Off Topic
cpikas | July 25, 2010
He was also my husband's uncle. I only found two of his images online, the remainder are photographs of prints we have on our walls - intentionally poor quality for those. He was a member of the Lyme Art Association, so there may be more information on their site.
The Courant (Hartford, CT) had this bit about him announcing a showing:
The LAA Elected Artist first studied art in Hanover, Germany, while in the Lysenko refugee camp from 1945 to 1949 with Ivan Kubarsky (Armashevsky), Vasyl Perebyinis, Volodymyr Balas, Anatol Jabonsky and others. In 1949, Pater immigrated to the United States.…
sb admin | July 21, 2010So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
sb admin | July 15, 2010And why we should care. Gary Price of the Resource Shelf pointed to a news story today, that Ebsco has acquired two more research databases: Criminal Justice Abstracts and Communications Abstracts. For those of you who haven't been following, Ebsco has recently acquired Ageline (it is now not available for free), NetLibrary, research databases from OCLC, The Music Index Online, World Textiles, ExPub (ChemExpert)... oh and exclusive rights to some magazines.
What we can expect from this is that those other databases will no longer be available on multiple platforms. Folks who aren't librarians…
cpikas | July 15, 2010Via Jason P on friendfeed
BTW - the Old Spice videos over the last couple of days were an amazing marketing feat. To create that kind of buzz. See more on Read/Write Web.
cpikas | June 30, 2010Iâm very late in reviewing this book and there are a lot of very detailed reviews, but I thought I could add bit about the recording. I have my own signed copy of the print, but with work and school stuff, I donât have time for personal reading. I was very happy to notice that the audiobook had been added to my public libraryâs digital library.
The book:
Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers. Find in your library: http://www.worldcat.org/title/immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks/oclc/326529053
The audio version is available on CD and also via…
cpikas | June 18, 2010Just about everyone coming back from the business meeting commented on the dire shape of the association's financials. First, times are tough everywhere and association memberships are down across the board. Librarians are being furloughed so there's no extra money there to pay for expenses if their organizations can't.
Second, there's an elephant in the room that no one is mentioning in regards to membership renewals and meeting attendance: some of us haven't gotten over the name change vote and how disaffected we feel as a result of the entire mess. This isn't the reason I didn't go. I did…
cpikas | March 6, 2010 This post reviews a fairly recent article that examines the experiences of black men in nursing and asks whether they experience the "glass escalator" effect or if the work is racialized as well as gendered.
As requested by some fellow Sciblings, I recently blogged about an older article* that coined the term glass escalator. In my post I was uncertain about how the findings from the study were viewed by experts familiar with that body of work. In the comments, Kris D, who identifies as a sociologist, said that these findings have been upheld by subsequent research. Kris also recommended the…
cpikas | December 23, 2009The other day when I had to be at a stupid training session off site very early in the morning, I stepped on my iphone in the dark. It apparently slid out of my purse.
Sigh. It turned on, but the glass was shattered on the front. So I looked around and you could get the screen and the digitizer with a couple of tools for about $25. I carefully watched a bunch of YouTube videos and decided to give it a try. After all, pieces of glass were falling out and it didn't seem like a good idea to get many of these in my ear.
I sat down last Saturday morning to fix it. The videos I watched showed…
cpikas | December 5, 2009Getting this from Drugmonkey - the first line from the first post of each month this year. Looks like I should pay attention to having snappy first lines!
The first half of the year is all about preparing for my comprehensive exams and the second half of the year is all about recovering from taking them! Let's hope next year brings a dissertation proposal defense and writing, writing, writing.
January: Finished Yin [link]
February: This is 2 weeks, and really quite paltry. [link]
March: I'm now back into re-reading, so notes will be shorter (and I'm hoping to pick up speed). [link]
April:…
cpikas | November 17, 2009I got back from the SLA conference last June to the whole lab in a crisis. It passed and in e-mail, I got a notice that my SLA renewal was over due. Which is funny because I routed all the paperwork at the same time as my conference registration paperwork (we have an office that processes all of our society memberships). So then I dug, and dug, and dug, and dug... and didn't find that I still had a print/signed copy of my registration renewal form. I found it saved on my hard drive and printed it out and put it on the pile... closed the library down... moved offices... thought about it...
So…
cpikas | November 15, 2009
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/2009/11/sunday-secrets_15.html
via Andrew on FriendFeed.
(don't sue me, I'm just the messenger!)
Even if it isn't true, it's sort of funny and now all I can see is my kitchen sink strainer (not a toilet).
cpikas | October 20, 2009I think sometimes the widget on the left side doesn't work. Here's the direct link to support one of the projects I've picked. I think these are some great things that will help students in my state, but if you don't see anything here that floats your boat, please pick a project on one of the other ScienceBling's giving pages.
We've also just heard that the very generous folks at HP will be donating even more to the cause. This is what they've told us:
HP wants to make yet another contribution to your Giving Page. The more you raise by this Sunday, October 25, the more HP will contribute!…
cpikas | October 8, 2009I still am not online on my own computer at home so I'm not able to add posts as I'd like. Please bear with me!
cpikas | October 5, 2009So my faithful little laptop has now died. It's 4 years old and hasn't really been treated all that gently. (my father-in-law just poured his drink in it a couple of weeks ago). I'm faced with the choice of buying new or repairing. It was purchased through the University of Maryland's student program with 4 year on site repair, but .... sigh. I had a post in preparation about free online books, so I'll try to reconstruct that soonest.
cpikas | October 2, 2009No, not mis-giving. In fact, there will be no misgivings if you give to any of the projects Iâve selected or any of the other projects on Donorâs Choose.
A little background. DonorsChoose.org is a way that you can safely give a little or a lot of money to help teachers in the classroom. The teachers have to have very specific plans and then have to report back. Itâs all very carefully managed. Read about how it works. Science Blogs and other social media folks have a little contest going, but you should give because itâs the right thing to do. It would be nice if you did it so I got credit in…
cpikas | September 16, 2009Sure Hubble's pictures are prettier, but there's a lot of cool science coming out of the nifty MESSENGER spacecraft. She's up for a third Mercury fly-by in two weeks. She'll go into orbit in 2011 and she's the first spacecraft there for 30 years!
Already we've seen her video leaving Earth on a 2005 fly-by. Her first two Mercury fly-bys showed part of the planet we had never seen, and also answered some questions about the Caloris basin (and its formation), the planet's exosphere, and the planet's magnetic field.
Go visit the website to hear more or read from the special issue of Science from…
cpikas | September 15, 2009Anybody can code but what just anybody codes can be crap.
There's a real problem in my place of work and probably in other places where you have scientists and engineers who haven't been formally trained in CS and haven't taken the time or effort to learn about proper techniques but who are writing a lot of code. It's one thing to whip something up quickly to answer a question, but some of this code becomes pieces of larger things or gets delivered to a customer. And someone has to maintain it, but it's got memory leaks, isn't documented, it is unreliable, it's not secure, and no one knows…
cpikas | August 20, 2009I've used a citation managers/ bibliographic managers for years - ever since I came to my current job in which I do in-depth literature searching for scientists and engineers. I report my results as an annotated bibliography with analysis. To do this I need to search a bunch of research databases and compile the results and then export them into a bibliography in a useful and attractive format.
Also, I do information analysis and I compile the citations before I do some things (see my series on the same).
So WHY DOESN'T IT JUST FREAKIN' WORK!!!!
Seriously. Why?
You select things to…
cpikas | July 5, 2009
This picture arrived in email last week. My parents lost an oak tree. M and I offered to come and help clear it out. When we got there around 10 this morning, my brother in law had already cut a bit up.
The tree was probably ~150 years old and was 32" across at the trunk.
Luckily it missed the house, the transformer and my dad's huge ham antenna. It did fall on this sycamore, but it was still standing
By the end of the day it was cut into segments, but we left the splitting for my brother in law. He had to more them around with my Dad's tractor, which also gives you an idea of scale.…
cpikas | June 29, 2009
(this post talks about a recipe for granola)
edit: oh. not actually so funny, they use these terms in the post. but hey, did you know bloglines gave related searches?