New Funding for arXiv Online Scientific Repository
Posted on January 31, 2010 Comments (0)
The Cornell University Library is broadening the funding base for the arVix online scientific repository. Nearly 600,000 e-prints – research articles published online in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines – now reside in arXiv, which is an open information source for hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers.
arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv. “Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution’s resources,” said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. “If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list.”
The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions, and most of the top 25 have already committed to helping arXiv.
arXiv’s original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication. Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. arXiv, founded by physics professor Paul Ginsparg, has about 400,000 users and serves more than 2.5 million article downloads per month. Its 101,000 registered submitters live in nearly 200 countries.
arXiv is interconnected with many other scholarly information resources. These include the INSPIRE system being developed by supporting high-energy physics laboratories CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, as well as the Astrophysics Data System at Harvard University, another supporting institution. Read details about the operating principles of the new structure.
Related: Toward a More Open Scientific Culture – So, You Want to be an Astrophysicist? – MIT Faculty Open Access to Their Scholarly Articles – Science Commons: Making Scientific Research Re-useful
Bewick’s Swan Divorce
Posted on January 29, 2010 Comments (2)
Experts stunned by swan ‘divorce’ at Slimbridge wetland
During the past four decades 4,000 pairs of Bewick’s swans have been studied at Slimbridge, with only one previous couple moving on to find new partners.
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First suspicions of the rare event were raised when male swan Sarindi turned up in the annual migration from Arctic Russia without his partner of two years Saruni and with a new female – newly-named Sarind – in tow.
The pair’s arrival led conservationists to fear the worst for Saruni. But shortly afterwards Saruni arrived at the wetlands site – also with a new mate, Surune.
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As for why they may have split, she said: “Failure to breed could be a possible reason, as they had been together for a couple of years but had never brought back a cygnet, but it is difficult to say for sure.”
Bewick’s swans are the smallest and rarest of the three species found in the UK and each individual can be identified by their unique bill pattern.
Related: Bewick’s swan diary – Darwin’s Beetles Surprising Sex Lives of Animals – Backyard Wildlife: Crows – Duckling imprinted on this puppy in China – Bird Species Plummeted After West Nile
Apple’s iPad
Posted on January 27, 2010 Comments (20)
Steve Jobs introduces the Apple iPad. A touch screen tablet with wireless internet connectivity and a touch screen keyboard (when desired).
Related: Freeware Wi-Fi app turns iPod into a Phone – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote – Build Your Own Tabletop Interactive Multi-touch Computer – Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT
Tags: cool,Engineering,gadgets,innovation,Products,Technology,webcasts
Infinity Project: Engineering Education for Today’s Classroom
Posted on January 24, 2010 Comments (3)
The Infinity Project is a national middle school, high school, and early college engineering curricula. The math and science-based engineering and technology education initiative helps educators deliver a maximum of engineering exposure with a minimum of training, expense and time. Created to help students see the real value of math and science and its varied applications to high tech engineering – The Infinity Project is working with schools all across the country to bring the best of engineering to their students.
The Infinity Project curriculum is a complete, year-long course designed to complement the existing mix of math and science classes. Experience in classrooms all across the United States shows that Infinity keeps students challenged, learning and exploring from start to finish. Using The Infinity Project curriculum in the classroom, students learn firsthand how to use math and science to create and design a wide variety of new and exciting technologies that focus on topics of interest to students – the Internet and cell phones, digital video and movie special effects, and electronic music.
Engineering Our Digital Future is designed for early college students or high school students who have completed Algebra II and at least one science course. The course focuses on the fundamentals of modern engineering and technology in the information and communications age.
Related: Hands-on Engineering Education – Education Resources for Science and Engineering – posts on engineering education – Fund Teacher’s Science Projects
Unique Dolphin Strategy for Hunting Fish
Posted on January 22, 2010 Comments (4)
A pod of bottle-nose dolphins off the coast of Florida have developed a hunting technique unknown in other dolphins. One swims in a circle stirring up mud and then the dolphins wait to catch fish that jump out of the water to escape the contracting circle of muddy water.
Related: Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt – Do Dolphins Sleep? – Dolphin Delivers Deviously for Rewards – Bird Using Bait to Fish – Dolphin Rescues Beached Whales
Electric Wind
Posted on January 21, 2010 Comments (8)
photo of William Kamkwamba on his windmill from his blog.I have written about William Kamkwamba before: Inspirational Engineer – Home Engineering: Windmill for Electricity. And along with the post, Make the World Better, donated to his cause. His new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, is quite enjoyable and provides an interesting view of how he persevered. His talk of the famine, not being able to afford school and putting together a windmill using scrape parts and a few books from the library (donated by the American government – much better foreign aid than all the military weapons that are often counted as aid) is inspirational. And should help many sitting in luxury understand the privileged lives they lead.
“Using Energy, and this book has since changed my life… All I needed was a windmill, and then I could have lights. No more kerosene lamps that burned out eyes… I could stay awake at night reading instead of going to bed at seven with the rest of Malawi. But most important, a windmill could also rotate a pump for water and irrigation.” (page 158)
William set out to demonstrate his windmill for the first time to a skeptical crowd saying (page 193)
I like how the story shows how long, hard work, reading, experimenting and learning is what allowed William to success (page 194-5)
[to William's father] “What an intelligent boy. Where did he get such ideas?”
“He’s been reading lots of books. Maybe from there?”
“They teach this in school?”
“He was forced to drop. He did this on his own.”
William is now attending the African Leadership Academy in South Africa, with an amazing group of classmates. See how you can support the Moving Windmills Projects.
Related: Teen’s DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope – Make the World Better – William Kamkwamba on the Daily Show – What Kids can Learn – appropriate technology
Siftable Modular Computers
Posted on January 19, 2010 Comments (3)
Pretty cool. I must admit I don’t really see how this would function outside of specifically designed situation. I can imagine it could be very cool for education, especially of young kids. Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them – piling, grouping, sorting – to interact with digital information and media. David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi originally created Siftables at the MIT Media Lab and have formed a company to commercialize the product and have received a grant from NSF to continue the work.
Related: Cool Mechanical Simulation System – Video Cat Cam – Arduino: Open Source Programmable Hardware – What Kids can Learn
Tags: computer science,cool,Education,Funding,innovation,MIT,Products,Science,Technology,TED,Universities
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, Fulfillment and Flow
Posted on January 18, 2010 Comments (2)
“After a certain basic point, which translates, more or less, to just a few thousand dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well being don’t see to affect how happy people are.”
The speech includes, the first purpose of incorporation at Sony:
To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.
Excellent books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1991. People enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction.
Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1997. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders to poets and artists, the author uses his famous “flow” theory to explain the creative process.
Related: Honda Engineering – The Science of Happiness – Curious Cat Management: posts on psychology – Engineers Should Follow Their Hearts – The Purpose of an Organization
Tags: Career,Economics,Engineering,psychology,TED,webcasts
What Dogs Reveal About Evolution
Posted on January 17, 2010 Comments (0)
From, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
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Coppinger points out that when domestic animals break free and go feral for many generations, they usually revert to something close to their wild ancestor. We might expect feral dogs, therefore, to become rather wolf-like. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, dogs left to go feral seem to become the ubiquitous “village dogs” – “pye-dogs” – that hang around human settlements all over the Third World. This encourages Coppinger’s belief that the dogs on which human breeders finally went to work were wolves no longer. They had already changed themselves into dogs: village dogs, pye-dogs, perhaps dingos.
Real wolves are pack hunters. Village dogs are scavengers that frequent middens and rubbish dumps.
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Belyaev and his colleagues (and successors, for the experimental programme continued after his death) subjected fox cubs to standardised tests in which an experimenter would offer a cub food by hand, while trying to stroke or fondle it. The cubs were classified into three classes. Class III cubs were those that fled from or bit the person. Class II cubs would allow themselves to be handled, but showed no positive responsiveness to the experimenters. Class I cubs, the tamest of all, positively approached the handlers, wagging their tails and whining. When the cubs grew up, the experimenters systematically bred only from this tamest class.
After a mere six generations of this selective breeding for tameness, the foxes had changed so much that the experimenters felt obliged to name a new category, the “domesticated elite” class, which were “eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs.” At the beginning of the experiment, none of the foxes were in the elite class. After ten generations of breeding for tameness, 18 per cent were “elite”; after 20 generations, 35 per cent; and after 30 to 35 generations, “domesticated elite” individuals constituted between 70 and 80 per cent of the experimental population.
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The tame foxes not only behaved like domestic dogs, they looked like them. They lost their foxy pelage and became piebald black and white, like Welsh collies. Their foxy prick ears were replaced by doggy floppy ears. Their tails turned up at the end like a dog’s, rather than down like a fox’s brush. The females came on heat every six months like a bitch, instead of every year like a vixen. According to Belyaev, they even sounded like dogs.
These dog-like features were side- effects. Belyaev and his team did not deliberately breed for them, only for tameness.
The famous domesticated silver fox experiment offers interesting insight into animal traits and evolution.
Related: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins – The Evolution of House Cats – Darwin’s Beetles Still Producing Surprises – Backyard Wildlife: Fox
Capuchin Monkeys Using Stone Tools
Posted on January 16, 2010 Comments (1)
This BBC documentary “Clever Monkeys”, narrated by David Attenborough, shows Capuchin monkeys in Brazil using heavy stones to break open aged palm nuts.
Related: Chimps Used Stone Hammers – Bird Using Bait to Fish – Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt
Microbes Flourish In Healthy People
Posted on January 15, 2010 Comments (1)
Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear? by Katherine Harmon
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“Someone who didn’t have their microbes, they’d be naked,” says Martin Blaser, a professor of microbiology and chair of the Department of Medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City.
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Even though it is such an apparently integral and ancient aspect of human health, scientists are still grasping for better ways to study human microbiota—before it changes beyond historical recognition. Borrowing models from outside of medicine has helped many in the field gain a better understanding of this living world within us. “The important concept is about extinctions,” Blaser says. “It’s ecology.”
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The first step in understanding these systems is simply taking stock of what archaea, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses are present in healthy individuals. This massive micro undertaking has been ongoing since 2007 through the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Human Microbiome Project. So far it has turned up some surprisingly rich data, including genetic sequencing for some 205 of the different genera that live on healthy human skin.
Despite the flood of new data, Foxman laughs when asked if there is any hope for a final report from the Human Microbiome Project any time soon. “This is the very, very beginning,” she says, comparing this project with the NIH’s Human Genome Project, which jump-started a barrage of new genetic research. “There are basic, basic questions that we don’t know the answers to,” she says, such as how different microbiota are between random individuals or family members; how much microbiota change over time; or how related the microbiota are to each other on or inside a person’s body.
Related: Microcosm by Carl Zimmer – Tracking the Ecosystem Within Us – Alligator Blood Provides Strong Resistance to Bacteria and Viruses – Beneficial Bacteria
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