Branner Blog

The newest mechanical visitor to Mars, the Phoenix Mars Lander, descends through the atmosphere on Sunday to land in the Martian Arctic. Dubbed the first of the “Scout Missions,” the lander will provide information that may answer questions such as: Can the Martian arctic support life, what is the history of water at the landing site, and how is the Martian climate affected by polar dynamics?

You can read more about the mission at the main project Web page. Local Bay Area events include:

* Mars: Fire & Ice at the The Crucible in Oakland. Live feed of the landing from NASA.
* Chabot Space and Science Center, Oakland will host activities on Saturday and Sunday including a live feed of the event on Sunday afternoon.
* NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, will host a Sunday afternoon event with robotic demonstrations and pre-landing remarks from local scientists and engineers.

You can also watch the landing over the Internet by tuning into NASA tv at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

LANL will be doing necessary upgrades and maintenance on their SearchPlus and FlashPoint systems. They will be unavailable beginning at 5pm on Thursday, January 17 with resumption of service on Tuesday, January 22nd.

If you need to access SciSearch you may do so through ISI’s Web of Science.

A round-up of news from the fall AGU meeting up in San Francisco:

• From the AGU website, news and a few podcasts.
• AGU dispatches from realclimate.
• Lots of Ink: News from the American Geophysical Union Meeting from the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
• NYT’s dot earth.

Any more?

It’s time for the 2nd annual Bay Area Automated Mapping Association (BAAMA) Education award and mapping challenge. The competition is designed to support students in higher education using GIS both as a major field of study and in support of their own research fields. The top prize is $2,500 with a one-year membership in BAAMA, and a complementary entry to CalGIS in April, 2008 where you’ll present your work. Entries are due February 15, 2008. More information can be found at the BAAMA website. It would be great to have a Stanford student win this year!

Are you going to be in or around Chicago between now and March 2008? If you love cartography, you will not want to miss the Festival of Maps. Over 30 organizations are joining in this city-wide celebration by hosting exhibits, talks, and meetings devoted to cartography. The Field Museum has mounted an exhibit entitled “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” featuring a stone Inca map, a landscape vessel from Peru, a eucalyptus bark map from Australia, as well as more conventional maps from the 1200s to the present. The University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit featuring the spectacular Roman “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae dating from the mid-1570’s. The Art Institute of Chicago has mounted an exhibit of historical maps of Paris. Other events can be found at the Festival of Maps Web site.

Satellite imagery and digital mapping has changed the way we interact with and know about large-scale disasters. A case in point are the Southern California wildfires.

The San Diego Office Of Emergency Services is releasing maps each day of the burn areas, the perimeters of the fires, and the evacuation areas.

NASA has a series of satellite images showing the spread of the fires over the past few days over all of Southern California, one taken from the Space Shuttle Discovery as it rose into orbit on Tuesday.

Google is offering content from KPBS, which can be loaded into Google Earth.

The US Forest Service has released infrared imagery showing the locations and intensity of the fires in San Diego. I have yet to be able to access this imagery. My guess is the traffic has been so heavy that the site is down. Keep trying to get in over the next few days.

Join us at the Stanford University Libraries Open House on October 17th from noon to 4pm. Mike Keller, the University Librarian, will talk about the future of the libraries, there will be tours of the robotic book scanner, and information from 20 libraries across campus. Win prizes including an iPod Nano (courtesy of Apple and the Stanford Bookstore), books by Stanford authors, iTunes and Stanford Bookstore gift certificates, and more.

The Open House will take place in Green and Meyer Libraries this Wednesday from noon to 4pm. We look forward to seeing you there!

NEWS:
The Branner fall newsletter is up on our site here. Click over to the newsletter for information about recent library purchases, changes in journal subscriptions and other news.

ORIENTATION:
An orientation session for new ERE students will be held this morning at 11 am in the Branner Teaching Corner.

Welcome back! Several orientation sessions are coming up at the library. These are intended for new students, but returning students who’d like a refresher are welcome as well. Details follow:

Thursday, 9/20 at 3 pm for GES students (Branner Library, 2nd floor Mitchell Building)
Friday, 9/21 at 2:45 pm general introduction for all School of Earth Sciences students (Hartley)
TBD: IPER, Geophysics, and ERE.

Want to hear about upcoming events at the library? Visit our calendar.

The New York Academy of Sciences, along with Falconer Biology Library and Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Library, is sponsoring a seminar on effective presentation skills for scientific communication.

The presentation is designed for Stanford grad students and postdocs in Biological Sciences and Chemistry, but others are welcome and will find this presentation useful. The speaker, Lisa B. Marshall, is an experienced public speaking coach who has presented her seminar at institutions throughout the United States. Read more about the speaker here.

Details:

Title: Speaking Skills for Scientists
Speaker: Lisa B. Marshall
Time: 9:30-11:30am, Wednesday, August 22
Location: Herrin Hall, Room 175
Other: Continental breakfast will be served.
Price: Free!
Register: Send a message to sciencealliancenyas.org or call (212) 298-8616.

Please register and plan to attend this free program.