Rowland Institute Library Blog

2003-12-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

The Rowland Institute Library Weblog has a new URL. Here is the XML feed. Previous posts will continue to be archived at this site.

2003-11-18T09:23:00.000-05:00

The Strongest Links |Cutting the Tether: Great Resources on Wireless (source: beSpacific)

2003-11-17T14:54:00.000-05:00

2003-11-17T14:37:00.000-05:00

United States Patent: 6,643,686 a patent granted to A T &T for a way of sending e-mail that foils anti-spam measures (Source: Lockergnome Bytes) Does it mean we will be at the mercy of ma bell?

2003-11-10T16:32:00.000-05:00

Popular Science | Best of What's New 2003 100 innovations profiled in the magazine (Source; Slashdot)

2003-11-10T14:23:00.000-05:00

Weblogs: simplifying web publishing An article in IEEE Computer discusses weblogs' usefulness for content management, the different applications involved, and future apps such as cell phone blogging...

2003-11-06T15:50:00.000-05:00

New Scientist: US crackdown on bioterror is backfiring

New Scientist casts a critical look at a "climate of fear."

2003-11-05T16:40:00.000-05:00

Turning up the heat on preprint servers

This week's Nature features two news articles on troubles with the arXiv.org (or xxx) preprint server; according to one piece, 22 papers were withdrawn amidst allegations of plagiarism; another story,

Critical comments threaten to open libel floodgate for physics archive, reports on one physicist attacking another's work in a paper posted to the archive, and the implications of such uncensored comments. Paul Ginsparg remarked "We don't want these food fights conducted on a regular basis." An editorial (gleefully?) admonishing preprint server and scientific website administrators about libel law kicks off the issue.

2003-11-05T14:24:00.000-05:00

Inside Science News Service

AIP has a service with links to science news stories of general interest. One of the latest is a statement by Steven Weinberg to the Texas Board of Education supporting the teaching of evolutionary theory - in fact, he advocates that no alternative theories (such as creation science) be taught alongside it.

2003-11-05T10:47:00.000-05:00

Argali White & Yellow - the most complete and reliable phone directories search on the Internet

enables searching of multiple web-based phone and e-mail directories (Source: Search Engine Watch)

2003-11-05T10:23:00.000-05:00

Wired News: DNA That's Yours for the Taking

an article about the Sanger centre in London, which evidently has a database of more than two billion letters of DNA; geneticists can search the database freely ...

2003-11-03T16:45:00.000-05:00

On The Net - Unusual Power Web Searching Commands From Greg Notess, who should know ...

2003-11-03T16:16:00.000-05:00

Physics' theoretical approach might aid biology An interesting discussion of how one discipline help the other ...

2003-10-30T17:09:00.000-05:00

An article in this week's Science reports that URLs in scientific papers become decreasingly reliable over time :Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References

2003-10-29T11:21:00.000-05:00

U.S. Copyright Office, Anticircumvention Rulemaking

a list of exemptions to the DMCA (Source: Slashdot)

2003-10-29T10:34:00.000-05:00

From self-organizing polymers to nano- and biomaterials This article reviews the use of self-assembling polymers in nanotechnology, particularly elucidating ways that self-assembly ("bottom up") and materials design ("top down") may be combined for really functional nanomaterials useful in drug discovery/delivery, electronics and materials science. (Source: Chemical Biology Virtual Journal)

2003-10-27T13:04:00.000-05:00

Amazon Offer Worries Authors(Source: Open Access News)

2003-10-24T15:26:00.000-04:00

Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia More on Amazon's new service and the legal challenges they faced ... (Source: Open Access News)

2003-10-24T10:29:00.000-04:00

Amazon.Com Launches ``Search Inside the Book'' Enabling Customers to Discover Books by Searching and Previewing the Text Inside Amazon moves to full-text searching ... Imagine ... How will they secure rights to the content? (Sources: Open Access News, beSpacific)

2003-10-23T18:22:00.000-04:00

Science -- Malakoff 302 (5645): 550 Science magazine reports on PLoS; comparison with other journals (cost to authors)

2003-10-23T18:17:00.000-04:00

Wired News: Plumbing Depths of Data Mining

the sinister side of information access ...

2003-10-23T18:06:00.000-04:00

Apple's Latest 0.1 Adds a Lot review of the new Mac OS X.3 release, favorable ... (Source: Slashdot)

2003-10-23T11:22:00.000-04:00

Max Planck Society - eDoc Server Max Planck societies purportedly will archive all their research output on this server ... how will it work? (Source: LIBLICENSE)

2003-10-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News - U.S. Honors in Science, Technology Named the 2003 National Medal honorees are named, and the awards will be presented 11/6/03, according to the article. I didn't recognize any of the names except Leo L. Beranek of Cambridge's Bolt Baranek & Newman (BBN)... (Source: AP Science)

2003-10-22T12:54:00.000-04:00

Marti Hearst: What Is Text Mining? A folllow-up to a New York Times article on the subject (Source: Open Access News)

2003-10-22T10:43:00.000-04:00

Open Access Conference - Berlin Declaration

Message from a group of German scientists, following a conference ... Offers a definition of an "open access contribution"; among the key points in the declaration are:"advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation," a biggie. (Source: Open Access News)

2003-10-22T10:29:00.000-04:00

Detection rescues cause and effect: Information does not really travel faster than light. the title of the Nature paper discussed here is "The speed of information in a 'fast-light' optical medium, " which seems to verify that information could not travel faster than light. However, Lene Hau, among the scientists quoted, asks "what defines information".

2003-10-22T10:21:00.000-04:00

Academe - Marketing Science, Marketing Ourselves

A harsh piece about the influence of money and politics upon academic science. (Source; Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Update)

2003-10-22T10:11:00.000-04:00

Is the Yucca Nuke Dump All Wet?Yuck! Nobody listened the geologists, as this Tech Review piece points out, when identifying the Nevada mountain as a nuclear waste storage site. Flooding and eruptions are potential safety threats. Alternative storage sites, as this article describes, may not have been given much consideration. (Admittedly, there are plenty of opposing viewpoints to go around.

2003-10-21T12:21:00.000-04:00

Bicentenary of atomic weights: John Dalton presented chemistry milestone 200 years ago today.

2003-10-21T10:51:00.000-04:00

Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving A list of publishers and their policies concerning archiving papers on the web, with links to specific copyright transfer policies. (Source: LIBLICENSE-L)

2003-10-21T10:25:00.000-04:00

PCWorld.com - Great American Privacy Makeover PCWorld designed a quiz for users to find out more about secure computing. (Source: BeSpacific)

2003-10-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

Entrez cross-database search New look for NCBI's Entrez, enabling simultaneous search of PubMed, online books, PubMedCentral, gene and protein databases... enough info for you? (Source: Harvard Libraries)

2003-10-20T10:09:00.000-04:00

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web guru fights info pollution Jakob Neilsen, who writes about web usability and the user experience, identifies several practices for effective e-mail use. (Source: internet Legal research weekly)

2003-10-20T10:04:00.000-04:00

The Scientist :: How to Create the Best Workplace, Oct. 20, 2003 From a survey, The Scientist names ten components towards effectiveness and collegiality in the lab; related material includes a survey and ranking of U.S. and non-U.S. institutions .

2003-10-17T12:23:00.000-04:00

Science Journal to Put Research Online (washingtonpost.com) Another article on PLoS Biology, the monkey paper and the 500,000 hits .... (Source: Moreover)

2003-10-17T12:21:00.000-04:00

Open Access Now | A journey into DSpace

Interview with MIT's Mackenzie Smith on the current status of the 'tute's DSpace project (Source: Open Access News)

2003-10-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

Open-Access Journals

Roy Tennant gives a good, conscise summary of current trends in scholarly publishing. (Source: Peter Scott)

2003-10-17T10:51:00.000-04:00

RSS Readers: Bringing the World to Your Desktop

6 pieces of software are reviewed, emphasis on the PC (Source: Lockergnome Bytes)

2003-10-15T17:45:00.000-04:00

Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics(Source: Cruel Site of the Day)

2003-10-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

fyuze Who knew? An aggregator that runs on the web.... You have to set up an account, but there's no software to download or configure, etc. , etc. (Source: Marcus Zillman)

2003-10-15T12:31:00.000-04:00

Lingo - The Lamont Library Website

What are they talking about? Harvard vernacular demystified in this lexicon ...

2003-10-15T10:06:00.000-04:00

Salon.com News | Monkeys can move robotic arm with thoughts

Mike was talking about this yesterday at lunch .... (Source; SciTechDaily)

2003-10-14T10:45:00.000-04:00

Out of the Way How the next copyright revolution can help the next scientific revolution An interesting comparison between open access initiatives such as the newly launched Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology and Creative Commons ...

2003-10-14T10:20:00.000-04:00

Consumer WebWatch: An Analysis of the Potential Benefits and Challenges of Booking Through a Car Rental Web Site

Another potentially useful report from the Consumers Union, focussing on "which Web sites offer the lowest rates for rental cars, and whether online pricing methods among these sites are confusing or misleading to consumers." (Source: beSpacific)

2003-10-09T17:12:00.000-04:00

Wired News: Nobel Winner Critical of U.S. Interesting ... Peter Agre of JHU speaks out against compromise of academic and scientific freedoms in the new security environment.

2003-10-09T17:08:00.000-04:00

SANS Top 20 Vulnerabilities - The Experts Consensus

top 20 Internet Security vulnerabilities (Source: ResourceShelf)

2003-10-09T17:06:00.000-04:00

Nat'l Acad Press Catalog: The Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain:

From a 2002 conference (Source: ResourceShelf)

2003-10-09T17:05:00.000-04:00

ALA | California Survey Reveals FBI Visited 16 Libraries

Interesting .. only "four days after John Ashcroft asserted" that the DOJ had "never invoked section 215" of the USA PATRIOT Act for access to library patron records ... comes this revelation. (Source: ResourceShelf)

On a related matter, the owner of the Harvard Book Store (not affiliated with the university, and fast becoming the most popular store in the area, because, unlike some more famous ones, you can move around) published a piece in the Globe saying why booksellers have a problem with USA PATRIOT. (Source: Behind the Homefront)

2003-10-09T16:54:00.000-04:00

ConsumerSearch.com

A Great site for comparison shopping - ConsumerSearch's motto is: "reviewing the reviewers, " and they collect different reviews for a dozen categories of consumer products (electronics, computers, office equipment, automotive, to name a few). Also lists where you can buy goodies. (Source: Librarian's Index to the Internet, via ResourceShelf)

2003-10-09T14:14:00.000-04:00

New Model of the Universe: It's Shaped Like a Soccerball

(Or a dodecahedron, reminding one of the twelve-faced creature in "The Phantom Tollbooth," each of whose faces was expressing a different emotion (laughing, crying, anger, etc.) at once. a Princeton claims to have results that contradict the new theory and plan to publish them on arXiv.org, according to the article.)

2003-10-09T11:09:00.000-04:00

Newsday.com - American Dominance of Nobels Continues

News about Americans winning majority of the science prizes; I like how they say "they're not as good as writing or waging peace, however."
(Source; Science in the News)

2003-10-09T09:48:00.000-04:00

John Ewing of the American Mathematical Society argues against simplistic justifications or detractions of copyright, giving some history and philosophical background to demonstrate that it is neither "inherently good or evil" and not necessarily for the protection of authors' interests alone. (Sources: LIBLICENSE-L; The Virtual Chase; beSpacific)

2003-10-08T14:47:00.000-04:00

Scientific publishing: Who will pay for open access?

Nature anticipates the launch of PLoS Biology this month and asks how will it pay for itself, and furthermore, how will it attract submissions from scientists who feel the need or pressure to publish in name journals?

2003-10-08T14:29:00.000-04:00

PMC Back Issue Scanning quite a project ... PubMedCentral, the NIH archive that hosts back issues of PNAS and several other journals, will now scan the entire runs of its hosted journals. This includes also the ASM journals and Nucleic Acids Research. (Source: ResourceShelf)

2003-10-08T13:57:00.000-04:00

Grant To Fund New Chemistry Center Stuart Schreiber will head the NIH funded Chemical Methodologies and Library Development center

2003-10-08T13:44:00.000-04:00

City Considers New Laboratory

... namely, the Laboratory for Interface Science and Engineering (LISE) ... Also, the articles discusses the prospects for Harvard science across the river ...

2003-10-08T13:37:00.000-04:00

Unintended Consequences: Five Years Under the DMCA

a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Source: beSpacific)

2003-10-08T11:53:00.000-04:00

Technology Review weblog

Tech Review has a weblog; Simson Garfinkel is one of the principal contributors. No RSS feed that I can see. (Source: The Virtual Chase)

2003-10-06T11:04:00.000-04:00

German-American Frontiers of Science ----

polymers, coral reefs, molecular motors and microelectronics were among the topics visited in this NAS symposium from June 2003. Audio and video included. (Source: Sci-Tech Library Newsletter)

2003-10-06T10:35:00.000-04:00

Pushing Peer-to-Peer

Simson Garfinkel argues that file-sharing systems, reviled by the media industries, could lead to a more flexible, de-centralized and less secure internet.

2003-10-06T10:16:00.000-04:00

24 Win MacArthur 'Genius Awards' of $500,000The "Genius" grants are always interesting to see, especially the diversity of fields and kinds of work recognized; Lene Hau got one two years ago. There are "no strings attached"; 100 grand a year to use however the recipient wishes.
(Source: Harvard in the News)

2003-10-02T17:04:00.000-04:00

the NIH Roadmap The new head of NIH, Elias Zerhouni, discusses goals and funding priorities for the agency.

2003-10-02T16:37:00.000-04:00

An Economic Analysis of Scientific Research PublishingYes, but is it Wellcome? Indeed, since the trust came out in favor of open access publishing. This document reviews the key players in science publishing, hoping to encourage dialogue among them. (Sources: Open Access News; ResourceShelf)

2003-10-02T16:23:00.000-04:00

RedLightGreenThe Research Libraries Group has put together a web-based union catalog culled from members' (academic and research libraries throughout the US) library catalogs. It's like searching a whole host of research libraries all at once. (Source: ResourceShelf)

2003-10-01T12:11:00.000-04:00

Supercomputer climate model whips up a storm

New Scientist reports that virtual hurricanes have been added to climate predictions in a Japanese research center's models ...

2003-10-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

A Report on the Evaluation of Criteria Sets for Assessing Health Web Sites

A worthwhile report from Consumerwebwatch, given that many look to the web for medical information. (Sources: beSpacific, The Virtual Chase)

2003-10-01T11:09:00.000-04:00

OLDMEDLINE Citations Join PubMed®

the National Library of Medicine has added citations dating from 1953-1965 to the PubMed database.

2003-10-01T10:04:00.000-04:00

Re-imagining the Future

Report from Technology Review's Emerging Technologies conference

2003-10-01T09:51:00.000-04:00

Nature Biotechnology

The October issue of Nature Biotechnology includes a "focus on nanobiotechnology," with articles on microfluidics, labelling of DNA, using cells to deliver drugs and harnessing bacterial energy. Commentators feature George Whitesides and authors include Stephen Quake and Jacqueline Barton. Sections on patents, careers and funding and investment round out the magazine.

2003-10-01T09:26:00.000-04:00

a Mass Spec Timeline

This article from Today's Chemist at Work summarizes the developments in mass spectrometry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the shift of focus to biomolecules. Joel Parks's work at Rowland , exemplifies this kind of interdisciplinary shift; he's extended his group's cluster trap instrument to study gas-phase proteins and eventually oligonucleotides. (See their recent paper and poster. A Chemical and Engineering news report from a recent conference highlights severl current mass spec techniques used to study proteins, both in proteomics and in structural biology.

2003-09-30T16:35:00.000-04:00

The Scientist :: Biology's new online archive

Gives a description of q-bio, a section of the arXiv(or xxx or lanl, as it has been called), for quantitative biology, biological physics, neural networks, complex systems and related topics. The thinking is that physicists may help biologists by taking interest in these problems (so says Terry Hwa of UCSD). And, as the opening of HMS's Systems Biology department, and a recent Science issue devoted to biological networks attest, these are topics generating a lot of bits.

2003-09-30T16:12:00.000-04:00

Using Google to Search Your Personal BlogsphereInteresting ideas from Chris Sherman, Search Engine Watch (Source; Library Stuff)

2003-09-30T15:58:00.000-04:00

MIT OpenCourseWare | Master Course List

500 MIT course lists are available online. Now, if only the same mandate could given to institutional archiving in DSpace... (Source: Open Access News)

2003-09-29T16:12:00.000-04:00

Science Journals Tighten Rules for Disclosure of Financial Ties Full disclosure ... next, blind trust ....

2003-09-29T16:09:00.000-04:00

SatireWire | Feature: Interview with the Search EngineCareful which site you use and how you use it; an example with Ask Jeeves - somebody took it literally .... (Source: Darci Chapman, Infomage in Training)

2003-09-29T15:57:00.000-04:00

To Fix Software Flaws, Microsoft Invites AttackA NYTimes story reports that Microsoft has released more than thirty patches this year; the guy in the picture who does security for Microsoft looks kinda nervous ...

2003-09-29T15:54:00.000-04:00

Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act The antidote to the sweeping surveillance powers granted by the USA PATRIOT act, HR 3171 was introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and others... (sources; LISNEWS, Shifted Librarian, beSpacific, ResourceShelf...)

2003-09-29T15:51:00.000-04:00

The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide

Mor e open season on Powerpoint, and its proponents respond ....

2003-09-29T15:34:00.000-04:00

DARPA Fact File: A compendium of DARPA programs

the 2003 edition of DARPA's reference publication, summarizing highlights from its funding recipients. (Source: The ResourceShelf) (Note: warning; it's a little out of date; still mentions the TIA (Terrorism Information Awareness) initiative as an active area of research.

2003-09-29T15:31:00.000-04:00

EJSSNT : e-Journal of Surface Science and NanotechnologyWell maybe Surface Science will have some competition after all... So far in its first volume; currently all articles are available as .pdf downloads, but this could change. (source: the Sci-Tech Library Question)

2003-09-29T14:40:00.000-04:00

Mercury News | 09/28/2003 | In the Wild West of the Internet, there are good guys and bad guys

Interesting viewpoint ... examples of the "good guys" include Peter Suber's "open Access News and the Internet Archive. (Source: Open Access News)

2003-09-29T10:31:00.000-04:00

Investment Gains Lift Endowments at Leading Colleges(Source: Harvard in the News)

2003-09-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

RecallInteresting ... The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive has a search interface. You can search back to 1996 and find a lot of material that has disappeared from view (although some of it might not have been missed, admittedly ...) (Source; Internet Legal Research Weekly)

2003-09-29T09:56:00.000-04:00

Internet Search Engine UpdateGreg Notess gives a good summary of specific, recent changes effected by some of the more popular search engines. (Source: Internet Legal Research Weekly)

2003-09-26T13:19:00.000-04:00

Actionbioscience.orgInteresting ... A highly touted site (lauded by Scientific American) that seeks to educate students and the public on issues in bioscience, including discoveries in evolution, genetics, biodiversity and biotechnology, among other themes. Each section has an extensive list of articles explore a variety of topical questions ("How do antibiotics affect bacteria" "What is nanotechnology") and provide links to further reading. Well-researched and thoughtful. (Source: Neat New Stuff on the Net)

2003-09-26T13:12:00.000-04:00

Book Report - How four magazines you've probably never read help determine what books you buy. By Adelle WaldmanAside from the comments of high-schoolers traumatized by the Grapes of Wrath, who are the reviewers on Amazon.com? This article names four common sources, magazines from the publishing and library trades, such as Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, and gives a sense of their style and possible agendas. (Source: Bookslut)

2003-09-26T13:00:00.000-04:00

States build terror database resembling controversial federal project MATRIX. Not the movie. Just when you thought we'd seen the back of TIA, turns out that states are employing a similar data-collection concept. (Source: LIS News) (see also related article in the Register)

2003-09-26T12:02:00.000-04:00

World Weather Information Service - Official Observations. Official Forecasts. Somebody's done something about the weather - WMO has made data from a wide range of cities available on this pilot site. (Source: yes, again, the amazing ResourceShelf)

2003-09-26T11:47:00.000-04:00

PSIgate - Science TimelinesPart of PSIGate(Physical Sciences Information Gateway,) this site features timelines in various disciplines (physics, earth sciences, chemistry, materials sciences - or you can browse all at once), listing significant scientific events in chronological order. From each entry, links to related web sites are featured, resources indexed and annotated extensively by PSIGate. Keyword searching is available. (Sources: BlackStump; ResourceShelf)

2003-09-26T11:25:00.000-04:00

The Wilbur and Orville Wright PapersThe Library of Congress announced the latest site in its American Memory Project, observing the centennial of the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Material includes letters, drawings, photographs and the brothers' glass-plated phtographic negatives. (Source: The ResourceShelf)

2003-09-26T10:50:00.000-04:00

going Google beyond Another good discussion of how to use more than what search engine, and what others offer that Google does not. alltheweb,altavista, teoma and vivismo are examples. (Source: The Virtual Chase)

2003-09-25T10:36:00.000-04:00

History shows hurricanes are not rising A New Scientist article reports on research that contradicts the belief that hurricanes are becoming more prevalent due to climate change and other factors.

2003-09-25T10:34:00.000-04:00

Do we need more scientists? An article in the Public Interest says make careers in science more attractive rather than worrying about speculated personnel shortages. (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Update)

2003-09-24T16:43:00.000-04:00

Open-access row leads paper to shed authors Nature reports that the New England Journal of Medicine and Stanford University researchers have been trading barbs over a paper recently published by the journal. Stanford's Pat Brown is one of the founders of the Public Library of Science; when one of his grad students wanted to publish their results in NEJM, Brown tried to get the journal to accept open-access considerations. NEJM refused. Subsequently, the student resubmitted the paper, with Brown and three others no longer listed as authors but acknowledged as contributors. It was accepted and published this past summer. A cartoon in the news story shows a medical researcher caught between the "rock" of traditional journals such as NEJM and the "hard place" of open access publishing. Is this a false choice?

2003-09-17T16:47:00.000-04:00

Science education: Spare me the lecture An article in Nature asks what works in the science classroom and highlights some successes.

2003-09-16T09:52:00.000-04:00

Yoran named head of national cybersecurity The department of Homeland Security has launched a National Cyber Security Division, and Amit Yoran, a vice-president at Symantec (makers of Norton and other anti-virus software,) has been appointed to lead it. (Source: EDUPAGE)

2003-09-10T15:53:00.000-04:00

Earth Scientist's Periodic Table of Elements and Their Ions A Georgia geologist redesigned the periodic table showing the ions of elements and their natural occurances. (Source: Nature)

2003-09-08T09:35:00.000-04:00

Neighbors Hear Plans For New Science Facility

2003-09-08T09:33:00.000-04:00

Deans Vet Allston Plan A Crimson article discusses what is to be done with all the real estate across the river; School of Public Health and HUGSE named as potential candidates.