Wired Blog: Toyota Wants to Build Car form Seaweed

This just in from Wired Blog:

Toyota Wants to Build Car from Seaweed – By Ben Mack

February 24, 2009

Quote: “Toyota is looking to a greener future — literally — with dreams of an ultralight, superefficient plug-in hybrid with a bioplastic body made of seaweed that could be in showrooms within 15 years.”

SAE Digital Library Free Trial – until March 8, 2009

Waldo Library is currently running a free trial of the SAE Digital Library.  This database, which would be an upgrade of our current SAE Publications database, would provide the full text of all SAE Technical Papers from 1998 to the present.  Caution – no PDFs will be downloadable for this trial. When you search for a paper and click on the “View Document” link, you will all be looking at the same article in PDF.  This free trial is just to test the interface. But do not worry – we’re hoping to subscribe to this product after the free trial, barring any access or technical issues.  Access information is below.  Note also that there is a different password for each week of this two week free trial.  The trial ends: March 8, 2009.

SAE Publications and Standards (full text upgrade)
http://www.elecpubs.sae.org/dl
The purpose of the trial is for you to see the functionality of the full text upgrade to the SAE Digital Library. Although you will be able to view the full-text of SAE documents, you are not permitted to download, save to a hard drive, or print any full-text documents during the trial.

Trial username: dldemo

Trial passwords:
kqwpfuy5 (valid from: 2/18/2009 to 2/22/2009)

draztkkp (valid from: 2/23/2009 to 3/8/2009)

Trial ends: March 8, 2009

How Graduate Students Do Research

My new article “The Emerging Engineering Scholar: A Citation Analysis of Theses and Dissertations at Western Michigan University” is now available online in the Winter 2009 issue of the journal Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.  This article is based on my project gauging graduate engineering students” research abilities from the types of sources they cite.  I’m very proud of this article, which basically took two years total from inception to publication.  You can read the abstract of the article below:

Can one glimpse the development of emerging scholars in the work of engineering graduate students? To answer this question, the author studied the citation patterns in 96 Master’s theses and 24 Ph.D. dissertations completed at Western Michigan University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences between 2002 and 2006. The hypothesis of this study is that an increase in graduate student research competence between the master’s and doctoral levels can be seen in their use of scholarly sources such as journal articles and conference papers. For each thesis and dissertation, bibliographic information (title, author, document type, year of publication) was gathered for each individual citation in the reference list(s). The data analysis indicates that doctoral engineering students use a significantly greater number of scholarly journal articles (44.3% to 29.3%) and conference papers (21.9% to 12.5%) than master’s students. Also, master’s students depend more heavily upon literature available on the web (web sites, government papers, grey literature, trade magazines, and patents). These results give tentative support to the hypothesis. Without knowing how faculty expectations influence the quality of graduate literature reviews, the hypothesis could not be conclusively supported with the data gathered. This study shows that there is a significant difference in the proportions of scholarly and other research sources used by master’s and doctoral engineering students. The implications of these citation patterns in the development of the engineering scholar are discussed.

Article URL: http://www.istl.org/09-winter/refereed.html

MIT Students Design Wearable Computers

Wired online has a great short article on a project some MIT students have worked on that enables a person to wear a virtual computer display on his or her body.  Read “TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense” by Kim Zetter, Wired Blog, Feb. 5, 2009.  The URL for the link is http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-digital-six.html