PolyThinkers Pad

The library has been notified that the IEEE electronic journal service will be unavailable for approximately 4 hours this Saturday, March 15. This is due to an upgrade scheduled to start at about 11:00am EDT. If you need to download articles from IEEE, we hope you can plan around this service interruption. IEEE apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause and believes that the upgrade will result in better service.

An international group of leading technological thinkers identified the biggest challenges for engineers in the 21st century. Their conclusions are now available in the report, Grand Challenges for Engineering. The National Academy of Engineering released the report, which identifies 14 areas awaiting engineering solutions, on February 15, 2008.

Here’s the full list of challenges from the academy’s experts:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Ever thought of your out dated computer as a work of art? Perhaps you’ll change your perspective after seeing Mark Richard’s remarkable photographs of old school computers.

Richard’s book, Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers, reveals modern technology’s evolution by combining computer history with a series of striking photographs of the world’s most renowned computer collection, the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Pictured above is Apple 1, a far cry from MacBook Air, it’s the first computer built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs back in 1976.

Sometimes it’s easy to think our electronic devices have minds of their own. No doubt we’ve all wanted to yell at our computers at some point for behaving badly, and some of us probably have. But has it ever yelled back?

It’s not as far fetched as it may sound. Kelly Dobson of MIT’s Media Lab created a blender that is interactive, sensitive and “talks” back. Blendie, as it is affectionately known, is voice operated and changes speed with low and high pitched growling. Click the video above for an amusing demonstration.

Not only does this little machine blend engineering, psychology, and design - Blendie whips up a mean margarita!

Service to the IEEE digital library has been restored.

Please note, on Saturday November 10, IEEE will be upgrading their digital library so you may experience an interuption in service for approximately 2-4 hours between 9 am and 1 pm. The update will include the following features:

• Tabbed search results, including a beta test of Application Notes, practical content for working engineers
• Citation (Known Item) search, RefWorks/BibTeX citation download, and improved author search
• Subscriptions to IEEE Expert Now educational courses available through the IEEE Xplore platform

TechXtra is a free service which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, thesis & dissertations, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.

From the website:

TechXtra searches parts of the Web that Google doesn’t, and TechXtra helps you find subject-based information, which Google doesn’t do very well. Many of the things you’ll find through TechXtra come from the ‘Hidden Web’, and are not indexed by Google.

An important note: Search Dibner’s subscription databases first since we may have paid access to some of the resources you will find on TechXtra. Also remember that if they are not free and we don’t have a subscription, you may always make a request using our online document delivery form.

TechXtra is now available in the list of Research Tools in the blog’s right sidebar. Give Google a rest and check out the other great tools listed there when you want to conduct a more focused search.

With the rise of Open Access and advances in cyberinfrastructure, scholarly communication is in the midst of upheaval. What will this mean for the academic world, the research community, and the advancement of science overall? These are some of the questions addressed by that the latest issue of CTWatch Quarterly: “The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfratructure”

CTWatch Quarterly is an online journal that focuses on cyberinfrastructure related research critical to collaboration and information dissemination within the science community. Past issues are available online in the Issues Archive.