On Christina's Radar

Playing with the template

2006-12-21T10:17:00.000-05:00

I wanted to upgrade a blog to the new template and work with it ... and to use a blog with some modifications yet not my LIS Rant which is pretty important to me.

I'm really mostly on my LIS blog now...

2006-03-24T06:39:00.000-05:00

Hi All-
I'm still really into science but I also work full time and am a doctoral student so I'm mostly just blogging over at my library science blog. I may start adding things back here but yes, it has been quiet around here :)

Christina

Testing

2006-03-23T07:10:00.000-05:00

So apparently my main blog is locked because it's been identified as spam? Trying to post here to see if it works or if all of blogger is messed up.

Seed: Udder Impossibility

2005-12-13T17:18:00.000-05:00

Seed: Udder Impossibility

My favorite line: "For an unsuspecting cow standing normally, you'll need 4.4 people and for a cow smartly bracing herself, you'll need to muster 5.75 willing tippers."

Proceedings of the IEEE: Silicon Geranium?

2005-09-21T09:48:00.000-04:00

Well, at least the PDF is right!
From the Circuits newsletter v5 n9 (Sept 2005)
PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE FOCUSES ON SILICON GERANIUM
The September issue of Proceedings of the IEEE (v. 93, no. 9) provides a detailed analysis of the impact of silicon geranium on commercial products since its integration with complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS). The issue focuses on silicon geranium and advanced CMOS semiconductor compatibility, which has led to the development of highly integrated single-chip designs with advanced bipolar performance. Paper topics include device physics, new processes, scaling issues, reliability, and device optimization for specific applications. Other key areas of interest are high-breakdown SiGe heterostructure bipolar transistors, low-cost derivatives, linearity and noise, modeling, design enablement, and circuit examples...

Don't you love spell check?

Communications Networks Fail Disaster Area Residents

2005-09-01T15:43:00.000-04:00

Article by Arshad Mohammed and Jonathan Krim (9/1/2005) pD01
Maybe these people don't know that local ham groups practice multiple times a year out in mobile units with generators and mobile rigs and antennas. It's purely voluntary -- they do it because they think it's important and they know they can help.

In fact, if you have an amateur radio license please volunteer. Here's more information from ARRL:
Hurricane Katrina Volunteer Signup Database Now Open (Aug 31, 2005) -- The Hurricane Katrina Disaster Communications Volunteer Registration & Message Traffic Database now is open. Site Administrator Joe Tomasone, AB2M, set up the database, and South Texas ARRL Section Emergency Coordinator Jerry Reimer, KK5CA, is handling volunteer coordination. This site is intended for Amateur Radio volunteers to sign up for communication support duty on behalf of Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi. Full Story
(link courtesy of WB3DAJ via e-mail)

-N3RFI

Same place, different template

2005-08-31T09:48:00.000-04:00

I was forced to change templates -- so you probably have landed in the right spot, it just looks different.

Arxiv has trackbacks!

2005-08-25T09:52:00.000-04:00

Wow. Post copied in its entirety from Cosmic Variance. Pointed to by Crooked Timber (I sub to CV, but hadn't read this yet) which was pointed to by DR on Chem-Inf.

arxiv.org Joins the Blogosphere!
Sean at 6:14 pm, August 24th, 2005

Over the last fifteen years, the way that physicists communicate research results has been revolutionized by arxiv.org, the preprint server devised by Paul Ginsparg (formerly xxx.lanl.gov). Any time you write a paper, you send it to the arxiv, where its existence is beamed to the world the next day, and it is stored there in perpetuity. Along with the SPIRES service at SLAC, which keeps track of which papers have cited which other papers, physicists have a free, flexible, and easy-to-use web of literature that is instantly accessible to anyone. Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals — they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.

So it’s exciting to see the introduction of trackbacks to the abstracts at arxiv.org. As blog readers know, an individual blog post can inform other blog posts that it is talking about them by leaving a “trackback” or “pingback” — basically, a way of saying “Hey, I’m talking about that stuff you said.” This helps people negotiate their way through the tangles of the blogosphere along threads of common interest. Now your blog post can send trackbacks to the abstracts of papers at the arxiv! Here’s a test: I will link to my most recent paper. If it works as advertised, the trackback will appear automatically, due to the magic of WordPress.

Now, if you write a paper and people comment on it on their blogs, that fact will be recorded right there at the abstract on arxiv.org. Drawing us one step closer to the use of blogs as research tools.

Update: In the comments, Jacques points to an explanation of some of the history; he was (probably) the first to suggest the idea, years ago (which is millenia in blogo-time).

New nanoparticle environmental health and safety database available

2005-08-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

Via The Engineer 8/23/05.

From Rice and supported in part by NSF, this database collects scientific articles researching environmental health and safety aspects of nanoparticles (read press release). From a librarian point of view, it leaves a little to be desired. In fact, it might be quite difficult to find the full text of the article based on the citation given. A guide to the abbreviations use for journals might be helpful (hmm, maybe they're using the pubmed ones?). I'd love to see the DOI and a link to the pubmed record (it does list PMID, though, so you can find the article that way if you recognize the number). For the articles on environmental concerns, there's no PMID... Hmm. Don't see a list of journals referenced or a methodology of how articles are identified.

Anyway, looks like a good first step and will no doubt be useful to those working in the area.

Come on, the Washington Post writer's a wimp!

2005-08-18T12:49:00.000-04:00

Come on, the Washington Post writer’s a wimp! (article pointed to on the Make blog)

I’ve totally been enthralled by Make since I heard about it a couple of months ago. It’s a quarterly magazine from O’Reilly that basically features life hacks. It’s how to actually make things…

The Washington Post article basically says that you have to be an electronics genius to use a multimeter. Personally, I think everyone should learn that in high school (if they didn’t already learn it in elementary). Honestly, though, you don’t have to be a teenage boy to get this magazine. I think this is really an extension of the movement that brought us junkyard wars and monster garage and I’m all for it.

Kung Fu Science :: An Einstein Year Project

2005-08-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

This new IOP site rocks. (pointed out by Clifford on CV). Perhaps not the best science ever for my colleague with whom I have an ongoing argument regarding science for the masses but cool nonetheless.

WashingtonPost: Russian Space Agency: Solar Launch Failed

2005-06-22T12:39:00.000-04:00

For the above linked article, free reg. req.
Author: By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV,The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 22, 2005; 12:20 PM

This vehicle was being launched to demonstrate a controlled flight of a solar sail. Solar sails are a means of spacecraft propulsion relying on pressure from sunlight. They would potentially work well for interstellar flight because they would allow the spacecraft to conserve fuel.

Apparently the booster rocket failed 83 seconds after launch. Readers may remember that this space vehicle was submarine launched (pretty cool if it works).

See the Cosmos 1 Blog for real time updates from Emily Lakdawalla, Project Operations Assistant and Image Processing Coordinator for Cosmos 1. There's no archive listing, so you have to page back to read from the pre-launch activities...

Triangulating position from wi-fi signal strength instead of GPS

2005-06-22T09:51:00.000-04:00

Pointed out in an IEEE Newsletter and they saw it on this blog.

They say it's good to 20m in dense urban environments and doesn't have the multipath issues of A-GPS. Since it's going on signal strength, I'm guessing you'd probably want 4 sources for a reliable fix (two signals would give you two equally probable locations, a third would say which of the two, a fourth would make me happier-- especially if the other signals are coming from the same general direction). This does limit you to dense downtown areas -- but that's what it's made for. The blogger who first pointed this out mentions people moving and taking their transmitters with them.
Update: John Krumm from Microsoft Research recently presented a paper on this at MobiSys 2005, the Third International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, held June 6-8 in Seattle.... apparently signal strength doesn't work as well as "other aspects of signal quality" hmm? The paper will appear in ACM here for subscribers.
Update 6/30: I just noticed that the July 2005 issue of IEEE Signal Processing (link for subscribers to Xplore) has a large special section on positioning in wireless networks.

The next kitchen gadget you have to have...

2005-06-20T08:59:00.000-04:00

A rapid prototyping machine? Actually, it appears to be more than that, it's a one-stop fabrication lab with machine tools, electronics manufacturing, and assembly.

On Weekend America this past weekend, the hosts spoke with MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld about the Fab Lab project. The hope is that users will be able to make one off machines to fit their needs.

You know, I really respect Professor Gershenfeld who laments the disconnect between working with your mind and working with your hands... to go to a liberal arts college or learn to weld in a trade school (the assumption that you can't do both). What he's trying to do with this fab lab is to reconnect thinking with doing. Actually making something is a worthwhile pursuit.

The Engineer Online - NASA demonstrates Mini AERCam

2005-06-16T16:16:00.000-04:00

Article date: 6/15/05

This little robot looks like something out of a Douglas Adams book... but it makes a lot of sense to have a "mini autonomous extravehicular robotic camera" to be able to check out parts of the spacecraft that can't be seen by a camera on a stick. It uses a "rechargeable xenon gas propulsion system" -- aack, that's expensive. Xenon, if I recall correctly, is pulled out of the atmosphere, but you have to suck up a lot of atmosphere to get a little bit of Xenon. So with this, the imaging is the easy part the docking station and propulsion are slightly more tricky.

Here's the NASA page for the little guy.

The Engineer: Radar spots climate anomalies

2005-05-24T17:20:00.000-04:00

Article dated 5/24/05

British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bath have installed a remote sensing radar in Antarctica that aid in the investigation of the Mesosphere. It also tracks the many meteors that burn up in the mesosphere.

Wired News: Super Water Kills Bugs Dead

2005-05-17T15:58:00.000-04:00

Article by Skip Kaltenjeuser, 5/16/2005

The upshot is that a US company has developed a super-oxgenated water that is perfectly drinkable, but kills bacteria, viruses, and spores. Cool, right? Shelf-life of over a year.

This reminds me of a short story in which an ice that sank was invented. Short story short-- it took over the world and killed the planet. So, I guess the solution to pollution with the super water is dilution, but it still wouldn't be good for your fish tank.

Wired News: Asteroid Warnings Toned Down

2005-04-18T15:48:00.000-04:00

Article by David Cohn, 4/16/05.

I like NEO stories but this is pretty funny. It's a slow news day when newspapers publish panic headlines about NEOs that have a 1 in 45 chance of hitting the earth in the next 25 years. Wikipedia has this article on the Torino Scale.

With all of these scales, whether from DHS or the meteorologist, they're supposed to clarify the actual threat, but the number of words it takes to explain a mango warning probably out weigh the original story.

...The colors haven't changed from the old system, but the explanation of what each color means has. Asteroids in the green section used to be deemed 'events meriting careful monitoring,' but now are considered 'normal.' And a level 6 object was described as capable of causing 'global catastrophe.' Now these, too, only merit the concern of astronomers...Not all the changes paint a rosier picture. Under the old system, a level 10 warning used to be described as 'causing global climatic disaster.' The new description reads 'a certain collision capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.'

Yay! ADS adds RSS Feeds

2005-04-18T12:54:00.000-04:00

Pointed out by SD Librarian.

Ok, so ADS (the NASA Astrophysics Data System) is really THE astro database. They've had e-mail alerts, but unfortunately not for affiliations. Now you can subscribe to a search in your feed reader and be kept up to date without filling your in box. Still no affiliations, but great nonetheless.

Notices of the AMS: The Importance of MathML to Mathematics Communication

2005-04-14T13:46:00.000-04:00

The link here is to the table of contents. Free registration required to retrieve the full text PDF.

Robert Miner. "The Importance of MathML to Mathematics Communication." Notices of the AMS v52 n5 (May 2005): 532-8.

One of my lines of inquiry has been how to search math -- I mean really search it. What if you don't know what the equation is called? Why can't you do a substructure search like you do in chemistry? Shouldn't math be easier to search than chemistry? Instead, it's worse that image searching.

MathML is supposed to fix some of these things. Miner is very enthusiastic in extolling its virtues. The only problem is that mathematicians don't seem to be jumping on the bandwagon. They seem to really like LaTeX.

One physicist has created some plugins for WordPress and Movabletype to convert TeX equations to MathML. Cool...

The New York Times|Technology: Pogue tests the new Oxyride battery

2005-04-07T11:04:00.000-04:00

Free reg. req. David Pogue. "Can a New Disposable Battery Change Your Life? Parts of It, Maybe" NYT, 4/7/2005

He's a technology writer, not a scientist, but Pogue gives these new batteries a test. Not bad, but probably not as useful as NiMH. The Cnet article has a little more on the actual technology involved. If I ever find the relevant patents, I'll update this.

NASA - Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2005

2005-04-06T10:41:00.000-04:00

From NASA's neat Science Feed
"On April 8th in North America crescent-shaped sunbeams will dapple the ground during a partial solar eclipse." There's a timetable from NASA's GSFC that tells you when it will happen in your neck of the woods. People in the south will have a much better show but this article points out some neat tricks.

news @ nature.com - Black holes 'do not exist'

2005-03-31T17:22:00.000-05:00

by Philip Ball 31 March 2005; doi:10.1038/news050328-8
"These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims." Isn't that something out of StarWars? So the idea is that stars don't collapse and become black holes; rather they become filled with dark energy. The author says that this explains some of the event horizon wierdness. The original article is: Chapline G. Arxiv, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503200 (2005).

NASA is podcasting

2005-03-28T09:07:00.000-05:00

They've had feeds and multimedia reports, but now they're in the popular and easy to find format.

The Engineer Online - Reducing the scale of drag

2005-03-24T16:59:00.000-05:00

I always like posting about coatings for ship hulls. Previous posts looked at more chemical methods to prevent barnicles, etc. I think I even posted about the vorticies created by dolphin skin. The method linked above uses a mechanical method. They created a coating that mimicks the placoid scales of sharks "by creating a plastic and rubber composite coating made from billions of raised diamond-shaped patterns, each measuring 15 microns. Each diamond also contains seven raised ribs."

Closer to Truth > How Does Basic Science Defend America?

2005-03-11T09:23:00.000-05:00

I love this show. Luckily Howard University Television (WHUT, Channel 32 in DC) actually carries this. The show is a panel discussion with experts from different fields with different points of view.

While supporting basic science research is indeed essential for protecting national security, can that be our sole primary motivation for pursuing knowledge of the natural world? When asked by Congress whether Fermilab, the expensive atomic accelerator, would contribute to the national defense, its founding director replied that the contribution would be "… not to the defense of the nation, but rather to what made the nation worth defending."

This session is very timely -- for NASA and EPA, too. In government, it seems that they're really pulling away from having scientists on the payroll (not as contractors) who do basic research that may not have an immediate practical use.
Sean Carroll, a Physicist at the University of Chicago, recently posted on why do we do science that isn't immediately practical (look back in his archives and you'll see more discussion of this).

StructuredBlogging.org > Semantic Web Comes to the Blog

2005-03-10T14:54:00.000-05:00

SC (now at PubSub, the guys who are developing this) pointed this out. It's not as good as Reger was/is, but since it's a plug-in to WordPress it might get some play. I think that's been the problem with other tools -- they haven't caught on. You need a critical mass of bloggers adding content to make it really useful. So if you're blogging on WordPress, consider giving it a shot. I still need to find a book plug-in for my blogger blogs... one that links to Open Worldcat, of course.

Science.gov adds (e-mail) alerts!

2005-02-17T11:40:00.000-05:00

Pointed out on ResourceShelf.

Pretty cool. I'll get my first alert on Monday so then I'll know how cool. Too bad they're not RSS. I wonder, too, how they compare to e-mail alerts from the database vendors that have versions of the databases covered by this?

Housekeeping

2005-02-17T11:13:00.000-05:00

Added gigablast site search.
Removed the plug-in for commenting -- overdue, didn't realize I had both.

EV2 Adds RSS Feeds

2005-02-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to my LIS blog.

I was trying to figure out what search I would do that wouldn't provide any specific info from my place of work so disregard the subject...

Anyway, you can now get weekly search alerts/updates right in your aggregator. You have to be a subscriber ($$, of course). My e-mail alerts get to me on Fridays, so I'm guessing that's when the feed will be updated I'll come back and update this if not.
rss|engineering|databases

Physical Review Focus: Watching Atoms Move

2005-02-15T10:30:00.000-05:00

See a video from a STM of a phase transition of a lead layer on silicon. Watch the video linked from this page pretty carefully at the about the halfway mark. Pretty cool. In the past, the STM haven't been stable enough so the scientists have just compared before and after images. The full article (subscribers only) is available: I. Brihuega, O. Custance, Rubén Pérez, and J. M. Gómez-Rodríguez. "Intrinsic Character of the (3×3) to (sqrt(3)×sqrt(3)) Phase Transition in Pb/Si(111)" Phys Rev Lett v94 046101 (4 Feb 2005).

PACS: 68.35.Rh, 68.35.Bs, 68.37.Ef, 71.15.Nc|physics
Updated: wacky font sizes

The Mathematics Survey

2005-02-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Pointed out in the NSDL Scout Report v4 n3 (Feb 11, 2005). Note: the journal's been linked from our internal portal for a while, this is just more about the project.

This ambitious project seeks to solve a lot of what's wrong with mathematics information right now. Two (1, 2) new books came out in the last year trying to help users and librarians make some sort of in road into finding necessary math. While the books are very good the fragmentation and compartmentalization of the math knowledge is so severe that it's almost a lost battle.

Pitman, from Berkeley, has envisioned an open access set of survey journals and encyclopedias indexed by MSC (subject) and interlinked by author and collaboration graphs. Really quite a broad sweeping plan. Sounds like it could be done on a wiki (with editorial review). He hopes that the end information will be heavily cited (thus findable in WoS) and searchable on Google Scholar, MathSci, and Zentralblatt Math.

The first part of this is the probability and stochastic processes electronic journal: Probability Surveys.

Link this, if you will, to my suggestions (1, 2) of using established classification codes for new projects, etc. Note: Pitman doesn't propose a whole new classification scheme, he suggests the use of MSC. Perhaps mathematicians and statisticians should tag their posts and web pages with MSC codes? Maybe they already do?

math|00-xx|openaccess

Human Factors: Special Section on Driver Distraction

2005-02-09T13:08:00.000-05:00

(full text to subscribers only, nb: long-time institutional print subscribers might not realize that they can now register for online access... we're just getting this set up now)
This is a timely section. Everything from modeling to how age makes a difference in seeing traffic signs while involved in a conversation.

Also, RSS feed available for this and all other Extenza pubs.

updated (fixed a typo)

Preposterous Universe: Hallucinatory neurophysics

2005-02-09T10:53:00.000-05:00

U Chi Physicist Sean Carroll describes this recent work in mathematical neurophysics. Essentially, describing in mathematical terms/wave equations the patterns of hallucinations.

But here is the punchline: patterns of hallucinations reflect normal modes of the neurons in the visual cortex. By "normal modes" we mean the characteristic patterns of vibration, just as for a violin string or the head of a drum. The idea is that a drug such as LSD can alter the ground state of the visual cortex, so that it becomes excited even in the absence of stimuli. In particular, certain oscillating patterns can appear spontaneously. Generally these would take the form of different configurations of straight lines in the cortex itself; however, due to the distortion in the map from our visual field to the brain, these appear to us as spirals, tunnels, and so on. Indeed, Cowan and collaborators have shown that these normal modes can successfully account for all of the basic forms of hallucination classified by Kluever decades ago.

Take time to read the comments, too. In the comments there's a comparison to other mathematical models of the brain which do not fit as well as these wave functions.

Nature: Schrodinger's mousetrap (fiction)

2005-02-08T15:40:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'm hooked. The link above may only work for subscribers, but it is marked free -- Go to your local library if you don't have access.

There I was, browsing the covers of our scientific journals when I ran across this article. Turns out that it's a new short story broken up in to parts accross multiple issues. Why do our issues come so late? I'm not saying it's particularly well written, but what a neat idea.

The article has quantum entanglement, negative refraction...

Welcome to the World Year of Physics 2005

2005-02-02T10:21:00.000-05:00

What with running around like a chicken with my head cut off I've lapsed a little in posting here. This is already the second month of the World Year of Physics. In case you're a little behind the times, this is the 100th anniversary of the year when Einstein published three very important papers. I think the UN even did a proclamation about it.

Here is a very brief list of things to do/read on WYoP:

There's a set of blogs called Quantum Diaries that will be maintained by physicists and will describe a year in the life of selected particle physicists. Turns out that they're pretty much normal people. Go figure.
IOP is calling it Einstein Year 2005. They have games, DJ remixes, and a poetry contest ( like Terry Pratchett's play on Andrew Marvell) on their site.
Here are MSN , PubSub, Waypath, Blogdigger, Feedster feeds on the subject. I'm inaugurating a Technorati Tag

EinsteinYear|WorldYearofPhysics|physics

For your inter-holiday enjoyment: Mathematical Humor

2004-12-29T16:47:00.000-05:00

(PDF) Pointed out onNot Even Wrong.

I've been telling the hotel fire joke for years. Funny how the physicist always comes out looking the brightest ;)

NYTimes: Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster

2004-12-28T09:13:00.000-05:00

By JOHN SCHWARTZ, 12/28/2004
"For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.
The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help..."

As the amateur radio community ages, their role as emergency communicators from war or natural disaster areas is being taken over in part by bloggers. ARRL (American Radio Relay League) is reporting on current DX efforts. Still, in an area with no infrastructure, running an HF rig on a generator takes much less power and is easier to do than blogging -- especially if you don't have an adequate way to charge your cell or sat phone. HF signals can travel for thousands of miles without a repeater, and the equipment can be handbuilt using spare parts or kits. Commerical sat comms just aren't as practical in many emergency situations.

e4engineering.com: Tuneable windows

2004-12-23T13:21:00.000-05:00

From Design Engineering 12/16/04
"Secrets that zip across offices through wireless computing networks are all to easy also zip through office windows into the hands of ones competitors.
But now researchers at the University of Warwick have come up with a solution to the problem. They have devised a method of producing tuneable surfaces that can selectively block signals from wireless networks from spilling out of the office."
I've reported on this before but the tunability of this application really makes a huge difference. The other applications were installed in walls and (I think) were just wideband. This is problematic if you want to allow a pager, just not ____, for example.

Searching for Math Equations and Symbols on the Web: Part 3

2004-12-07T16:14:00.000-05:00

Part 1, Part 2

No joy on the LaT_EX front. J's post on math on the web caused me to smack my forehead and wonder if I had been missing something big. Well, yes and no. First, the way Wikipedia deals with symbols, etc., is actually pleasant. Compare to other methods. So I decided to try the major search engines using the coding used to implement the TeX markup in Wikipedia.

Google
\nabla – found places the word "nabla" appears including the history of the symbol, etc.
\partial – yuck. found partial den tu res, partial-b1rth abo rti ons, Springer, Wiley, and Dekker journals (but just from the titles apparently)
"\nabla" – same as above, but also has this page that has what looks like TeX in the source code.
"\partial" – same yuck.
open tag math close tag \nabla* – (as compared to above and as compared to math nabla) better than without the math - but this is just my trick of specifying domain when doing natural language searching!! It doesn't really get any TeX stuff. It does retrieve other wikis that give instructions for adding formulae.
open tag math close tag\partial – see above. Note, though that this page was generated in LaTeX and converted to HTML - the equations are in fact PNGs but the alt's for the images are the actual LaTeX writing! I tried this in the google image search and it gives me whole page jpgs, not individual equations for the most part. Here's an exception.

So, it looks like you can search for the TeX coding in the images search somewhat successfully if the author used a conversion tool that added the encoding as the ALT for the image.

Yahoo

Very much the same as Google. At first I thought the image thing was working much better, but then I realized that they were all from the same site.

Teoma
Doesn't index symbols at all
*Note: apparently blogger is trying to interpret the math tag. curious.

e4engineering.com: Another nanotube yarn

2004-12-03T17:42:00.000-05:00

29 Nov 2004
This one claims a lot more than the previous attempt I blogged about. It's an electrically conductive, bullet-proof, temperature adjusting miracle fabric. They use multi-walled tubes, instead of single-tubed.

Koders - Source Code Search Engine

2004-11-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

Pointed out on Resource Shelf
This is a search engine for code.

Koders makes it easy for software developers to find existing source code that solves many common development problems with our vast index of working source code from a variety of open source projects. In many cases you may find code that solves the exact problem you are working on, and in other cases, you can find an 80% solution - where existing code can be suited to your needs with minor modifications.

Appears to be similar but more complete than what's offered in Safari. I'd be interested in hearing back from somebody who's tried this how well it works.

Update 11/10: Resource Shelf now says where they read about it. The NewsForge article also has a brief interview with Darren Rush, the founder and chief architect.

AZoNano Launch Online Open Access Journal of Nanotechnology

2004-11-05T13:24:00.000-05:00

The Online Journal of Nanotechnology is based on a free access publishing model, coupled with what is believed to be a unique development in the field of scientific publishing – the distribution of journal revenue between the authors, peer reviewers and site operators.

The Online Journal of Nanotechnology at AZoNano.com will publish high quality articles and papers on all aspects of nanotechnology and related scientific, social and ethical issues. All the contributions will be reviewed by a world class panel of founding editors who are experts in a wide spectrum of nanotechnology science.

Note also that AZoNano now has an RSS news feed. Pointed out by the Institute of Nanotechnology newsletter from November 2004.

Full text ebook: Notes on Molecular Orbital Calculations

2004-11-05T11:09:00.000-05:00

Dana Roth of Caltech pointed this out on CHMINF-L
Roberts, John D., 1918-
Notes on molecular orbital calculations / John D. Roberts ; illustrated by the author New York : W. A. Benjamin, 1961
Uncontrolled Keywords: organic chemistry; atomic orbital models; electronic energy levels; bond orders; free-valence indexes; charge distributions; application of group theory to MO determinants; aromaticity; 4n+2 rule; chemical reactivity
The book is in PDF format.

PhysicsWeb: The greatest equations ever

2004-11-05T10:53:00.000-05:00

Pointed out by the The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology v3 n23 (November 5, 2004), although I am subscribed to the feed.
by Robert P Crease, October 2004.
This Physics World columnist asked readers to submit nominations for the greatest equations of all time. What he found out is that there were different interpretations of the question and that some of the equations have a deeper political, cultural, or historical context that is perhaps more important than the scientific use.

Blogging will continue to be light

2004-11-05T09:21:00.000-05:00

While I prepare for a Conference. Expect more regular posting again after 11/22.

The New York Times:Malaria Vaccine Proves Effective

2004-10-15T17:03:00.000-04:00

By Donald G. McNeil Jr. (10/15/04) (free reg. req.)

For the first time, researchers say, a vaccine against malaria has shown that it can save children from infection or death.
The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.
But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.

Thank goodness. Hopefully this will lead to an even more effective vaccine. I worry, though, that it will be impossible to vaccinate enough children - especially if it has to be repeated several times.

EEVL Free Trade Pub directory: computers, business and engineering trade publications

2004-10-12T13:13:00.000-04:00

Pointed out in the EEVL news feed.
All of the trade pubs here are free to "qualified" subscribers. Some mentioned on the front page are: Biophotonics, Solid State Technology, Photonics Spectra...

IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement: Sensor-Rich Feedback Control

2004-10-11T14:12:00.000-04:00

(link above for IEEE Xplore subscribers only, I think).
by Rafal Zbikowski. v.7 n3 (Sept 2004):19-26.
The article discusses the insect-like micro air vehicle (MAV). A PBS show recently showed some of these in action. Trying to design a computer like an insect's brain is apparently pretty tricky. According to the author, 98% of the insect's brain neurons are for sensory processing. So imagine all the little tiny sensors necessary, and the little tiny computer that has to take all the inputs and take action while flying.

2004-10-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Nanotech Searching Tips

2004-10-06T15:33:00.000-04:00

This is a boiled down version of the talk I gave with Susan Fingerman and Carol Brueggemeier at the Greater Washington Nanotech Alliance Fall 2004 Symposium. Thanks go out to all those from the CHMINF-L who provided feedback for the presentation. I announced this talk in an earlier post.

Finding the Vocabulary and the Literature of Nanotechnology

Language Matters

If you try to define nanotechnology, you come up with ≤ 100nm, ≤200nm, several hundred nm, molecular, atomic, macromolecular – it means many things to many people. Although the widespread usage of the term "nanotech" is more recent, we've been heading that way since the 40's and the technology has been evolving over that time period.

Web Searching

In general, in web searching, you are searching through an immense, world-wide collection of file types and formats. There is no spell checking, vocabulary control, language convention, or barrier to publishing. Nevertheless, it can be tremendously valuable in finding research, people, supplies, and everything else nanotech!

Jargon is important, your word choice will determine the scientific discipline and sometimes the country the results come from. Use specific words that would be used by a researcher in this subject (maybe one with a different academic background) to describe the specific process. Think also of older, perhaps obsolete terms that might still be in use in other countries.
Use the most important terms first, followed by several terms that modify or narrow the search. Use more words instead of less. OR synonyms - all you can think of - to be comprehensive.
If the results show that your word has multiple meanings (like bank – place to put money, side of a river or stream) add a very general word that will take you to the domain ex: (bank OR riparian) ex2: bank AND –(money)
Look through at least the first 3 pages – the top 10 results may be commercial sites that are better at “search engine optimization” than academic sites.
It’s an iterative process: review the first few pages of results, then modify the search and try again.

Finding the Jargon

Consult a thesaurus or glossary like The Institute of Nanotechnology or
PACS (Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme) Nanotech Supplement
Glean words from a known document
Consider searching in British spelling or in German, French, Japanese, etc.

Other Tips

More on synonyms: the internet has no standardized spelling or formula conventions. Search for formulae in Hill order, empirical order, and with abbreviations (ex: Yttrium orthoferrite, YFeO3, FeO3Y; ex2: NZP, NaZr2(PO4)3, “Sodium Zirconium Phosphate”). Use all the variations of the word because there’s no truncation like epitax* (as in Inspec)
Nano is seen the same as NaNO by most engines!
Spell out processes/techniques – use “molecular beam epitaxy”, not MBE
Remember quotes. Quotes are almost universally recognized as signifying a “phrase search” – the words will appear together, only in the order provided. Most web search engines do not have proximity operators that allow you to find the words near each other but in any order.
Try dropping the term “nano” from the search for more results and adding it to narrow the search. Compare searching focused ion beam lithography with nanolithography focused ion

Specialized Web Searching

Scirus – a science web search engine from Elsevier
Chemie.de and Bionity – specialized chemistry and biotech web search engines
Web results provided in CSA and ISI databases
Science.gov and/or Scitech.gov
Government databases freely available: PubMed, Energy Citations, NTIS, Agricola
Pre-print and e-print servers like arxiv

Fee-based Resources

Where do I begin?

All of the following cover nanotech: Compendex, Inspec, IEEE Xplore, CSA databases on materials, environment and aerospace, Web of Science, Chem Abstracts, BIOSIS, PubMed, SPIE DL.

You may be surprised! An article with this title, "Nanosensor for Detection of Glucose”, was found in ... SPIE DL and not in PubMed.

Biologists and chemists should try the engineering literature, engineers should try the biological and medical literature.

What terms do I use?

Controlled vocabulary has not kept up with current trends
Be careful using popular terminology. ex: Carbon nanotubes stuffed with buckeyballs i.e. “Peapods”
Use wildcards to search variant forms. ex: Nano?lithography will find nanolithography, nano-lithography, and nano lithography

Journals

See in particular: Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science and Technology – a weekly compilation of the latest research on nanoscale systems.

See also:
IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology
Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering
Journal of Nanobiotechnology
Nanostructured Materials
Physical Review A-E
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
Smart Materials and Structures (and many more)

Community of Science

link
Search database of 500,000 experts worldwide
Search Medline, Federal Register, FedBiz Ops/Commerce Business Daily, Agricola, funded research, and patents
Sign up to receive funding alerts

Research and Industry Portals

These sites were selected specifically because they point to or provide literature. Look for the “publications” link or do a site search if available. Some full text, some citations, some abstracts only. These provide many links to other organizations, conference and funding information etc.

Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument

2004-10-01T11:14:00.000-04:00

This is the official site for the national monument created after the May 1980 eruption. Scientists are predicting (as much as possible) a new eruption in the next few days. There's a live volcano cam also available at the site, but this eruption should be a lot less to look at than the last one.
The main site pointed out by The NSDL Scout Report for the Physical Sciences v3 n20 (October 1, 2004).

e4engineering.com: Deadly Nanocarpet

2004-09-27T17:05:00.000-04:00

It not only changes color when it encounters different chemical agents, it can kill bacteria. How neat.

Holey Fibers, Batman!

2004-09-24T16:10:00.000-04:00

Actual title: Holey Fibers Shed New Light by Chelsea Wald Physical Review Focus 9/20/04
This is actually pretty neat - they've found a way to convert commonly available laser light into some of the wavelengths they hadn't been able to make a laser in. There are some valuable biomed applications, apparently. The primary article is F. Benabid et al., "Ultrahigh Efficiency Laser Wavelength Conversion in a Gas-Filled Hollow Core Photonic Crystal Fiber by Pure Stimulated Rotational Raman Scattering in Molecular Hydrogen" Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 (2004). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.123903

Searching for Math Equations and Symbols on the Web: Part 2

2004-09-24T11:46:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I talked about searching for math represented on the web using entity and code values (those starting with an & and ending with an ;). What about pages like this one, just mentioned in the new edition of The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology v3 n20 (September 24, 2004)? If you "view source", you'll see that they use .gif files for the math. This particular page uses the word curl several times, but there's no alt for the image, so there's less information for an image search engine to use. Don't even try to search for curl, but if you try grad OR gradient in Google images, on the second page of the results, you'll get someone's handwritten notes. The collection of images in Yahoo seems much smaller - you do get handwritten notes if you enter curl math. If you call the symbol I've been calling grad by it's more generic name "del", you'll actually get a couple of equations, interestingly enough. Google yields a few results with del math. See one interesting one: http://home.usit.net/~cmdaven/hyprcplx.htm . AltaVista is apparently still using it's own technology and collection, but the results are not much better.

So, what about the new(er) image searches that analyze the picture itself instead of just the context and alt text? Those that do feature extraction? Can they pick out an integral? or a gradient? The one at Columbia I knew about a while ago is apparently down (websEEk). The one at Penn State by Wang and Li runs only on a practice set of images - and they're from a cd of clip art. (Actually I'm having a hard time finding any of these so I just posted a request to a list for help.)

Picsearch.com (found via SearchEngineWatch, I don't know if it's content based)
This one does better. If you cut and paste the ∂ or the ∇, it actually comes up with mathematical equations. Now, what if we try ∂x/∂t ? Nothing, but ∂x does yield ∂_x . It's a start but I 'm not going to try to narrow the results!

I'll add to this (hopefully) when I find some other engines.

Searching for Math Equations and Symbols on the Web: Part 1

2004-09-24T09:02:00.000-04:00

NB: I derive an almost perverse pleasure in torturing search engines. Please also note that I'd like to form this into a paper for publication so I'm calling dibs on my ideas (link, disagree, comment, expand upon ... but please don't copy and republish)

It came to me that I'm sure there are a ton of web pages out there with papers talking about div, curl, grad, summation, integration.... all these things best described by their equations and symbols. Mathematicians frequently solve and prove solutions to equations divorced from the applications of the equations to describe nature. Physicists develop new equations to describe nature and then try to solve them, engineers look up solutions to equations to solve real, immediate, application problems. So, how can physicists, engineers, and librarians search for math stuff on the internet if the writeups and the equations themselves do not use the language of the physical phenomena the equations describe? Or if the equations are not yet named and famous? Or are not recognizable as belonging to the physical phenomena?

You can search in Safari by code snippet and in chemistry databases (like the ChemIDplus from NLM) by substructure. (You can also try the ACM Portal with code snippets, but there's no real way to search the open internet for chemical structures.) That's pretty cool, but what about searching for a particular mathematical formula? In Inspec and MathSci Net, the subject headings are probably the best access points and there are rules for representing symbols (like /sub/ depending sometimes on the vendor) – but this doesn't help if the mathematical formula is not linked to the particular phenomenon you're studying. I discussed in an earlier post how there are various ways to represent math on the web. So, what happens when you search for ∑ or & sum; or & #8721; ? Maybe sum isn't the best choice because normally you'd have an n=a somewhere attached so I'll also search for the partial derivative symbol ∂ and the gradient ∇.
Google
Graphic symbol pasted in – does nothing, not even an error
Name code or entity (starting an & and end with a ; ) – returns mostly tables and posts on how to use MathML or the codes or various things from computer programming. For the partial derivative symbol (∂), Google returns nothing on the code (& #8706;) and returns non-math stuff for the entity with one exception - an improperly created abstract that actually shows the code, not the symbol.

Yahoo
Graphic symbol pasted in – zero results.
Name code or entity – Yahoo ignores the & and the ; and searches for Sum, or part, for the entity and the numbers for the code. You end up with phone numbers, part numbers, etc.

Teoma
Graphic symbol pasted in – lots of results, it's seeing them all as empty boxes, so it's finding non-romanized language pages.
Name code or entity – Teoma apparently ignores the & and the ; and searches for sum, or part, for the entity and the numbers for the code. Quotes don't help.

NY Times: Drawing Semiconductor Circuits, One Tiny Line at a Time

2004-09-23T15:52:00.000-04:00

by Anne Eisenberg 9/23/04
It's like a nano glue gun. A new way from NRL and Georgia Tech to do nanolithography that uses dip pen technology on the tip of an atomic force microscope. From this article, what's new is that they can turn the writing on and off by heating and cooling the tip and having the "ink" solid at cooler temperatures... you know, like a glue gun. Their full article is Sheehan et al "Nanoscale deposition of solid inks via thermal dip pen nanolithography" Applied Physics Letters v85 n9 (30 Aug 2004): 1589-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1785860.

I'm not quite sure how their version differs from the one described by Bullen et al in "Design, fabrication, and characterization of thermally actuated probe arrays for dip pen nanolithography" Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems v14 n4 (Aug 2004): 264-602 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JMEMS.2004.828738.

A side note: Inspec has a heading for nanolithography. Cool.

ChemIDplus, Now Updated With More Information

2004-09-22T10:07:00.000-04:00

Pointed out on ResourceShelf.
ChemIDplus is the National Library of Medicine's chemical dictionary. It covers 370,000 chemicals (# from help file, higher than # in press release). It allows property searching, substructure searching, CAS RN searching -- all paid for by US tax dollars, and free to the world. They've recently updated the search and added more chemical property fields.

The Industrial Physicist: Scramjets integrate air and space

2004-09-20T12:55:00.000-04:00

by Dean Andreadis. (Aug/Sep 04): 24-7.
This is a nice, understandable overview article on scramjets. It discusses the differences between scramjets and ramjets, turbofans, turbojets. Shows the parts of the scramjet. Provides a laundry list of terms.

Call for Assistance/Input/Comments

2004-09-17T16:46:00.000-04:00

Two colleagues and I are presenting at the upcoming Greater Washington Nanotechnology Alliance Fall 2004 Special Topics Symposium (agenda not posted as of 9/17/04). Our topic is:
“Finding the Vocabulary and Literature of Nanotechnology.” Basically, the idea is that this is a new and fast moving field that crosses biology, chemistry, physics, etc. The standard databases in these areas have coped in different ways and have added or failed to add indexing to support searching. Also, there are specific methods that are useful to search the internet to find information in these topics. We'll discuss the current state of literature and web searching on scientific (not business, patent, news) nanotech topics.

If you're interested in a related article on this subject, ask your library for Rick Weiss, "Language of Science Lags Behind Nanotech; Burgeoning Field in Need of Universal Way to Describe Creations," Washington Post (May 17, 2004): A07.

If you would like to offer suggestions or preferred strategies on any of these topics, please comment here, link to this post, or e-mail me at cpikas (at) gmail (dot) com. I'll cite you if you like and post some results here.

I'll probably be asking questions of the various listservs, so please pardon any duplication.

e4engineering: Not a Pretty Picture

2004-09-16T12:09:00.000-04:00

9/16/04 (via feed).
This is just the most recent of a ton of recent reports on this security hole. I'm posting here because for the last couple of months or so I've been intrigued by steganography (see overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography). It's conceivable that this hole exists for other browsers/operating systems. Niels Provos is (was?) marketing a product to check jpegs for steganographic content. It seems that the spamfilters kind of need to incorporate this. Maybe they do already?

PhysicsWeb: Petroleum under pressure

2004-09-15T15:34:00.000-04:00

9/14/04
Scientists have made methane through inorganic reactions... and have monitored the reaction in situ through diamond surfaces.
"Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton believes the results are important because they could help answer the question of whether natural gas and petroleum could be created inorganically. 'If the answer turns out to be inorganic, this has huge implications for the ecology and economy of our planet,' says Dyson.
However, Scott is more cautious about his team's results. 'Although I believe the Earth's mantle could contain a significant quantity of even heavier hydrocarbons, I cannot constrain how much of this reaches the Earth's surface, or the extent to which it may augment resources that we exploit commercially,' he told PhysicsWeb. 'I do not want to suggest in any way that these hydrocarbons are likely to represent an untapped energy reserve.'"

New Journal of Physics: Focus on Turbulence

2004-09-15T15:17:00.000-04:00

Found via the IOP feed. Should be available free of charge.
One of the foci of the current issue of the New Journal of Physics is Turbulence. It includes about 15 articles now and more will be added. Per the editors, the purpose is to

address ... basic questions in turbulence theory, experiment, computation and modelling, highlighting where progress has been achieved, and where it can be reasonably expected within the next few years.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Students make washing machine talk

2004-09-13T17:01:00.000-04:00

9/12/04 by Geoff Adams-Spink (via their RSS feed)
This should have been done long ago. But I trust my washer to keep my secrets.
Update: Ok, I can't help it "we have ways of making you talk"

Free Full-Text Journals in Chemistry

2004-09-13T14:57:00.000-04:00

The compiler, Alexander Ragoisha, just reminded us of this resource on [CHMINF-L].

All links and comments had been verified in August 2004. It was a surprise to me that less than ten journals died or closed free access to full texts since August 2003. Moreover, every forth journal of the list has expanded in free cyberspace.

As in the previous year, I plan to add new information to the site twice a month.

The New York Times: Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China Is a New Hotbed of Research

2004-09-13T10:24:00.000-04:00

by Chris Buckley 9/13/04 (free registration req)
Initially, this seems pretty simple: the big funders of research outside of the government are outsourcing their R&D overseas to save money. It is probably more complex and the gains are perhaps not all that they had hoped. First, we may be encouraging this with our more strict immigration policies since 2001 (look at grad student attendance). Second, one person in this article says that the IP concerns and management concerns make it like herding cats.

Still, now that it's not just manufacturing jobs leaving but creative jobs, it's definitely worth being on the radar.

e4engineering.com: Researchers Spin Nanotubes Into Fibres

2004-09-09T17:13:00.000-04:00

From Design Engineering (found on e4eng feed) 9/9/04
Cool! We're that much closer to our space elevator. Ok, quick review. Carbon nanotubes are really strong but clumpy. They're also brittle. They need to be made into fibers or ribbons to be useful in a somewhat pure form. Looks like researchers from Penn and Rice (a nanotube HQ) have figured out a way to do it. It's similar to the way Kevlar fibers are made. (The original article actually came out in December: V.A. Davis, et al. "Phase Behavior and Rheology of SWNTs in Superacids." Macromolecules v37 n1 (2004): 154-160. DOI: 10.1021/ma0352328.)

IEE Electronics Systems and Software: Filling in the Gaps

2004-09-08T13:40:00.000-04:00

by Bill Collis and Anil Kokaram v2 n4 (Aug/Sep 2004): 22-8. (in print, the download is PDF, 884KB).
This is a pretty neat article describing post-production image processing to do "motion interpolation" and "image synthesis." Basically, automated removal of the camera rig from the frames and in-painting to fill in a crowd.

The algorithms described in this paper have been implemented as plug-ins by the authors and are now in widespread use within the post production community. Film credits include The Matrix films, the Harry Potters, Lord of the Rings, and many others, although part of the success of these techniques is that the average viewer is unaware of their use in a film.

Washington Post: Vehicle-Profiling Technology Speeds Up Fast Food

2004-09-08T13:18:00.000-04:00

by Charles Sheehan AP 9/8/04 (pointed out via e-mail newsletter, free registration required)
No, not that kind of profiling! This is non-invasive, image processing of feeds from roof cameras pointing at the parking lot. Looks at the size of vehicles and number of vehicles predicts need for more Big Macs.

National Hurricane Center RSS Feeds

2004-09-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

This seems like a particularly good example of e-gov and of a government agency using new methods to communicate with the citizenry. Here are the feeds:
Atlantic (English): http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-at.xml
Atlantic (Spanish): http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-at-sp.xml
Eastern Pacific (English): http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index-ep.xml

You want me to ride in what? The Engineer: Inflation set to rocket

2004-08-31T14:09:00.000-04:00

8/27/2004 by Helen Knight
"The craft, which resembles a shuttlecock, is being developed with support from ESA as a cheaper alternative to the US Shuttle for transporting cargo from the ISS. It could also be used as an emergency rescue system for crews, the company claims." Re-entering the earth's atmosphere in an inflatable birdie-shaped raft takes a small leap of faith -- but it is light, and less expensive, and can possibly carry more weight.

New Scientist: Radar to scan shuttle for launch debris

2004-08-31T13:48:00.000-04:00

8/26/04
"NASA will use ground-based radar imaging to monitor the next space shuttle launch, scheduled for spring 2005, agency officials said on Wednesday. The technology was tested successfully on 3 August, when NASA's Messenger mission to Mercury blasted off from Florida."
It makes sense to use radar. I hope they'll be using other imaging tools, as well. According to this article, cameras will be mounted on the tanks and other places on the shuttle.

If you need show your math work on the web...

2004-08-26T15:17:00.000-04:00

My last post mentioned that there are some complications to using symbols on the web. Those of us who started by hand-coding html will probably recognize what happens when you toss in a greater than sign or ampersand. For the previous post, I looked up the code for the Greek letters on http://www.evergreen.edu/biophysics/technotes/misc/entities.htm . Jukka Korpela provides a pretty detailed discussion of math and html on his site: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/ .

There's sometimes a difference between the programs you use to calculate and those you use to display on the web. Back in the day, I used MathCad to calculate and display or just the equation editor in Word to add pretty equations to my lab reports and papers. Word made pretty equations (it still does), but it doesn't calculate. It's more for taking your handwritten stuff and putting it into a document everyone can read. I also used Mathematica for diff eq, but as I recall, its input was text only. Very picky, too. At the time, you could print the graph or whatever, then tape or glue it to your lab notebook. Now you can export to a document that you can include as a graphic. There's also a gizmo that lets people calculate within a web page. I would guess Mathlab is in the same category. They're both powerful but ugly. TeX and LaTeX are widely used and accepted by many publications but I believe they are just typesetting deals and need to be converted for the web.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about MathPlayer (free, kind of like Adobe Acrobat Reader is free) and MathML (a mark-up language). MathML is from W3C and it's a mark-up language for math on the web. From what I can tell, you need a plug-in like MathPlayer to see MathML and a tool to write it. While you can pretty much wing HTML, MathML is supposed to be pretty ugly behind the scenes.

Update: I just noticed a book on our new book shelf that's causing flashbacks - it's a new edition of the book I used for Mathematica for diff eq in college. They do have an "input palette" now that's similar to what you get in Word's equation editor. There's also a save as... html, xml, TeX.

Read my review: High - κ Gate Dielectrics

2004-08-26T12:18:00.000-04:00

(cross posted with my LIS blog) Pikas, Christina K. "High - κ Gate Dielectrics" E-Streams v.7 no.8 (August 2004). There was a little font problem. The relative dielectric constant (relative permittivity) is either ε_r or κ as they use in the title of the book. It comes out in various forms of the review as ? , ! , e. Ah the joy of mathematical or Greek symbols on the web.

AIR tells us how to write science press releases

2004-08-25T13:55:00.000-04:00

(pdf) If you're like me you scan through a lot of press releases and scientific news articles that are pretty much embellished press releases. They do start looking alike after a while. The AIR folks have the pattern down so now you, too, can write a science news press release.

e4engineering.com: Absorbing corrosion-causing chemicals

2004-08-25T11:41:00.000-04:00

by Pam Frost Gorder 8/24/04
"The new paint is unique because its pigment contains tiny particles of clay that capture the chemicals that cause corrosion. It also releases just the right amount of a corrosion-fighting agent when needed, explained Rudolph Buchheit, professor of materials science and engineering. 'It works kind of like high-tech kitty litter,' he said."
This is pretty cool stuff, at least until they find environmental problems with using cerium like this. It's possible to tell when the cerium is used up by X-ray diffraction so you can tell in advance if the coating has lost is protective qualities. I believe in painting once over dust and twice over rust and that it's easier to talk the junior guy into painting than cleaning....

EurekAlert: British scientists exclude 'maverick' colleagues

2004-08-16T17:09:00.000-04:00

8/16/2004

Cardiff study shows attitudes differ in UK and Sweden
Scientists in Britain tend to exclude controversial 'maverick' colleagues from their community to ensure they do not gain scientific legitimacy, new research has shown.
A Cardiff University study has found that British scientists' attitudes differ considerably from those of their counterparts in Sweden, when managing dissent.

The research, by Lena Eriksson, a Swedish researcher in the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, has shown that British scientists operated with firm boundaries between 'inside' and 'outside' and believed that controversial scientists needed to be placed outside the community so as to not gain scientific legitimacy.

Swedish scientists were more inclined to ensure that all members 'have their say'. They were more likely to be inclusive, so as not to create adversaries who would threaten the scientific community.
...
"The image of a scientific establishment attacking and punishing individual researchers with contentious results — such as the MMR vaccine controversy - has done little to inspire public trust in science."

Is the US more like Sweden or Great Britain? In some ways, we're harder on people outside of the mainstream; but, they do seem to be less likely to be discouraged.

Read my review: Communication Patterns of Engineers

2004-08-10T14:26:00.000-04:00

(cross posted with my LIS blog) Pikas, Christina K. "Communications Patterns of Engineers" E-Streams v.7 no.7 (July 2004).

BBC NEWS | Health | Prozac 'found in drinking water'

2004-08-10T12:49:00.000-04:00

8/8/04
Yes, of course. US EPA's been on this for a while. Turns out that all the hormones we're collectively taking, and anti-depressants, and other drugs flush through somewhat in tact. The treatment plants aren't designed to remove these. This BBC article is concerned with effects on human health, but more importantly, what about all the chilled out fish with hot flashes? What is it doing to oysters and crabs?

WorldNetDaily: Israeli invention sees through walls

2004-07-28T09:09:00.000-04:00

7/2/2004 by Aaron Klein (pointed out by the IEEE Signal Processing Newsletter received via e-mail)
This article discusses using an ultra-wideband radar system to image through a wall. Helpful for rescuers of earthquake victims. Similar to another article IEEE pointed out recently on using terahertz technology for security screening and yielding results like the original Airplane movie (remember what happened when people walked through the x-ray on that movie?). What does this all mean for our ability to hide?

World Year of Physics/Einstein Year 2005

2004-07-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

Did you remember that 1905 was the year that Einstein published 3 groundbreaking papers in Physics? IOP, AIP, APS, and others are all sponsoring activities to commemorate. In fact, they're calling 2005 the World Year of Physics and working to get a UN resolution on it. The two main sites with events, facts, activities are: http://www.physics2005.org (primarily US), http://www.einsteinyear.org (British)

ABCNEWS.com : Ship-Sinking Monster Waves Are Widespread -- ESA

2004-07-26T15:35:00.000-04:00

(warning: Pop-ups galore)
7/24/04 Found via Topix
"Rogue waves that rise as high as 10-story buildings and can sink large ships are far more common than previously thought, imagery from European Space Agency (ESA) satellites has shown."

This is a little disconcerting. I've spent many a day on the ocean and have never seen a wave like this (even in hurricane sorties, thank goodness). If you read the press release from the ESA you can learn a little more about this. Susanne Lehner from the University of Miami is working this so we'll look out for more from her.

Hawking and Black Holes

2004-07-23T11:07:00.000-04:00

Brief background: Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist from Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time among others, contacted the organizers of a conference to submit a paper at the last minute. Why so important? Apparently he now has reversed his theory on black holes and information and lost a bet. In the past he maintained that black holes sucked in everything around them without so much as a thank you. Now he says some of the information about the creation of the black hole actually hangs out near the event horizon and can influence radiation emitted by the black hole. Listen to Sean Carroll and Juan Maldacena discuss it here (real required).

There are plenty of articles on this in the media (like
About Those Fearsome Black Holes? Never Mind by Dennis Overbye, NY Times 7/22/04) and many scientific bloggers have weighed in (here and here)

The problem is that just because Hawking says it doesn't make it a done deal. Physics is rarely revolutionary (or at least as much as people think); instead, it's evolutionary. Good scientists who have carefully studied this subject disagree and it isn't proven -- there are only thought experiments. I do think that it's great that Hawking can generate this much media attention and I look forward to more discussion.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > What's Next: For Doctored Photos, a New Flavor of Digital Truth Serum

2004-07-22T16:16:00.000-04:00

7/22/04 by Noah Schachtman
Another article discussing issues around doctoring of digital photographs. Dr. Farid, who is cited in this article, had a nice article in New Scientist (v. 179 no. 2411 (9/6/2003): 38, here for Academic Search Premier subscribers) on this same subject. You can read his other academic papers on his Dartmouth site.

An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning

2004-07-22T09:55:00.000-04:00

Pointed out on Furl as one of Today's Popular Items
"Bayes' Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction. By Eliezer Yudkowsky"
If you, like me, kind of get Bayesian Reasoning but wonder why everybody's so excited about it... read through this lengthy explanation. Ok, so I'm still not excited but now I remember how to read p(X|A). It's a nice resource either way.

e4engineering.com > Revolutionary Steel

2004-07-15T10:10:00.000-04:00

7/8/2004
"Scientists at the University of Virginia have announced the discovery of a non-magnetic amorphous material that is three times stronger than conventional steel and has superior anti-corrosion properties." The scientists say it's somewhat brittle right now but they're working on that. Apparently it can be molded and shaped like plastic.
See V. Ponnambalam, S. Joseph Poon, and Gary J. Shiflet. "Fe-based bulk metallic glasses with diameter thickness larger than one centimeter" Journal of Materials Research v19 no5 (May 2004): 1320-1323. (DOI: 10.1557/JMR.2004.0176, PDF for subscribers).

e4engineering.com> High society (engineering of new skyscrapers)

2004-07-14T17:05:00.000-04:00

7/9/2004By Christopher Sell
"Once complete, Burj Dubai will claim the title of the world's tallest building. At over 2,000ft it will be almost twice as high as the Empire State Building and over 500ft taller than the current record holder, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But to reach such dizzying heights, unique engineering design challenges have presented themselves." Innovation had a really neat episode on the engineering of new skyscrapers. Most observers won't realize how much these buildings move. You can get sea sick! The article linked above discusses how the engineers for the Dubai building went back to wind tunnels and other standard approaches because the computer models doen't adequately predict the microscale wind turbulence. It also discusses vortex shedding (see Tacoma Narrows Bridge). The article also mentions the materials to be used which are much stiffer than older materials. The Innovation episode also discusses the change in attitude or lack of real change in attitude toward skyscrapers since 2001.
Update: NYT has a nice article on an exhibit of skyscrapers. It's more on the art than the engineering but still worth a visit. (Herbert Muschamp, "Skyscraping Around the Urban World" July 16, 2004, free registration required or contact your library to find out how to get access through their databases) (7/16/04)

Slate: Science as Metaphor: Where does Brian Greene stand in the pantheon of physicists?

2004-07-08T15:33:00.000-04:00

7/6/04 by Amanda Schaffer
"His celebrity can be attributed to a widespread popular appetite for avant-garde science dressed in neat metaphorical packages: The universe is elegant; the cosmos is like a string symphony. Yet there is plenty to be suspicious of in Greene's unself-conscious romanticism—his unnuanced use of terms like elegance and beauty—and his teleological approach to the history of physics. Where, exactly, does he stand in the pantheon of physicists?"
Sean Carroll points out and discusses this article on his blog, Preposterous Universe. He also points to several other people who are commenting on this article.
I have my own opinion. First, a disclaimer: I only have a BS in physics so am not the one to really poke holes in the actual theory. My opinion: The best physics and math is elegant, simple, and yes, beautiful. Mathematics is beautiful. The power to describe the world in terms of equations is amazing. I've tried to explain this to people who got turned off of math and science by high school teachers who couldn't actually explain their subjects. I like Brian Greene and I like what he's trying to do. I think he does a good job of making this information more accessible to the public. For all of you doing government funded research, this is important! Greene also gives some disclaimers and problems of the theory, but maybe he doesn't go far enough. I think he does. I had a middle school age kid come up to me at a public library and ask for a copy of Fabric. I asked him and he read, understood, and enjoyed Elegant and he wants to be a physicist. That's what I'm talking about.
So, to answer the question, where does Brian Greene stand? He's respected in his field. He is respected and liked outside of his field.

e4engineering.com: New twist on fibre optics

2004-07-06T16:27:00.000-04:00

by Josh Chamot, 6/2/2004
"By twisting fibre optic strands into helical shapes, researchers have created unique structures that can precisely filter, polarise or scatter light. Compatible with standard fibre optic lines, these hair-like structures may replace bulky components in sensors, gyroscopes and other devices.
While researchers are still probing the unusual properties of the new fibres, tests show the strands impart a chiral, or 'handed,' character to light by polarising photons according to certain physical properties." The author discusses an article originally published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1097631). This is a pretty cool way to do this plus it's pretty simple... elegant even. For a really nice explanation of how fiber optics work, see the PBS Innovation episode "Light Speed". These scientists use a rectangular internal core, pop it into an oven, and give it a twist. The amount of twist decides if the photons of the same handedness are reflected backward, trapped in the cladding, or escape the cladding into space.

IEE Communications Engineer: Designing Buildings for the Wireless Age

2004-06-30T14:07:00.000-04:00

Apparently this isn't online yet. Full citation: Alan Newbold, "Designing Buildings for the Wireless Age," IEE Communications Engineer v.2 no.3 (Jun/Jul 2004): 18-21.
I mentioned on my other blog about jamming or installing screening material to block mobile phone signals in libraries, theaters, etc. As emergency workers and "essential employees" go to their hiding spaces in buildings outside of the beltway, they have been planning on use mobile phones to maintain communications. Unfortunately, almost all buildings were not designed to take wireless communications into account. If I want to use my cell phone, do I have to go outside to get a signal? Some buildings have been retrofitted with repeaters.

On the other hand, internal wireless data networks can be snooped from across the street.

This articles discusses using frequency selective surfaces (fss) in building design to tackle these problems. Some of these surfaces are films for windows and reflecting material for walls that consists of a pattern of conductors on a dielectric substrate. If the walls have this dielectric substrate, low-pass filters can be installed to allow emergency communications frequencies through. Makes sense, but I wonder how many architects are taking RF into account? Also, what frequency band will we be using in 5 years?

optics.org - News - Fiber gratings give abrasion alert

2004-06-30T10:27:00.000-04:00

6/24/04
Andrew Gillooly has developed a wear sensor that uses a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG). CFBGs have been used for temperature measurement and other sensor applications, but this is an inexpensive way to do wear sensing.The full article is from Measurement Science and Technology (TOC, PDF for subscribers)

Physical Review Focus: The Computer Minds the Commuter

2004-06-21T15:05:00.000-04:00

6/18/04
"The model gives virtual drivers the option of cruising cautiously or speeding forward optimistically based on what they think the car ahead is about to do. Previous models haven't accounted for driver psychology in such a direct way. "
Another use of stat. mech. outside of physics: to model traffic. As you see above, this model improves on similar previous models because it doesn't have instantaneous acceleration and also models the "overreaction" of drivers. Does it model the complete jerks on the DC beltway, though? That's what I'd like to know.
Original article: Hyun Keun Lee, Robert Barlovic, Michael Schreckenberg, and Doochul Kim. "Mechanical Restriction Versus Human Overreaction Triggering Congested Traffic States" Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 238702.

PhysicsWeb - Nanobulbs make their debut

2004-06-15T16:33:00.000-04:00

6/4/04
"...physicists in China have now made a light bulb in which the conventional tungsten filament is replaced by carbon nanotubes. The new design has several advantages over traditional light bulbs and could be available in less than five years (J Wei et al. 2004 Appl. Phys. Lett. 84 4869)."
Finally a real, practical use for carbon nanotubes. These lightbulbs burn brighter with lower applied voltage and will probably last longer.

optics.org - News - Sensor takes the drag out of flying (June 2004)

2004-06-15T16:16:00.000-04:00

6/11/04
"Airspeed measurements are currently made using a number of finger-sized pitot tubes that protrude from the aircraft. They measure airspeed (the speed of the aircraft relative to the surrounding air) by sensing the impact pressure, the difference between static and total pressure. But this well established technology comes at a price. The probes cause drag and with aircraft operating lifetimes estimated at between 20 - 25 years, the associated fuel cost to the airline industry is huge"
It uses doppler shift (like lidar). Unlike other applications, they are trying to increase backscatter. To me, though, SOG (speed over ground) is a little more important and I assume they're using GPS for that. Ships use a pit sword which also creates drag. At the speed they're going, though, perhaps it isn't so important.
(I'm obviously using my new feeds from IOP, thanks guys)

optics.org - News - Tiny projectors set for 2005 debut (June 2004)

2004-06-15T16:10:00.000-04:00

6/15/04
"Pocket-sized projectors being developed by a Finnish company will make their commercial debut next year.
Upstream Engineering of Finland plans to release a pocket-sized color video projector onto the market next year. What's more, Upstream believes it can shrink the product down to the size of a matchbox within three years. These developments could pave the way for miniature projectors to be used in everything from mobile phones to laptop computers. "
Soon we'll have Power Point presentations going from our mobile phones/PDAs/cameras. This is definitely a better way to share information and will save the backs of many presenters.

IOP now has even more feeds

2004-06-07T22:46:00.000-04:00

Use this page to find all of the IOP feeds on jobs, features, news, and magazine and journal tables of contents. Sort by category or look at recently updated feeds.

(Wireless) Sensor Networks

2004-06-03T13:43:00.000-04:00

There are sensors in just about everything: from biomedical devices to bridges. The in-style thing right now is Wireless Sensor Networks. After all, if we can all be wireless with tiny little devices, why can't the sensors. An easy way to see how mainstream this is is to scan the shelves of your local science library. The covers of two journals this month feature sensor network article(s):
Communications of the ACM, v47 n6 (June 2004). (link for subscribers)
Scientific American, v290 n6 (June 2004).(free preview, click here if you have Academic Search Premier).
These networks have been enabled by the miniaturization of the sensor and communications technologies, decreased power consumption, increased durability, and decreased cost.
Privacy activists worry that Big Brother will look more like the little computers in Crichton's Prey(Harper Collins, 2002). The "motes" are very simple, how do you guarantee they only tell you what they are sensing, not anyone with a receiver?
(updated to correct typos)

Science Daily: 17th Century Solar Oddity Believed Linked To Global Cooling Is Rare Among Nearby Stars

2004-06-03T10:35:00.000-04:00

6/3/04 UC Berkeley-
"For 70 years, from 1645 until 1714, early astronomers reported almost no sunspot activity. The number of sunspots - cooler areas on the sun that appear dark against the brighter surroundings - dropped a thousandfold, according to some estimates. Though activity on the sun ebbs and flows today in an 11-year cycle, it has not been that quiet since. "
Sunspots are pretty important because of the potential impact they have on our climate, space missions, communications satellites, etc. There have been a few recent press releases about sunspots because of the Denver meeting of American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Another interesting one: "Groundbreaking Research To Improve Forecasts Of Sunspot Cycle" Science Daily, 6/1/04.
"Using a new computer model of the Sun, scientists have begun work on a groundbreaking forecast of the next cycle of sunspots. Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) announced new research leading to an improved forecast of cycle 24"

Science -- NetWatch {28 May 2004; 304 (5675)}: Watching the Transit of Venus

2004-06-03T10:15:00.000-04:00

This week Science points to several sites that will offer webcasts of the transit of Venus on 8 June. Venus will pass between Earth and the sun. You'll have to get up early, it starts at 1 a.m. Eastern!

Associated Press: Scientists Dig into Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater

2004-06-02T10:24:00.000-04:00

6/1/04 (found via Topix)
"CAPE CHARLES, Va. (AP) _ Geologists drilling half a mile below Virginia's Eastern Shore say they have uncovered more signs of a space rock's impact 35 million years ago."
With all the talk of Bedout and Chicxulub, it's good that they're looking at our very own impact crater (the 6th largest in the world). The USGS press release is here. According to a recent workshop proceedings report (PDF, text), they are drilling to study:

Crater Structure and Morphology
Crater Materials
Impact - Postimpact Transition and Postimpact Events
Modern Deep Biosphere