Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

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.

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

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 .

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