The 2007 Rube Goldberg Contest

For those who don't know about this 20th century cultural icon (or aren't old enough to remember), Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who was famous for drawing complicated machines to perform a simple task. There are some wonderful cartoons of his adventures here.

Purdue University's chapter of Theta Tau, a professional engineering fraternity, sponsors a nationwide contest for college students to see who can invent and assemble the most whimsical and complicated machine to carry out a given task . You can see a video of some of the machines in this year's competition.

Thanks to the Librarians' Index to the Internet for this heads-up!

New edition of CRC Handbook of Chemistry & Physics available online!

Did you know that you can access the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics online through the UMass Amherst libraries?

Our online subscription has just been updated to the most recent (86th) edition of the handbook. Changes include:

- Includes seven important new tables and extensive updates and expansion of 20 others

- Incorporates substantial revisions to the Bond Dissociation Energy and Standard Transformed Gibbs Energy of Formation for Important Biochemical Species tables

- Updates the valuable Sources of Physical and Chemical Data appendix

New tables!

1. Vapor Pressure of the Metallic Elements
2. Electrical Conductivity of Aqueous Solutions
3. Proton Affinities
4. Electron Inelastic Mean Free Paths
5. Selected Properties of Semiconductor Solid Solutions
6. Vapor Pressures (Solvent Activities) for Binary Polymer Solutions
7. Density of Sulfuric Acid

To access the online version of the CRC Handbook, just visit the UMass Libraries homepage, click Databases, and navigate to C for CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

Enjoy!

Springer Tracts in Modern Physics now online, 2000-present

More new e-journals....the UMass Libraries now offer online access to Springer Tracts in Modern Physics, 2000 - present.

Europhysics Letters now available online

The UMass Libraries have just set up online access to the journal Europhysics Letters, back through 1996. Enjoy!

arXiv Founder Paul Ginsparg Named Recipient of Paul Evan Peters Award

News release from the Coalition for Networked Information:

Paul Ginsparg, physicist and Internet scholarly communications pioneer, is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, announced today by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE. The award will be presented on April 3, 2006, at the CNI Membership Meeting in Arlington, VA, where Ginsparg will deliver the Paul Peters Award lecture at the opening plenary. A professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, Ginsparg has distinguished himself as the visionary behind arXiv (http://arxiv.org), an Internet e-print archive for articles in the sciences, which allows scholars to circulate and comment on research prior to publication in traditional peer-reviewed journals, thereby significantly reducing the amount of time it takes for an article to be available to researchers. Started in 1991 as a service for preprints in physics, arXiv eventually expanded to include mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. Today, the resource boasts open access to over 350,000 articles.

"Paul Ginsparg's accomplishments as a theoretical physicist, alone, distinguish him as a superb scholar, but his innovations in scientific publication, for which the Paul Evan Peters award honors him, truly places him in the annals of history as a transformative figure who has changed the landscape of scholarly communication forever," remarked Ronald Larsen, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the award search committee. "This is a richly deserved award," Larsen continued, "that honors the legacy of Paul Evan Peters."

Commenting on how Ginsparg's brainchild has revolutionized science publishing, in the October 2005 issue of Sky & Telescope, author Richard Tresch Fienberg reports that papers published in more than a dozen major astronomy journals are twice as likely to be cited by other researchers if they have also appeared on arXiv. He observes, "Clearly, professional astronomers are gravitating toward [arXiv] as their primary—perhaps even exclusive—reference source." Expressing this view directly as part of the 2001 UNESCO Expert Conference Electronic Publishing in Science, Ginsparg wrote, "The essential question for 'Electronic Publishing in Science' is how our scientific research communications infrastructure should be reconfigured to take maximal advantage of newly evolving electronic resources."

Full announcement, via ARL Announces

Best-sellers in Physics, 2005

Which physics books were flying off the shelves last year? YBP Library Services has released the following list of physics best-sellers for 2005. Titles owned by UMass libraries have clickable links that will bring you to their library catalog records. Think we should own a title on this list? Let us know! Happy reading.

Best Sellers in Physics, January–December 2005, as compiled by YBP Library Services

1. Plows, Plagues, And Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
Ruddiman, W. F.
Princeton U. Press
2005. ISBN 0691121648. $24.95

2. It's About Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity
Mermin, N. David
Princeton U. Press
2005. ISBN 0691122016. $29.95

3. Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes
Emanuel, Kerry A.
Oxford U. Press
2005. ISBN 0195149416. $45.00

4. Einstein on Race and Racism
Jerome, Fred
Rutgers U. Press
2005. ISBN 0813536170. $23.95

5. The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race
McMillan, Priscilla Johnson
Viking
2005. ISBN 0670034223. $25.95

6. Knowing: The Nature of Physical Law
Munowitz, M.
Oxford U. Press
2005. ISBN 0195167376. $35.00

7. The Theory of Almost Everything: The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics
Oerter, Robert
Prentice Hall
2006. ISBN 0132366789. $24.95

8. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
Randall, Lisa
Ecco
2005. ISBN 0060531088. $27.95

9. Environmental Change: Key Issues and Alternative Approaches
Oldfield, Frank
Cambridge U. Press
2005. ISBN 0521829364. $120.00

10. Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
Susskind, Leonard
Little, Brown
2006. ISBN 0316155799. $24.95

11. Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
Bowen, Mark
Henry Holt
2005. ISBN 0805064435. $30.00

12. Worlds of Flow: A History of Hydrodynamics from the Bernoullis to Prandtl
Darrigol, Olivier
Oxford U. Press
2005. ISBN 0198568436. $74.50

13. Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response
Hoffman, Matthew J.
State U. of New York Press
2005. ISBN 079146525x. $81.50

14. Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance
Gosnell, Mariana
Alfred A. Knopf
2005. ISBN 0679426086. $30.00

15. Thermodynamics: A Dynamical Systems Approach
Haddad, Wassim M.
Princeton U. Press
2005. ISBN 0691123276. $49.50

16. Weighing the World: The Quest to Measure the Earth
Danson, Edwin
Oxford U. Press
2006. ISBN 0195181697. $29.95

17. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
Chaisson, Eric
Columbia U. Press
2006. ISBN 0231135602. $34.50

18. Electromagnetic Processes
Gould, Robert J.
Princeton U. Press
2006. ISBN 0691124434. $89.50

19. Quantum Wells, Wires and Dots: Theoretical and Computational Physics of Semiconductor Nanostructures
Harrison, Paul
John Wiley
2005. ISBN 0470010797. $150.00

20. Pauli's Exclusion Principle: The Origin and Validation of a Scientific Principle
Massimi, Michela
Cambridge U. Press
2005. ISBN 0521839114. $75.00

New e-journal @ UMass Libraries

The full text of the following journal is newly available through the UMass library catalog. Enjoy!

International journal of hydrogen energy (1998-)

Faraday Discussions on Nanotechnology

The most recent Faraday Discussions from the Royal Society of Chemistry focuses on nanotechnology--more specifically, molecular wires and nanoscale conductors. UMass Amherst users have online access to Faraday Discussions via the library catalog, and RSC has also made several articles from this issue freely available to all.

If you use feedreader software like My Yahoo, Bloglines, or FeedDemon, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for RSC journals, including Faraday Discussions--more info.

(via Dana Roth, PAMNet)