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Book from the NSF.....
Girls In Engineering - PDF book which makes recommendations on how science and engineering should be taught so as to increase the number of women and minorities in the scientific and engineering workforce.
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Sloan Career Cornerstone Center
The Many Uses of Vodka
Interesting tips--- HSM
The Many Uses of Vodka
By: Dahlia Rideout (
View Profile)
Aside from being a fantastic drink, vodka has many uses which you may not have known about. Since vodka is one of the world's most popular drinks, many of us have a bottle handy in the home. And since its typically filtered and pure, it makes a handy liquid to have around.
Here are a few uses:
- To remove a bandage painlessly, saturate the bandage with vodka. The solvent dissolves adhesive
- To clean the caulking around bathtubs and showers, fill a trigger-spray bottle with vodka, spray the caulking, let set five minutes and wash clean. The alcohol in the vodka kills mold and mildew.
- Clean jewelry. Soak the jewelry in vodka for five minutes, then rinse, and dry.
- Clean lipstick from clothing. Rub the stain with vodka, then throw into your regular wash.
- Remove the glue left behind by a bumper sticker. Rub the glue with a soft, clean cloth soaked with vodka
- Prolong the life of razors by filling a cup with vodka and letting your safety razor blade soak in the alcohol after shaving. The vodka disinfects the blade and prevents rusting.
- Spray vodka on vomit stains, scrub with a brush, then blot dry.
- Using a cotton ball, apply vodka to your face as an astringent to cleanse the skin and tighten pores.
- Add a jigger of vodka to a 12-ounce bottle of shampoo. The alcohol cleanses the scalp, removes toxins from hair, and stimulates the growth of healthy hair.
- Fill a sixteen-ounce trigger-spray bottle and spray bees or wasps to kill them.
- Pour one-half cup vodka and one-half cup water in a Ziplock freezer bag and freeze for a slushy, refreshable ice pack for aches, pain or black eyes.
- Fill a clean, used mayonnaise jar with freshly packed lavender flowers, fill the jar with vodka, seal the lid tightly and set in the sun for three days. Strain liquid through a coffee filter, then apply the tincture to aches and pains.
- To relieve a fever, use a washcloth to rub vodka on your chest and back as a liniment.
- To cure foot odor, wash your feet with vodka.
- vodka will disinfect and alleviate a jellyfish sting.
- Pour vodka over an area affected with poison ivy to remove the urushiol oil from your skin.
- Swish a shot of vodka over an aching tooth. Allow your gums to absorb some of the alcohol to numb the pain.
- Soothe a sore throat. Add a tablespoon of vodka to glass of warm water and gargle. The alcohol helps numb the sore throat.
- Eliminate swimer's ear. If you don't have rubbing alcohol, fill an eardropper with vodka, and squeeze it into the affected ear, then let it drain out
Article source: Miss Charming.com. Photo courtesy of Kaishin on Flickr (via Creative Commons).
Monday, May 5, 2008
Ploofle » Software list
For review -- hsm
Software list
Published by Charlene | Filed under geeky stuff
Just for grins, I’ve gone through my computer to see what stuff I use is open-source or free…and here’s what I got. You can just google the names as I’m too lazy to link. But I’ll write a bit about the things I like.
Work
OpenOffice - Does word, powerpoint, excel-like things. Also has a better system for page layout and visio-like drawings in my opinion.
Zotero (with OpenOffice/Word extensions for in-document citing) - A firefox addon that lets you download RDF/DOI data (think autofilling of citation fields) from most places, including PubMed, and store the pdf/article in the database, AND you can tag and it’ll do fulltext searches within both citation info and the pdfs on the fly. The extensions let you cite from it and formats automatically into a lot of typical citation styles with either endnotes or footnotes.
InfraRecorder - Burns CDs, DVD, or makes ISOs painlessly.
Handbrake - Converts video (VOB files) painlessly into various divx formats, including for ipods
VirtualDub - Make simple video edits/effects for AVI files
Audacity - Record or edit sound.
Firefox - You know what this is
Free Download Manager - Very useful here in Mongolia. Supports download resuming without as far as I know putting crap on your computer.
WAMP - An all-in-one package that runs a local Apache web server with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. Can also be set up to run multiple versions of PHP and MySQL or set up as a “live” webserver. Includes SQLite I believe, but I don’t use it.
OpenEpi - Offline (but browser-based) interface to a lot of common biostatistical/epi/public health calculations, such as sample size or chi stuffs. Also explains decently what these calculations are for.
WeftQDA - Haven’t used it for real, but it’s a qualitative data analysis tool similar to ATLAS.ti
FreeMind - Used for mind-mapping - multi-branched tree-like structures that are great for group work and discussions or medium-sized planning sessions where you want to focus on gathering all ideas then refining/organizing them
Sumatra PDF - Simple PDF reader that will run off a USB drive - also saves/bookmarks the last page you had open of individual files if you do the ebook thing.
CutePDF - “Prints” files to PDF format
CompareIt - Just that. Compares line-by-line two files for changes. Useful if you poorly manage documents or code, as I do.
Fun
VideoLan - Great media player - plays virtually anything and will try to fix corrupted files
Trillian - Multi-platform chat client
QuickPlay with ZSNES, Kega Fusion, Nestopia - Old video games! And Quickplay serves as a management frontend for the various systems and stuff.
StepMania - DDR clone for computers. Many many many songs are available online, and with a laptop with tv-out and a usb-based pad, you have DDR for real.Utilities
WinDirStat - Cool utility for looking at your hard drive’s space usage graphically to identify where you have random large amounts of crap. Also has cool pacman hourglass-equivalent icon while analyzing your drive.
USBVirusScan - Needs some setup, but in the end will execute a program (e.g., a virus scanner) upon insertion of any removable disk.
PuTTY - Blame sourceforge. Used for SSH and telnet-kinds of things. Mostly command-line
Spybot - Malware/web-based exploit protection software. May be becoming obsolete with more virus scanners including this kind of module…
TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN - Again, sourceforge. Used on Windows machines for CVS/SVN code management
WinRAR - Shareware. Much nicer interface than Winzip
FileZilla - FTP tool
Firebug - Firefox extension for checking code in browsers and examining CSS.
UW proxy tool - Used with Firefox to toggle on or off UW netid authentication when looking for articles and what-not.Even if that wasn’t interesting to you, now I have it saved somewhere so I can download stuff if I need it later and don’t remember what I have…
Monday, January 7, 2008
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Librarian: Executive Summary - US News and World Report
Librarian: Executive Summary - US News and World Report
Librarian: Executive Summary
By Marty Nemko
Posted December 19, 2007
Forget about that image of librarian as a mousy bookworm. Librarians these days must be high-tech information sleuths, helping researchers plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records. It's an underrated career. Most librarians love helping patrons dig up information and, in the process, learning new things. Librarians may also go on shopping sprees, deciding which books and online resources to buy. They even get to put on performances, like children's puppet shows, and run other programs, like book discussion groups for elders. On top of it all, librarians' work hours are reasonable.
Related News
Median Pay
National: $51,400.
More pay data by metropolitan area(Data provided by PayScale.com)
Training
- The American Library Association lists all accredited programs
- U.S. News rankings of library programs (fee applies).
Smart Specialty
Special Librarian. All sorts of organizations need librarians, not just universities and local governments. They work for law firms, prisons, corporations, and nonprofit agencies. In fact, special librarianship is the field's fastest-growing job market. Unlike public and university jobs, which require night and weekend hours, these jobs are mostly 9 to 5.
Other Resources
- Department of Labor profile: Librarian
- American Library Association
- Special Libraries Association
- A Day in the Life: Career Options in Library and Information Science
by Patricia Shontz and Richard Murray (editors)
- Straight from the Stacks: A Firsthand Guide to Careers in Library and Information Science
by Laura Townsend Kane
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective
Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective
An article in Inside Higher Ed just caught my eye, "Pooling Scholars' Digital Resources ". The article described something that is hopeful for social scholarship, ominous for libraries.
The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. The purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable.
Scholars will upload documents to the archive with an enhanced version of the Zotero plugin for Firefox. Imagine scholars contributing documents that they've annotated with Zotero and you get one of the great ideas behind this initiative. This version of the plugin will also allow scholars to collaborate on materials on a shared server.
Score one for social scholarship. Score a big one. But where are libraries in all of this? Andy Guess, the author of the article, has an answer. Here is his opening paragraph:
The various and competing efforts to digitize university libraries’ vast holdings have no lack of ambition, but access to documents and copyright issues have been two factors slowing the development of online scholarly repositories. Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead.
Bypass libraries entirely.
Apparently, we libraries are a) not innovative enough to solve the problem of access, and b) too caught up in copyright issues to be of much use in the age of social scholarship.
Is this a fair comment? On the face of it, not really. First of all, I'm not sure that access and copyright are the main things holding us back. And second, these are issues that concern us and rightly so.
I think the problem goes deeper. I see no evidence that academic libraries have it in them to band together to sponsor a project like Zotero Commons. We don't have the group vision. If we did, we'd be doing it.
There seems to be promise in the Open Content Alliance. The OCA is also associated with the Internet Archive and includes content from academic library collections. But here's the heart of the matter, the operative phrase "library collections". We need to be looking beyond the realm of our collections and figuring out our role in the process of scholarship. This is where our profession doesn't seem to get it. This is why an initiative such as Zotero Commons has no library involvement.
Our collections are our bedrock, but the notion - and reality - of collections are changing. The scholarship that makes use of these collections is changing. The Zotero Commons might contribute to that. " “I think it’s really going to have an impact on the way that scholarship is done.” So says the Center director. This may be overly optimistic, maybe not. But when two notable groups get together with this goal in mind, academic libraries should sit up and take notice. We should ask ourselves why we aren't involved. We should wonder why we didn't think of this ourselves. We should ponder what this says about us, and our role - and our concept of our role - on campus.
Bypass libraries entirely. It's so disheartening to read this.
Posted by Laura Cohen at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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