Branner Blog

We’ve been posting articles on the bulletin board of our photocopy room for some time now. We hope you’ve enjoyed having news to peruse as you’ve made your copies. In case you want to find something you encountered there, all of the citations for our bulletin board bits will be saved in Branner’s CiteUlike library under the tag “bulletinboard.”

If you have access through Stanford you should be able connect directly to the full text of the articles when available.

If you use CiteULike or would like to join the Branner group, let us know.

Ever wonder what your carbon footprint is and how you can find out? It’s getting easier to do so by the day. Yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News devoted two full pages of their Tech section to helping each of us figure out just how much we contribute to global warming. Included was a simple calculator to assess your impact based on energy usage, driving, and flying. To read the article, go to the Mercury News website and search for carbon footprint.

Numerous carbon calculators are available on the Web including one connected to the Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” PG&E has a much simpler calculator that asks only for energy usage and miles driven. The Nature Conservancy has the most detailed calculator I found. It considers broad categories such as home energy use, driving and flying, food and diet, and recycling and waste.

If these calculators get you thinking about how to live a greener life, check out from the library “How to live a low-carbon life: the individual’s guide to stopping climate change.” It’s on the new book truck this week and then will be on the shelves. Call number: QC879.8 G62 2007.

The result of one of your requests, our subscription to the conference proceedings of the International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association is now live.

Stanford readers can access the content through the proceedings page of the IRCSA website.

Non-Stanford readers can browse the conference abstracts.

The International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association grew out of a series of international conferences held in Hawaii 1984, Virgin Islands 1984, Thailand 1987 and the Philippines 1989. Since its formation, the association has run conferences every two years, in Taiwan 1991, Kenya 1993, China 1995, Iran 1997, Brazil 1999, Germany 2001, Mexico 2003 and India 2005. The next conference will be held in Australia this year.

Is your research taking you out of the U.S. this summer? Check out the geological survey of your destination-nation. There are a couple of sites with fairly comprehensive lists of international geological surveys and links to websites of the organizations that have them.

Mainz maintains one here and the Geological Survey of Japan here.

We are also storing related documents under the del.icio.us tag “international.” Find them here.

And, of course, come visit us in person for all of materials in print.

As I was ordering some publications from EAGE, I discovered their earthdoc interface. Earthdoc gives EAGE members access to the abstracts of papers and proceedings presented at EAGE conferences since 2000. Only members can download the full-text abstracts, but the citations themselves will be useful regardless.

Most of the conference abstracts are held in Branner (check Socrates to make sure), but earthdoc gives you a quick and easy way to check contents before you come over here to borrow the hard copy.

Geology of United States Highpoints is a fun and informative site I stumbled upon. I wish I’d seen it in time for the GES1 student who was writing his term paper on Mt. Washington.

clipped from www.ipy.org

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

If you’ve ever searched for a book on amazon or some such site, but hesitated with your purchase because you wondered if you might just borrow the book from the library, then book burro is the tool for you. From the site:

Book Burro is a Web 2.0 extension for Firefox and Flock. When it senses you are looking at a page that contains a book, it will overlay a small panel which when opened lists prices at online bookstores such as Amazon, Buy, Half (and many more) and whether the book is available at your library.

So rather than cut-and-paste the title from amazon to socrates, book burro links to WorldCat and lets you see if we (or another local library) have the volume. Once you install the plug-in, update your zip code so book burro knows where you are.

Street view, the latest feature on google maps, is, in a word, phenomenal. To check it out, put in an address, click on the new “street view” button, and if the street is highlighted in blue, you’ll be able to see a street-level view. You can use the “man on the street” to navigate around, or the arrows and zoom options within the image itself.

The view from our very own Palm Drive is quite nice as always.

Edited to include one of my critiques of the new feature, this one from NYT. I’ll let you do your own research if you care to follow the buzz regarding the more provocative views from the Farm.

Check out the blog of one of our GES grad students: …Or Something. Brian offers a nice mix of posts about earth science (with an eye towards sedimentary geology), general science news, as well as great visuals.

I’ve been surprised about how few dedicated geology-related blogs there are, so I’m always happy to hear about one. Let us know if you blog about the earth sciences, or if you read any ones of interest.