There are any number of free introductory science courses available as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). This one, however, is the first that I’ve seen that includes a laboratory component. It looks like all that you need to participate in Introductory Physics with Laboratory from Coursera is a smartphone with a camera or a webcam to capture video. They will provide the open source software for analyses.
Let me know if you give it a go.
Last April I visited the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal in Orlando. I have to admit, it was pretty neat. Now, thanks to Google and Warner Brothers Studios in Hertfordshire, everyone is welcome to Diagon Alley on Google Maps. How cool is this for Harry Potter fans?
If you have ever thought about making your own custom maps take some time to explore Google Maps and Google Earth tutorials. That is, after you have spent some time exploring the virtual exhibits in Diagon Alley. Just drag the street view symbol (little person) onto the map and away you go!
Who doesn’t love Internet Archive? I am a big user of the Wayback Machine, where they are capturing and archiving websites back to 1996. Take some time to explore thier site and you will certainly find something in the audio, video, or text archive (they recently hit 10 petabytes). For example, I have been listening to a radio mystery series called Mr. and Mrs. North that aired on CBS from 1942 to 1954. What I didn’t realize about Internet Archive is that they are collecting print books with the goal of archiving one copy of every book ever printed – watch this video – it will blow your mind.
Internet Archive from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.
These engineering students at Northwestern University are learning to think on their feet. Anyone up for dance classes?
Two guys walk into a bar – they just happen to be CERN scientists and they can help explain Higgs boson excitation of the Higgs field. This particle physics video is one of a series of five videos from TEDxCERN. Waltch all five on the TED blog for a little on the birth of the universe, the history of the web and big data, dark matter, and antimatter.
We have blogged in the past about metrics for measuring impact, such as the well known Journal Impact Factor, and more recently Altmetric, so I thought that I would bring your attention to Google’s lists of top publications. As part of the Google Scholar Metrics offerings they have rankings of the top 100 publications in several languages.
Google has added categories and subcategories for the English language rankings, so now you can look up the top publications in, for example, Geophysics in the Physics & Mathematics category, or Robotics in the Engineering & Computer Science Category.
The usual suspects are there in the list, like Science, Cell, Nature, Physical Review Letters, but you may find some interesting results. How amazing is it that arXiv (open access e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science) is frequently listed by the separate subject areas?
Happy Monday!
The next time that you find an article of interest in the Scopus database, click on the title and look for this Altmetric for Scopus box. The article will get a score, based on how much attention or buzz it is getting online. For example, this article was mentioned by 18 tweeters and was saved by seven individuals to their Mendeley references. You can read the tweets and see how many of them are coming from the general public, versus scientists, practitioners, or journalists and bloggers. The app will also tell you how the article ranks and if the Altmetric score is good compared to other articles that came out around the same time and from the same journal. Alternative metrics like these are great for going beyond the standard citation count, h-index, or journal impact factor, and can provide some realtime feedback.
There is no shortage of university rankings to be found on the Internet but I’d be hard pressed to find one as inclusive as the Webometrics Ranking, or as dedicated to self-improvement. The ranking, produced by Cybermetrics Lab (a research group of the Spanish National Research Council), covers more than 20 000 universities worldwide. They designed indicators of impact (links in to the university domain from third parties), presence (university pages found in Google), openness (files found in Google Scholar, including PDFs and other files from a university’s repository), and excellence (highly cited papers in scientific fields). It is quite an interesting methodology.
We are forever recommending the big databases for finding journal articles and conference proceedings but do you ever wonder how much overlap there is between the databases in science and engineering? You can compare databases using the Academic Database Assessment Tool from the Center for Research Libraries.
Compare the journal coverage of the two major multidisciplinary databases, Web of Science and Scopus, or see how the content overlaps with Compendex (engineering), Inspec (physics) and Geobase (geosciences). According to this tool, there are 11377 overlapping journal titles between Web of Science and Scopus – not a small number.
The redundancy in the search results from searching multiple databases is why we also recommend using citation management software. You can send all of your records to EndNote, for example, from the different databases and then remove the duplicates before you look through them to delete ones you don’t like and select papers of interest you’d like to read. EndNote can also check the McGill Library holdings and attach full text PDFs to records (just fyi).
This is my favourite U.S. National Science Foundation story of the week: printable robots designed to be consumer-friendly and inexpensive. We are not talking 3-D printing here, just good old fashioned inkjet. Okay, it isn’t that simple, it also involves a laser and motors and sensors, but think about what you could make if you let your imagination loose.