetings on the committee, we asked if we could share our perspective with the group on why we think an entire generation isn’t connecting to NASA."

Happy Anniversary to Physical Review Letters

The 50th anniversary retrospective of Physical Review Letters <http://prl.aps.org/50years/milestones>."As part of the celebration of PRL's 50th anniversary, we will be presenting throughout 2008 a series of milestone Letters that made long-lived contributions to physics, either by announcing significant discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research."

Institute of Physics Journals Enhancements

Here is an update on new developments to the IOPscience platform for February. You can begin to benefit from these immediately:

Be alerted by e-mail -- Set up an HTML Table of Contents alert for any journal and have new papers delivered direct. You can also manage your alerts from My IOPscience.

Export article details --They have added the option to export article abstracts, references and citations from the article page. You can also export to RefWorks from the article page and the 'Export Search results' page.

Discover highly cited articles -- They have updated their 'most cited' lists. These now show Top 10 articles from the last two years, based on internal data.

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.

Open Access Articles from PhysMathCentral

PhysMathCentral from BMC has just been launched -- http://www.physmathcentral.com/. The Penrose Library strongly supports BioMed Central and the Open Access Movement.

DU presence in Second Life

DU has been ramping up its presence in second life. The Physics and Astronomy Department plans to take advantage of the educational posibilities starting in 2008. See the recent articles in the July/August 2007 issue of Technology Review, Inside Higher Ed , and the Rocky Mountain news on Monday, September the 17th. Science Friday on NPR invites virtual observers and questions via SL at the DU Science School. I was able to ask a question that was nationally broadcast on September the 14th. Thanks to one of the DU Researchers, we now have a way for Second Lifers to contact the Penrose library with research questions. Just touch the sign (in the Olin Building of SL) to be redirected to the "Ask a Research Question" form.

Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "Turkish Professors Uncover Plagiarism in Papers Posted on Physics Server"

"Dozens of academic papers containing apparently plagiarized work have been removed by moderators from arXiv, the popular preprint server where many physicists post their work before publication, Nature is reporting (subscription required). According to the article, 67 papers by 15 physicists at four Turkish universities were pulled after an examination of their content revealed that they 'plagiarize the works of others or contain inappropriate levels of overlap with earlier articles.'"

One of the accused authors, Mustafa Salti, has written for many prominent journals, so some of these articles might be plagiarized, too.