Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

Can the law keep up with the rights of free speech when it comes to Social Networking sites?
According to CNN, Courtney Love is being sued for libel for her negative comments about a fashion designer on Twitter. Is this Love’s way of expressing her opinion on Twitter or is this a libelous remark? Do we all need to be more guarded in our commentary on social networking sites? Just something to think about before your next posting. For more details about this case click on the link:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/17/law.technology/index.html

Every 10 years the United States conducts a required census of its population. They are currently preparing for the 2010 census that will account for everyone living at your address as of April 1, 2010. For more details about the process or to understand why it is important for you to take part in the census you can go to http://2010.census.gov/2010census/how/how-we-count.php

By they way, for those geneaology buffs out there this will mean the the data from the 1940 census will become available as the year progresses as data is released after 70 years.

Those who remember the television show, Mission Impossible, with its self-destructing messages may appreciate Vanish - a new software tool still in development at University of Washington. In essence, it creates a shelf-life for e-mail and other forms of digital data, by assigning it a deletion time frame. Thus, it helps with the problem of internet data living indefinitely. Vanish can be downloaded while it is still in its development phase. To download and/or review licensing terms of use, go to http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/index.html

Tired of hearing the Phillies referred to as the underdog in the World Series against the Yankees? Sports Columnist, Tim Cowlishaw, has listed his top ten reasons why the Phillies deserve to be there. To read his top ten list click here http://timcowlishawblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/10/ten-reasons-to-like-the-philli.html.

www.Flu.Gov
A great website for information regarding the flu is: http://www.flu.gov. This is a government resource.

Tuesday, Oct 13th from 5:30-7pm students can compete for cash prizes in a Penn State internet searching contest. Students will be given 20 questions and 30 minutes to find answers. For more information see
http://live.psu.edu/story/41572

You can now have access to free lecture videos and audio downloads from PBS and NPR at http://forum-network.org/. You can search by series, speaker or lectures. Speakers range from the coordinator of public health for the World Bank, authors, speakers from Harvard Business School, the director of the Center of Astrophysics and more.

Introduced in 2006 as a simplified gateway to the most popular news on the internet, popurls (
http://popurls.com/) recently ranked among Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites for 2009.

After examining the site, it is easy to see why popurls rates so highly. Organized with simple-to-read headlines, interspersed with video and photo links, popurls provides readers with a single source for the most up-to-date internet activity on all the major websites. Users can start on the basic site, or customize their own popurls homepage with their favorite news feeds and sources. Users can also visit the popurls network (http://popurls.net/) to access the many mobile versions and add-ons.

With many newspaper’s elimination of science sections, where can readers turn for reliable Science News? Futurity (http://Futurity.org) is one option. This site collects and posts science news releases from universities. Universities such as Penn State, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, University of Penn, etc. needed a way to easily post their scientific findings and Futurity fits the bill. “It’s ironic that we have fewer writers in our major media focusing on science, while we have ever more issues that have a science base — from climate change to the health care debate, stem cells, evolution and swine flu — many of which are very controversial,” said Cristine Russell, a former Washington Post science reporter. Although a reliable source, Futurity lacks the impartiality of an independent science reporter. For that, readers can still turn to Knight Science Journalism Tracker, an MIT website of published science articles (http://ksjtracker.mit.edu).

For more details about locating science news, click on the link to the article on the Baltimore Sun:
Universities establish own way to tell public about findings
http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-university-wire-0916,0,6633143.story.

Want to know what to expect on the education front over the coming years? Who will be our students? How many degrees will be conferred? The National Center for Educational Statistics has released its report Projections of Education Statitics to 2018. The full report can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009062.pdf .

Looking for socially & environmentally responsible companies? Check out Business Week’s listing of B Corporations. A Certified B Corporation is one which is socially and environmentally responsible. As defined on the site, the B Corporation Net, (http://bcorporation.net), a B Corp “uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems”. It is part of “a new sector of the economy which harnesses the power of private enterprise for public benefit”. Examples of certified B Corporations are: King Arthur Flour (an employee-owned, open-book, team-managed company), Seventh Generation (a company committed to “becoming the world’s most trusted brand of authentic, safe, and environmentally-responsible products for a healthy home”), and Sustainable Harvest (one of the highest volume importers of organic & fair trade coffee in North America). For more information click on the link http://bcorporation.net

Want to expand your horizons? The Library of Congress has a number of podcasts available. The topics vary from interviews with popular authors from the 2009 National Book Festival to Slave Narratives, “oral histories and interviews with African Americans who endured the hardships of slavery,” to a series on Music and the Brain. There are also links to webcasts from the library and motion pictures and sound recordings from the American Memory Project. To find out more go to: http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/

Beliot college just posted their Mindset list for the incoming class of freshmen who will graduate in 2013. For those of us in libraries and technology it is interesting that they list:

They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.

They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.
Text has always been hyper.
Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.
There have always been flat screen televisions.

For the complete list go to: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php

Penn State has created a new Scientific Search Engine call CiteSeerX. The beta version was released earlier this summer, and it can be used to search scientific literature including: algorithms, data, meta data, services, techniques, software, and even tables. With more than a million journal articles and other scholarly works, this resource, developed by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences & Technology (ITS), is accessible to anyone. It is funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, NASA, as well as ITS. To access click on CiteSeerX or the link: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Planning on visiting a museum this summer or would you like to see one virtually? Download a podcast tour to your iPod from home and whet your appetite for the upcoming excursion.

Many museums offer virtual tours - such at the Louvre at http://www.louvre.fr/llv/musee . The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History also offers a vitual tour at http://www.mnh.si.edu/panoramas/ .

However, Apple offers free podcasts of a variety of museums. To view the complete list, click on the link http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipodtours/ and then select The Museum Room.