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Shapiro to Receive Public Welfare Medal, NAS’ Most Prestigious Award Harold T. Shapiro, an economist lauded for his ability to distill, debate, and resolve the complex aspects of controversial scientific issues, has been awarded the National Academy of Sciences’ Public Welfare Medal. From: What’s New @ the National Academies Mon, Jan. 23, 2012 |
Monthly Archives: January 2012
March to the Moon — new digital archive from NASA & ASU
“Arizona State University announced last week the launch (no pun intended) of the new Project Gemini Online Digital Archive, an online archive of NASA’s Gemini spacecraft flights. (From the announcement: “Project Gemini (1964-1966) was the second United States human spaceflight program, after Project Mercury (1960-1963). The overarching goal was to test systems and operations critical to the Apollo program (1961-1975), conceived with the purpose of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’.” The archive is available at http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/. “
Source: Tara Calishain’s ResearchBuzz Jan. 19, 2012
Wikipedia – a 24-hour protest blackout January 18th!
“Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate — that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.”
Thanks to Library purchases & subscriptions, including those to many online encyclopedias, we should survive!
From: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout
NBII To Be Taken Offline Permanently January 15, 2012
“In recent years, however, the NBII–like so many other important federal programs–was plagued with budget cuts. The FY 2012 budget mandated its termination. The main Web site, www.nbii.gov, will be taken offline on January 15, 2012, along with all of its associated node sites.
The NBII provided three main benefits to the biological resource community. First, its design as a federation of partners allowed it to assist data owners in maintaining critical assets that might not otherwise be made broadly available; second, scientists, managers, and others searching for data on a particular subject could do so from a single, Web-based source rather than having to go to the sites of numerous organizations to compile the results they sought; and third, the NBII provided users with direct access to many data resources that are deeply embedded in structured databases on the Web and that are relevant to biology–resources that would not be revealed to them using a standard search engine such as Google.
USGS staff now are working with partners to identify ways that–to the extent possible–will help to fill the gap in data access that will be created when the NBII goes offline.”
To read more about the National Biological Information Infrastructure, here’s a link from which the above quote was taken:
http://www.usgs.gov/core_science_systems/Access/p1111-1.html
A Postscript:
“The Library of Congress is a part of a collaborative web archive project to archive U.S. Federal Government Websites, and this site has been crawled by the Internet Archive as a part of that project. It is not publicly accessible yet but it has been preserved.
Since we’re a part of the collaborative project, we’ll eventually get a copy of that capture for the Library of Congress archives.”
/mrc (Margaret Clifton, mcli@loc.gov)