slester@stanford.edu's blog

Update! Our first three classes are full, so we have added 2 additional dates 11/23 and 11/30. Send your RSVP today to reserve a spot.

Please bring your lunch and join us for the third in a series of workshops. Did you know Stanford Libraries provide free access to RefWorks and EndNote Web? Join us to learn how citation management tools can help you track your research and simplify creating your papers.

All faculty, students, and staff are welcome to attend!

Dates: Monday 11/2, 11/9, 11/16, 11/23 or 11/30
Time: Noon to 1 pm
Where: Yang and Yamazaki Environment & Engineering Building (Y2E2), Conference Room 105 (across from Coupa Café) Y2E2 is at the corner of Via Ortega & Panama St.

To sign-up, send email with your name and preferred workshop date to: engreference@stanford.edu

Cookies will be provided.

The Engineering Library in undergoing a lot of change in preparation for our move to our new library next summer. Stop by and pick up a brochure about our new space or check out our Future Engineering Library page.

While you're at the library, check out our display, "Engineering Library Donors: Giving for the Future".

Have a great weekend!

The Engineering Library is launching a pilot project that allows users to borrow either the print or Kindle edition of a number of our reserve titles. We have two Kindles available for you to try. For the list of titles available, see the Engineering Library Kindle Page.

The reserve Kindles will circulate for two hours just like the print book. Anyone who borrows the Kindle version will be asked to complete a short survey about their experience.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiologic Health (CDRH), in partnership with the Stanford Biodesign Program, is seeking Stanford students interested to learn more about the medical device regulatory process and the journey a technology travels as it progresses from the lab workbench to a patient. The fellowships provide a unique opportunity to learn about the FDA approval process for medical devices, including topics such as:

• Medical device design
• Clinical trial design
• Safety and efficacy evaluation

Journal articles on various topics, ranging from applied and chemical physics to renewable energy, are now available on Apple iPhone and Apple iPod touch devices. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) (www.aip.org), one of the world's largest publishers of information in the physical sciences and a leader in the field of electronic publishing, announced the launch today of its new mobile e-Reader application, iResearch. iResearch was developed to provide physicists, engineers, scientists, and students, with mobile access to valuable physics journal content.

iResearch is an offline e-reader that enables users to save PDF files locally to their device and view them offline without a Wifi or cellular connection. Users navigate through the journals, the volumes and issues to select an article they wish to read. Stanford iPhone users can access our institutional subscription to AIP titles from any Stanford IP Address. When the PDF has been loaded to the device the user can select to save the file locally onto the iPhone/iPod touch. Once the PDF is saved locally the user can read the article off-line.

More information from AIP: http://scitation.aip.org/iphone

Learn About the New Cross Search Tool and Enhanced Searching

Please bring your lunch and join us for the second in a series of workshops. Comprehensive searching of multiple databases in related disciplines uncovers articles, books and reports critical to your research. Search examples using ISI Web of Knowledge and the new Stanford Libraries’ Cross Search tool. E-mail alerts for subject, titles, and authors will also be covered. 

All faculty, students and staff are welcome to attend

Date: Monday 10/5; 10/12; 10/19; or 10/26
Time: Noon to 1 pm
Where: Y2E2 Conference Room 105 (across from the Coupa Café)

To sign-up, send email with your name and preferred workshop date to: engreference@stanford.edu

Cookies will be provided.

Looking for an internship? Cisco Systems is recruiting interns for summer, 2010. There will be an information session on October 5 (Monday). Stanford alums will speak about their Cisco experience. Former intern will also present. Please join for a raffle, free food and fun. All are welcome to come!

Event: Information Session
Date: Monday, October 5, 2009
Location: Stanford Computer Forum, Gates Building, Room 104
Time: 5:30pm – 6:30pm

In a major new extension to the ASM Materials for Medical Devices database, information has been added for all FDA classifications of catheters and other related interventional devices, including: clamps, vascular strippers, and catheters and related devices.

Characterization, numerical information and links to specific devices have now been completed for the following materials:

• Fe-17Cr-4Ni-4Cu (17-4 PH)
• Fe-19Cr-10Ni (Grade 304)

The third annual Sparky Awards invite contestants to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. Your challenge is to create a short video presentation that illustrates what you see as the value of sharing information. Use your imagination to suggest what good comes from bringing down barriers to the free exchange of information.

Thanks to all the new graduate students who attended our second Science and Engineering Libraries orientation on Thursday morning. We really appreciate everyone taking time out of your busy week to come to the library.

Congratulations to our raffle winners (each received an IEEE T-shirt):

Vibhav Bukkapatanam
Vijay Narasimhan
Lili Ca
Ricky Roesler
Sonia Buckley
Felix Huber

If you missed this weeks orientations we'll be having tours at 11am and 2pm everyday next week, and we'll have lots more prizes to give away!

The library will be holding two tours daily at 11am and 2pm, September 21-25th. Join us to learn the Four Key Things you need to know to navigate our library.

For more information see our Orientation page.

Thanks to all the new graduate students who attended our first Science and Engineering Libraries orientation on Monday afternoon. We had overwhelming attendance with standing room only.

Congratulations to our raffle winners (each received an IEEE 125th Anniversary T-shirt):
Adrit Lath
Sam Emaminejad
Morris Hsu
Derek Pang
Zhenchen Wu
Armand Rundquist

If you missed the orientation Monday, there are two more this week Wednesday, September 16 at 2:30 p.m. and
Thursday, September 17 at 11:30 a.m.

Please bring your lunch and join us for the first in a series of workshops. This workshop will give an overview of the options within CourseWork and CCNet for linking to licensed content for required or supplemental course reading. Examples of e-books, e-book chapters and journal articles will be covered.

All faculty and teaching assistants are welcome to attend.

Date: Monday, 9/14; 9/21; or 9/28
Time: Noon to 1 pm
Where: Y2E2 Conference Room 105 (across from the Coupa Café)

To sign-up, send email with your name and preferred workshop date to: engreference@stanford.edu

Cookies will be provided.

The Volkswagen Automotive Group is looking for students to participate in a two-day intensive brainstorming session to help design the car of the future. They are seeking creative minds to sit down with some of their engineers and designers to think about our world and how it'll be in the immediate future.

When: September 8-9 from 9:00am to 5:00pm
Where: Stanford Campus

For more information contact Sven Beiker of Stanford Automotive Affiliates at beiker@stanford.edu

A new game called Cogitate on The Institution of Engineering and Technology's website allows you to "manipulate gears, beams, conveyors and motors in order to complete ten pre-built puzzles using the laws of physics." The game also lets you create your own levels and challenge your friends to improve your score.

"For nearly 200 years, astronomers have been wondering why the star epsilon Aurigae turns down its light once every 27 years. Based on careful observations of the star’s periodic dimming, scientists believe that the supergiant star must have a mysterious companion that blocks its light periodically. But they still don’t know what that companion is.

The world's first piloted aircraft capable of manned flight using only power from hydrogen fuel cells took off in Germany Tuesday. Developed by the German Aerospace Center, the Antares DLR-H2 is based on the Antares 20E motor glider with a wingspan of 20 meters, it has a range of 750 km and can currently reach speeds up to 170 km/hr.

"The fuel cell is slung under the left wing and the hydrogen tank under the right wing – with a capacity of either 2 or 4.9 kilograms. The fuel cell system used to power the Antares delivers up to 25 kilowatts of electrical power, and when flying in a straight line, the aircraft only requires about ten kilowatts of power. In this situation, the fuel cell is operating at an efficiency level of approximately 52 percent."

The generosity of donors to the Engineering Library have made possible an outstanding collection of research materials for students and scholars. This summer the Engineering Library Exhibit, Engineering Library Donors: Giving for the Future honors our donors from the past and present. The exhibit will be on display throughout the summer.

You can read more about our donors and how you can help support the Engineering Library in the exhibit brochure.

A new tool has entered the larger market of search but it does something almost completely new. The Wolfram Alpha calculates an answer for you rather than just finding matches to your query among web results. Google has offered a small scale service like this (enter a simple query like "quarts in a gallon" in Google and it will give you the correct conversion) but the Wolfram Alpha engine is decidedly more advanced. A simple query like, "calories burned walking" takes you to a result set where it allows you to enter more clarifying data (e.g. your weight, distance walked, etc.). It also can handle more advanced equations or data queries like comparing the properties of two chemicals (try the sample search for Caffeine vs. Aspirin.

The National Academies have been working with Google to "digitize the library's collection of reports from 1863 to 1997, making them available – free, searchable, and in full text – through Google Book Search. The Academies plan to have their entire collection of nearly 11,000 reports digitized by 2011."

Some notable inclusions:

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1 (1863–1894).

On May 27 (5:30 - 6:30 pm) the Stanford Biodesign program will present the final installment of From the Innovators Workbench with a presentation from David Dvorak, President & CEO of Zimmer, Inc. In addition to his other accomplishments, David Dvorak has been responsible for Zimmer, Inc.'s Dental, Spine, Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgical Products divisions.

For more information:
http://biodesign.stanford.edu/bdn/people/dvorak_david.jsp

The annual Liu Lectures in Design begin on April 15.
The lectures are presented by educators and professionals in the field of design.

This years speakers include:
Andy Spade
Dr. Jonathan Cagan
Alex Wipperfürth

All talks will begin at 8pm in building 320, room 105. Every lecture is free and open to the public!

For more information about the speakers and to view past talks check out Liu Lectures Blog: http://liulectures.blogspot.com/

Photo: METEOTEK IES LA BISBAL SCHOOL via FLICKR

Using only a digital camera, some sensors, and a large helium balloon, a group of high school students from IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia, Spain were able to capture photos of earth and space up to nearly 100,000 feet. They had hoped to reach only 30,000 ft. Using an onboard radio receiver the team was able to track the balloon's progress on Google Earth.

Open Arms - What prosthetic-arm engineering is learning from open source, crowdsourcing, and the video-game industry

From IEEE Spectrum, this article discusses the prosthetics industry, the challenges and myths around creating new prosthetics and the importance of building devices using open source technology to allow for interoperability between different devices. The author, Jonathan Kuniholm is an Iraq veteran, amputee, and Engineering research at Duke University.

Distributed Solar Generation: A Developer’s Perspective on Opportunity in the Changing Economy

Arno Harris
CEO, Recurrent Energy

Location: George E. Pake Auditorium at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304

Abstract: