A very interesting article in the June issue of Atlantic Magazine is focusing on the Conficker worm – The Enemy Within

This article reads like Dan Brown’s novel…

You can also find more academic research about Conficker in our computer sciences databases, e.g. IEEE Xplore Digital Library or ACM Digital Library

In one of the classic understatements of aviation history, Eric Moody turned on the flight intercom of his British Airways 747 and reported to his 248 passengers:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.

The date was 24 June 1982, and Moody’s 747 was south of Java, en route from Heathrow to Auckland, amidst an ash cloud from Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. At first it looked as if the only hope was to ditch the plane in the ocean. However, the crew was able to glide the plane (let’s all nod now to engineers who managed to create a jumbo jet that descends only one meter for every 15 flown without power) until successfully restarting three of the four engines, but the damage from the cloud made for a harrowing landing over the mountainous terrain around Jakarta. In 1989, another 747 temporarily lost use of all four engines due to a volcanic plume (from Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt).

Not surprisingly, since the British Airways incident, volcanic plumes—previously studied more closely for their climatic effects—have become a preoccupation of weather forecasters. The world meteorological and aviation communities have collaborated on the International Airways Volcano Watch, whose advisories Thursday led to the cancellation of flights across northern Europe due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjalla volcano. It will be hard to overstate the consequence of this eruption for travelers around the world; it is already being compared to the no-fly days after 9/11.

For more information, read the full American Meteorological Society Blog Post

The Science and Engineering Library hosts a number of databases that will give you access to the peer-reviewed literature dealing with the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate and weather.

Have a look at

Geobase
MGA
Web of Science

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

The American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics have announced that the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month, April 2010, is Mathematics and Sports.

http://www.mathaware.org/mam/2010/

There are some interesting articles related to math and sports made available here – http://www.mathaware.org/mam/2010/essays/

Moreover, try the math super-database – MathSciNet for further research on sports applications in mathematics…

** Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/celinesphotographer/

Relief was the order of the day for Canadian scientists on Thursday as the federal government brought down its fiscal blueprint for 2010-11.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty moved to partially offset scheduled cuts in the budgets of the nation’s three granting councils, though they’ll still take a blow and there’ll be tighter competition for research operating grants.

Read the ScienceInsider news article here.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom science and engineering liaison librarian

Every year the Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society publishes a wonderful calendar – the Colors of Chemistry. Starting in 2010 this calendar is now available either as a free download or as an online interactive calendar.

Go to 2010 Colors of Chemistry Calendar and choose your option.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of British Columbia.

There are currently two very useful journal rankings SCImago and JCR. These rankings allow you to display amongst other things the h-index for a specific journal or a grouping of journals based on subject

“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. There are also over 500 conference proceedings in the database.

For more information, go to SCImago

“Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries.”
JCR Science Edition contains data from over 5,900 journals in science and technology.
JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 1,700 journals in the social sciences.

For more information, go to JCR (Journal Citation Reports)

It is important to be aware of the size of the body of literature (the number of journals and conference proceedings) being indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Journals listed in JCR are indexed in the Web of Science The larger the database, the greater the possibility that articles will be discovered, read, and hopefully cited. This is especially important for open access journals, some of which have not yet been indexed in the Web of Science.

Eigenfactor ranking is based on Web of Science data.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Science and Engineering

Ron Simmer Patent and IP Expert has once agained issued his Patex Bizarre Patents Calendar.

This calendar documents the creative spirt of the human race reflected in patents.

Check out Ron’s excellent site of patent and intellectual property links at the Patex website.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian

The AGU Digital Library is now available online. This collection gives you access to the archival content for the following AGU journals

Online access to the AGU Digital Library is for UBC faculty, students, and staff only.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

Author(s): Gerlich G (Gerlich, Gerhard)1, Tscheuschner RD (Tscheuschner, Ralf D.)
Source: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MODERN PHYSICS B Volume: 23 Issue: 3 Pages: 275-364 Published: JAN 30 2009
Abstract: The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics, such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature, it is taken for granted that such a mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper, the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Click here to read the full article.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

In “Measuring citations: Calculations can vary widely”, published in ScienceNews October 5, 2009, Janet Raloff reports on findings by Abhaya Kulkarni and his colleagues who compared three indexing services: Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. Not surprisingly the results were different between these services, because they index different publications. Perhaps the most important part of the article though is the point Kulkarni makes about the implications of not counting citations from non-high impact factor journals. Implications that might include: research that gets little or no credit if it is not cited in high-impact factor journals; or a failure to gauge the true influence of a particular piece of research if it is not cited in journals with high impact factors.
See the full article here: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48057