Branner Blog

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.

clipped from www.ipy.org

(Also, giving clipmarks a try. Note the image above.)

If you, like me, have been waiting to hear an engineer’s take on April 30th’s MacArthur maze collapse, check out the John A. Blume Distinguished Lecture Series on Friday. Dean Frieder Sieble from UC San Diego’s School of Engineering will give a talk entitled “Protecting our Infrastructure Against Natural and Man-made Hazards.” I assume there will be some talk of the maze.

Details:
May 10, 2007
4:15pm
Bldg. 320, Room 105
Stanford University

If your life doesn’t revolve around the state of Bay Area bridges, follow the links below to read what happened and how it will be fixed:
From the SF Chronicle.

From Caltrans.

Berkeley Civil Engineering Professor will study MacArthur Maze collapse.

The 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth will be held at UC Berkeley, June 5-9, 2007.

From the symposium website:
“The five day gathering will feature world-class representatives from industry, academia, government, and NGOs who have come from around the globe to highlight a central theme regarding shared interest in the concept of a digital Earth.”

Learn more about the concept of the Digital Earth and register for the conference: http://www.isde5.org/