Rowland Institute Library Blog

Rowland Institute at Harvard
Library News & Notes
January 8, 2010

Happy New Year and New Decade

“How are things? Just as they are.”

Rowland News

Shriram Ramanathan, leader of the Oxides Research Group, is the editor of the recently published Thin Film Metal Oxides. Congratulations, Shriram!

Harvard Libraries News

Kathryn Allamong Jacob, curator of manuscripts at the Schlesinger Library, published King of the Lobby:
The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age. Congratulations, Kathryn!

Internet Sites of the Week

Books/eBooks

From Spotify to Bookify: how playlists could revolutionize the books market
(Source: Library Web
)

Pico Iyer on the tyranny of the moment
(Source: Roy Kenagy)

There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen
(Source: JosephJEsposito)

A year of books

Computers and Internet

Google Nexus One review roundup
See also: Nexus One vs Droid vs iPhone [Comparison Chart]
(Source: The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian)

PayPal vs Fake PayPal: Can You Tell the Difference?
(Source: nahumg)

Thanks Technology
(Source: Paul Steinbrueck)

5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock
(Source: Michael Sauers)

Libraries

Academic Library Learning Network
(Source: David Osterbur)

Accessing library catalogue & databases on your Mobile phone

Do Librarians Really Do That?
(Source: Shamsha Damani)

Harvard Hacks Away at its Priceless Libraries
(Source: HarvardNews)

In Praise of Public Libraries

Reasons for College Students to Use Libraries

Scholarly Legitimacy
(Source: Open Access Tracking Project)

Social Media, Libraries, and Web 2.0: How American Libraries are Using New Tools for Public Relations
(Source: New Jersey Library Association)

7 arguments for building new libraries
(Source: ALDirect)

10 Librarian Blogs To Read in 2010

Life

Finding Happiness in Helping Those Who Have Less

How to Lower Your Cable Bill Now?

How to Protect Yourself From Identity Theft
(Source: Stephen’s Lighthouse)

Man Unable To Wear Nice Clothes Without Everyone Asking Questions

Peacefully Adrift as the Mississippi River Just Rolls Along

Scholarly Publishing

Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?
(Source: Open Access Tracking Project)

Unheard Voices: Institutional Repository End-Users
(Source: ResourceShelf

Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?
(Source: Joseph J. Esposito)

Who will pay for the arXiv?
(Source: Open Access Tracking Project)

Science and Technology

Academic research, DOE facilities are buoyed by recovery act

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
(Source: Brad Pierce)

The Blueprints Database
(Source: Beyond the Black Stump)

biological wiki comparison
(Source: phylogenomics)

Cherry Murray seeks impact for next-generation global leadership

A Decade in Computational Structural Biology
(Source: Bradley Pallen)

Epernicus
Science networking

An Experiment on Prediction Markets in Science

How the Scientist Got His Ideas

How to Train the Aging Brain
(Source: CommonHealth)

logbook: the shortest report

The Nature of Cell Science

Postdockin’ in the free world

Resuscitating industrial research without monopoly money

Social Networking

How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic
(Source: Xuemei)

How To Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page
(Source: Xuemei)

How to Teach With Google Wave

Why Twitter Will Endure
(Source: Roy Kenagy)

10 Ways to Use Speed Networking in Your Job Search
(Source: Alexis S. Kim)

It was standing room only at Lowell Hall yesterday evening and a line of would-be attendees (myself included) went around the block. Did anyone hear Dawkins’s talk yesterday? Luckily a Crimson writer got in and summarized it, saying that Dawkins refers to religion as a “virus,” not a function of evolution and “devise” and socially “costly.” It would be interesting to know his views on specific religions; I wonder if he treats them too generally, or if he ever read anything like James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience” or Ian Barbour’s “Religion and Science,” not that these would change his mind, just broaden it, perhaps. The second lecture is today at 5, same place.

New Scientist posts an article about a report from the US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force which states that many utilities did not keep up with the standards of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC); if they had, the largest power outage in U.S. history might have been avoided, says the task force.

Address real people and real issues and think of questions ahead of time, this article in Today’s Engineer urges (Source: WHAT’S NEW @ IEEE IN COMPUTING)

A Nature news article examines the appearance of increasing competitiveness in the life sciences, a push to get results out as fast as possible in pursuit of grants, tenure, prestige and other aims. A story is told of a couple that presented a poster and published their results, just barely ahead of four other groups that learned of their techniques through their conference presentation. Are carelessness and sloppy research on the increase as a result, or are there just isolated phenomena. (Karel Svoboda, formerly of Howard Berg’s lab at Rowland/Harvard, is among those quoted)

A Guardian article lists ten hoaxes and forgeries, some better known and more recent such as Jan Henrik Sch

I’ve moved the library weblog over to Harvard Law and am having a go with their Manila software. Read earlier postings at http://rihlib.blogspot.com, where I will continue to archive them …

Rowland members, anyone with a Harvard e-mail address can join this community and start a weblog. Go to the Weblogs at Harvard Law site, register and browse their help files.

Welcome to your new weblog. This is the first post to prove that it worked. Click on the title of this item for tips on getting started with your new weblog.