Cool photo program

I love the befunky website which lets you do all sorts of interesting things to your photographs!
http://www.befunky.com

Here is a photo of me with Martin Blume, the former Editor-in-Chief of The American Physical Society.
Marty always says, concerning new ideas in publishing: "Test on an obscure part of the garment!"  Advice I live by!

Keeping Current

I have blogged about this in the past, but a great way to keep current is to set up a Google News Alert–I came across a reminder of this on  http://mashable.com/2009/04/25/track-swine-flu/ which had a great page on tracking Swine Flu:

One of the best ways to keep up-to-date on recent changes or
breaking news is to use Google News and Google Alerts to have breaking
news emailed to you or sent to your RSS reader. Set up a Google News Alert with the keywords “swine flu” to be sure you catch any major mention of the issue.

Tips from Fondren: Nanotechnology sources

Looking for information on Nanotechnology?
Here are a few sources! (Sources may only be available to users with a Rice affliation, or another university affliation that subscribes to the material.)
Reference Works:

Schwarz, James A., Contescu, Cristian I., and Petyera, Karol, editors, 2004. Dekker encyclopedia of nanoscience and nanotechnology. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc. T174.7 .D43 or online:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713172968~db=refwork

Nalwa, Hari Singh, editor. 2001. Handbook of nanostructured materials and nanothechnology. San Diego: Academic Press. TA418.9 .N35 H36 2000

Booker, Richard. 2005. Nanotechnology for dummies. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005.  T174.7 .B66 2005

Bhushan, Bharat, editor, 2007. Springer Handbook of Nanotechnology, 2nd edition. Berlin, New York: Springer. T174.7 .S67 2007

Fondren 2.0

We are working on putting together a webpage that details all of Fondren Library's efforts at Web2.0 information.
Thought I would share the links here too:

Fondren Facebook Fan Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-TX/Fondren-Library/15587285151

Fondren Library on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/FondrenLibrary
(I want to add some content here this summer...screencasts, short videos 
etc.)

Podcasts:
http://podcast.com/show/74123/fondrenlibrarys-Podcast/

Woodson Blog:
http://woodsononline.wordpress.com/

We are looking for new places to meet you. We are thinking about Twitter, Flicker–is there a place on the Internet that you would like to see Fondren information? Let me know!

Making science accessible

I happened to come across this post from a science librarian at Penn State.

It was impressive to hear from Dr. Abraham Nemeth, the historic
mathematics professor who developed the standard system of Braille used
for math in the sciences.  Recording of the lecture available online. 
He worked on Computer Science projects at Penn State in 1968 and 1969. 
He had a map of Penn State in cloth with embroidered routes and notes
of braille
posted on locations in code for look up in another braille book.  After
studying it he could get to McAllister with no trouble on his own.  A
very amusing lecturer, I would have enjoyed sitting in his math
courses.  He had some comments about the lack of air conditioning at
Penn State dormitories.

Currently, the American Physical Society, along with John Gardner, a blind physicist and Rice alum, is working on a project to make APS journals accessible to the blind.At the 2009 Academic Publishing in Europe conference, this was a presentation on the very interesting project.

April Fools!

The jokes are coming in…here is a great one:

Continuing the trend of consolidation, the heads of the largest STM publishers will form a single, publicly-held company.  While details are still being worked out, the name of the publisher will be be Springer-Elsevier-Wiley-Blackwell, or SPEW for short.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/01/mergers-create-uber-publisher/