New types of journal metrics grow more influential in the scientific community

AT ONE POINT in his career, Nobel Laureate Sir Harold W. Kroto was the second most highly cited chemist in Britain—topped only by the University of Southampton’s Martin Fleischmann, one of the proponents of cold fusion.

Kroto, who codiscovered C60 and is currently a chemistry professor at Florida State University, declines to draw any conclusions from that experience. But given the ultimate fate of cold fusion, the anecdote suggests that citation statistics aren’t always a good indicator of scientific excellence.

Read the full article at Chemical & Engineering News

The Journal of Number Theory has created a presence on YouTube with video author abstracts.
JNT features selected research articles that represent the broad spectrum of interest in contemporary number theory and allied areas. A valuable resource for mathematicians, the journal provides an international forum for the publication of original research in this field.

https://www.youtube.com/user/JournalNumberTheory

As part of the UBC Library’s mandate to archive undergraduate research, two honors theses have just been added to the Physics and Astronomy Community in cIRcle – UBC’s Information Repository.

Measurement of Upsilon (1S) Production at BaBar
by Rocky So.

A Deformation Induced Quantum Dot by Daniel
Woodsworth.

If you are interested in contributing your undergraduate thesis to cIRcle, please contact me directly kevin.lindstrom@ubc.ca.

IEEE.tv is an internet based television network that produces and delivers special-interest programming about technology and engineering for the benefit of IEEE’s members and the general public.

IEEE.tv Public Access is free of charge to the public, and does not require IEEE membership or log-in.

Here is the url to view its programs – http://www.ieee.tv

Some recent programs include:

* Emerging Field of Biomedical Engineering
* Energy Innovations: The Hydrogen House
* Group on Earth Observations(GEOSS): Technology

** Photo by ___federico___ [happily married]

Microsoft’s much anticipated WorldWide Telescope was released on Tuesday – May 12th, 2008.

There is a very nice article about it in the New York Times – Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D

Moreover, around two months ago, Google also introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.

Take a look on the books UBC Library has on this topic of Astronomy

** Photo by Fort Photo

Dr. Bernard Laval and his PhD student Alex Forrest were invited to join a NOAA Signature Expedition to do baseline mapping of the state of coral reefs surrounding Bonaire (Dutch Antilles) using UBC-Gavia, UBC’s robot submersible. More information about the expedition can be found at: NOAA Ocean Explorer: Bonaire 2008.

**Photo by divemasterking2000

This blog is created and (being) maintained by three Science and Engineering librarians at the University of British Columbia (UBC): Aleteia Greenwood, Kevin Lindstrom and Eugene Barsky.

The purpose and mandate of this blog is to serve as a communication tool for us to let our liaison departments know about the services we offer to them, workshops we teach, databases and electronic/print resources and also what happens worldwide that might be of relevance to us at UBC.

The information is parsed and granulated to relevant categories, so if you are interested in a specific category, click on it to see what we have to offer in that discipline or subject.

Please send any of your comments and suggestions our way – we would be delighted to hear from you!

Vancouver, BC, April 23, 2008 – BCNet puts on the Broadband Innovation Challenge to promote student innovation with respect to the use of high-bandwidth networks. At the 2008 Challenge, students from UBC’s Computer Science department took top prize in the graduate student category and 3 prizes in the undergraduate category.

In the graduate student portion of the competition Brendan Cully won 1st place for his application SecondSite. SecondSite uses a virtualization platform for seamless, efficient disaster recovery.

In the undergraduate category:
1st place went to Charles Bihis, Victor Chan, Jason Hui, and Andrew Tjia for a peer-to-peer picture sharing system called Picture2Picture. Their application improves on photo-sharing applications by cutting out the need for a central server and with it, a single-point of failure. Learn more at:
http://p2p.thecube.ca/home

There was a tie for 2nd place:
* Chris Binckly, Daniel Dent, and Ian South-Dickinson for their project on distributed content delivery and processing system;
* Tane Adam, Yanik Berube, and Taivo Evard for their project Ramet, a peer-to-peer backup system based on erasure codes. This team also got 3rd place in the poster competition.

More on UBC winners here:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/news/press/BCNetCompetition2008.shtml

More on BCNet Broadband Innovation Challenge here:
http://www.bc.net/news_events_publications/competitions.htm

** Photo by Unhindered by Talent

“Canada at a glance” presents the current Canadian demographic, education, health, justice, housing, income, labour market, economic, travel, financial, and foreign trade statistics.

This booklet also includes important international comparisons, so that readers can see how Canada stacks up against its neighbours. Updated yearly, Canada at a glance is a very useful reference for those who want quick access to current Canadian statistics.

Access it in free full-text PDF on the Stats Canada website – “Canada at a glance”

** Photo by jpctalbot

The Open Atmospheric Science Journal is an open access, peer reviewed, online journal, which publishes research articles, reviews, and letters in all areas of climate research and atmospheric science. It aims to provide the most complete and reliable source of information on current developments in the field. The emphasis will be on publishing quality papers rapidly and freely available to researchers worldwide.

http://www.bentham.org/open/toascj/index.htm

UBC Professor Douw Steyn and Stefano Galmarini from European Commission Joint Research Centre have published “Evaluating the Predictive and Explanatory Value of Atmospheric Numerical Models: Between Relativism and Objectivism” in this new open access journal.

** Photo by selva