From the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO) website:

http://www.fao.org/forestry/52980/en/

This 17-minute video presentation, produced by FAO and the Forestry Commission of the United Kingdom, shows how much forests can contribute to the mitigation of climate change, stressing the importance of reversing forest loss.

Forests store more carbon than all the world’s remaining oil stocks. Continuing deforestation and forest degradation account for almost one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – more than the entire global transport sector. The presentation explains how society can combat climate change by conserving and managing existing forests, by tackling causes of deforestation and by planting new forests. It stresses the use of wood as a renewable energy source and as a raw material, pointing out that wood products store carbon for their entire lifetime, until they decay or are burned. A section on adaptation notes how the world’s changing climate will affect the health and composition of forests and stresses the importance of adapting and planning ahead for the changes.

** Photo by MorBCN

We would like to wish you happy holidays! We are looking forward to work with many of you next year!

Enjoy the snow 🙂

** Photo by velkr0

Interested in what’s going on at Google? There are a number of ways of doing this. Going to Google Labs will show you some of their cool new technologies.

What else is going on at Google? Searching the ACM Digital Library for Google in the Affiliations field retrieves 359 papers. The most recent being Programming the Intel 80-core network-on-a-chip terascale processor. A paper presented at the of the 2008 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing held in Austin, Texas.

Another good database to look at is Compendex. Repeating the same affiliation search in Compendex retrieves 278 papers. The most recent article in Compendex is A New Baseline for Image Annotation published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 5304, pages 316-329, 2008.

Okay. Let’s look at how Google protects its intellectual property. A search of the Google Patents database for Google in the assignee name field retrieves 100 patents/patent applications with the most recent US patent 7,352,833 Method and System for Temporal Autocorrelation Filtering being published on May 8, 2008.

Repeating the same search in Espacenet retrieves over 1675 patents/patent applications with most recent patent/patent application US 20080301093 A1 Determining Search Query Statistical Data for an Advertising Campaign Based on User-Selected Criteria published on December 4, 2008.

Okay, here’s the challenge. Use Google Scholar find the most up-to-date recent articles, patents/patent applications written by researchers at Google. Let me know what you find and how easy it was.

Moral of the story. There is something to be said for databases such as Compendex, Web of Science and Scifinder Scholar that index thousands of journals and conference proceedings and have sophisticated search interfaces that allow you – the end user to find exactly what you are looking for.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Electrical and Computer Engineering, Earth and Ocean Sciences, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Materials Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Physical Geography.

An article in the New York Times looks on the pine beetle epidemic in North America – “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West”

Many people in UBC deal with this precise issue. For instance, try a search on a very general multidisciplinary database such as Academic Search Complete here.

For more comprehensive coverage of this topic , try Web of Science or Agricola databases.

** Photo by Stephen Rees

Impact factors, Journal Citation Reports, the Science Citation Index and its online version the Web of Science are all statistical measures of the importance of journals and of the researchers who publish in them.

There are in fact journals that specialize in bibliometrics – the journal Scientometrics is one such example.

Dr. Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego has taken the “times cited” measure one step further by proposing the h-index “defined as the number of papers with citation number >h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.”

Does the h index have predictive power? Hirsch, J. E. Department of Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2007), 104(49), 19193-19198.
Bibliometric measures of individual scientific achievement are of particular interest if they can be used to predict future achievement. Here we report results of an empirical study of the predictive power of the h index compared with other indicators. Our findings indicate that the h index is better than other indicators considered (total citation count, citations per paper, and total paper count) in predicting future scientific achievement. We discuss reasons for the superiority of the h index.

Using the Web of Science database, h-indexes can also be calculated for individual departments . For example, here’s the h-index numbers for a select number of Canadian university electrical engineering departments:

TORONTO 89
UBC 54
MCGILL 53
ALBERTA 51

The folks at Thomson Reutershave put together a short but very information video on impact factors and how to use the Web of Science database to find your own h-index.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for the Physical and Appled Sciences, University of British Columbia

A new single gateway to NRC research is on the way. Following an NRC CISTI pilot project with seven NRC institutes, NRC has given the go-ahead to create an NRC Publications Archive (NPArC) that will provide access to NRC’s record of science and demonstrate the many ways NRC researchers translate science and technology into value for Canada.

This searchable, web-based repository will increase the access to NRC authored publications, guarantee long-term access to NRC’s research output, and serve as a valuable resource for NRC researchers, collaborators and the public. NRC-CISTI will manage and maintain NPArC.

As part of this initiative, NRC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peerreviewed, NRC-authored publications and technical reports in NPArC.

Wherever possible, NPArC will provide access to the full text of these publications. NRC’s Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) will be updated to declare its intent to deposit the full-text of NRC-authored publications in NPArC. However, the nature, timing and extent of access to individual publications depends on a variety of factors, including agreements with publishers, or in the case of technical reports the sensitivity or confidentiality of content.

More information about the NRC Publications Archive will be available closer to the launch date in December 2008.

Source: CISTI News September 2008

Posted by Kevin Lindstrom Physical Sciences and Engineering Librarian

Now after the election, it would be interesting to see whether Senator Obama will perform on the science and technology issues his campaign has promised.

Here is Obama’s platform on STM issues, accumulated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science – http://election2008.aaas.org/comparisons/obama.shtml

Do you notice something of a particular interest to you?

** Photo by jmtimages

Scifinder Scholar Web is a newly developed web interface that provides online access to Chemical Abstracts, CASREACT chemical reactions database, Chemical Abstracts Registry File, and Medline.

This new version of Scifinder does not require the installation of any additional client software.

For more information on how to access Scifinder Scholar Web

Posted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Chemistry, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Earth and Ocean Sciences.

Here is the presentation we deliver on Mon Oct 20th 2008 for the Pacific NorthWest Forestry Librarians Group in FPInnovations – Paprican Division in Vancouver, BC

Your comments are very welcome!

A technology report (PDF) by a Harvard University student shows that of all the digital tools that professors use, Harvard students find most useful online course material and syllabi.

The report said students want courses to have a Web site that contains readings, notes and other content so they can be accessed easily during the semester. The survey is based on responses last December from 328 undergraduates and 120 graduate students.

Is it the same with our UBC folks? Does it ring any bells for our faculty?

** Photo by AdamLogan