Star Tribune Widget

Your (real) Impact Factor from PhD: Piled Higher & Deeper

"Your (real) Impact Factor"
daily web comic

PhD: Piled Higher and Deeper, a graduate student web comic by Jorge Cham
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1108

10/1/2008

Gross - Another interesting comparison can be made between Grad Enrollment and the GDP (although in this case, it's harder to tell which one causes which).



Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/images/GDP.gif

So Cal Fires: ArcGIS Server application and shapefiles available

ArcGIS shapefiles which depict the perimeters of the recent fires (2008) in Southern California have been made available. I have downloaded the shapefiles and used them to develop an ArcGIS Server online service
where you can view the most current fire perimeters. To access this service, point your Internet browser here: http://gis.nacs.uci.edu/socalfires/

The map will open to the "Freeway" fire event and show the most recent fire perimeter for that event. The "Tea" and "Sayre" fire perimeters are also available to view. To navigate to each fire event, use the Zoom Out
tool so that you can see the broader Southern California area, then use the Zoom In tool by dragging out a rectangle over the fire area which you want to view.

Unfortunately, for this particular service, the Full Extent tool goes to the full extent of the world, so that is not too useful for this application.

For each fire event the shapefiles are ordered in the Table of Contents on the left side oldest to youngest from the top down. For each event the perimeter associated with the most recent shapefile is activated. You can
click to activate any one shapefile for an event. You can do this in a time sequence to view how each fire perimeter expanded over time.

The shapefiles were collected by GEOMAC (http://www.geomac.gov/index.html) and then stored on the USGS website (http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/outgoing/GeoMAC/2008_fire_data/California/?C=M;O=A).
You can access the shapefiles directly at that location. Since I already downloaded these shapefiles, I copied them on my Webfiles account for you to use in ArcMap. To access the zip file which contains the shapefiles go here: https://webfiles.uci.edu/xythoswfs/webui/_xy-5860175_1-t_RPbaA1Bn

Let me know if you have questions about the ArcGIS Server Southern California Fires application or the fire perimeter shapefiles.

Tony Soeller
Senior Research Computing Specialist
Network & Academic Computing Services, U. C. Irvine
949.824.3239 tsoeller@uci.edu

"Powering the Planet" - lecture on world's energy challenges

If you want a very sobering analysis of the world's energy problem, I suggest you attend Cal Tech Chemistry Professor Nate Lewis's lecture "Powering the Planet". If you can't see his lecture in person, you can view
a previously given lecture on his web site.

http://nsl.caltech.edu/energy.html

Yes We Can - Music Video Barack Obama

US Election Map Using Google Maps

Keep up-to-date on the 2008 election with Google Maps

"On election day, it will take at least 270 of the possible 538 electoral votes for John McCain or Barack Obama to win the Presidency. Use this map to predict possible state combinations each candidate needs to win the election. Clicking on a state will change the total electoral vote count per candidate."

Source: Elections '08 Map Gallery

Google lawsuit and UC project

It is good news that a proposed agreement has been submitted to the United States District Court to settle a lawsuit against the Google Book Search digitization project.

While the three major library partners (the University of California, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University) were not parties in the lawsuit, Google requested extensive input from us on issues of importance to library and university communities. For nearly two years, we strongly advocated for library interests including maximum public access to works in the public domain. Our efforts to preserve, maintain, and provide access to books played a critical role in achieving this agreement. While the settlement is not all we would have liked it to be, on balance the agreement is consistent with the libraries' mission and serves the public interest by providing the widest possible access to these materials.

The settlement agreement allows us to continue our participation in the Google Book Search project. The partner libraries and Google will review and update our original contracts to reflect the terms of the settlement.

I have attached a joint press release from the major library partners, and you can find more information from Google at http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/.

Gerry Munoff
University Librarian, University of California Irvine
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From Metafilter:
"The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search."
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Authors, publishers settle suit against Google
By HILLEL ITALIE - AP (Associated Press) October 28, 2008