PolyThinkers Pad

Curious about How Well Your State’s Bridges are Doing? or about the Condition of U.S. Highway Bridges? Have a look and see the data in a visual format. The folks at IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group use visualization “as an efficient way of transferring a large amount of information from a database into an individual’s head.” They believe that visualizations become even more powerful when multiple people access them for collaborative sense making. They developed Many Eyes, a public web site that allows users to gather data, visualize it, and discuss their visualizations. They use the site as an experimental platform to test our hypotheses about the ability of visualizations to spur communication and social interaction, and how that activity may yield new insights into data. Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. The goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Have a look how it works, and tell us what you think.

Do you ever need to find quick and comprehensive statistical data on a country?  Ever interested in comparing lesser known quantitative data from two or more countries?  Have a look at the Britannica Online World Data Analyst.  “Country Snapshots” provide the basic  data on a country.  “Ranked Statistics”  lets you view the countries with the highest or lowest rank in a particular category.   “Chronological Comparisons” allows you to select one or more countries, choose a data category, and display how they compare historically in either table format or chart format.  “Current Comparisons” enable you to display the most current available data in table or chart format.    Data fields include such recognizable and high demand ones as “GNP,” “Life expectancy,” and lesser known fields like “Percent of economically active engaged in services,” and even “Roots and tubers production.”  So whether you need to do some serious research, or are just looking to indulge your curiousity, this resource is well worth your time.

Try using a subject guide next time you are not sure where to begin the research process. The librarians at Dibner library have pulled together recommended resources for each area of study offered at Polytechnic. You’ll find lists of quality web sites, professional organizations, relevant databases and more.

For general tips and helpful tools, view our Research & Writing Guide. When it comes time to write that final paper, visit Poly’s Writing Center for one-on-one assistance.

Need more help? Ask Us!

Sure, Google searches billions of web pages, but it doesn’t come close to indexing the entire internet. A vast repository of information exists on the web that search engines such as Google don’t have access to. This is commonly referred to as the “deep web” or “invisible web.” Most of the deep web is made up of the contents of specialized, searchable databases that contain high quality information such as journal articles, technical reports, and scientific data.

The best way to start your search of the deep web is with one of the many valuable subscription databases Dibner Library provides access to. You can browse databases by subject area or ask a librarian for help in selecting a database for your research.

You can also search the deep web using free search portals that dig beneath the surface web to locate subject-based information that may not be indexed by Google. For example, the Science Accelerator utilizes federated search technology which retrieves results from multiple research databases located in different departments within the U.S. Department of Energy. It includes full-text documents, bibliographic citations, ePrints, patents as well as project summaries.

Other useful search tools for digging into the deep web include:

• E-print Network
• Infomine
• Scitopia
• TechXtra

For easy access, you can find these sites and others listed in the research tools section in the right sidebar of this blog.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology. The agency publishes standards many of which are free, including Ceramics WebBook, Chemistry WebBook and Physical Reference Data. To satisfy your curiosity, check out the complete list at the NIST Data Gateway, and get to know your standards.

Did you know that with just a New York state Drivers license, or a non-driver photo id, you have access to a wealth of free resources from NOVELNY? If you don’t have one of these, you can also gain access via a public library card from anywhere in New York State, or with the New York State Library Card available to all NY State residents upon request.

Searching the site is a snap. If you know the name of the magazine or journal you want, simply type it into the “Search magazines and newspapers by title” box. If you don’t know the name of a magazine, or don’t care from which available publication the information comes, use “Quick Database Search” to match your keywords with all the available resources.

The NOVEL library includes fewer resources than our own database collection or the resources of the major NYC public library systems, so it is best used as an additional avenue of information rather than as your main source.

In accordance with a new spending bill signed by President Bush last month, all research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal. Seeing as NIH has a $29 billion research budget, this new directive should open up a world of new opportunities for online research.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

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

Google’s goal to “build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world” is certainly an ambitious one. But debate about Google Books persists and not everyone is eager to sign up to partner with Google (as mentioned in a previous post). So while we might be a far cry from a universal library, there is an extraordinary amount of books currently available online.

To help you navigate the ever expanding collection of online books, Dibner Library has added a Guide to Online Books to our reference links. The guide lists a number of websites that you can use to search or browse for books online. It also includes links to smaller, specialized collections offering math and science books. Remember, none of these sites are comprehensive so make sure you check more than one when searching for a specific title.

Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have created the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a carefully vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. It currently lists a total of 2,870 journals, with a net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar day over the past year. The directory aims to be a “one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals.”

Subjects covered in the Directory include: [Read more →]