Police said masked men on a scooter fired five rounds on Tuesday evening. In July 17, miscreants had lobbed a grenade, but it did not explode and was later disposed of by a special squad

The State Cabinet, which considered the issue of bringing UPS for the government employees at its meeting, did not arrive at a final decision

People present at Rafeek Khan’s house overpowered the attacker, thrashed him and handed him over to police. The accused is a former CRPF assistant commandant and a Shaurya Chakra awardee

Special Judge Vishal Gogne fixed the matter for the next week after noting that no further clarification was required from the ED on the matter

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna, Sanjay Kumar and R. Mahadevan partially set aside the Patna High Court verdict acquitting all the accused and asked convicts Mantu Tiwari and ex-MLA Shukla to surrender within 15 days

The initiative has ensured a hassle-free process of obtaining disability certificates and saved the time of differently abled persons to travel all the way to the district headquarters to appear before the Medical Board

Got this in an email from one of my lists:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This presumably will be drawing some attention shortly. It is a very disturbing report by editors from the Journal of Cell Biology and the Journal of Experimental Medicine who have joined with the Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press in reporting their inability to verify published impact factors using data provided provided by ISI itself. Their fruitless efforts to replicate published impact factors for their own and other journals revealed numerous and serious errors in several data sets provided by ISI and call into question the validity of both ISI's dataset and their published impact factors. If the problems they encountered are widespread, then the host of evaluative decisions that rely at least in part on published impact factors are suspect. Published impact factors affect authors' decisions about manuscript submission, funding awards, and promotion and tenure. While critiques of the use of impact factors are quite common, this is the first serious question raised about the underlying validity of the data used to calculate impact factors and therefore the accurracy of the metrics that are published.


The editorial by Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill was published in the Journal of Cell Biology and is available at
http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091

At the last DLC meeting Becky Williams, an instructional designer with CITT, gave a presentation on CMS software issues and spoke about open source (such as SAKAI) vs. Vendor (WebCT/Blackboard) products and a new software system for teacher grading, called SWoRD. Here is a synopsis of what she presented, and feel free to take a look at her ppt for more information: (http://plaza.ufl.edu/rjwillia/swordtalk%20-%20learning%20consort-oct07.ppt).

The first four slides are about CMS vendors vs. open source:

A growing disillusionment with vendor products has many Universities moving or considering moving to Sakai (the most popular open source system available). WebCT and Bb have left many unaddressed issues, and they require universities to pay for upgrades or extensions if something does not work. Moving a CMS to open source has its own issues, but that the vendor situation is so aggravating more universities are considering it as an option. I thought these issues sounded familiar to our LMS experiences - I'll be interested in seeing where the CMS discussion goes.

Slide 5 through 42 are about a new, free software called SWoRD. In large classes, professors assign fewer papers as writing assignments due to the difficulty of grading a large number of papers. Despite writing less, student grades are higher and students feel they are good writers; and, yet, teaching faculty don't agree. SWoRD is a system by which papers are automatically assigned to other student writers, for peer-review. Each student peer-reviews 5 papers. Ms. Williams had evidence supporting the value of multiple peer reviewing of a paper; it is much more useful for a student to have 3 peers review their paper than it is for one student or one professor to review the paper. Read the slides if you are interesting in learning more. Currently the software is free, although Ms. Williams thought that would most likely change.

This meeting was held in the Digital Worlds Building at Norman and included a digital tour of the Gator Nation Island in Second Life. Someone at the meeting mentioned that the Libraries were holding reference hours within SL, which Laura Jordan was able to speak to.

We need to start brainstorming for ideas and features that we want on the new science portal so we'll be prepared for when we locate a web designer.

Here are a list of some other science library websites. Not all are great but I'd like for us to discuss what elements we like and which features we don't like (just as important). Please feel free to post links to other libraries you think are worthy of critique. Also, if there are general guidelines and features that you'd like to include please post about those too.

My first impression looking at these sites is how busy they all are. Lots of links and it seems overwhelming at first glance. Its a decision that we'll have to make about how much information should be quickly accessible on the main page but yet still easily usable. Caltech's library page is the most easily navigated, IMO. I like the quick drop down boxes and the selection of links. I especially like the menu for authors - as the issue of open access and author rights becomes more important on campus, we'll need to take an active role in helping the faculty understand their rights and options for publishing.


Berkeley: Chemistry: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/CHEM/
Engineering: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ENGI/
Physics/Ay: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/PHYS/

Caltech: http://library.caltech.edu/

Chicago : http://www1.lib.uchicago.edu/e/crerar/index.php3

Irvine: http://www.lib.uci.edu/libraries/science.html

Michigan: http://www.lib.umich.edu/science/

MIT Science Library: http://libraries.mit.edu/science/

Oregon Science Library: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scilib/

Santa Cruz: http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scilib/

The URL for the mock-up Leila showed last Tuesday is:
lnadams.org/msl.htm

Please remember that this is just a design layout, the links do not work, and it is subject to extreme change.

Comments are highly encouraged! Please post to this blog or email Sara or Joe.

2008 USAIN (United States Agricultural Information Network) Conference

Tradition in Transition: Information Fueling the Future of Agbiosciences

April 27 – 30, 2008 Wooster, OH

University of Florida is an institutional member of USAIN, an organization whose primary purposes are to promote discussion of agricultural issues and trends, to develop and influence national agricultural information policy, to make recommendations to the National Agricultural Library (NAL) and to increase collaborations between member partners (http://www.usain.org/). USAIN does an excellent job communicating legislative changes to its members, and then working with members to get involved with state and national government.

The conference was hosted by Ohio State University and held at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, closely situated next to a beautiful arboretum and rose garden.

Here are a few of the most important highlights from the conference:

1. The AgNIC Born Digital Steering Committee, of which UF is a participant, met for the first time to begin phase I of the born digital initiative. Here at UF it used to be we would receive a copy of IFAS Extension resources, which we would catalog and make available in our print collection. Many Extension resources (documents, websites, etc) are now published only in digital format and while this format increases access to the current resources, many of these older resources are at risk of being permanently lost due to a lack of consistent preservation processes. This is a problem not just at UF, but at almost every land-grant throughout the nation. The goal of this steering committee is to identify digitization standards (selection, metadata, format, etc.) and to develop an infrastructure to assist the land-grants in developing their own processes at the local level. The other institutions participating are Univ. of Arizona, Ohio State, Colorado State, Texas A&M, Cornell, Univ. of Minnesota, Purdue, and potentially Michigan State and Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2. Mary Ochs (Cornell) Peter Ballantyne and Barbara Hutchinson (IAALD) spoke about Agbioscience information for the worldwide community. There is a strong need to "make research information easy to access for current and future generations" through common international standards, open applications, user friendly information & data, andlocal and global action . A large amount of agricultural information is created within the U.S., and we should do more to share that information with the international community. The result of this discussion was the creation of an International Agricultural Information Interest Group which will focus on the first steps of bringing in librarians from other countries to future USAIN conferences, as well as providing more Ag information on the USAIN website. Here is Peter Young - the Director of the National Ag Library - speaking about global collaborations: http://iaald.blip.tv/file/864317/

3. Peter gave the NAL update, mentioning the new Blueprint for Success: The National Agricultural Library 2008-2012. Many of you may have seen in the Washington Post the article, A Precious Resource at Risk, about the drastic budget cuts facing NAL in the upcoming year. I believe it was at the last USAIN that I learned that the NAL has had a flat budget for the last twenty years. Somehow I didn't write down the percentage they will have to cut, but I believe it was either 40% or 60% - both staggering cuts. This will prevent the NAL from preserving their special collections, from buying print materials, from participating in Interlibrary Loan, and more. For more information, see the USAIN website for Lobbying Congress for Support.

Additional information related to the theme of the conference:

Many of the invited speakers spoke on biofuels, bioenergy/bioproducts, and sustainable farming, including David Kline, an Amish farmer and author/editor of Farming Magazine. Without going into too much detail, here are a few of the interesting things I learned from all the speakers:

1. In the 1850’s ethanols were used for lighting, but in the 1860s-1906 an ethanol tax was enacted (making kerosene more competitive). The first ethanol fueled auto was the Ford Quadricycle (1896). The first flex-fuel car: Model-T (1908)!
2. In 2008 there were 11 billion gallons of ethanol produced from corn. Unfortunately there are a number of issues related to: water quality, soil erosion, water supply, biodiversity, loss of grasslands, increase in feed costs. Also, corn is displacing other crops -- leading to food riots.
3. The cellulosic biofuels (corn, switchgrass, MSW, forest residues, etc.) industry will grow rapidly in coming years. And will bring some very specific questions, such as how will supply chains develop (big issue), what are the implications for the food/feed/fiber markets, how will environmental issues be addressed, can we coproduce fuels and foods, and how can farmers and local communities benefit?
4. Lastly, has been shown to increase smog and cancerous benzene emissions. Also, all current biofuels increase carbon dioxide emission relative to gasoline.

There was quite a bit more information available from all the speakers. If you are interested in reading the speaker presentations, they are available for download: http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/usain/downloads.html

Full Schedule
Proceedings

Best quote: Librarians are like Mr. Paperclip from MS Office - we pop up when you least expect it and try to offer to you help...

This conference focused on the science library's role in supporting e-science and integrating into research collaborations and science departments. There was a mixture of speakers: government, library and institute directors, and a few librarians. The presentations were a mixture of big picture descriptions and some concrete examples. I felt like there wasn't as much hard solutions that we could take back to the library and implement, but perhaps just educating the library community on how radically different e-science is changing the research landscape is the necessary first step.

I've included the highlights from my session notes below (let me know if you'd like the see my full notes in gory detail). Check out the proceedings link above for powerpoint and document files for most of the speakers.

As a side note, our poster about GatorScholar was well-received with many people already aware of the project from either Val's USAIN presentations, the SLA poster, or from hearing about Cornell's project. Medha Devare was one of the panel reactors and she mentioned our collaboration in her presentation. Most of the poster visitors seemed very interested in starting their own version and perhaps at some point we'll have a network of databases.

Thursday

E-Science: Trends, Transformations & Responses

Convener and Moderator: Wendy Lougee, University of Minnesota
Speaker: Chris Greer, Director, National Coordination Office

2. A Case Study in E-Science: Building Ecological Informatics Solutions for Multi-Decadal Research

William Michener, Research Professor (Biology) and Associate Director, Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office, University of New Mexico


3. Rick Luce, Vice Provost and Director of University Libraries, Emory University Libraries

"Making a Quantum Leap to eResearch Support: a new world of opportunities and challenges for research libraries"


Wendy Lougee

Pitfalls: not to fall back on traditional roles, currently we don't respond to multi-institutional collaborations, our boundaries stop with the institution

We need to understand scientists' workflows, need to identify strategies for embedding librarians into project teams. We need to think about core expertise of librarians, reimaging roles of librarians

What do we do to build this collaborative action? We need to think outside the box.

Data Curation: Issues and Challenges

Convener and Moderator: James Mullins, Dean of Libraries, Purdue University

• Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN

Transition or Transform? Repositiioning the Library for the Petabyte Era

How can libraries work with science (in a very general sense)?

1. Transition or Transform? Need to become embedded and integrated into team science. Many different models of engagement

Geosciences pilot where the library worked with the Geological department to curate their datasets (Edinborough):
Found: Time needed is longer than anticipated, inventory doesn't have to be comprehensive, little documentation exists
Outcomes: positive, requirement for researcher and auditor training, need to develop a data policy

2. Lots of opportunities of action: leadership by senior managers, faculty coordination, advocacy & tranining, data documentation best practices

People and Skills: there are not enough specialised data librarians. In UK 5 data librarians. Need to bring diverse communities together - facilitate cooperation between organizations and individuals.

Open science: new range of areas where results are being put onto the web (GalaxyZoo eg.) Librarians need to be aware of implications.

3. Need multidisciplinary teams and people in library, huge skill shortage, need to find core data skills and integrate it into the LIS curriculum. Recruit different people to the LIS team, rebrand the LIS career. Go from librarianship to Informatics.

• Fran Berman, Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, and Co-chair Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

"Research and Data"

Researchers are detectives, shows different major questions (SAF, Brown Dwarfs, bridge stress, Income dynamics over 40 years, Disease spread-Protein Data Bank) - key collections all over.

CI Support: all these issues are crucial. researchers want a easy to use set of tools to make the most of their data.

She finds different preservation profiles: timescale, datascale, well-tended to poor, level of policy restrictions, planned vs. ad hoc approach

Researchers focused on new projects, customization of solutions to problems, collaboration

Researchers need help: developing management, preservation and use environments, proper curation and annotation, navigating policy, regulation, IP, sustainability

Questions about preservation: what should we save and who should pay for it? Just saving everything isn't an option. 2007 was the crossover year - digital data exceeded the amount of available storage. What do we want to save? Who is we?
Society: official and historically valuable data, Fed agency or inst normally takes part.
Research community: PDB, NVO.
Me: medical record, financial data, digital photos - real commercial market for preservation solutions.

What do we have to save?
private sector: HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley,
OMB regulations for fed funded research data (3 years, not always easy to do).

Economics: many costs associated with preservation. Maintenance upkeep, software, utilities, space, networking, security, etc.

UCSD forged partnership with library. Trying to create a preservation grid with formal policies, nationwide grid with other institutions.

Panel Responders:

• Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean of University Libraries and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, Johns Hopkins University

Data Curation Issues and Challenges:

It makes sense to help scientists deal with public and higher levels of data, not the raw data.

Considerations: need to work within their systems, consider gateways for systems as part of infrastructure development (think about railroad gauge), focus on both human and tech components of infrastructure, human interoperability is more difficult than tech interoperability, trust is key!

Questions: What about the cloud or the crowd? Can Flickr help us with data curation? What are the fundamental differences between data and collections? Human readable vs. machine readable? How do we transfer principles into new practices? What are we trying to sustain? Data? Scholarship? Our organizations?


Supporting Virtual Orgs

• Thomas A. Finholt, Director, Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) and Research Professor & Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, School of Information, University of Michigan

Changing nature of geographically-distributed collaboration:

history: transition in terms of distributed work. Much of what came before (collaboratory, video conf) had a precedent but new emerging has no precedent (crowdsourcing, VO's), no traditional context leaves us a bit adrift.

Lesson 1: anticipate cultural differences.
Domain scientists: characteristics: power distance (bias toward seniority, hierarchical), individualist(solo PI, individual genius), masculine(adversial and competitive), uncertainty avoidance
CI developers: power distance (bias toward talent, egalitarian), collectivist(project model), masculine, embrace risk

Lesson 2: plan for first contact.

It can be tough to recognize successful innovations: first efforts are often awkward hybrids



Crowdsourcing: idea that we send out challenges and solutions come to us (ex. Innocentive website, Games with a Purpose). We don't know who is going to do the work, effort is contributed voluntarily -> incentives are important to motivate work

Delegation of organizational work: people can count on organizations to do some of the basic policy work. Much attention has focused on technology and processes to support social ties, alternative course is the use of technology to supplant social ties - > think of this as organizing without the work of organizing, questions of who to trust, who pays, permitted to use the resources are managed by middleware.

Group work is an inevitable fact of org life.

• Medha Devare, Life Sciences and Bioinformatics Librarian, Mann Library, Cornell University

Idea of Virtual Organization: boundary crossing, pooling of competencies, participants or activities geographically separated, fluid, flat structure, participant equality

Library contributions: technology choices, tools; tech support/guidance; subject expertise; understanding of research landscape; vision - user needs of the future?

Examples of library support: VIVO, DataStar (supports data-sharing among researchers)

DataStar: Data Staging Repository: supports data sharing, esp during research process, promotes publishing or archiving to discipline specific data centers and/or to Cornell's DR. Nascent stage

Reinventing the library? Librarians as middle-ware to facilitate process of connecting and creating coherence across disciplines - both VIVO and DataStar aid this.

Hope that both tools seamlessly interact with each other.


D. Scott Brandt, Associate Dean for Research, Purdue University Library

Tries to embed librarians in research teams. We have to redefine what we do, collect.

Chopra fell just 2cm short of Jakub Vadlejch’s effort, whose 88.38m in the opening round proved enough for the Czech to take first place

The move by AFI and SAI to send the athletes on a month-long camp helped them acclimatise and bounce back to qualify for the 2024 Olympics

The AFI chief said the athletes needed to declare their coaches’ names in dope control forms and all the coaches would have to be registered with the federation

World body marks results of Indian meet as ‘invalid’)

There are no eye-popping names in the fray, perhaps because the National inter-state championship is scheduled in close proximity (June 27-30 in Panchkula, Haryana).

AFI president Sumariwalla writes to the governing body about the issue

The 27-year-old gymnast, regarded as one of the best ever, booked her ticket to Paris with a resounding victory at the US trials. Having successfully made a comeback after a two-year break to safeguard her mental health, she has the opportunity to put the 2020 Olympics firmly in her rearview mirror

With big names like Caeleb Dressel, Katie Ledecky, Ariarne Titmus and Emma McKeon, it is expected that local favourite Léon Marchand may shine in the swimming event at Paris Olympics 2024

Narang said the sports science team, under the leadership of renowned sports injury expert Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala, is a never-before support for the Indian athletes.

Yogesh Kathuniya wasn't satisfied with his performance and he vowed to better the colour of his medal in the next major tournament.

The IOC, with 111 members currently, is in charge of the Olympic Games and the multi-billion dollar industry linked to the world's biggest multi-sports event.

As many as four world-class match-winners are expected to bid adieu to the game one by one in the next couple of years and Gautam Gambhir is in an unenviable position as head coach.

Official sources and a number of senior doctors confirmed that these deputation/postings were made to address specific manpower shortages in medical colleges in Nagapattinam, Tiruvallur and Tiruvarur

Such attacks on hospitals “can be issues of life and death” World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who addressed the U.N. Security Council, said

India is expected to stick to its stance of getting developed countries to increase climate finance, with a highly placed official saying, “We are flexible and open to different kinds of finance.” The official told The Hindu, “A key concern is that developed countries are trying to include developing countries (China and India) using new terms such as ‘major economies’ in a bid to get them to be part of NCQG.”

India’s COP29 strategy emphasises climate finance, accountability, and protection for vulnerable communities, urging developed nations to fulfill climate pledges

To give better access to women for screening of cancer, the Health Department is taking their programmes to work sites and also encouraging women to come in for annual check-ups

These initiatives aim to provide multidisciplinary care to senior citizens and enhance their quality of life

Agenda disputes are common at UN climate conferences but this one is especially significant as countries have limited time to agree on a new climate finance goal.

Chetan Bhattacharji, who is at Baku for the first week of negotiations and The Hindu’s Jacob Koshy, will guide us through high-stakes conversations at COP29 at 5 p.m. on November 12

Apple is planning on launching a wall-mounted display that can control appliances, handle video conferencing and use artificial intelligence to navigate apps, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday

The CSS text-wrap property is (rightfully) widely assumed to be used strictly for text elements. But Terrence Eden posted an article on his blog that shows how it can also be used to balance the way other types of elements wrap, including icons.

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You can use text-wrap: balance; on icons originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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