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.

The Internet and Civic Engagement

This is the title of a new report that just came out from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It should be noted that the report doesn't even include Twitter or comment on how social media was used at the end of the presidential campaign in October/November of 2008. Happy reading.

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.

50 Millionth Unique Chemical Substance is indexed

Here is the new substance. It is (5Z)-5-[(5-Fluoro-2-hydroxyphenyl)methylene]-2-(4-methyl-1-piperazinyl)-4(5H)-thiazolone.

Overview of the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 Workshop

I went to the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 "Road Show" Workshop way back on August 7, 2009. It was an all day affair held on the Auraria Campus here in Denver.

Presentation materials are here. For example, they began the day with "Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics".

• Introduction: Scholarly communication system
• Economics
  
• Copyright and author rights
  
• Open access and openness as a principle
  
• New models and modes of scholarly publishing

Handouts are here, such as:

• Workshop overview & outline
  
• Ten things you should know
  
• Assessing copyright management exercise
  
• Copyright MadLibs story exercise
  
• Copyright transfer agreement comparison exercise
  
• Openness exercise
  
• Final reflection activity
  
• Workshop evaluation

Videos are here.

The organizers of the event recorded audio during the day, but it is not available yet.

An updated version of LibX is now ready

The new verison of LibX (version 1.5.8) makes Encore the default method for searching the catalog. Encore provides a new and improved interface to search the Peak Catalog with keywords.

If you don't already have LibX installed on your computer, click here to install it for Firefox or click here to install it for Internet Explorer. If you already have LibX, just update the install when Firefox or IE prompt you to do so.

This webpage provides more details about what LibX does.

SciFinder e-seminars

Want to learn more about how to use SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts) Software better? Take a seminar at https://casevents.webex.com/mw0304l/mywebex/default.do?siteurl=casevents.

Penrose is now on Friendfeed

We now have a Penrose Library Friendfeed account. This way, we can keep all of our social networking feeds linked through one source, and you can leave comments. Go ahead and check it out.

Do you get PhD? Nature vs. Science

This is a good comic strip...

Need an e-book? We've got 'em by the truck load.

We provide access to hundreds of thousands of e-books. Here are some of the vendors that provide e-books. This includes a lot of stuff that you can't find in Google Books!

Focusing on science and technology

• CRC ENGnetBASE (Over 900 ebooks in engineering)
• Morgan and Claypool Synthesis (Over 100 ebooks in computer science and engineering.)
• Books24x7
• Safari Books Online (from Proquest -- This includes books from O'Reilly.)
  
• SpringerLink e-books and e-book series. Some of the series include Lecture Notes in Mathematics and the Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

General e-book collections (current)

• ebrary
• netLibrary
• National Academies Press

General e-book collections (history)

• Early English Books Online (aka EEBO)
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Evans Early American Imprints (1639-1800) - Digital Edition
• Sabin Americana, 1500-1926

Penrose in the National News

Penrose got covered in the Washington Times, and a number of other local sources, too.

Washington Times, July 8 — It’s one thing for college students to glean information online or from a textbook. It’s quite another to read or even hold actual material that played a part in history. Students at the University of Denver soon will be able to check out actual documents linked to the assassination plot against Adolf Hitler as well as papers associated with the Nuremberg trials, thanks to a just-donated trove of materials from California resident Andrea Sears-Van Nest.

Here are some other sources that cover the same topic.

Finding the history left behind in boxes (Channel 9 News)
Holocaust history revealed in family letters (The Denver Post)
Intimate Collection Given To University Of Denver (Channel 7 News)

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.