February 2010 Archives

The Cornell Library based arXiv.org asked for assistance with their open access pre-print server. The cost to run this operation is equivalent to an entire physics library's purchasing budget, or $400,000. Cornell Library hopes that these funds will help sustain operations and continue development of the arXiv.

Based on the ranking of institutions representing the most active users of arXiv each institution will pay a tied sponsorship starting at $4000 (UMN ranked 64th in use in 2009).

Read more about Cornell's new model in the Chronicle's 1-25-10 article "Cornell Library Proposes New Model to Keep arXiv Going"

Also, read the "arXiv Business Model White Paper" which is, or course, posted in the arXiv.

Here's a selection of the new Physics and Astronomy books in Walter Library. You can view the entire list on our New Books Website.

QB471.7.B85 H86 2008
Gamma-ray bursts : 6th Huntsville symposium : Huntsville, Alabama, 20-23 October 2008
Melville, N.Y. : American Institute of Physics, 2009.
xiii, 537 p.
Link to MnCat Record


QB801 .B54 2009
The biggest, baddest, coolest stars : proceedings of a workshop held at the Millennium Centre, Johnson City, Tennessee, USA, 16-18 July 2007
San Francisco, Calif. : Astronomical Society of the Pacific, c2009.
xii, 263 p.
Link to MnCat Record

QC1 .L4x 783
Bona, Carles.
Elements of numerical relativity and relativistic hydrodynamics : from Einstein's equations to astrophysical simulations
2nd ed.
Berlin : Springer, c2009.
xiv, 214 p.
Lecture notes in physics,
Link to MnCat Record

QC174.45 .P367 2009
Parker, Leonard Emanuel, 1938-
Quantum field theory in curved spacetime : quantized fields and gravity
Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2009.
xiv, 455 p.
Link to MnCat Record

Read on to see the rest of the book...

Article in the Chronicle examines the triumph and pitfalls of open access publishing. They also highlight an open source software that some libraries and institutional repositories are implementing to help faculty publish their society journals in an open and cost-effective way. Read more about Open Journal System.

Open-Access Journals Break Barriers to Academic Freedom
For scholars around the world, online open-access publishing--in the right hands--has the potential to provide a "Gutenberg moment."

Interesting article from the digital library section of the arXiv:

On the meaning of the h-index
Authors: S. Redner
(Submitted on 4 Feb 2010)
arXiv:1002.0878v1 [physics.data-an]

Abstract: The h-index -- the value for which an individual has published at least h papers with at least h citations -- has become a popular metric to assess the citation impact of scientists. As already noted in the original work of Hirsch and as evidenced from data of a representative sample of physicists, sqrt{c} scales as h, where c is the total number citations to an individual. Thus sqrt{c} appears to be equivalent to the h index. As a further check of this equivalence, the distribution of the ratio s=sqrt{c}/2h for this sample is sharply peaked about 1. The outliers in this distribution reveal fundamentally different types of individual publication records.

First there was mine-sweeper, then Snood, and finally Facebook took over as our number 1 time wasting internet hobby. But poke your friends no more! Instead, help astronomers categorize galaxies with Galazy Zoo.

This is part of a suite of tools in Zooniverse that Adler Planetarium has developed thanks in part to an NSF grant. The "citizen science" website allows anyone to sign up and start classifying. Beyond galaxy descriptions are new tools such as :

• Solar Stormwatch (sun spots
• Galaxy Mergers


• Galaxy Supernovae (using live data from telescopes around the world!)
  

My mahjong days are over!