Science at Collins

WolframAlpha is out and worth trying out today. It’s hard to tell whether its future will live up to its claims, but it’s certainly fascinating. (And certainly programmed with a sense of humor. Click the image at left).

It’s tricky to get used to, since it’s not a fancier Google. It won’t find references to concepts or ideas, or pull back articles or web sites, and it chokes up on excess verbiage.

What it will do is pull back data and perform some analyses. (You might be clued in quicker than me by the little orange = in the search box).

So, no, I can’t find out everything out there about Tacoma—but I can find out what the weather was like in 1980—or any year back to 1939. Or the per capita income.

Additionally, since WolframAlpha uses Mathematica technology, mathematical questions are a strong point. Enter a formula to see it plotted out and presented in alternative representations.

Note the link at the bottom for sources of information when a question involves data. It’s explicitly not a citation explaining the data’s provenance, but it helps guide the user toward more information.

WolframAlpha is clearly still in the early stages of development, but it’s very interesting to play around with and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Environmental History Resources is a well-built site that collects and promotes environmental history sources. Maintained by Dr. Jan Oosthoek at the University of Ediburgh (who has published a companion teaching site), the site serves as an approachable starting point for students’ orientation to environmental history and as a resource for finding multimedia learning reinforcements like podcasts.

Bibliographies divided by topic and geography are available as starting points for the interested student, and a series of podcasts, vodcasts, and creative-commons licensed essays are available as well.

It’s easy to use “read a scholarly article” as a shorthand for “consume reputable information”. In many cases, it’s a viable shorthand. However, as more and more articles are presented digitally and divorced from their context, students will need to learn more skepticism and rely on critical thinking rather than visual cues to determine scholarly content.

This imperative becomes clearer when we consider the breaking news of Elsevier’s numerous publicity journals, paid for by Merck. Read more at Forbes.

Between 2002 and 2005, Elsevier created a “scholarly journal”,  the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine as a promotion for Merck in return for an undisclosed sum of money. The ‘journal’ hit many of the key identifiers that suggest an unbiased scholarly journal to an observer: ISSN, editorial statement, publisher’s reputation, article formats. Copies were distributed to doctors, and no affiliation with Merck was made public anywhere in the publication until the fifth issue.

As the story developed, Elsevier confirmed six other questionable journals. All have now ceased publication, and Elsevier believes the situation was confined to Australian publications. However, they did not disclose whether any companies other than Merck had paid for similar journals.

Elsevier has reviewed their standards in the intervening years and now vows to disclose sponsorship more carefully in the future.

While on the one hand, this seems like a distant problem from a college campus, since the journals were not listed by Medline or  ScienceDirect, and thus were unlikely to be used by students, on the other hand it’s a call to better develop students’ information literacy skills for the sake of their future information needs.

As many science students will be health professionals and all students will be health care consumers, it will be important for students to be able to not only  to distinguish a scholarly journal from a popular source, but also to look keenly at articles and publications themselves.

• Bloomfield, Victor A., and Esam E. El-Fakahany, eds. 2008. The Chicago guide to your career in science : A toolkit for students and postdocs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Fishman, Stephen. 2008. The public domain : How to find & use copyright-free writings, music, art & more. 4th ed. Berkeley, CA: Nolo.
• Johnson, George. 2008. The ten most beautiful experiments. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

• Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, and Christine Blondel, eds. 2008. Science and spectacle in the European Enlightenment. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Pub.
• Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of age in second life : An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Carlson, Elof Axel. 2008. Neither gods nor beasts : How science is changing who we think we are. Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
• Eaton, William R. 2005. Boyle on fire : The mechanical revolution in scientific explanation. New York: Continuum.
• French, Francis, and Colin Burgess, eds. 2007. In the shadow of the moon : A challenging journey to tranquility, 1965-1969. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• Galison, Peter, Gerald James Holton, and S. S. Schweber, eds. 2008. Einstein for the 21st century : His legacy in science, art, and modern culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle, eds. 2008. Motoring : The highway experience in America. Athens Chicago: University of Georgia Press .
• King, Christa Knellwolf, and Jane R. Goodall, eds. 2008. Frankenstein’s science : Experimentation and discovery in Romantic culture, 1780-1830. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
• McNeil, Maureen. 2007. Feminist cultural studies of science and technology. New York: Routledge.
• Pursell, Carroll. 2007. The machine in America : A social history of technology. 2nd ed. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Robson, Eleanor. 2008. Mathematics in ancient Iraq : A social history. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Rudman, Peter S. 2007. How mathematics happened : The first 50,000 years. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Wexler, Alice. 2008. The woman who walked into the sea : Huntington’s and the making of a genetic disease. New Haven: Yale University Press.

• Bryan, Jeff C. 2009. Introduction to nuclear science. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
• Dosch, Hans Günter. 2008. Beyond the nanoworld : Quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. Wellesley, Mass.: AK Peters.
• Ferraro, Rafael. 2007. Einstein’s space-time : An introduction to special and general relativity. New York: Springer.
• Galison, Peter, Gerald James Holton, and S. S. Schweber, eds. 2008. Einstein for the 21st century : His legacy in science, art, and modern culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

• Beck, József. 2008. Combinatorial games : Tic-tac-toe theory. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.Dowker, Ann, ed. 2008. Mathematical difficulties : Psychology and intervention. 1st ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
• Hardy, GH. 2008. A course of pure mathematics.  New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kenner, Hugh. 2003. Geodesic math and how to use it.  Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Kung, Joseph P. S., Gian-Carlo Rota, and Catherine H. Yan, eds. 2009. Combinatorics : The rota way. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Robson, Eleanor. 2008. Mathematics in ancient Iraq : A social history. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Rudman, Peter S. 2007. How mathematics happened : The first 50,000 years. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

• Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of age in second life : An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Pezzè, Mauro, and Michal Young, eds. 2008. Software testing and analysis : Process, principles, and techniques. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
• Schumann, David W., and Esther Thorson, eds. 2007. Internet advertising : Theory and research. Rev. ed. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

SciFinder is now working with IE8, so users will no longer have to use the C0mpatibility View settings.

However, difficulties printing detailed reference answers have been reported, with sections of content missing from the printouts. SciFinder’s publisher, CAS, suggests exporting your answers to a PDF or RTF file and then printing from the file until the problem is resolved later in the year.

• Campbell, Kurt M., ed. 2008. Climatic cataclysm : The foreign policy and national security implications of climate change. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
• Doremus, Holly D., and A. Dan Tarlock, eds. 2008. Water war in the Klamath Basin : Macho law, combat biology, and dirty politics. Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Fagan, Brian. 2008. The great warming : Climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
• Jacobson, Michael C., ed. 2000. Earth system science : From biogeochemical cycles to global change. San Diego Calif. : Academic Press.
• Kennedy, Donald, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, eds. 2008. Science magazine’s state of the planet, 2008-2009. Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Mass, Cliff. 2008. The weather of the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Oliveira, Jose Antonio Puppim. 2008. Implementation of environmental policies in developing countries : A case of protected areas and tourism in Brazil. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Spellman, Frank R. 2008. The science of water : Concepts and applications. 2nd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
• Starr, Steven Producer, Irena Director Salina, Caitlin Dixon Film editor., Christophe Composer Julien, Group Entertainment, and Oscilloscope Pictures, eds. 2008. Flow [videorecording] : For love of water. Anamorphic widescreen format (1:78:1) ed. New York, N.Y.: Oscilloscope Pictures.
• Stern, N. H., and Great Britain. Treasury, eds. 2007. The economics of climate change : The stern review. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.