Do you love trailers as much as we do at The Turret? This one is advertising the Impact Measurements Demystified webinars that begins next Tuesday at lunch hour.
Enjoy the kicky music!
Impact Measurements Demystified
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Earth as Art and other images
If you are looking for images to spruce up a class presentation or a conference poster here are just a few of my favourites. Google Images may be the most obvious place to start, with the option to limit to faces, photos, clip art or line drawings, or to a particular size or colour. I use the colour option a lot to find images with a white or transparent background.
Flickr: Creative Commons is another resource that I use often. Here you can find images that others are willing to share, so that you can use them and credit whoever they belong to, based on a Creative Commons license as an alternative to copyright.
Most science magazines have image galleries online but I do love to browse NASA’s image gallery and 3D resources. They are generally not copyrighted and can be used with acknowledgements.
Lastly, there is a gorgeous set of images from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The image gallery of the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center contains the Earth as Art photo seen here. This is Akpatok Island, where native Inuit people hunt walrus and whales in northern Quebec, that “rises out of the water as sheer cliffs that soar 500 to 800 feet (150 to 243m) above the sea surface.” The USGS EROS Digital Image Gallery also includes land remote sensing images of the Journey of Lewis and Clark.
Happy viewing!
Image from USGS EROS Digital Image Gallery
mini announcement
Is it a giant iPod? No, it’s a mini iPad (okay, iPad mini), just announced from Apple.
Drop off your CV and participate in OA Week
To be sure that your research gets the widest distribution possible, showcase your work in McGill’s institutional repository, eScholarship@McGill. It includes articles, conference papers, books, research reports, and theses.
This is Open Access (OA) Week and it couldn’t be easier to make your research output available to everyone freely online in eScholarship with the Library’s CV Drive. Drop by and drop off your CV and the Library will do the rest.
There are still 2 dates left for the CV Drive: Wednesday, Oct 24th, 12:30 – 14:30, FDA lobby (at the entrance to the Schulich Library), and Thursday, Oct 25th, 14:00 – 16:00, Leacock lobby.
Whether or not you have a CV in hand, librarians will be there to answer all of your questions about OA.
Happy OA Week!
OA Week approaches
Open access (OA) is free, mostly unrestricted, online access to scholarly output. There is a strong international movement to promote OA and this month there is an Open Access Week, from October 22-28.
From the OA Week About site:
“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
Over 100 countries will participate in OA Week this year. You will see us around the Library wearing OA t-shirts so be sure to stop and ask us questions. We hope to have a series of blog posts on OA so I will kick things off by pointing to the McGill Library OA pages, including the extensive list of resources on the Learn more about open access page.
Image from PLOS
No plans for the long weekend? Why not catch some zzz’s?
This is one of my favourite TED Talks from Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep. It was recorded live at TEDWomen in December, 2010. She knows something about the value of sleep, having fainted from exhaustion and broken her cheekbone on her desk. If you feel exhaustion creeping up, this short pep talk may be just the thing.
Schulich Library will be closed this Thanksgiving Monday so I plan on taking her advice and getting the most out of the long weekend with a few good sleeps.
Sweet dreams!
3D printers for the masses
The latest Wired magazine arrived at my door today and on the cover: a MakerBot three-dimensional printer, slated to change the world. There are actually two new machines available for under three thousand dollars that can create objects in bioplastic from CAD files. A 3D printer in 4-6 weeks? Crazy, right?
The Wired article brought to mind Cory Doctorow’s story, Printcrime, originally published in 2006 in Nature. It is a short story and a good one so I won’t give away the ending here but it is about a man who goes to prison for building and operating a 3D printer.
I admit that I have been day dreaming about 3D printers ever since I noticed that there is the possibility of a live demonstration on October 20 at the Access 2012 library technology conference, from folks at Dalhousie Libraries. I’ll be there with camera in hand and I’ll check back in with you afterwards!
Image from Makerbot Industries
Do it yourself science videos
If you are thinking of dabbling in videography, here is some advice on making science videos from MinutePhysics creator, Henry Reich, in Waterloo, Canada.
MinutePhysics celebrated it’s first birthday this year and is now up to 67 educational and entertaining videos, 35,011,571 views and 487,686 subscribers. Learn about the Higgs boson (parts I, II, and III), for example, or why there is no pink light.
Oh, and be sure to watch the Rolling in the Higgs video from McGill graduate student, Tim Blais, for an extra boost of inspiration.
Happy DIY!
Uncommon chemistry
I talked about ChemSpider in a previous post but if you are serious about finding information on substances there is a chemistry database like no other: SciFinder.
Just last year Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, announced that the database was moving from the software version to the web. Since then there have been a number of changes to SciFinder, along with a newly redesigned CAS website. For example, there are great interactive SciFinder training videos for all aspects of substance and reaction searches that point out new features.
What sets Scifinder apart is not just the chemical literature, with articles, patents, dissertations, etc., going back over 100 years, it is how they bring together a wealth of information on reactions, structures, properties, and commercial sources, and link it all to substances with unique identifiers, called CAS Registry Numbers. That means that if you come across the name of a compound in an article that you do not recognize you can use the Explore Substances search in SciFinder and find out just what it is.
McGill students, faculty, and staff can now benefit from unlimited access to SciFinder (registration is required) so let me know it works for you.
CAS does have a free search engine for substances of general interest if Common Chemistry is more your thing.
Course reserves now on 2 day loan
Course textbooks that were once shelved behind the Loans desk at the entrance to Schulich Library have now moved to the regular collection of books on the different floors. Search the Course Reserves Catalogue for your course number, course name, instructor, etc., to see if a reserve book is available. Once you find the book on the shelf you can borrow it at one of the auto-loan machines located across from the elevators on the main floor.
Rather than having course reserves for 3 hours at a time, they now have a 2 day loan period, indicated by stickers on the spine and the cover (see image), with no renewals and no holds. Extra copies of textbooks can be found on Level 5 in room 513 for in-library use only, shelved alphabetically by author.
Don’t forget that Schulich Library is open for study 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, and until midnight on Friday and Saturday. You can check out reserve books all hours of the day and night. Just be sure to have your McGill ID card on hand.
We look forward to hearing your feedback on the course reserves move – let us know how we are doing!
Image by Rebecca Nicholson