Friday 27 March 2009

CAS e-seminar - Finding “greener” research processes

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
19:00-20:00 GMT

May 19, 2009
11:00-12:00 GMT
14:00-15:00 GMT

To register, visit: http://casevents.webex.com

*Effectively search the scientific literature for green chemistry technologies
*Explore novel green discoveries in patents
*Find syntheses using green reagents and solvents
*Create alerts to inform you of green findings

Poster Design

ISiskills directs you to a couple of courses and leaflet about poster creation. Search for poster.

Books exist in the library on scientific writing and communication and include poster creation. Some classmark areas which would be good places to browse:
QA1778, Q222, Q223, T11 [PE1408]

See also Flora Grabowska's, a librarian at US's Vassar College:
list of poster design sites
look to the left menu

Third Science Learning and Teaching Conference (SLTC)

16-17th June 2009,
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

The aim of this national conference is to bring together practitioners in the teaching of science disciplines in HE to share their experiences, identify common challenges and an opportunity to share effective practice. The conference programme will include keynote lectures; short oral presentations; hands on workshops; posters and exhibitions.

Early bird registration deadline is 31st March 2009.

for more information at http://www.sltc.info/

Thursday 26 March 2009

CDS - Upgrades for the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database software

Recent updates to the ICSD-WWW software have been implemented which brings the CDS implementation fully in line with the ILL master server at Grenoble.

These updates bring various improvements. In particular a number of users of Internet Explorer may have previously experienced difficulties with the Jmol display where thermal ellipsoids were not accessible and various tick boxes were not displayed. These problems have now been fixed.

details from http://cds.dl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/news/disp?icsd

Wednesday 25 March 2009

History of the Book seminar - John Murray's Travel Books

Barbara Schaff (University of Goettingen)
Friday March 27 (1-2pm)
5th Floor seminar room,
Edinburgh University Library

In the course of the nineteenth century, the Murray Handbooks were embraced by the British middle classes as exemplary manuals model for tourists, thereby helping to normalise a certain kind of cultured and educated travel practice. Amongst other things, the seminar on Friday will discuss John Murray's invention of the new format of the tourist guidebook and its long lasting cultural relevance. It will also address Murray's competition with Baedeker.

Barbara Schaff is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Göttingen University. In 2006-07 she held a Caledonian Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh at the Centre for the History of the Book for her research on the John Murray Handbooks.

Tuesday 24 March 2009

Main Library will be closed on Saturday 28th March

This closure is necessary due to essential work to the Appleton Tower server room which will result in the loss of the network to the Main Library building.

Other Libraries (Darwin, Robertson, Law & Europa, Moray House) and Open Access Labs will be operating as usual on Saturday 28th March.

Information on opening hours of Site Libraries
Information on Open Access Labs

The Main Library will open with full services as usual at 12 noon on Sunday 29th March.

3rd European Variety in Chemistry Education with Variety in Chemistry Education

3rd European Variety in Chemistry Education with Variety in Chemistry Education,
2nd – 4th September 2009,
University of Manchester

This conference, which is a European counterpart of the UK conference Variety in Chemistry Education, is devoted to practical aspects of chemical education at tertiary (university) level. It provides a forum for the:

*exchange of ideas related to teaching and learning chemistry at degree level
*sharing of good practice and innovation
*dissemination of outcomes of pedagogic research as it relates to chemistry at university level in Europe

The submission of abstracts is invited for workshops, oral communications, oral Bytes. The deadline for submissions and early bird registration is June 30th 2009. Please see the website for details:

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/eurovariety

US EPA database on Environmental Chemicals

ACToR (Aggregated Computational Toxicology Resource)
A collection of databases collated or developed by the US EPA National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT). More than 200 sources of publicly available data on environmental chemicals have been brought together and made searchable by chemical name and other identifiers, and by chemical structure. Data includes chemical structure, physico-chemical values, in vitro assay data and in vivo toxicology data. Chemicals include, but are not limited to, high and medium production volume industrial chemicals, pesticides (active and inert ingredients), and potential ground and drinking water contaminants.

Talbot Rice Gallery - Wednesday Walkabouts at One

Desire Lines - Art on Campus
Wednesday Walkabouts at One
Next tour Wednesday 25 March at 1pm

Join a member of the Talbot Rice Gallery staff on a guided tour of the Desire Lines Art on Campus projects, and hear how each artist came to be located in their unique site.

These tours will run fortnightly throughout the exhibition starting on 25 February finishing on 17 June. Meet at the Information Hub at the entrance to Talbot Rice Gallery. The tour will take around 45 minutes. Bring appropriate clothing, as some of the tour will be outside. No need to book, just turn up on the day.

Friday 20 March 2009

RSC - enhancement to online journal articles

RSC have released a few new features based around the RSC Prospect project to enhance their articles. Some of these features are cosmetic and improve the look and feel, and some are deeply semantic and a bit specialist.

mouseover popups of chemical structures,
improved subject pages and compound pages,
compound link through to ChemSpider,
better toolbar and page layout.

An example is at http://tinyurl.com/dba3mv - [compounds in the title show the structure when you put your mouse over them].

As part of our work in expanding the set of open subject classifications in our subject area, we're also making available the first three of a set of open chemistry ontologies:

Name Reaction Ontology (RXN),
Chemical Methods Ontology (CMO)
Molecular Processes Ontology (MOP).

These are all available from http://www.rsc.org/ontologies.

Thursday 19 March 2009

Call for submissions on: The teacher’s role, identity and presence in game-based learning

Mini Track at the 3rd European Conference on Game Based Learning,
FH JOANNEUM University of Applied Sciences,
Graz,
Austria,
12-13 October 2009

Mini track on: The teacher’s role, identity and presence in game-based learning
Track chair: Hamish Macleod, University of Edinburgh, UK

Game-based and game-informed approaches to learning are often seen as powerful examples of student-centred and experiential learning. While this is an important emphasis, there appears a need to clarify the task of the teacher within such settings...

This call for papers and full details of the conference at http://www.academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2009/ecgbl09-home.htm

Free events on sustainable laboratories - Edinburgh date 1st May

Free events on sustainable laboratories have been organised for academics, managers and technicians in laboratories. All feature Allen Doyle, founder of the award winning LabRATS initiative in the University of California, and have been organised by the HEFCE-funded HEEPI project.

Bookings can be made at http://www.eventlink.org.uk.

They are being held at the Royal Society of Chemistry, London (27/04/09), the University of Bradford (28/04/09) and the University of Edinburgh (01/05/09).

The London event focuses on laboratory operation, and deals with topics such as energy efficiency, green IT and waste management.

The Bradford event is mainly aimed at academics and focuses on using laboratory operations as a mechanism for teaching and learning about sustainability (e.g. HVAC systems as engineering case studies; experimental chemicals as a route into teaching green chemistry and life cycle assessment).

The Edinburgh event combines both.

Student Voice conference

Gerry Czerniawski and colleagues at UEL are putting on a conference on April 22nd at the Docklands campus on student voice. Guest speakers include Michael Fielding, Gill Mullis, Mick Waters, Pippa Lord and the event is being chaired by Wes Streeting (President of the NUS).
More information from http://www.uel.ac.uk/listeningtolearners/

Wednesday 18 March 2009

Beilstein content update

The latest update of the Beilstein database, 2009/01, was made available on Tuesday 17th March.

Statistics for the new Beilstein database are as follows:

Number of compounds: 10,978,219
Number of citations: 2,218,503
Number of reactions: 22,528,937

Chemistry databases

NeSC - Workshop on Use Cases for Provenance

Workshop on Use Cases for Provenance
April 20, 2009 http://wiki.esi.ac.uk/UseCasesForProvenanceWorkshop
e-Science Institute
15 South College Street, Edinburgh

Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) - Spring 2009 CDK workshop

The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) team is glad to announce the Spring 2009 CDK workshop
held at the
European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).

So far, 23 participants from Industry and Academia are registered. There is a capacity of 40.

One day of tutorials on how to use CDK and talks on research using the CDK. Free-form developers workshop for the rest of the second day. Both the evening of the 20th and the 21st will be opportunities for enjoying refreshments.

Small nominal registration fee of 50 Pounds.

Monday 16 March 2009

6th annual Problem Based Learning (PBL) summer workshop

The workshop is run every year by academic staff from the University of Leicester. This year it is being hosted by Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland and delivered by the team from the University of Leicester on 13th- 15th July 2009.

The PBL summer workshop is not discipline-specific covering arts and social sciences disciplines along side sciences, engineering, mathematics, IT, medical and health care fields. In recent years this event has welcomed participants from across the globe and across the disciplines.

More information from http://www.dkit.ie/leap

Art Collective artsci series - first event

Art Collective has its first 'artsci' series event at the Edinburgh College of Art this afternoon (Mon 16th Mar)

The event is open to anyone and will be followed by a talk by conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth, at the National Gallery (starting at 6).

Also.... The Place Project schedule is now available.

CrossFire - both logins working

CrossFire service is running normally again (as of Saturday 14th Mar) and logins via both IP and web authentication are possible. MIMAS believes the service is now stable, but members of the University of Edinburgh please report any problems to your liaison librarian or directly to CrossFire staff at crossfire--at-mimas.ac.uk.

Friday 13 March 2009

CrossFire is running again for IP access

Fri 13 Mar 09 pm - CrossFire is running again following the disk controller replacement and firmware upgrade on an essential Mimas file system this morning, and logins via IP authentication are now possible. Unfortunately, web authentication via Shibboleth is not yet possible due to problems with an Oracle database; MIMAS staff are working on this now.

UoEd Open Access computing labs/CrossFire packaged for desktop all have to use IP authentication.

CrossFire - MIMAS downtime

The unavailability of Mimas services including CrossFire continues . Engineers were unable to download the necessary firmware for transfer to one of the disk controllers yesterday and this task was resumed today (13th Mar09) at 9 a.m.

CrystalWeb data update and improved searching

CDS Homepage is at: http://cds.dl.ac.uk

The latest ICSD update is now available via CrystalWeb and ICSD-WWW. Also the coordination search facility within CrystalWeb has been restored.

The latest version of the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD 2008/2) has been added to CrystalWeb.

Coordination searching has been restored to the CrystalWeb Formula and Coordination Search Form. Coordination searching is available for all component databases except the NIST Crystal Data Identification File. The maximum coordination limit has been removed.

Crstalweb information at http://cds.dl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/news/disp?crystalweb
Inorganic Crystal Structure Database information at http://cds.dl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/news/disp?icsd

Thursday 12 March 2009

eCheminfo Community of Practice Drug Discovery Meeting

eCheminfo Community of Practice Drug Discovery Meeting
Bryn Mawr College,
Philadelphia,
13-16 October 2009

Information on the program at http://echeminfo.com/COMTY_conferences

Includes:
Invitation for contributed papers from members of academic, government research and commercial organizations on areas of new research and innovation involving drug discovery research informatics.

Bursary Awards
Bursary Awards will be used to support the attendance of a selection of academic investigators at the meeting and workshops.

On Trial - Chinese databases from Taiwan

EUL staff have arranged a free trial of two Chinese databases from Taiwan.

The trail period provides time for readers and library staff to assess the products. Please send feedback via Electronic Information Service Trials webpage where these services should soon appear. Or to your Liaison Librarian.

1. Taiwan Electronic Periodical Services (TEPS) http://www.airiti.com/teps/ec_en This is an on-line database offering the full-text of more than 700 Taiwan periodicals of different subjects in Arts, Humanities, Social Science. Science and Medicine. Interface in both Chinese and English.

Trial period: Mar 10 2009 ~ Apr 09 2009

2. National Palace Museum Online (NPM Online) http://www.airiti.com/npmoln/
An image database of Chinese Art. Interface in both Chinese and English.

Trial period: Mar 10 2009 ~ Apr 09 2009

History of the Book seminar

Friday 13th Mar09
13:00-14:00
CRC seminar room
Main Library, 5th floor.

Dr. Paul Barnaby
"The Corson Collection: Edinburgh University Library's Scott Monument."

More information at http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/ebhs08_09.htm

CrossFire down time

All Mimas services including CrossFire will be taken down at 11:15 today, 12th Mar09,in order to replace the faulty disk controller. We anticipate that the work will take around 2 hours. Apologies once again for the disruption.

Tthis is for an engineer to replace the faulty disk controller to solve the continued unavailability of CrossFire logins via web authentication (logins via IP have been possible).

Tuesday 10 March 2009

e-Science Institute public lecture - Adding Semantics to Geographic Data Models

Adding Semantics to Geographic Data Models by Dr Femke Reitsma (Geography Department, Canterbury University) is open to all interested parties in academia and industry.

More about the lecture from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/981

Date and Time: 16:00, 7 April 2009 (tea and coffee at 17:00)

Place: Newhaven Lecture Theatre
e-Science Institute
15 South College Street (Edinburgh)

Note that there is no need to register for this event - just turn up.

Cambridge Healthcare Institute's Structure-Based Drug Design Conference

June 4-5 2009,
Cambridge, Mass., USA

Register by March 13th for early bird discount.

Conference information at http://www.healthtech.com/SBD/overview.aspx

Topics include:

Target Structure-Guided Drug Discovery.
Feeding SBDD with Biochemical and Biophysical Information.
Ligand-Based Predictions Applied to Drug Design.
SBDD and Computational Chemistry Methods: A Marriage of Innovation.
SBDD of Pharmacological Chaperons.

Pre-Conference Workshop: Wednesday, June 3:
Designing Kinase Inhibitors

Monday 9 March 2009

MRC's research portfolio online

The UK Medical Research Council's database is available online as a searchable database

All funded projects and intramural programmes are in the database, each with a lay summary and scientific abstract.

Search the database, or browse by broad disease area, research type, location, organisation, MRC Board or grant category.

The portfolio has been online in a couple of previous incarnations, once via Community of Science and once on the MRC's own website, but both were withdrawn for a mixture of reasons.

Friday 6 March 2009

EPSRC agree continued ACD/Labs I-Lab Funding

EPSRC has agreed continued funding of I-Lab for the full three years.

Details of the I-Lab system and the EPSRC decision

CDS users are encouraged to carry on making full use of the I-lab system and all CDS components to help ensure their continued availability beyond 2011.

ACD/Labs Online (I-Lab) is an Internet-based service that allows instant access to spectroscopy information, compound name generation and property prediction programs.

All registered CDS users are eligible to access the system. The service is mounted on a server operated by the CDS.

UK academics can register to use the CDS.
Definition of UK Academic

Wednesday 4 March 2009

£50 Amazon Voucher - Intute - survey

PRIZE DRAW: A £50 Amazon Voucher will be awarded each week throughout March.

Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners.

Ensure it meets your needs by completing this short online survey. It only takes about 5 minutes to complete.

http://feedback.intute.ac.uk/userfeedback

More free web-based resources for Chemists

Research-Teaching Links in the Physical Sciences: Politics and Practice

Wednesday 18th March 2009,
The Reinvention Centre,
University of Warwick

Undergraduate Research and the Research Teaching Link are currently hot topics. Autumn 2008 saw the publication of three major reports, from the Scottish QAA and from Professors Nigel Thrift and Paul Ramsden to the Minister, John Denham, that provide a clear political framework for 2009 onwards.

Lynda Thrift will introduce the event and Paul Taylor will talk about the work of the reinvention Centre at the University of Warwick. Tina Overton, Physical Sciences Centre, Ros Roke, University of Warwick and Simon Bates, University of Edinburgh, will discuss the impact of these reports.

The full programme is available on the website: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/physsci/events/detail/2009/rtl_mar_2009

There is no registration fee for this meeting for those working in UK HE and lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Case studies will be presented that highlight what is actually happening in Physical Science Departments around the country. If you would like to contribute a 10 minute case study presentation to the workshop, please contact Ruth Wellock, r.wellock -at- hull.ac.uk, with details of what you would like to present.

SciFinder e-seminar - Energizing your chemical synthesis research

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
2:00 – 3:00 PM U.S. Eastern Standard Time

For other broadcast dates and to register visit: http://casevents.webex.com

SciFinder provides access to synthetic methods from 1840 to the present, from journals, patents, and evaluated reference works.

In this session, you will learn how to:

* Explore CAS reaction content
* Sort and analysis features that can help with more precise reaction searching
* Conduct effective product yield searches
* Plus, tips for exploring SciFinder's reaction content

More about SciFinder Scholar at UoEdinburgh

Create books from almost any MediaWiki wiki

PediaPress is a German company which for a cost will print in book format material sourced from wikis using MediaWiki software.

See their webpages for the widget and more information