Saturday, May 16, 2009

#10 OpenURL

"When you click on the Go button with this altered information, what happens? Make sure to note any differences and your thoughts on the causes and ramifications of these differences in your blog entry." I did the experiment of changing one piece of the citation information. I changed the date from 1998 to 2000 and it still said the library had the material. Does it only match on a certain # of fields? I changed the date to 2009 and then there wasn't any listing for the print version but it mentioned that it could help us find the material.

Having the "Find it" button on Google Scholar with the openURL pulls users into our website. This could be a bit confusing if they need a password to access the periodical item online. They would have to come here to see it right? But at least they could see we have it in electronic & possibly print. We could use this open URL with some of our free National Academies Press eBooks though. But one could google these and get them online anyway.

OpenUrl link for fun article:

Weiss, P. "That's the Way the Spaghetti Crumbles." Science News (2005):315.

http://sfx.calstate.edu:9003/fullerton?auinit=P&aulast=Weiss&atitle=That%27s%20the%20Way%20the%20Spaghetti%20Crumbles&title=Science%20news&date=2005&spage=315&issn=0036-8423&sid=libx


Here's the full text:
AUTHOR:Weiss, Peter
TITLE:That's the way the spaghetti crumbles
SOURCE:Science News 168 no20 315-16 N 12 2005

(C) Science Services, Inc. To contact the publisher: http://www.sciserv.org/

PETER WEISS

Physicists solve a vexing kitchen puzzle
Great scientists sometimes do silly experiments. The renowned physicist and Nobel prize winner Richard P. Feynman, for instance, once I got it in to his head to figure out why uncooked spaghetti doesn't snap neatly in two when you bend it far enough to break. Pay attention next time, and you'll notice that the pasta tends to shatter into three or more fragments of unequal lengths.
In the midst of making a spaghetti dinner for themselves one night about'20 years ago, Feynman and a friend--super-computing innovator W. Daniel Hillis-- launched into a brief investigation of this perplexing breaking-past a performance. "We ended up, at the end of a couple of hours, with broken spaghetti all over the kitchen and no real good theory about why spaghetti: breaks in three," Hillis recalls, as quoted in the book No Ordinary Genius by Christopher Sykes (1994, W.W. Norton.)
Sometimes, such experiments turn out to be not so silly after all. Recently, French scientists who unwittingly followed in the footsteps of Hillis and Feynman, who died in 1988, finally solved the" spaghetti mystery. And a group of physicist's arid-mathematicians conducted a related study that transcends spaghetti. The team examined various lands of brittle rods under circumstances quite different from ordinary bending.
Besides explaining a quirk of everyday life, the new studies are improving scientists grasp of fragmentation--the process by which objects shatter." Fragmentation is a complicated problem that we still don't understand very well," says mechanical engineer and materials scientist Kaliat T. Ramesh of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. "Most of us are trying to understand the basic mechanisms involved.
Because spaghetti rods are similar in some ways to a wide variety of brittle objects ranging from industrial cutting tools to body armor, the research may end up elucidating how such structures can fracture and fail. "If we understand how things break, we can build tougher structures," says mathematician Andrew L: Belmonte of Pennsylvania State University hi State College.
SHATTERED SCIENCE Fragmentation occurs in nature on many scales, from subatomic-particle collisions to volcanic explosions to the pummeling of planets by asteroids and comets. Disintegration processes are also ah important part of the human realm-- for instance, the smashing of windows the pulverizing of ore, and the deadly detonations of bombs, as well as the benign breaking of spaghetti
The unexpected incomprehensibility of that least example especially perturbs scientists trying to figure out how all this breaking unfolds.
"This is really the kind of simple question that you can't help thinking about over and over until you find the answer," says , Sébastien Neukirch of the University of Paris VI, one of the physicists whose new work seems finally to set the bent-spaghetti issue to rest. To illustrate his point, he notes that Feynman isn't the only Nobel laureate to have been captivated by the pasta puzzle. In interviews on French television 14 years ago, after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, popular physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes of the College of France in Paris repeatedly alluded to the spaghetti mystery as one of the very simple, yet unsolved, problems of science.
Belmonte says that "he fell, under t spaghetti's spell all on his own. An applied mathematician who specializes in fluids and. turbulence (SN: 10/31/98, p. 285), he started experimenting with spaghetti and other types of rods early last year.
Because he was collaborating with some colleagues who had an interest in fragmentation, says Belmonte, "I was inspired to think about breaking things. I actually spent some time one evening "breaking spaghetti in my sink because I had always been puzzled by that small piece which flies out of the center.
Belmonte knew of some fragmentation experiments performed, in the early 1990s.The researchers had put glass rods in side sturdy steel cases and then dropped those packages onto concrete floors from varying heights. The tests produced an abundance of large and small shards that the researchers could correlate with the energy imparted by each impact.
Fragmentation studies of that type; which go back decades, have revealed an intriguing feature of impacts and explosions. Their debris' typically obeys simple mathematical relationships--called power laws--that account for the distribution of fragment sizes (SN: 2/12/05, p. 106). Such studies, however, haven't generally been designed to examine what happens during fragmentation; such as what specific forces impinge on various locations in a breaking object.
To uncover those features, Belmonte and his colleagues built a simple apparatus in which they could stand a rod on end and then drop or shoot a metal slug directly onto its top. The team observed the resulting carnage with a high-speed video camera able to record up to 62,000 frames per second.
Among the items that the researchers tested were spaghetti-size rods made of steel, glass, Teflon, and paper, as well as actual pasta-San Giorgio #8 spaghetti and Barilla angel hair.
When smacked on the end by slugs at speeds up to 30 meters per second, all the rods initially responded similarly. First, like a walking cane turning into a snake, the rod would buckle at regular intervals along its length, growing wavy. As the slug pushed in a little farther, the "brittle rods, such as those of glass or pasta, suddenly shattered. However, the ductile materials, such as steel and Teflon, just became more sinuous.
In one analysis, Belmonte and his coworkers measured thou-, sands of fragments of spaghetti and angel hair from separate experiments, then tallied the fragments of each particular length. They found that two sizes were by far the most abundant--one approximately equal to the distance from a peak to a valley of the wavy buckling pattern that preceded the breakup, and another that was roughly half that long.
From the longer fragments and from the videos, the scientists concluded that fractures occurred nearly simultaneously at every location where the rods bad become intensely curved--that is, roughly, at each peak and valley of those undulations. The shorter dominant fragments had snapped from the ends of the rods and represented half of the peak-valley distance.
Belmonte and his colleagues reported their findings in the Jan. 28 Physical Review Letters.
It's rare to find any size that dominates the debris of fragmentation events, says Hans J. Herrmann of the University of Stuttgart in Germany, who has studied disintegrations of eggshells and hollow glass spheres. Indeed, the absence of a predominant trait is typical of phenomena that obey power laws, he notes.
The spaghetti findings probably don't actually contradict power-law models, Belmonte says. He expects that the results represent a low-energy breakage pattern that would change into a power-law pattern were the researchers to crank up the speed of the metal slugs.
The team had refrained from higher-energy experiments because of worries about flying projectiles. "We're just in a math department," Belmonte notes. "It was getting a little dangerous."
SNAPPY ANSWER For Neukirch and his University of Paris colleague Basile Audoly, the spectacle of Belmonte's buckling pasta rods brought to mind the puzzle that de Gennes had discussed long ago. "To our great surprise, the question of why bent spaghetti breaks into many pieces was still unsolved," Neukirrch recalls. That's because in the kitchen, people don't break spaghetti by pushing in on the ends.
So, Neukirch and Audoly set out to rigorously test kitchen-style spaghetti breakage. Rather than bending a spaghetti rod until it broke, they reasoned they could simply pretend that their bent spaghetti rod was the remainder of a hypothetical longer strand that had just snapped and hadn't yet straightened out
To achieve that, they clamped one end of a rod in place and then bent the rod short of causing breakage. Then, by letting the unclamped end go, much as if releasing a catapult, they duplicated what would happen if a hypothetical strand had broken and its still-clamped portion were then free to unbend. In that manner, they could observe any further breakage of the rebounding rod.
In their setup, which they dubbed "the equivalent catapult experiment," the researchers recorded the action with a digital camera that took 1,000 images per second. Those images, along with computer simulations, showed that a released spaghetti rod behaves in surprising ways.
It doesn't act as a diving board would, springing back to its resting position and then cycling up and down with diminishing amplitude. Instead, each rod's sudden release triggered ripples that whipped along its length and bounced back from the clamped end, locally increasing the rod's curvature. At some locations where the crests of the initial waves and crests reflected momentarily added together, the curvature tripled from what it bad been before the rod was released, the scientists calculate.
It's all too much for the spaghetti, which spontaneously snaps where the curvature is greatest, Audoly says. What's more, the process repeats itself in the remaining stretch of spaghetti each time a fracture occurs.
Consequently, each freshly severed remnant undergoes its own burst of ripples, causing further breaks. The process is a cascade that yields many fragments, Audoly says. He and Neukirch describe this process in the Aug. 26 Physical Review Letters.
The physicists are surprised by their result "You would expect that by releasing, stresses on a material, you would make it less likely to break," Neukirch says.
Thomas A. Witten of the University of Chicago says that the buildup of curvature observed in the spaghetti is a previously unrecognized way to focus energy. "New mechanisms of energy concentration are of great value," be says, like cracking a whip, it puts the energy at a specific location.
NOODLING ALONG Audoly and Neukirch's revelations do seem to finally answer the long-standing question of why spaghetti breaks the way it does. "The combination of theory and experiment makes for a very elegant story," comments Howard A. Stone of Harvard University.
However, the Parisians' study also raises a new question. If the pasta-fragmentation process does follow the described cascade, why does a laboratory chef typically generate only no more than 10 pasta shards?
"We explain that it should break into many, many pieces," Audoly says. "What we really miss is how it stops."
He and Neukirch plan to look into not only that still-hidden part of the process but also at other aspects of spaghetti breaking. For instance, the researchers can't yet predict exactly where a spaghetti rod rattled by waves will break. In some cases, fractures probably occur where peaks of extra curvature coincide with weaknesses of the rod, perhaps caused by small, preexisting cracks or voids.
The mechanisms of fragmentation uncovered by the pasta investigations "are both astonishing and are examples of how everyday effects still contain a lot of novel physics," Herrmann says.
Such fragmentation mechanisms probably also have relevance outside the kitchen, says Ramesh. For instance, the spaghetti findings may illuminate failures of brittle structures such as cutting bits for machining high-strength alloys and strong, light, ceramic blades found in some engine turbochargers.
Whether, or not such implications hold up under further study, one thing's for certain: Even everyday phenomena have secrets worth cracking.
ADDED MATERIAL
SPARE THE ROD? - High-speed video reveals that (left to right) a stick of dry spaghetti whacked at the end by a metal slug (top) buckles in waves before shattering.
USE YOUR NOODLE -- After a place of spaghetti bent in a circular arc(far left), springs free at one end, a ripple of extreme curvature Zooms down the rod. At one of the spots where that curvature peaks (arrows), the shaft degree of curvature, respectively from simulations.

#9 Wiki Wiki

Wiki is similar to google docs as far as editing a shared document; however, wikis allow for the creation of numerous documents that can be linked to each other. I'd like to explore the library success wiki for ideas of how other libraries have used it. I did check digitization and they have "best practices" information with links. We could use this information for future digi projects without having to reinvent / re-search information.
Thanks for sharing this site.

Thing #8 Cloud computing


Overall others have great ideas for this application. Security of sensitive material is an issue.


See my comments on the shared googledocs document:



Week #7 - social bookmarking & tagging

The idea of allowing the users to tag the catalog is great! Professors or Librarians could tag bib records, esp eBooks for their classes, BI's or Research Guides. Tagging websites would be useful for the same reasons.

Also tagging allows for current "slang" terms to be used rather than relying only on a "given" structure like LC Subject Headings. (LCSH) English is a language that changes daily - there is no way LC could keep up with the changes. Look how long it took Joy & I to add the subject heading: Wizard rock music. The band Harry & the Potters has been around since 2002! Tagging will help keep the catalog current. The question is will there be a given # of tags allowed per record? Also will "slang" terms be cleaned after a certain time period after they may no longer be relevant?

my delicious site: http://www.delicious.com/Andersonma

Monday, April 6, 2009

Firefox & add ons


For the tech savey bunch this allows jumping to various other sites/sources without have to open another screen. I like the students' ability to use the library site via a toolbar.

I managed to download Firefox & thought I downloaded book burro but couldn't get it to work. Too many toolbars & gadgets makes it confusing. Perhaps you could lend me a hand Will.

Thanks.
Annette

Monday, March 30, 2009

I jing, you jing, we all jing-a-ling

This resource would be useful for demonstration videos on how to use the various e-databases, especially for long-distance learners who won't be able to come in for the BI presentation(s).

For nature & glass lovers: This past weekend I traveled to Phoenix to the Desert Botanical Garden to see the following fabulous exhibit of Chihuly glass. (see the Jing image link below)

http://screencast.com/t/RapbDBda0d

The link for the Chihuly show at the Desert Botanical Garden is:
http://www.dbg.org/index.php/chihuly

Monday, March 23, 2009

Flickr


Post a reflection on your blog responding to the following: Can you think of any way that we might use Flickr at the Pollak Library? More generally, perhaps there is some way we could use images to communicate important information about us or our collection to our community. What are your thoughts?

I think Cathy Kaye's idea of posting photos for course reserves is a good one. Perhaps some of Special Collections or Oral History since these depts have so many interesting items.