From Clement C. Maxwell Library...

October 30, 2007
From Nature News

Autumn leaves turn fiery-red in an attempt to store up as much goodness as possible from leaves and soil before a tree settles down for the winter.
The worse the quality of soil, the more effort a tree will put in to recovering nutrients from its leaves, and the redder they get.

That's the conclusion that Emily Habinck from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, came to after looking at trees in a flood plain and in an adjacent upland area. The soil in the upland area was low in nutrients, and the leaves there were bright red. In the floodplain, where the soil was packed full of goodness, the autumn leaves remained yellow.

"In a nutshell: the redder a leaf is, the more nutrients it is going to recycle," explains Habinck, who presents her findings at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, today.

The full article is available at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071029/full/news.2007.202.html.

**All World Scientific and Imperical College Press Journals to Offer Open Access Option**

Authors now have the option to pay $2,500 for their articles to be Open Access. Open access choice will apply to ALL of World Scientific and Imperial College Press journals with electronic version.

World Scientific and Imperial College Press is aware of the scientifc community's desire for more open access publications so that scientific information can be shared by all. Thus, We have decided to offer authors the choice to do so. Nearly 6,000 Research articles every year will now have the potential to be open access.

More infomration may be found here:
http://www.worldscinet.com/authors/openaccess.shtml

**New Open Access Journal- Optics and Photonics Letters**

World Scientific is also happy to announce that we will be launching our first fully open access journal, Optics and Photonics Letters in 2008. Optics and Photonics Letters (OPL) is an open access journal which offers rapid dissemination of original and timely results in various fields of optics and photonics, with emphasis on peer-reviewed short communications.

Articles submitted for publication before January 2008 will enjoy a 50% waiver on publication charges. Please visit http://www.worldscinet.com/opl to find out!

October 29, 2007
From American Scientist

As children, we played in the dirt, ate fruit without washing it, licked the juice from our grubby fingers and never fell sick, if memory serves.
This last detail probably isn't quite true, but it's also possible that something has changed since we were kids - something in the food itself, or in society, that makes us more vulnerable than before.

... It is indeed true that, for fresh produce, the number of outbreaks of food poisoning caused by microorganisms has risen in recent years. There are many potential explanations for this trend. Perhaps most significantly, people are eating more fresh fruits, vegetables and salads than ever before, and more meals are eaten outside the home at restaurants or public gatherings ...

... [The] most effective strategy is to keep produce free from harmful pathogens in the first place. If pre- and postharvest practices are stringent enough, we should be able to eat any produce with confidence.

The Library does carry the American Scientist journal. You can also read this article in the following databases:

Academic Search Premier
MAS Ultra: School Edition
MasterFILE Premier

Off-campus users need to log in first.

This is the first report from the third wave of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a study of a nationally representative sample of children born in 2001. The report provides descriptive information about these children when they were about 4 years old. It also includes results from language, literacy, mathematics, and fine motor skills assessments, and information on children's nonparental education and care experiences. For example, the report shows that 65 percent of children between 48 and 57 months of age were proficient in number and shape recognition, a component of the mathematics assessment. Proficiency varied by several child and family characteristics such as socioeconomic status. Forty percent of children from low SES families were proficient compared to 87 percent of children from high SES families. For experiences with nonparental care and education settings, the report shows that approximately 20 percent of the cohort did not regularly attend such settings. The primary nonparental care and education setting was a non-Head Start center for 45 percent of the cohort, a Head Start center for approximately 13 percent of the cohort, a home-based relative setting for 13 percent of the cohort, and a home-based non-relative setting for 8 percent of the cohort.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

The Library has a one month trial for the PRISMA database. PRISMA Publicaciones y Revistas Sociales y Humanísticas is a comprehensive reference resource providing 100 full-text scholarly journals in the social sciences and humanities for the interdisciplinary academic study of Hispanic and Latin America and the Caribbean Basin. Please try the database and send your comments to Kendra St. Aubin at kstaubin@bridgew.edu. by November 30.

October 25, 2007
From the Washington Post

If you need satellite images to put the news of the day in perspective, the news is probably not good. Satellite photography is the preferred method for announcing the arrival of hurricanes and it has become indispensable to showing the scale of the fires that are ravaging Southern California this week. It is also a popular visual accompaniment to stories about global warming and disappearing ice caps.

Since the first pictures of the Earth taken from outside its atmosphere (by a camera on a V-2 rocket launched in 1946), there has been something uncanny about pictures of the planet. They confirm, of course, that the Earth is round. But they also capture a frailty in the planet, its loneliness in space.

In Milton's "Paradise Lost," just before the Devil takes up residence in the Garden of Eden and tempts its original residents into sin, he arrives on Earth out of the realm of chaos, and sees our planet rather the way the first astronauts may have seen it. Milton calls our planet "this pendent world." As if it were just hanging there, unprotected, innocent, waiting to be despoiled.

The full article is available in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to acces this article.

October 25, 2007

BioMed Central today announced the launch of Biology Image Library, an online resource that provides access to over 11,000 carefully selected biology-related images. This is the latest service from BioMed Central, part of the Science Navigation Group of companies which was also responsible for the creation of images.MD, a popular medical image resource.

The Library is a new subscription-based service offering access to an annotated selection of high-quality biological images, movies, illustrations and animations. Subscribers may make royalty-free use of images in the collection for research and educational purposes, while commercial usage rights will be available for an additional fee.

"Biology Image Library will be an invaluable resource for biological researchers and educators" said Matthew Cockerill, Publisher, BioMed Central. "Researchers often maintain their own collections of useful images, but until now there has been no easy way for others to find them. By annotating the best images, making them searchable and accessible, and licensing them to allow convenient reuse, Biology Image Library will help academics and other biologists to illustrate their work and to create eye-catching presentations and course material."

Biology Image Library gives researchers, teachers and students an easy way to find and download high-quality visual material. All content comes from sources that are peer-reviewed by academic editors prior to publication online, so researchers can be sure that the images are scientifically reliable. Subjects covered include developmental biology, histology & pathology, immunology, microbiology & parasitology, molecular & cellular biology, neuroscience and plant biology.

The Biology Image Library is continuously working to expand its collection of images. Potential contributors should email:
info@biologyimagelibrary.com or see http://www.biologyimagelibrary.com/contribute for more information.

To view Biology Image Library and register for a free trial, visit www.biologyimagelibrary.com.

Collected on October 22, 2007 by ResourceShelf
Note: Media Should Read DigitalGlobe Attribution and Publication Guidelines

+ National Interagency Fire Center

+ Resource of the Week: Learn About Wildfires

+ CAL FIRE ||| Fire Information

+ Bird’s Eye Imagery of Several Affected Southern California Areas (via MS Live)

+ San Diego County Emergency Services

+ San Diego Union-Tribune Map and Facts

+ Real-Time Access to California Highway Patrol Incident Database

+ FEMA: National Situation Update

Radio
++ KFMB-AM (Windows Media)
++ KPBS (NPR)

TV
++ KNSD (includes live video streams)
++ CBS 8

Thanks to Michael McCulley for his help with this post.

See Also: Mapping The Southern California Fires (via SEL)

See Also: NOAA Weather Radio

See Also: NASA Earth Observatory Daily Update

See Also: Operational Significant Event Imagery (NOAA, Published Daily) ||| Direct to Latest Imagery

UPDATE: Two Images From DigitalGlobe Using QuickBird Satellite

These are natural color, 4-meter QuickBird satellite images featuring the wildfires in Ramona and Santa Clarita, California.

Global warming is not a myth. It is real, and its affects are being felt by the people who have made their life in the Arctic for generations. Come hear the story of Peter Irniq, Inuit, activist, and former Commissioner of the Territory of Nunavut as he presents "An Inuit Perspective on Global Climate Change" on Friday October 26 at 4:00 p.m. in Manning Hall, Brown University.

Visit the Haffenreffer Museum's location in Bristol on Saturday and Sunday, October 27-28 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. to watch Peter Irniq build an inuksuk, that will stand on the Museum grounds for years to come. Inuksuit are stone figures built by the Inuit as hunting and navigation aids, coordination points, and memorials. Crafts, tours, and games will be a part of this family event. Plus, Mr. Irniq will speak about Inuit culture in an informal lecture each day.

Sponsored by the Canadian Consulate, the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs and ARCUS, donors to the 2007 Barbara Greenwald Memorial Arts Program, and Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.

October 23, 2007
From the Washington Post

George H.W. Bush: Call your dermatologist. New research suggests that broccoli, the vegetable that the former president famously demonized as inedible, can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And as Bush would surely appreciate, he would not even have to eat it.

In tests on people and hairless mice, a green smear of broccoli-sprout extract blocked the potentially cancer-causing damage usually inflicted by sunlight and showed potential advantages over sunscreens. The product is still in the early stages of development.

... But scientists said the research represents a significant advance because the extract works not by screening out the sun's rays -- which has the downside of blocking sun-induced Vitamin D production -- but by turning on the body's natural cancer-fighting machinery. Once stimulated, those mechanisms work for days, long after the extract is washed away.

The full article is availabe in the Library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this article.

The report was prepared with the aid of Gary Langer and the ABC polling unit. It provides a detailed analysis of a recent poll of Iraqi public opinion on the war, sectarian cleansing, the Iraqi government, US forces and the surge, and many of the other issues that show the state of Iraq hearts and minds. It also shows the differences in such public opinion by sect, ethnicity, governorate, and major city where the sample of public opinion was large enough to provide a valid picture that could be broken out into such detail.

The results should be reviewed in detail. Polls do not provide some simply punch line insights, they rather provide a mosaic of the various attitudes Iraqis have towards key issues. Unless they are reviewed in detail, picking out one trend or result can be more misleading than helpful. This is particularly true of the results in this analysis. Some are consistent with the results of previous polls over a period of several years. Some reflect the initial impact of changes in US strategy and the surge at a time when the degree of added security in Baghdad and the impact of the tribal awakening in Anbar was less apparent to most Iraqis than it is today.

The reader should also remember that the results in this report do reflect “hearts and minds” on a broad level. Decision makers often act on their own, very different perceptions. Violence and extremism are also generally driven by the views and actions of small minorities. Broad popular support for violence is rare, but this can have limited impact in a nation where minorities are willing to kill and use extreme violence with or without popular support.

To celebrate Architecture Week in Australia, the National Library of Australia/PictureAustralia has compiled in a single location a number of picture trails loaded with images of Australian achitecture.

Trails bring together highlights from the collections of all the participating agencies on particular themes, such as Australian animals or Bushrangers. When you click on a trail, a selection of images relating to that theme will be displayed.

Picture Australia is an Internet based service that allows you to search many significant online pictorial collections at the same time.

Maxwell Library will be having a candy jar contest starting on October 29 and ending on Oct 31st. Filled candy jars will be held at each service area (Circ, Reference, ERC, Doc Delivery, and Special Collections). The box for completed entry forms will be held at the reference desk.

RULES

* All enrolled students are encouraged to guess the total number of candies in each jar.

* 1 filled jar will be at each service desk. A total of 5 jars throughout the library.

* Guess the total number of candies in as many of the 5 jars that you like. You do not have to guess all 5 jars to be eligible to win.

* Guess as close as you can without going over the number of candies in the jar.

* If you exceed the number of candies, you are not eligible for that jar, but you still could win on another jar.

* All entries must be placed in the entry box by 11pm on Oct. 31st to be eligible to win.

* Winners will be chosen from the closest guess or in the event of a tie – the winner will be selected from a drawing from those entries.

* 5 Prize candy jars will be awarded.

Come to have fun!

Good Luck!

Grove Music Online includes the full text of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (second edition). Grove Music Online is regularly updated. Limited to one user at a time.

To access this database on-campus, click on the Research Tools link on the Library's home page under Research Help section. The database is listed under Music section. Off-campus users can use the Use the Library from Home link on the left menu of the Library's home page to access this database.

From Center for American Progress

The Senate continues the budget battle this week with the consideration of the Labor, Health, and Human Services Appropriations bill, which sets levels for education spending, as well as other key domestic programs. President Bush has already stated he plans to veto the bill because it provides $64.9 billion for the Education Department. Bush’s proposed budget appropriates only $61 billion—$3.9 billion less than Congress’ budget and $1.3 billion less than the Education Department received last year. The Bush administration, in the same year that it is spending $50 billion each month on operations in Iraq, plans on vetoing a bill because it increases funding for American schools by $2.6 billion, among other domestic budget increases. What’s even more surprising is that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings actually announced back in February that Bush’s newly proposed budget would increase education funding by 41 percent relative to 2001. A look at the president’s budget tells a different story. As this new interactive map shows, 44 out of 50 states would see reductions in federal funding for elementary and secondary education for fiscal year 2008 if the Bush administration got its way. Rather than bold increases, states on average will see a -1.4 percent decrease in elementary and secondary school funding.

Yemen’s economy is highly dependent on oil production, with the country’s oil exports accounting for around 85 percent of export revenues and 33 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2006, around 240,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) of oil was exported, primarily to Asian markets, including China, India, and Thailand. Recent high oil prices have increased Yemen’s hard currency receipts and remittances from Yemeni workers in other Persian Gulf countries. Nonetheless, Yemen continues to be the Middle East’s poorest county with a 2006 GDP per capita of US$ 880 according to the World Bank. Inflation was an average of 15.5 percent in 2006, partially resulting from the deteriorating value of the U.S. dollar.

More information about Yemen is available at Energy Information Administration web site.

Abstract
Most of the judges in America are elected. Yet the institution of the elected judiciary is in trouble, perhaps in crisis. The pressures of campaigning, particularly raising money, have produced an intensity of electioneering that many observers see as damaging to the institution itself. In an extraordinary development, four justices of the Supreme Court recently expressed concern over possible loss of trust in state judicial systems. Yet mechanisms that states have put in place to strike a balance between the accountability values of an elected judiciary and rule of law values of unbiased adjudication are increasingly invalidated by the federal courts. This article presents an argument against this transformation of the American judiciary. It is aimed at conservatives, for they are the driving force in the movement to make campaigns for judicial offices exactly like campaigns for other “political” offices. I seek to establish, as a matter of policy, that conservative principles argue for a presumption against politicization. I review the judicial “parity” debate, and conclude that conservatives have a tremendous stake in the health and viability of state courts - and in perceptions of the quality of those courts. Broader issues of federalism are at stake as well - particularly the “laboratory” value of state experimentation in seeking the optimal balance between accountability and rule of law values. With this policy perspective in place, the article then examines the Supreme Court decision in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, the major victory for the pro-politicization position. I argue that White rests on flawed premises and should be narrowly construed.

The full article is available at Boston College Law School web site.

The Harry Potter Contest proved to be Maxwell Library’s most popular contest yet. The contest ended on October 6, 2007 and three lucky winners have been chosen from the entries that had all the correct responses. Maxwell Library would like to congratulate the following winners.

The answers to the Harry Potter Contest are now available.

The American Physical Society is pleased to announce that both of the original articles describing the work that led to this year's physics Nobel Prize have been made "Free-to-Read" so they can be downloaded without a subscription. Links to the articles follow:

Enhanced magnetoresistance in layered magnetic structures with antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange ( G. Binasch, P. Gruenberg, F. Saurenbach, and W. Zinn, Phys. Rev. B 39, 4828 (1989)): http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v39/i7/p4828_1

Giant Magnetoresistance of (001)Fe/(001)Cr Magnetic Superlattices (M. N. Baibich, J. M. Broto, A. Fert, F. Nguyen Van Dau, F. Petroff, P. Eitenne, G. Creuzet, A. Friederich, and J.
Chazelas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 2472 (1988)): http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v61/i21/p2472_1

In addition, to honor the 50th anniversary celebration of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Theory of Superconductivity being held Oct 10-13 at the Univ. of Illinois, the APS has also made the three original BCS papers "Free-to-Read"

Bound Electron Pairs in a Degenerate Fermi Gas (L.N. Cooper, Phys. Rev. 104, 1189 (1956)) Microscopic Theory of Superconductivity (J. Bardeen, L.N. Cooper: http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v104/i4/p1189_1

and

J. R. Schrieffer, Phys. Rev. 106, 162 (1957)) Theory of Superconductivity (J. Bardeen, L. N. Cooper, and J. R.
Schrieffer, Phys. Rev. 108, 1175 (1957)): http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v106/i1/p162_1

We are honored to have published these seminal works that have become the basis for many important technological developments.

Sincerely,
Gene D. Sprouse, Editor in Chief, American Physical Society
Joseph W. Serene, Treasurer/Publisher, American Physical Society

October 8, 2007
Mark Henderson, Science Editor
The Times (London)

The papers of one of Britain's greatest scientists, which were lost for centuries and saved for the nation in a 1-million-pound sale last year, became available to read online [yesterday].

The innovative "digital folio" provides unprecedented public access to hundreds of pages of manuscript notes and minutes kept by Robert Hooke, who is sometimes described as Britain's Leonardo da Vinci.

The remarkable collection contains Hooke's minutes of early meetings of the Royal Society, taken while he was curator of experiments and then secretary of the national academy of science, between 1661 and 1692. They record many of the scientist's own experiments and others conducted by figures such as Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, as well as the disputes and rivalries that arose among the founding fathers of British science.

The full article is available in the library's LexisNexis database. Off-campus users need to log in first.

The winners are:

Congratulations!

October 4, 2007
The Chronicle of Higher Education

This week the Smithsonian Institution opened a brand-new museum—online. It is the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian’s 19th and newest museum.

The museum opened on the Web, as a virtual collection for scholarship and education, because bricks and mortar won’t be laid down in Washington, D.C., until 2012. It’s the first time a major museum has opened a virtual presence before putting up a real building.

The Web museum highlights a collection called “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” portraits and photographs of people who stood against oppression in various ways, from Frederick Douglass to Ella Fitzgerald to Malcolm X.

The museum also has a “Memory Book”, which lets site visitors upload their memories in the form of stories, images, or audio recordings. An online map, which users can navigate, shows how these diverse memories are linked to each other and to content created by the museum to spotlight people, places, issues, and moments in African-American history.—Josh Fischman

All of the respondents to the Library’s trial preferred Social Work Abstracts on the EBSCOHost platform. Our subscription has been switched from SilverPlatter to the EBSCO version, effective immediately. Among the advantages are the ability to cross-search with other EBSCO databases and to link from Social Work Abstracts to full text articles.

October 1, 2007
Publishers Weekly

Amazon is getting into the author-writing contest arena, launching the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award today in cooperation with Penguin and Hewlett-Packard. Amazon will accept submissions through November 5 and the winner will have his or her novel published by Penguin, which is also offering a $25,000 advance. PW will serve as preliminary judges of the material as well.

The contest is free and open to unpublished authors in 20 countries who have English-language manuscripts (complete contest rules and requirements are available at www.amazon.com/abna). Amazon, which will accept up to 5,000 entries, is assembling a panel of customers who have posted the most, and best, reviews on its site to serve as the judges for the first round. After the submissions have been cut to 1,000, a team put together by PW will give a full review to each manuscript, and the review and excerpt will be posted on the Amazon Web site where customers can read, rate and review the offerings. The PW team -- of existing and new reviewers -- will be paid to administer the reviews, and reviewers will remain anonymous. Amazon is paying PW's administrative costs only.

Penguin will pare the 1,000 manuscripts down to 100 and those will undergo "a full editorial review process," said Penguin director of online sales and marketing Tim McCall. Once Penguin cuts the submissions to 10, excerpts will again be posted on the Amazon site where customers will vote for the winner. Voting will close March 31 and the winner announced April 7. McCall said Penguin will release the book, "in the appropriate format," and he hopes to have at least a galley of the book on hand at BEA.

There have been a number of changes to the databases we get through the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) and Southeastern Massachusetts Library System (SEMLS).

The Gale Infotrac database Professional Collection was replaced by Educator’s Reference Complete. Educator’s Reference Complete includes more than 1,100 periodicals and 200 reports, most in full-text. This database covers multiple levels of education from preschool to college and every educational specialty. We also added Gale’s Massachusetts History Online, a collection of full-text articles from 50 magazines and local newspapers for coverage of Massachusetts people, places and historical events.

There were a number of changes in our online newspaper coverage. The Cape Cod Times is the only newspaper remaining in the Newsbank collection. The following newspapers had links changed from Newsbank to Proquest: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and Worcester Telegram. We also added a number of new newspapers to Proquest including the Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield), BusinessWest (Chicopee), Gazette (Haverhill), New England Business, North Adams Transcript, Plymouth County Business Review, Providence Journal, Sentinel & Enterprise (Fitchburg), Standard Times (New Bedford), Sun (Lowell)

MBLC also supplied us with the Literary Reference Center from EBSCO with full text information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes, including 27,000 plot summaries, synopses and work overviews, 140,500 author biographies, 350 literary journals, 54,000 poems, 14,500 short stories, 8400 classic texts, 4000 author interviews and more.

September 28, 2007
From the Chicago Tribune

This environmentally conscious city is already home to the headquarters of the Whole Foods organic grocery store chain, a new City Hall built mostly with recycled materials and a municipal electric utility that features solar cells on the roof of its parking lot.

The Texas capital also pays residents rebates if they install extra attic insulation or high-efficiency clothes washers. There are steep discounts on rainwater collection barrels. Low-flow toilets are practically free.

But those are just eco-baby steps compared with Austin's latest, and most ambitious, environmental quest: to lead the nation in slashing emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

The full story of this article is available in the Library's Newspaper Source database. To read the full article from off-campus, please log in first.

By Jonathon Porritt, with a new foreword by Amory B. Lovins
Earthscan, Revised Edition (September 2007)

When first published in 2005, Capitalism as if the World Matters shocked both a generation of environmentalists and a generation of business people by brushing aside their petty squabbles and artificial battle lines with a powerful argument—that the only way to save the world from fuel shortages, climate change and environmental catastrophe is to embrace a new type of capitalism, and to do it quickly.

In this substantially revised and updated edition with a new foreword by Amory B. Lovins, Jonathon Porritt—Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief environmental advisor—tackles the most pressing problems of our time and extends his powerful and controversial argument by suggesting new actions in a tightly argued and highly accessible book. New material includes in-depth coverage of the United States and the politics of climate change, the state of environmental debate and the massive upsurge in religious engagement with climate and the environment.

This October eBook of the Month is provided through the generous support of the publisher, Earthscan.

To read this free ebook on line, click the EBooks link under the Find Books, Videos, Sound Recordings link on Library's home page. The link to the October free eBook of the Month is on the right side of NetLibrary page. Creating a free user account is required if you haven't had one.