Bits, Bytes and a little housekeeping

I had planned on posting this blog yesterday (Thursday) doing a little housekeeping, picking up bits and pieces of information, trolling the Internet and databases for a few more precious bytes of information. Then my tween walked through the front door the unwitting participant in a physics experiment gone wrong. Here is the scenario: tween (mass 80-85 lbs.) in the back of the bus and driver swerves to avoid a car that runs a stop sign. The motion of the swerve and the lack of suspension as the bus bumps over the curb which throws the tween from the seat, who comes to rest on the floor. Force, motion and gravity- thanks for the science review. But wait there is more – medicine. Several hours at the ER was next on the list and fortunately, a simple break of the humorous above the growth plant. Too bad my tween couldn’t throw a little engineering in for me.

This posting will have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. My goal is to explore a few more resources. Starting with the easy stuff first.

Publishing
Under the publications section his CV, Greg Asner lists out 199 published items including peer reviewed papers, edited books, proceedings, book reviews and technical reports. There is a second list of meeting presentations with published abstracts; this list runs for six and half pages. Note to self, the best place to start when researching an individual is their CV. Also crossing checking database results to a CV would confirm the accuracy of the results.

Professional Associations
Greg Asner is a member of several professional associations. These associations have several publications such as Biotropic, Tropinet, Liana, Amiogos, Ecology, Ecology Applications, Geophysical Research Letters, Biogeosciences, BioScience and Photogrammetric Engineering + Remote Sensing. Several of these associations maintain databases, online archive, online journals, podcasts, and RSS feeds.

Association for Tropical Biology
Organization for Tropical Studies
Ecological Society of America
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing

Moreover, Greg Asner is a journal reviewer and has several major service commitments including

Chair, NASA Senior Review Committee
Carnegie Airborne Observatory program
NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) Airborne Remote Sensing Program
Scientific Steering Committee for the Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazônia
(LBA) Program
Scientific Steering Committee for bioDISCOVERY, Diversitas International

Clusty: the good and the ugly
Clusty is a “clustering service engine” according to the tagline. I typed in Greg Asner into the search dialogue box and received 8,590 results with the top 180 results listed for me. The good was a detail link that reported where the data was harvested (New York Times - 0, Open Directory - 0). The ugly was that in the top ten was a link to an “adult entertainment” site. Using quotes in the search, limited the results to 372 results and the list of the top 155 were all related to Greg Asner. New information gleaned from the data include that Greg Asner was involved with National Geographic Strange Days on Planet Earth, and that he is on ITAP Listserv. Also the image bank could be useful for a typical student report. Because I work in the youth services department of a library, I will not be recommending this search engine to students. Actually because of filtering, I am not sure if this site could be accessed at the library (CCL accepts e-rate and thus must follow Federal regulations). However, it might be a good tool (with parental supervision) for my own tweens and teen.

Periodicals and Newspapers (not the academic stuff)
One of my classmates had found a wealth of information on her scientist in the more general periodicals. A search of Newspaper Source database netted two articles:
Levine, B. (10/15/2007). ‘Brilliant’ minds think alike. USA Today.
Block, M. (10/20/2005). Analysis: mixed report for state of Amazon forest. All Things Considered (NPR).

Thoughts
I will do a wrap up in the next blog.


Next blog – The End: Thoughts, Final Answers and Recommendations to a Budding Scientist