Engineering & Mathematics Notebook

Monday, 12 September 2011

Remembering 9/11 – from the Health Standpoint

Yesterday – September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11 – was a sobering event for many.  It becomes even more sobering to realize the toll – both physical and psychological – that the events of a decade ago had on the survivors.

One way to evaluate the damage is to view a website from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIMRC) titled  The Health Effects from the Collapse of the World Trade Center. This website features comprehensive data on many health-related aspects of the event, including studies from multiple government agencies, environmental data, follow-up studies (including updates on the rescue dogs), and bibliographies.   The site also provides quick links to relevant materials in NLM databases such as PubMed, TOXLINE, and the NLM Catalog.

Another informative, health-focused, government site comes from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC): The World Trade Center Health Program.  This site provides resources for responders and survivors of the  events as well as an index of scientific articles which can be filtered by types of effects, groups of survivors, and other parameters.

Together, these two websites provide a comprehensive starting point  for gathering information on the public health impact of the collapse of the twin towers.

Posted in Public Health Engineering   

Thursday, 12 May 2011

The 50 Most Innovative Companies (per MIT)

The March/April, 2011 issue of technology review (published by MIT) contains a special section on the 50 Most Innovative Companies. This is an online directory of 50 public and private companies, updating a list that the review introduced in 2010. The companies straddle the biomedicine, computing & communications, energy, materials, transportation, and web & digital media sectors and range from well-known technology players such as Apple and IBM to Web 2.0 companies, including Facebook and Twitter, to up and comers in “green” energy and materials, like 1366 Technologies and Serious Materials. Such a company list offers ideas for technological inspiration, job and career possibilities, and investments.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Green Industries   

Monday, 01 November 2010

eTextBooks take the Spotlight

Electronic books platforms – or eBooks – have been a popular discussion topic in library circles in recent years.  They offer a number of apparent virtues, as they take up no physical shelf space and they enable searching on a book’s complete text, including bibliographies and footnotes (thereby compensating for sketchy tables of contents and indexes). Some publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, enable searching on ebooks alongside journals and other publication types, providing an online research environment which can bypass the “silos” of particular formats.  For libraries constrained by tight budgets and staff shortages in a poor economy, they may provide a faster and more economic means of expanding a book collection.

An emerging subset of eBooks are eTextbooks [electrionic textbooks].  Over the past few years, these have been cropping in the form of individual titles at college bookstores (such as the Tufts online bookstore) and online rentals, and a number of publishers now offer comprehensive platforms of textbooks to which institutions can subscribe, thereby purchasing textbooks directly for students.  There is even an open access [OA] eTextbook movement, in parallel to the OA journal movement.  Despite some apparent advantages of these products, they have not been uniformly well-received by their primary target audience – college students – as evidenced both by national surveys and by focus groups which Tisch Library recently conducted.  More about these new takes on a traditional book format is detailed in an article in the Fall, 2010 issue of the Tufts TRL Innovations newsletter.

Posted in Collections News, Trend Watch