Indiana University Swain Hall Library

Russell Pullan discusses Innovation at last OECD Conference

2010-01-03T21:19:00.003-05:00

I originally saw this on the OECD page updated in December titled "From Crisis to Recovery". I like the motto for OECD these days..."For a stronger, cleaner, fairer world economy".

Bill Ziemer Donates Useful Mathematics Books

2009-12-05T16:28:00.004-05:00

Professor Emeritus Bill Ziemer and his wife recently contacted the library about donating some books. It turns out Bill had several boxes which I gladly hauled away last weekend. We've added some mathematics titles to the library already, and some will be sent to Wells for the 2010 Indiana Univerisity Library Association (InULA) book sale in April.
By the way, I've never seen so many tennis trophies in my life as I did when I visited the Ziemers. All this time I thought Bill was engrossed in mathematics...clearly his interests and skills are widespread and varied.
Hats off to Bill for his generosity and thoughtfulness, he's made both the library better, and has supplied InULA with books that will most likely sell in the spring!

American Physical Society Rethinking Policy on Climate Change

2009-11-10T09:56:00.009-05:00

In 2007 the American Physical Society's national policy on climate change contained fairly strong language..."global warming is occurring", and we need to do something about it beginning now. Click on the image to read the full statement adopted in 2007.

In the summer of 2009, several APS physicists signed a petition recommending that the language be changed, softened. Here is the open letter to the Council of the APS. In a July, 2009 letter published in Nature, six physicists applauded the APS' decision to review its current climate statement by appointing a high level subcommittee "devoid of political or financial agendas," so a more accurate representation of the current scientific evidence is expressed. Essentially the petitioners want to make sure that at least physicists are not behaving as alarmists, and endorsing an untruthful position.
Meanwhile, on October 21, 2009, 18 large, American scientific societies and organizations, including the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, ~127,000 members) sent a letter to the US Senate using language at least as strong as the 2007 APS statement on climate. Essentially this letter from huge numbers of American scientists is saying to the US government that climate change is a big, current problem; let's do something about it, please come to us for advice and help. The APS did not sign this letter, they're still trying to work out whether climate change is an imminent threat. In November, 2009 the ad hoc committee reviewing the climate statement are expected to report back to the society with their findings. Let's hope that most American scientists end up on the same page with respect to climate by the end of the calendar year.

11/16/09 below is reprinted from today's www.aps.org page. This is good in my opinion. By the way, by using the Biography and Geneaology Master Index, and WorldCat, we averaged the age of the petitioners to change the language. The avg. age (159 of 206 signers we could find) was 71 years old. What does this say about the scientific method, and opinion(s) based on number of yrs one has left living on the planet? In other words, when I'm 70-80 yrs old, will I be strictly interested in "truth", or will it be more complicated than that?

"APS Council Overwhelmingly Rejects Proposal to Replace Society’s Current Climate Change Statement

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society’s 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming.

The Council’s vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members. The petition had requested that APS remove and replace the Society’s current statement. The committee recommended that the Council reject the petition.

The committee also recommended that the current APS statement be allowed to stand, but it requested that the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) examine the statement for possible improvements in clarity and tone. POPA regularly reviews all APS statements to ensure that they are relevant and up-to-date regarding new scientific findings.

Appointed by APS President Cherry Murray and chaired by MIT Physicist Daniel Kleppner, the committee examined the statement during the past four months. Dr. Kleppner’s committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research. APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter. On Nov. 8, the Council voted, accepting the committee’s recommendation to reject the proposed statement and refer the original statement to POPA for review."

Lost, Harmonic Analysis, by Elias M. Stein

2009-10-06T14:08:00.004-04:00

This appeared in the Swain Hall Library today. 諧波分析 It may belong to someone in M611 or M711; check your bags grad students, if you're missing your Harmonic Analysis, come by the library. It's behind the circ desk under the name "Lost".

New Books NOT on Display this Week

2009-09-21T09:22:00.006-04:00

A couple of new books will not go on display today because people at other campuses or in other departments have already requested them. They include "Mathematical Methods in Physics: Partial Differential Equations, Fourier Series, and Special Functions (A.K. Peters), and "The Mathematical Mechanic" (Princeton University Press).

Thomas Friedman Makes a Lot of Sense

2009-09-17T12:42:00.011-04:00

Have a look at yesterday's New York Times piece by Thomas Friedman. Have a Nice Day: It's about how solar parts factories (the facilities that make the parts comprising solar panels) aren't being deployed here in the United States. Other countries are acquiring them.

I'm looking forward to how this Op-Ed piece will prompt action by our government, our universities, and US companies. Good job Mr. Friedman, and a tip of my hat to the NYT for publishing this.

Excerpt:

"Not a single one [solar matls plant, cost $200 milllion each by the way] is in America.

Let’s see: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. I suggested a new company motto for Applied Materials’s solar business: “Invented here, sold there.”"

[note: this image is not from the NYT article, it's from a 3/19/08 Solid State Technology piece by Katherine Derbyshire titled What solar cells can learn from electronics, and the photo was supplied to them courtesy of the company Applied Materials.]

[10/8/09 update on Thomas Friedman] Um...let me back up a little bit on Thomas Friedman. I often like his ideas on energy and sustainability, but if you can find the YouTube of him on Charlie Rose, talking about the three bubbles of the 1990s, particularly the terrorism bubble, I don't know what the hell he's talking about. It doesn't make any sense to me. Find "Thomas Friedman sums up the Iraq war" - can someone tell me what I need to do in order to understand what he's trying to say?

Public Printer in the library not functioning tonight

2009-09-16T16:56:00.003-04:00

Public printer is all jammed up and we won't be able to fix it until tomorrow morning. Printers are available in the basement of Swain East and in the Physics Forum down the hall at the west end of Swain.

Swain Hall Library trivia

2009-09-15T10:25:00.005-04:00

Since the mid-20th century, the Swain Hall Library has been collecting physics, astronomy, mathematics, and computer science literature for this university. In the 1990s, the collection here peaked in terms of number of items with well over 100,000.
In the past 10 years we've removed many items and much has gone to storage, particularly the journal literature. Over all this time, did we ever catalog and put a work of fiction in Swain Hall? Yes, we did (maybe several, depending on how you view string theory), we definitely cataloged a single novel titled "Beyond the Planet Earth" by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist / engineer and the father of cosmonautics. Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский (9/17/1857 - 9/19/1935, check out his drawings at that cyrillic link). In honor of Tsiolkovsky's 152nd birthday in a couple days, we mention this early work of science fiction here in Swain Hall. In a nutshell, the book is about these six guys (a German, Frenchman, American, Englishman, Italian, and a Russian) who find themselves in a big castle in the Himalayas and they work together to create a vehicle to take them into space. At the top of the castle is a glass domed-in area.

To be honest, this is not a great novel. It's quite awkward in fact, but in some ways it's still an important book. Click on this image and you can read the dust jacket blurb. The English translation (what we have) came out in 1960, but the Russian was published in 1920. Right now this is an unlinked item record in IUCAT and it is being converted (NOTIS conversion from 11/2000)...the only way to find that we hold it would have been to browse in the Stacks for it. Anyway, it will be back in the stacks this fall.

Peterson's "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach"

2009-09-09T13:51:00.005-04:00

Copies of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach arrived today in Swain Hall Library. It wasn't here earlier, and several people were asking about it last week; two copies will be available on Reserve for the semester.

Stewart's Single Variable Calculus FOUND late last week

2009-09-08T16:07:00.004-04:00

Last Friday in Swain East 105, an IU custom version of Stewart's "Single Variable Calculus" was found and turned in to the Math Department in Rawles Hall.
While the custom edition is slightly cheaper than the desk copy hardback, it's still an unfortunate thing to lose this the first week of classes. This is the kind of thing that sends mom and dad into orbit, right? Or it possibly depresses you if you happen to be putting yourself through college.
Ok, so if you lost your copy, come to the Swain Hall Library (Swain West 208) and see Bob to claim your copy.

Speculation on Infinity

2009-09-04T11:01:00.006-04:00

Pictured here with our returning students Lauren Younis and Whitney Greenwood, and our new SLIS GA from Nepal, Asik Pradhan, is a recent work of art donated by a local artist and inspired by the life and career of Dr. Frank Edmondson.

Have a look at this beautiful and finely done intaglio etching the next time you're in Swain Hall Library. It's located on the east wall of the Reference / New Journals room.

Swain Hall Discontinuing most cyrillic journal subscriptions

2009-08-27T14:41:00.003-04:00

For many years the Swain Hall Library has been receiving the original Russian version of their chief phyiscs, astronomy, and mathematics journals. We will discontinue these exchange subscriptions, and the Wells Library will continue to receive two of the most important titles in Russian. We are keeping the English translations of these titles.

What a Mega-Publisher Can Learn from Small Publishers

2009-07-31T17:23:00.006-04:00

Remember earlier this year when it surfaced that Elsevier (a large publishing company) was paid by Merck (a large pharmaceutical company) to launch in 2002 a bogus, ostensibly peer-reviewed science journal, "The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine"? The content of this journal "presented data favorable to Merck products". It wasn't science. What kind of environment and thinking...what kind of organizational culture permits or encourages that kind of thing to happen?
Contrast that with this announcement on the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences, also a publisher of peer-reviewed information:
Announcement: To aid libraries worldwide coping with budget shortfalls due to the global economic crisis, AIMS (American Institute of Mathematical Sciences) has declared an across the board freeze of its journal prices for 2010.
This is the kind of thinking that prompts some libraries to ignore future publications from the large publisher, and buy everything from the smaller publisher. Hats off to the AIMS, you're vetting high quality mathematics and making its dissemination to both the privleged, and to those with flat or shrinking funds, a priority.

Mathematica disappeared from Swain Hall Library Public Computers

2009-07-07T17:24:00.003-04:00

Some of you noticed last week that Mathematica is simply gone from the nearby machines. I have a call into Library Information Technology...not sure what the root of the problem is but they're looking into it.

60 Years of nature backfile available online (at least for now...)

2009-06-19T08:37:00.006-04:00

Just noticed yesterday that the nature backfile 1950-present is available. This is not something Indiana University has picked up (yet); it's quite expensive and we continue to rely on our archived print copies for articles published prior to the 1980s. Anyway, just an fyi for everyone... this has happened in the past, and eventually is spotted by nature and they turn it off on their end, then we abruptly lose access. It's one of, or perhaps the best science journal on the planet. Have a look at some of the old issues while the virtual doors are open.

Mathematical Physiology, 2nd edition, au: Keener, Math Department Permanent Reserve Now Available Electronically

2009-06-07T11:42:00.004-04:00

Math Department, biophysicists, and School of Public Health (formerly HPER) - James Keener and James Sneyd's 2nd edition of Mathematical Physiology is available online to the Indiana University community. No restrictions on multiple, simultaneous users, so please let your students and colleagues know of its availability.

1960s print Scientific American added to Swain Hall Library

2009-06-05T13:08:00.010-04:00

Thanks to Hans-Otto Meyer, the print version of Scientific American from 1961-1970 is now in Swain Hall Library, so there's no need to stroll over to Optometry or request from ALF. With the exception of the polar bear article below, here are some of the most heavily cited articles from that decade (I just included the polar bear one beause it seems like they're having a hell of a time lately, and a 40+ year old study about their migration may be informative today). We do have e-access to 19th century Scientific American, and to 1993-present, but not to mid-20th century articles. Let me know if you need any articles quickly and we'll get them to you.

3-DIMENSIONAL STRUCTURE OF AN ENZYME MOLECULE Author(s): PHILLIPS DC SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 215 Issue: 5 Pages: 78-& Published: 1966 Times Cited: 479

(click on image for better view)

POPULATION DENSITY AND SOCIAL PATHOLOGY Author(s): CALHOUN JB SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 206 Issue: 2 Pages: 139-& Published: 1962 Times Cited: 446

EXPERIMENTS IN INTERGROUP DISCRIMINATION Author(s): TAJFEL H: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 223 Issue: 5 Pages: 96-& Published: 1970 Times Cited: 366

CULTURE OF POVERTY Author(s): LEWIS O: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 215 Issue: 4 Pages: 19-& Published: 1966 Times Cited: 278

ORIGIN OF FORM PERCEPTION - IS MANS ABILITY TO PERCEIVE FORM OF OBJECTS INBORN OR MUST IT BE LEARNED EXPERIMENTS INDICATE THAT IT IS INNATE BUT THAT MATURATION AND LEARNING PLAY IMPORTANT ROLES IN ITS DEVELOPMENT Author(s): FANTZ RL: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 204 Issue: 5 Pages: 66-& Published: 1961 Times Cited: 251

ECOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY Author(s): BROWER LP: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 220 Issue: 2 Pages: 22-& Published: 1969 Times Cited: 218

PLASTICITY IN SENSORY-MOTOR SYSTEMS Author(s): HELD R: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 213 Issue: 5 Pages: 84-& Published: 1965 Times Cited: 211

ATTITUDE AND PUPIL SIZE Author(s): HESS EH: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 212 Issue: 4 Pages: 46-& Published: 1965 Times Cited: 201

THIRD-GENERATION PESTICIDES Author(s): WILLIAMS CM: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 217 Issue: 1 Pages: 13-& Published: 1967 Times Cited: 194

RELATIVISM OF ABSOLUTE JUDGMENTS Author(s): PARDUCCI A: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 219 Issue: 6 Pages: 84-& Published: 1968 Times Cited: 139

SPLIT BRAIN IN MAN Author(s): GAZZANIG.MS: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 217 Issue: 2 Pages: 24-& Published: 1967 Times Cited: 123

HOW WE REMEMBER WHAT WE SEE Author(s): HABER RN: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 222 Issue: 5 Pages: 104-& Published: 1970 Times Cited: 107

MIGRATION OF POLAR BEARS Author(s): FLYGER V, TOWNSEND MR: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Volume: 218 Issue: 2 Pages: 108-& Published: 1968 Times Cited: 8

(polar bear photo is a portion of a photo from metro.co.uk 2/2/07 online newspaper; the other image is from the Calhoun paper cited over 400 times).

CIC Librarians visit Bloomington for Conference

2009-05-19T09:06:00.011-04:00

It's a veritable SLA-PAM reunion this week...

The famous Kris Fowler (Minnesota), affable gentleman Travis Warwick (Wisconsin), and legendary Bob Michaelson (Northwestern) are visiting Bloomington this week for the Center for Libraries Initiatives Conference "Off the Shelf: Defining Collection Services" Conference. All three came by the Swain Hall Library yesterday after the sessions for a brief tour and walk-a-bout. I think we should invest more in these smaller, local conferences...great to see everyone!

Heros of Dead Week

2009-04-29T09:04:00.013-04:00

Dead week, the period of quiet and calm before finals week, is almost over. It seems fitting to identify and recognize the heros of dead week. Is it Arlen Specter, for leaving the Republican Party to become a Democrat? No, it doesn't matter what party he's in, he ought to simply do his homework, think long term when it comes to his state and country, and lead responsibly (Mr. Specter has nothing to do with this topic, but I kept hearing his name all day yesterday.)
Is it Jimbo Wales, co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia, and currently President of Wikia, Inc., is he a dead week hero? No, though he's done, and is doing very interesting things.
The Heros of Dead Week are really two groups of people: the Monroe County Public Librarians who offer and teach free courses on MS Word 2007 and Excel. These classes are often superior to fee-based courses, and help lots of people struggling in a difficult economy learn things, better themselves, and become more efficient, adept computer users. We're all stuck using computers, we may as well use them efficiently so we can walk away from them and do something that's actually meaningful, and an entire day isn't wasted.

The second group of heros are the UITS employed undergraduates working for close to minimum wage in the Wells Library Information Commons and campus clusters; they're often self-taught experts, helping their peers with spreadsheets, web-work, Acrobat, and offering short-cuts and advice to thousands of students trying to finish assignments and semester-end projects.

Hats off to these Heros of Dead Week, the Swain Hall Library salutes you. (Above, this is a World War I poster from Artstor...I added some text to it, so I guess I'm citing this as an Artstor resource, and you're able to view because Artstor makes this available to us. But when I think about it, is it really Artstor that provided this image? Apparently this image is from a University of Minnesota repository. Ok, well who deposited there? I don't know.)

Handbook of Mathematical Functions

2009-04-21T15:31:00.005-04:00

For almost a half century Milton Abramowitz's Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables has been poured over by physicists, engineers, and other scientists across the globe. Full-text now available, no fee.

http://tinyurl.com/bp7xof

Trends in Mathematics Exchange Programs

2009-04-14T10:42:00.003-04:00

For decades university libraries here and abroad have been exchanging scholarly journals - trading them, not paying for them; it's been a successful alternative model to building libraries without paying institutional subscriptions to various titles. Recently exchange partners are beginning to back away from this in part because "just in case" collecting of print material is valued less today than previously. Click on this image to view the Japan Academy's letter to the Indiana University Mathematics Journal.

Using Facebook to track down the disorganized

2009-04-03T10:37:00.005-04:00

Just this morning an Enrico Fermi dover book, Thermodynamics, was returned to Swain Hall Library after we tracked down the former summer REU student (research experience for undergraduates) on facebook. He's currently doing graduate work at Bryn Mawr...he wasn't really stealing it, he just sort of found that he forgot to get this back to us in 2007. Alright, well whatever. Fortunately his name was somewhat unusual, so we didn't need to explore dozens of "Johnson"s or Smiths.

Lost Swain Hall book found in Atlanta at Georgia Tech Library

2009-04-01T14:10:00.011-04:00

Thanks to Gladys T. at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Swain Hall Library has a book back that's been lost for the past 7 years. If you click on this image, you'll notice a little water mark in the upper left and right hand corners. This may be an accident, but I think what's likely is someone took water and attempted to fade out the SWAIN HALL LIBRARY stamp. You'll notice also that someone, probably a student in Georgia, wrote his/her name on the inside.

I think it's unlikely this is the person that took the book, but I suppose it could be, I don't know. [April 1, 2009 update, no, it's not the person who wrote her name on the inside cover 简体中文版, I sent her an e-mail asking about this book, and she actually still had the receipt from the Amazon transaction, so she e-mailed that back. (airbrushed out her name at her request) She purchased it online from Pro Quo Books...I'm not very impressed with Pro Quo Books. Here's a relatively new, high demand book that they've acquired, clearly a library book with all the markings and an intact call number still on the spine...they somehow acquired it, turned a blind eye to the fact that it was and remains a library book, and resold it to a Georgia Tech student for $10.94. Here's a little free advice Pro Quo Books - why don't you schedule a staff meeting and say to everyone "Look, don't buy and then turn around and resell stolen books. It's illegal, ok?" There were no "withdrawn" stamps on that book and no indication that it had been legitimately removed from the collection. How hard is that? You appear to be a big online book dealer operation on the web...show a little responsibility and respect for the law. ]

This book is associated with a different person, a former IU student, an undergrad that graduated probably around 2002. She was barred from the IU Libraries because we couldn't get a current address for her, but she still has four science books checked out that are 7 years overdue. More on this when I follow-up. It looks to me like she has a facebook page...

What do you know about Bloomington, Indiana high schools?

2009-03-30T08:10:00.006-04:00

(this photo is from an article by Chris Howell, Herald Times, 3/7/09)
What most Hoosiers are aware of today is that Bloomington South beat Ft. Wayne Snider for the state basketball championship! Congratulations team, and hats off to Snider, a great team from my home town.

Now, let me climb onto my high horse and tell you what you ought to know. What you, your spouse, your kids, and parents ought to know and pay attention to is the fact that Bloomington North placed first in this year's State Science Olympiad held the same day, and Bloomington South placed a close second. I would be willing to bet that if you polled Indiana residents about the science olympiad, few could tell you what the event is, let alone the winners. I like basketball just as much as everyone else, but I stopped being a fan a few years ago. I got sick of a stupid environment that permits "The Big 10 Channel" to come into being, for example, and sick of other things.1

What happened to a possible culture and community value system that would rank the exploration into energy sources, for example, at least as important as hitting a jump shot? Alright, this posting is starting to ooze with self-righteousness, so I'll shut up. Still...

(this photo is from an IPFW science olympiad site, see http://www.ipfw.edu/as/Scienceolympiad/photos7.htm)

1 11/18/09 update, after sitting in a Blmgtn Faculty Council mtg. yesterday, I'm changing my mind about the Big 10 Channel...some schools like Purdue are offering programs that go beyond sports. More on this later.

James P. Sethna's "Statistical Mechanics" is available online

2009-03-02T07:46:00.003-05:00

Hats off to James Sethna, from Cornell's Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. His Oxford University Press book Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity is available online.

On a related topic, see Joseph Storch's Chronicle of Higher Ed commentary titled "Needed: a Single Electronic Source for Textbooks". From the article: "...and no more incentive to meaninglessly update textbooks simply to sell new editions."

His closing remark: "Now that we are firmly in the digital age, it is time to shift the paradigm for students from a system of information for sale to one where unlimited access is a basic right."