IEEE Xplore Video Shows New Interface and Features

Couple opens Engineering Institute in Bellingham

The Bellingham (WA) Herald (2/6, Cox) reports, "The Washington Engineering Institute, located in Barkley Village, is a new school that will offer one- and two-year certificate programs, as well as continuing education classes for professional engineers."

From the website: WEIS is: " A private institute providing engineering, surveying, and GIS certificate programs and classes to job seekers and industry."

Founded and operated by Dave and Katherine Bren, the program is as follows, "all students take the same first-year program, civil engineering technology. Then if they want to continue for a second year, they can specialize in construction engineering technology, surveying technology, GIS technology or continue with civil engineering technology. Professional engineers also can take some continuing education courses, mostly focused on technology training, or they can take a class that's part of the certificate programs if there is space available." The instructors will be practicing engineers.

New website showcasing DOE Reseach & Development Accomplishments

Check out the website/database from the Department of Energy (DOE), called DOE Research and Development (R&D) Accomplishments, a central forum for information about the outcomes of past DOE R&D that have had significant economic impact, have improved people's lives, or have been widely recognized as remarkable advances in science.
The site is comprised of the R&D Accomplishments Database, Featured Scientists/Topics pages, Laureates, Interesting Insights, and Snapshots. More information about DOE R&D Accomplishments content is available on the About page.

The Most-Cited Institutions in Engineering, 1999-2009, data analyzed by ScienceWatch.com

This is a very interesting list showing the the top 20 institutions which attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed Engineering journals. These institutions are the top 20 out of a pool of 1,084 institutions comprising the top 1% ranked by total citation count in this field.  http://sciencewatch.com/inter/ins/10/10febTOP20ENG/

RiP Database from TRB

The Transportation Research Board's Research in Progress (RiP) website contains the Research In Progress (RiP) Database and a data-entry system to allow users in State Departments of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and University Transportation Centers to add, modify and delete information on their current research projects. The RiP database now contains over 8400 current or recently completed transportation research projects. Most of the RiP records are projects funded by Federal and State Departments of Transportation. University transportation research is also included. The RiP Database now serves as a clearinghouse of University Transportation Centers ongoing research. International research projects from the TRIP file of the International Transport Research Documentation Database are now included in the RiP database. The Transportation Association of Canada supplies records from its Canadian Surface Transportation Research Database for RiP.

More societies and publishers add content to Knovel - including SAE and ASHRAE

Knovel, an online resource that helps engineers find reliable technical information, has announced partnerships with 16 organisations. Knovel’s comprehensive collection of content is continually updated as new titles are available and reflects the evolving needs of its users – engineers.

Knovel works with its Editorial Advisory Board, comprised of multi-disciplinary industry and academic leaders, to prioritise content additions and editorial features based upon current workflow needs and emerging industry trends. The company has partnered with more than 50 international professional societies and publishers including McGraw-Hill, Wiley and Elsevier. Joining Knovel's growing roster of content partners are SAE International, ASHRAE and 14 other societies and publishers.

Knovel offers validated engineering content, selected from trusted sources and delivered to engineers quickly and with extreme precision. The value of Knovel’s content is extended by its optimised search and data analysis tools, enabling engineers to not only easily find relevant data, but also analyse, document and incorporate it into their everyday work.

"Crash-resistant" train cars- really? Is this the cartoons come to life?

Metrolink To Use "New High-Tech, Crash-Resistant Cars."

The Los Angeles Times (12/18, Connell) reports, "Nearly five years after a deadly Metrolink train wreck in Glendale intensified debate about passenger car design," the commuter rail service in Southern California "will soon take delivery of new high-tech, crash-resistant cars," according to officials. Two of the cars, "the first of their kind in the nation, are to be unloaded from a ship in the Port of Long Beach in mid-January and will be put into service as early as next summer." They "have energy-absorbing ends designed to distribute the force of train-on-train collisions. Other features include breakaway interior tables."

OSTI gets fancy with its' database results display!

The Information Bridge has recently added word clouds to give you a window into the content of full-text research documents. The word clouds visually represent word frequency within each document and can be viewed from the search results screen or on the bibliographic citation page when hovering over the title or the PDF icon. The top 50 terms are shown alphabetically within the word cloud. Font size is determined by the frequency of usage within the document. Depending upon the term weighting, fonts can be as much as 80 percent larger than the least used terms in the document. The colors are random.

To see it in action, run a quick search. Hover over the title of one of the resulting citations to see a colorful word cloud! Groovy!

Information Bridge provides free public access to over 200,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy research report literature. Documents in Information Bridge are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees. Legacy documents are added as they become available in electronic format.

The Librarian's Mission- R. David Lankes' keynote at Charleston Conference

This is a ~40 minute screencast of Lankes' inspirational presentation last week in Charleston. It's worth watching, if not for the necessarily unique or new ideas, but for his smart reasoning and conclusions. During the last 10 or so minutes you're expecting the audience to start yelling "Hallelujah!".

More WorldCat news re: Science Direct collections

Elsevier metadata for SCOPUS and ScienceDirect collections from 2006 to the present have now been indexed in WorldCat.org search results. 

This article-level metadata joins similar content such as the GPO Monthly Catalog, ArticleFirst, Medline, ERIC and the British Library Inside Serials. The ScienceDirect content corresponds to 1,800 journals, 150 book series and more than 1.3 million records. 

Totally Tubular - FRP Bridge Design

NYTimes.com: Building a Bridge of (and to) the Future

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Carbon- and glass-fiber fabric tubes filled with concrete offer strength, light weight and resistance to corrosion.

"Long the stuff of surfboards and pleasure boats, and more recently used in aircraft wings and other components, plastic polymers reinforced with fibers were first researched for use in bridges in the 1980s. Civil engineers were attracted to them for the same reasons other designers were — their strength, light weight and corrosion resistance."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/13bridge.html

Though more expensive to create, the technology makes the bridge less expensive in the long run, due to lower maintenance, transportation, labor and equipment costs.  

IBM journals to be available via IEEE Xplore, exclusively

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and IBM, US, have announced a publishing agreement. Under the deal, all papers published in IBM journals will be available exclusively in the IEEE Xplore digital library (www.ieee.org/ieeexplore) from the first quarter of 2010 onwards. The aim is to disseminate key technical articles and papers in computer hardware, software and information systems to a wider audience of researchers and interested readers around the world. The IBM Journal of Research and Development, which now includes the IBM Systems Journal, is claimed to be one of the top-cited journals in the field. The two, which have been published online since 1998, merged into one fee-based online publication in 2009. The production of future editions of the current publication, the IBM Journal of Research and Development, will be handled by IEEE. IBM will be responsible for the content acquisition and peer review, while IEEE assumes the article production, copy editing, data conversion, online hosting and maintenance.

Rockets Able To Run On Toffee

For real!

The UK's The Scotsman (10/7) reports, "Rockets can run on toffee, a scientist has proved. Jem Stansfield demonstrated a hybrid rocket powered by the sweet on BBC1's Bang Goes The Theory." Ray Wilkinson of the University of Hertfordshire "suggested the experiment could help scientists find environmentally-friendly materials to fuel rockets."

The rocket was capable of powering a bicycle ridden by Mr Stansfield at Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. Hybrid rockets require nothing more than a cheap solid that burns and a gas – in this case nitrous oxide – to provide oxygen, he said. Ray Wilkinson, principal lecturer in aerospace design and rocket propulsion at the University of Hertfordshire, suggested the experiment could help scientists find environmentally-friendly materials to fuel rockets.

Thanks Harry Potter! - Invisibility cloak could hide buildings from quakes

Borrowing from the physics of invisibility cloaks could make it possible to hide buildings from the devastating effects of earthquakes, say physicists in France and the UK. The "earthquake cloak" idea comes from the team led by Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France. They were the first to show that the physics of invisibility cloaks could have other applications – designing a cloak that could render objects "invisible" to destructive storm waves or tsunamis. See also: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-06/cloak-could-make-buildings-inviible-earthquakes

New Fed Gov website: Data.gov

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data.

New webpage for reporting Libraries system down emergencies

This is the page Libraries ITS wants everyone to use to determine the correct reporting procedure for any system down emergencies: https://staffweb.lib.washington.edu/units/ITS/system-down-emergency

Major Cuts Planned at Canada’s National Science Library Draw Protest

CISTI's budget could be cut up to 70%, a combination of a 50% cut across the board and a 20% cut that will force particular services to be operated on a cost-recovery basis. CISTI has already cut all print journal subscriptions, retaining only those that are available online. It's a sad sad state. Read the full report: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6649848.html?nid=2673&source=title&rid=1206325913

Free International Nuclear Information System database from the IAEA

The INIS (International Nuclear Information System) database is available free, as at 3 April 2009: http://inisdb2.iaea.org/ It is a product of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), which promotes the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Information about the content of the database is available at http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/inis/products/aboutdb.htm:

"Leading reference database for scientific literature published worldwide on the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology

• Comprehensive international coverage by INIS Members and the INIS Secretariat.

• over 3 million bibliographic citations and abstracts of journal articles, scientific and technical reports, conference papers, books, patents, theses, laws, regulations and standards, and web documents, covering publications in 63 languages; all records include keywords and most have an abstract in English

• Includes a unique collection of over 850 000 full-text documents: scientific and technical reports, conference proceedings, patents, theses, and preprints. This “grey” non-conventional literature (NCL) is not easily available from other sources."

Computer science enrollment rebounds nationally and at UW

Local perspective on the NYT story that reports that for the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year. In a blog entry by the Seattle Times' Ben Romano are comments from Ed Lazowska, from the UW CSE department. Full story: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2009/03/17/computer_science_enrollment_rebounds_nationally_an.html