Slashdot Mirror

Yes, and its part of a natural cycle. The polar caps on Mars are also melting, but we seem to be peaking and cycling back into the cold half again for another 11 or 22 or 28 or 88 years. There are several cycles that sometimes harmonize to cause the extremes.

Solar cycle extremes as a seasonal predictor of Atlantic-Basin tropical cyclones

FTA:
Minimum sunspot years and the AMO index can combine to explain more than 54 percent of the variations in total tropical cyclones and nearly 46 percent of the variation in tropical cyclone days. Solar cycle extremes should be considered for more accurate seasonal tropical cyclone predictions.

So what does that have to do with the permafrost melting, or even global warming more generally?

Did you just find a peer reviewed article talking about sunspots and figured no one would realize it didn't support your argument?

Yes, and its part of a natural cycle. The polar caps on Mars are also melting, but we seem to be peaking and cycling back into the cold half again for another 11 or 22 or 28 or 88 years. There are several cycles that sometimes harmonize to cause the extremes.

Solar cycle extremes as a seasonal predictor of Atlantic-Basin tropical cyclones

"Literature" isn't mutually exclusive to just books. Movies are literature as well. [url]http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/gloss ary/glossary_im.htm%5B/url%5D

... it shows me what a void there is still to fill!

ISI has had a fantastic run providing bibliometric research tools for nearly 30 years, but only to deep-pocket libraries. WebOfScience finally brought the ISI analysis of academic pubs into 21st century, and so it is no surprise that they quickly bumped into Google, who brought fundamentally the same insight (citation impact/in-degree is a great clue) to the Web. If GoogleScholar has simply nudged Thomson (who bought ISI in 1992) to broaden the market for this tool, that's already progress in my book.

For now, the interesting part to me is a compare/contrast of just what each brings to the party. While this review by Péter Jacsó' (his earlier review is also helpful) is part of Thomson/Gale's site, I think it's unfair to see it simply as a vendor whitepaper; he identifies serious flaws in GoogleScholar. But even with the price differential aside, it must be clear to all that WoS has some serious issues, too! (Some of you might be interested in an author-focused comparison I did recently between GS and WoS: Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data , arXiv.org preprint arXiv:cs.IR/0504046, 11 Apr 05). Do they really want to hold up the interface to WoS as a virtue?! Checkout the touchgraph browser for CiteSeer as an example of what we can hope for. And while there isn't yet an API to GoogleScholar, screen-scraping at least lets us do some experiments over this corpus; WoS does not seem willing to provide similar access (I've tried:).

These aren't the only two vendors, of course: GoogleScholar was certainly inspired by the CiteSeer (originally at NEC, now at UPenn) project; it continues to be an innovative force. Our local, generally well-stocked library doesn't carry Scopus (too expensive?), but I hear good things about it. Entrez/PubMed has been mentioned and (while it is great in many other dimensions!) I don't see it is as especially relevant until the citation linkages it is beginning to build via PubMedCentral come online. And when the NIH's "Open Access" policy (cf. [Science 11 February 2005; 307: 825 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.825], but not without a subscription:) starts to kick in, and as changing standards regarding exchange of ``open citation'' information (e.g, CrossRef) propagate, the pace of change is bound to accelerate.

Looking a bit farther afield for suggestions of what might be coming, some of you lawyer-types may appreciate what Shepards does for case law searching. They orignally started doing simply the manual "inversion" of citation links that ISI does, but grew into an entirely new source of independent analysis of the arguments connecting the two documents. Imagine how helpful it could be if scientific and web citations carried as much third-party (ie, from neither the cited or citing authors) metadata!

And this as well...

From the "About the Reviewers" page:

Find out what the experts are saying about new print and electronic reference products. Thomson Gale hosts three monthly review columns to assist you in deciding which products are right for your library. Please note, products are not exclusively from Thomson Gale and are chosen at the discretion of the individual reviewer.

To learn more about each reviewer, or suggest a title you'd like them to review, use the links below:

http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/ about/index.htm

...it is a review by Peter Jasco, who is an independent reviewer.

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/

We just provide him the space to post his reviews.
As we do for several others...

http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/ index.htm

"Visit gale.com regularly to check out the latest reviews on reference resources by these prominent experts:"

The Mr. Gates in question is Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In 1952, a new evil surfaced.

Now, in 2003...

Evil will battle evil.

Jesse Jackson vs. RIAA: Coming to a theatre near you.

Another source of Books in Print is through Gale Group. Many local libraries are purchasing access to the Gale Group databases (Books in Print, InfoTrac, etc) for their users. For instance, Virginia residents can type in the bar code number from their library card to get access to these databases from home.

I work in a library, but I'm not a librarian.

Online method: The library scans a book with the CueCat, the software does a lookup against the online databases, and returns the data to your own database. You get your answer in real time but each lookup takes time to execute. Also, you need to be connected to the net at the time so you can't walk around your stacks and scan right off the shelves.

Batch Method: The libary scans a whole load of books at once with the CueCat and the software makes a list of all the ISBN numbers. At the end of the night, the system hooks up to the online databases and does all it's lookups. By morning you have data on all the books you scanned in the previous day and you have not tied up your Internet connection while users are in the library. This would work well with an old laptop hooked to the CueCat scanner because then you have a portable bar code scanner.