Good news regarding the UBC Library’s CISTI Orders Document Delivery Service. You no longer need to come to the Library to pick up your CISTI or Interlibrary Loan request.

For CISTI Orders articles, Interlibrary Loan staff are creating brief records in Relais (our ILL/DD software) in order to post the articles to the web and to send an email to the user. The article can be accessed a total of 3 times within 15 days from the date of the email message. After either accessing the article 3 times or 15 days have passed, the article is no longer available to the user.

Articles ordered from Interlibrary Loan are now being delivered to UBC users via post to web. When an article is received, Interlibrary Loan staff match the article to the correct request and then it is posted to the web. The user receives an email message with a link to the article. The user then clicks on the link to obtain the article. The user does not need a password to access their articles.

All articles received by 5:00PM Monday to Friday will be processed that day.

Under the Copyright Act, if the user wants to keep a copy of the article, they must print a copy. The article has been received for the purposoe of research or private study only. It is not for redistribution, retransmission or electronic storage. It cannot be used for any other purpose or reproduced without permission of the copyright owner.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian

A new article today in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science could be of interest to those of you who post their studies to arxiv.org:

A. Haque and P. Ginsparg, “Positional effects on citation and readership in arXiv,” J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., vol. 60, pp. 2203-2218, 2009.

Abstract:

arXiv.org mediates contact with the literature for entire scholarly communities, providing both archival access and daily email and web announcements of new materials. We confirm and extend a surprising correlation between article position in these initial announcements and later citation impact, due primarily to intentional self-promotion by authors. There is, however, also a pure visibility effect: the subset of articles accidentally in early positions fared measurably better in the long-term citation record. Articles in astrophysics (astro-ph) and two large subcommunities of theoretical high energy physics (hep-th and hep-ph) announced in position 1, for example, respectively received median numbers of citations 83%, 50%, and 100% higher than those lower down, while the subsets there accidentally had 44%, 38%, and 71% visibility boosts. We also consider the positional effects on early readership. The median numbers of early full text downloads for astro-ph, hep-th, and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 were 82%, 61%, and 58% higher than for lower positions, respectively, and those there accidentally had medians visibility-boosted by 53%, 44%, and 46%. Finally, we correlate a variety of readership features with long-term citations, using machine learning methods, and conclude with some observations on impact metrics and the dangers of recommender mechanisms.

** Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/easternblot/ – “Paul Ginsparg shows that everyone submits their paper to ArXiv *just* after the submission deadline so they’ll be the first on the front page the next day”

The Nanomaterial Research Strategy describes the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) strategy for conducting and supporting research to understand the potential human health and ecological implications from exposure to manufactured nanomaterials, and how nanotechnology can be used sustainably in environmental protection applications.

EPA’s Nanomaterial Research Program is designed to provide information to support nanomaterial safety decisions. The eight key science questions described in the strategy are intended to help decision makers answer the following questions:

This week’s issue of Science focuses in CO2 capture and storage.

Articles include

Why Capture CO2 from the Atmosphere?

Round and Round: A Guide to the Carbon Cycle

Onshore Geologic Storage of CO2

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

While working at UBC, I’m often amazed by some of the some spectacular sunsets I have ever seen. If you’re interested in learning more about the weather associated with these clouds have a look at the Cloud Appreciation Society website.

If you are interested in learning more about the weather in general, check out the Weather School.

For a more complete list of websites have a look at the Science and Engineering Library subject guide for Atmospheric Sciences

Today’s weather in Vancouver? Kiel?

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences

“Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.”

“For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment — specifying that the document or message should “vanish” in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.”

For more information, visit the Vanish site at the Department of Computer Science, University of Washington.

There is a also a technical paper that will be presented at the 18th USENIX Security Symposium taking place this August in Montreal.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Electrical and Computer Engineering

New Scientist reports about the final draft of the American Meteorological Society‘s carefully worded position paper on geoengineering. The AMS is the first major scientific body to officially endorse research into geoengineering.

From New Scientist:

The document states that “deliberately manipulating physical, chemical, or biological aspects of the Earth system” should be explored alongside the more conventional approaches to climate change. Conventional approaches means reducing emissions – “mitigation” in policy-speak – and adjusting to the unavoidable effect of climate change – known as “adaptation”.

The paper states that “even aggressive mitigation of future emissions cannot avoid dangerous climate changes resulting from past emissions. Furthermore, it is unlikely that all of the expected climate-change impacts can be managed through adaptation. Thus, it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential benefits, to understand its limitations, and to avoid ill-considered deployment”.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17490-climate-engineering-research-gets-green-light.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

** photo by courambel

UBC Engineering student helps collect scientific data for Canada’s Arctic submission to the United Nations

Alexander Forrest, a UBC civil engineering PhD candidate, is part of a team supporting the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to collect scientific data for Canada’s Arctic submission to the United Nations.

Forrest has been working with International Submarine Engineering Ltd. as a support engineer and will assist in AUV operations next year when two AUVs operate thousands of metres under the ice to survey the seabed.

Canada, the U.S., and Denmark are collecting scientific data to establish sovereign rights to parts of the Arctic Ocean under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Canada has until 2013 to provide its submission to the United Nations. Russia and Norway have already made submissions to the UN.

More at UBC This Week.

**image by cam17

A short article from last month in the New Scientist discussed the changes in quantum computing in the last decade.  Another related article from the April’s Science could also be of interest – “Where Is My Quantum Computer?”

See more research about quantum computing in the Web of Science database that UBC subscribes to.  Here are 180 articles retrieved for my quick search for “quantum comput*” and secur* (you need a subscription to this database to view the results).

** Photo by All Glass

Statistics isn’t just about bayesian disease mapping and analyzing incomplete multivariate data. Statistics has some very important applications for analyzing hockey – yes, ice hockey. While my team hasn’t made the playoffs for a while except for that glorious 2006 run, it might be interesting to for any of you hockey statisticians to apply the research to the teams currently playing in the NHL playoffs.

Here’s a sample of some the articles available in MathSciNet and Current Index to Statistics dealing with ice hockey.

Thomas, Andrew C. (2007) “Inter-arrival Times of Goals in Ice Hockey,” Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Volume 3: Issue 3, Article 5. Available at: http://www.bepress.com/jqas/vol3/iss3/5

Thomas, Andrew C. (2006) “The Impact of Puck Possession and Location on Ice Hockey Strategy,” Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Volume 2: Issue 1, Article 6. Available at: http://www.bepress.com/jqas/vol2/iss1/6

Anthology of Statistics in Sports. Edited by Jim Albert, Jay Bennett and James J. Cochran. ASA-SIAM Series on Statistics and Applied Probability, 16. 2005.

Gill, Paramjit S. (2000) “Late-Game Reversals in Professional Basketball, Football, and Hockey” The American Statistician, Volume 54, Number 2 (May, 2000), pp. 94-99 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2686024

The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports is a great place to browse.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom UBC Science and Engineering Librarian