Imagine no facebook, twitter, myspace, email, internet for a entire day?

Shutdown Day is a Global Internet Experiment whose purpose is to get people to think about how their lives have changed with the increasing use of the home computer, and whether or not any good things are being lost because of this.

The idea of Shutdown Day project is simple – just shutdown your computer for one whole day of the year and involve yourself in some other activities: outdoors, nature, sports, fun stuff with friends and family – whatever, just to remind yourself that there still exists a world outside your monitor screen.

For more information, go to Shutdown Day

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian

BC Wood WORKS!/Canadian Wood Council annually host the Western Canadian Wood Catapult Competition on the UBC Campus in Vancouver BC. The third annual Wood Catapult Competition will take place at the UBC Campus in Vancouver on March 28th, 2009.

The purpose of the competition is to challenge registered college or university students to design and build a wood siege engine capable of accurately hitting targets at 20, 30 and 45 meters using a cement ball. Teams consisting of students and one faculty member submit a short report prior to the competition about their catapult design. On the morning of the competition each team will be required to give a fifteen-minute presentation to the judges, after their weigh-in and setup.

For information on the registering for this competition and technical requirements, go to the
BC Wood WORKS! Competitions website.

Background Reading

Denny, Mark. Siege engine dynamics. European Journal of Physics. 2005. 26 561-577.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Materials Engineering, Physics and Astronomy

Our new article – “Comparing Safari Tech Books Online and Books24x7 E-book Collections: A Case Study from the University of British Columbia Library” has just been published this week in the Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

It is open access and is available for everyone.

Abstract:

Most academic libraries are seeking to provide electronic access to the very dynamic and changing field of technology related material. Safari Tech Books Online and Books24x7 are the major e-book collections in this area. We compared the Safari Tech Books Online and Books24x7 e-book packages as to their usefulness for the University of British Columbia Library, second largest academic library in Canada. In our sample, we found that Books24x7 had more titles to offer (25% more); the overlap between the collections was relatively small (13-16%) and publishers varied considerably; and although there were no major differences in the “usefulness” measures of the titles in the two packages (Amazon.com ratings, WorldCat holdings and Reviews.com reviews were quite similar for both packages), O’Reilly titles, available only through Safari Tech Books Online, were held by a slightly higher number of libraries worldwide. We conclude that in order to have comprehensive coverage of this constantly changing area of knowledge, a large research academic library needs to subscribe to both collections. If subscribing to both collections is not an option, we recommend selecting a package based on the pricing that the library can negotiate with ProQuest, the vendor of both products, since the collections are complimentary in their nature.

Please feel free to ask us any questions or follow-up with this area of ebooks evaluation.

** photo by Adrian

The University of British Columbia Library and Springer are delighted to introduce a new Print on Demand feature linked to the Library’s eBook collection: MyCopy powered by SpringerLink.

As a current faculty member of the University of British Columbia, MyCopy allows you to order your own personal print copy of a Springer eBook included in the Library’s collection. The individual copy will be delivered as a printed soft cover version directly to your doorstep. Best of all, it will be available to all patrons for just $24.95 (USD plus GST & PST, including shipping and handling costs).

The University of British Columbia Library is one of the first libraries to introduce the MyCopy service that includes more than 11,000 eBooks out of a total of 30,000 eBooks available on SpringerLink. We invite you to take a look, browse this comprehensive eBook collection and take advantage of the MyCopy service.

If you find an eBook that you would like to use for a course, you can simply copy the URL in the address bar on SpringerLink and add this to your course syllabus. The students can then follow the URL and purchase the eBook directly on http://www.springerlink.com for home delivery.

Below are directions for ordering a MyCopy book for just $24.95 (USD plus GST & PST, including shipping and handling costs)
1. Go to SpringerLink: http://www.springerlink.com
2. Search or browse eBooks in your research area (Available titles will have an orange MyCopy label associated with it.)
3. Click on the eBook or eBook chapter of your interest
4. Click on the MyCopy Logo found underneath the eBook or eBook chapter information, or the “add to shopping cart now” link within the orange box on the right hand column to start the ordering process.

We trust you will find this feature a valuable addition to Springer’s eBook collection. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact UBC Librarians Joy Kirchner (joy.kirchner@ubc.ca) and Aleteia Greenwood (aleteia.greenwood@ubc.ca) or Springer at http://www.springerlink.com/feedback.

For a complete list of all Springer Ebooks including MyCopy titles go to the Springer eBooks by Subject Collection page and download the Excel spreadsheet for your discipline. Look for the column that contains the Springerlink openurl and paste this url into your browser.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for the Physical and Applied Sciences.

This is a quick post to remind you about various standards we have in the SciEng library:

* ASTM up to 2006
* CSA and ANSI standards up to 1995 (How to get those?)
* IEEE Standards: The IEEE Electronic Library provides access to over 1,000 current, revised and superceded standards in the field of electrical and computer engineering. You must be a UBC faculty, student or staff to access these resources. Print standards can be found in the UBC Library catalogue, though coverage varies.
* ISO: We own a number of ISO standards that are listed individually in our library catalogue, mostly from the early 1990s. Try typing ISO and standard? in catalogue search box.
* Open Access Standards (Free):
a.International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T)
b. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Standards. The Standards Council of Canada will grant a license for use of ISO and IEC international standards by recognized Canadian educational institutions in a credit course. Please contact us to learn more about this option.

Please do not hesitate to contact Kevin Lindstrom or Eugene Barsky if you require any additional info!

** Photo by Sifter

Here’s a recent article by UBC Physics and Astronomy researchers Zibin, Moss, and Scott

Can we avoid dark energy? Zibin, James P. Moss, Adam; Scott, Douglas.Physical Review Letters, 101(25) p. 251303 2008.
Abstract: The idea that we live near the center of a large, nonlinear void has attracted attention recently as an alternative to dark energy or modified gravity. We show that an appropriate void profile can fit both the latest cosmic microwave background and supernova data. However, this requires either a fine-tuned primordial spectrum or a Hubble rate so low as to rule these models out. We also show that measurements of the radial baryon acoustic scale can provide very strong constraints. Our results present a serious challenge to void models of acceleration.

Need more background information on Einstein-de Sitter spacetime? Or the Friedmann-Lemaitre model?

Have a look at the Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A search of Springer’s ebook collection for Einstein-de Sitter gives the following results.

For additional ebooks on the topic, have a quick browse of Springer’s Physics and Astronomy collection.

Need a comprehensive list of databases, ejournals and related resources? Check out the Science and Engineering subject guides for Astronomy and Physics.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Physics and Astronomy

The US National Security Agency has helped put together a list of the world’s most dangerous coding mistakes.

Experts from more than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released the consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Shockingly, most of these errors are not well understood by programmers; their avoidance is not widely taught by computer science programs; and their presence is frequently not tested by organizations developing software for sale.

BBC news article lists the mistakes here – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7824939.stm

** Photo by Marco Gomes

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.

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