The MIT Libraries now have a subscription to Naxos Video Library. This streaming video database provides a large collection of classical music performances, opera, ballet, live concerts, and documentaries.
Shortcut URL: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/naxosvideo
(MIT certificates required; 5 simultaneous users)
Photo by L. Barry Hetherington
The Barker Library reading room has reopened to reveal the grandeur of the restored oculus atop the Great Dome. Read about the details of the project in MIT’s Great Dome is reborn.
Natural light, as well as additional lighting around the perimeter of the dome, brightens the entire space revealing beautiful architectural detail. Additional improvements include the installation of acoustic panels and a new sound-mitigation system that will help soften echoes and ambient noise. Comfortable chairs, large tables, and individual study carrels have also returned to the reading room, making it a perfect space for quiet study.
The reading room is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week to members of the MIT community with an MIT ID.
James Poterba
David Autor
Is the cost of a university degree worth it? It’s a question on the minds of many American families in an era of high unemployment and rising tuition costs. Scholars and policymakers at an on-campus forum last week suggested that though expensive, college is valuable both to individuals and the country at large. Labor economist David Autor pointed to evidence showing that college graduates earn $250,000 to $300,000 more over their lifetimes, regardless of undergraduate major. Autor is co-director of MIT’s School Effectiveness & Inequality Initiative, whose mission is to study issues related to the economics of education. Moderator and economics professor James Poterba said that higher education is “an extremely important sector of the U.S. economy,” representing about 3.5 percent of the national GDP.
Explore Professor Autor’s research and Professor Poterba’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.
Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.
Composer forum series: 5 pm, Lewis Music Library Bldg. 14E-109
Reception follows. Free and open to the public.
Elena Ruehr
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Elena Ruehr, Lecturer in Music at MIT, discusses her new CD, Averno, for chorus and orchestra, with poetry by American poets Louise Gluck, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson.
Visit: elenaruehr.org/
Cindy Cox
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Cindy Cox derives her “post-tonal” musical language from acoustics, innovations in technology, harmonic resonance, and poetic allusion. Her compositions synthesize old and new musical designs.
Visit: cacox.com
Sponsored by MIT Music and Theater Arts.
Scientists have known for two decades that Huntington’s disease, a fatal brain disorder, is caused by a mutant gene that’s expanded to include DNA repeats. But it’s not clear how the gene produces the disease symptoms. MIT biological engineers, including MIT grad student Christopher Ng and professors Ernest Fraenkel and David Housman, recently published a paper that comes closer to answering that question. They found that the protein encoded by the Huntington’s gene changes the chemical structure of genes involved in brain function. Disruptions to these genes could cause neurodegenerative symptoms.
Explore Professor Fraenkel’s research and Professor Housman’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.
Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.
The MIT Libraries are pleased to announce campus wide access to DesalData.com, a business development and consultancy package from the publishers of Global Water Intelligence in association with the International Desalination Association (IDA).
Within Desal Data you will find desalination plant listings, incorporating the IDA Inventory (a catalogue of desalination facilities contracted and under construction since 1945, based on over 25 years of annual industry surveys), market analysis and economic forecasting from Global Water Intelligence, company profiles and desalination news from countries worldwide.
You can find DesalData in VERA or use this URL http://libraries.mit.edu/get/desaldata
We welcome your feedback and hope this product supports the desalination work on campus!
More than half of people worldwide with access to water have to walk to fetch it. In urban Morocco, households relying on public taps spend seven hours a week collecting water—a burden that can lead to stress and conflict within families. Economist Esther Duflo and colleagues recently published a paper showing that when offered credit and assistance, nearly 70 percent of households bought a connection to water despite a doubling of their water bill. Nearly half of those who did said their overall quality of life improved afterwards.
Explore Professor Duflo’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.
Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.
Researching energy industries? Need statistics, market analysis, news, company information, and financial deals? Try our suite of eTrack databases:
eTrack provides data and reports on energy industry sectors worldwide. Each database contains numerous statistical databases; detailed information on companies, deals, and key events; plus in-depth industry research. Find detailed statistics and generate lists such as:
Note: To download tables, copy and paste them into Excel page by page.
Want further information about energy? Attend one of our energy IAP workshops and try the other resources on our Energy Research Guide.
Have you used data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) in your research? If so, consider submitting your paper for the IPUMS Research Award, the annual cash prize award competition for research using the IPUMS microdata collection.
Cash prizes will be awarded for:
Papers or publications submitted should utilize IPUMS-USA/CPS, IPUMS-International, or IHIS to study social, economic, and/or demographic processes.
Deadline for nomination or submission: February 15, 2013.
Never used IPUMS data and want to learn more? Want to know more about your options for utilizing microdata (i.e., record level research data) to answer research questions in the social sciences? See our guide to Social Science Data Services and contact Kate McNeill, Social Science Data Services Librarian, at mcneillh@mit.edu.
Using a home computer in the early 1980s meant knowing at least some programming to get it off and running. When you turned on your Commodore 64—which you may well have done; it was the best-selling single model of computer ever produced—a nearly-blank blue screen emerged. “READY,” it told you. A blinking cursor awaited your commands.
Many of us used prefab programs to play games or do word processing, but the tinkerers among us wrote their own code, long and short, to explore what computers could do. Take this one-liner in BASIC language that Associate Professor of Digital Media Nick Montfort found in a magazine from the era: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Run it on a Commodore 64 (or an emulator on your laptop today), and diagonal slashes fill the screen in a random way, building a pleasing maze that continues until interrupted.
Montfort posted 10 PRINT to an online Critical Code Studies conference in winter 2010. A lively discussion ensued among a dozen participants including MIT librarian Patsy Baudoin, who is liaison to the Media Lab and the Foreign Languages and Literatures department. Though the code is short and there’s not much known about its history, “it was obvious that there was plenty to say about it,” says Montfort. “However concise it was, it clearly connected computation to creativity, and to culture, in really intriguing ways.”
A few months after the conference, Montfort asked the 10 PRINT thread contributors to collaborate on a book exploring different aspects of culture—mazes in literature and religion, randomness and chance in games and art, the programming language BASIC, the Commodore 64 computer—through the lens of that one line of code.
The book, whose title is the code, was published in December by MIT Press. Besides Montfort and Baudoin, the authors include John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample and Noah Vawter. Though 10 PRINT is freely downloadable under a Creative Commons license, its first print run nearly sold out within a month. (This is another example of increased sales accompanying open access.) Royalties go to the Electronic Literature Organization, a nonprofit that promotes writing, reading, and teaching digital fiction and poetry.
Baudoin, the lone librarian of the group, has a PhD in comparative literature, which she says proved useful during the year-and-a-half collaboration. “I understood implicitly that exploring a concise line of computer code was like reading a short poem,” she says. “[As a graduate student] I wrote a 50-page paper on Catullus’s Odi et amo, a two-line Latin poem. In one sense, this line of code doesn’t appear to do a lot, but analyzed carefully, it speaks loudly.”
10 PRINT has a lot to say about a specific time. Though we can easily edit video, chat online, and play music on our laptops today, “when it comes to allowing people to directly access computation and to use that computing power for creative, expressive, and conceptual purposes, today’s computers, out of the box, are much worse” than those of 30 years ago, says Montfort. “I can type in and run the 10 PRINT program within 15 seconds of turning my Commodore 64 on. I can modify it and explore the program quite extensively within a minute. How long would it take you to produce any program like that after you started up your Windows 8 system?”
Montfort is quick to note that his interest in code like 10 PRINT is not nostalgia for a lost era; this, he says, trivializes important ideas in computer history. 10 PRINT itself is far from trivial, which is why Montfort, Baudoin and their coauthors found it a worthy book topic. “This type of program was written and run by millions in the 1980s on their way to a deeper understanding of computation,” he says.
Find 10 PRINT events under “Upcoming” at http://nickm.com.
See also: MIT News coverage of the book
Thursday, January 10, 2013, 3-4pm in 14N-132
photo by L.Barry Hetherington
Are you interested in music, video, literature, art or architecture? Join Libraries staff for a session highlighting some of the vast arts, culture, and multimedia resources available to you through the MIT Libraries. Learn how to access over a million tracks of streaming audio (everything from classical to jazz to popular music), over 150,000 online music scores, streaming video of foreign films, dance, theater, documentaries and more, and over one million high-res images of art, architecture, science and the humanities.
Please register for this class.
Questions? Contact Mark Szarko.
Newspapers from the U.S. and around the world are at your fingertips with our new subscription to Library PressDisplay!
Search complete issues of over 2000 newspapers from 97 countries in 54 languages, including the current issue and a three-month archive. The papers are viewable in full color in the original layout of the print edition, with complete content, including photos, graphics, advertisements, and classifieds.
Titles include the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, China Daily, Dong-A Ilbo, Le Figaro, the Globe & Mail, the Guardian, and Times of India.
Two MIT researchers have won the country’s highest honors for scientists, engineers, and inventors. Sallie (Penny) Chisholm, a professor of environmental studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, won the National Medal of Science. Robert Langer, an Institute Professor and professor of chemical engineering, won the National Medal of Technology. President Barack Obama will present the awards at a ceremony early in 2013.
Explore Professor Chisholm’s research and Professor Langer’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.
Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.
If you use Google Scholar, you already know it’s a great tool for finding citations to literature in your research area. It’s a massive index of articles, books and other publications of a scholarly nature. (It doesn’t cover ALL the scholarly literature in any discipline, however, so be sure to include the Libraries’ databases in Vera in your literature search.)
Many of the articles in Google Scholar are licensed by the MIT Libraries through our subscriptions, so – in many cases – the full text is available to you. If you are on campus, you’ll see this link in your results list:
Are you working off campus? To take advantage of this feature, click on Settings and then Library Links.
Type MIT in the search window; select it; click Save. You should now see the full text link in your results list for articles in any of MIT’s paid subscriptions.
The MIT Libraries is hosting a series of classes related to energy over IAP! Some classes require preregistration.
Photo Courtesy of the National Science Foundation
Energy Sci/Tech Information: Where to Go, What to Do
Mon Jan 14, 3-4:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Chris Sherratt, gcsherra@mit.edu
Energy Information: Industries and Statistics
Mon Jan 14, 4-5:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Katherine McNeill, mcneillh@mit.edu
Energy Information: Maps and Data to use with GIS
Tue Jan 22, 3-4:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Jennie Murack, murack@mit.edu
Finding the Energy in E-Books!
Thu Jan 24, 11:00am-12:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Chris Sherratt, gcsherra@mit.edu
For a complete list of IAP classes offered by the Libraries on other topics, please see our Calendar of Events.
San Andreas cheese, a raw sheep's milk cheese made by Bellwether Farms in Sonoma County, California. Image courtesy of Heather Paxson
What makes a good cheese? It’s a complicated question, and one that cultural anthropologist Heather Paxson explores in her new book, The Life of Cheese. Paxson has written about (and eaten a lot of) cheese over the last decade, and in her research she’s met some of the new wave of American artisan cheesemakers, whose force has doubled since 2000. Paxson argues that handcraft cheese production is valuable in many ways: it creates “decent livelihoods, healthy ecologies, beautiful vistas, and, most immediately, good food.”
Explore Professor Paxson’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.
Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.
Have you tried Scopus, one of our citation databases in Vera? Scopus’ main focus is in the sciences but it also includes strong coverage of the social sciences. Use Scopus to look for journal articles, conference papers and other materials. Once you find relevant articles Scopus can link you to other related articles in the database and show you other articles (published since 1996) that have cited the article you are looking at.
To focus your Scopus search in the social sciences literature click the Social Science and Humanities button on the search screen:
As a graduate student in Chemical Engineering, MIT’s Patrick Heider is very familiar with variables of time and pressure. And as this year’s winner of the Knovel University Challenge, Patrick will use his new iPad to optimize these just in time for the holidays.
Each year Knovel invites engineering students worldwide to enter a competition designed to show the content and powerful search functions of this collection of sci/tech handbooks. One example is Patrick’s favorite feature, the Equation Plotter. “[This] … is a great way to quickly get property information without having to dig through the text to figure out the functional form used for a specific correlation,” he writes. Users can also input names of properties and ranges of data values to search for compounds that fit these bounds. At your fingertips is a digital library that, thanks to the MIT Libraries, will bring you specific answers as well as full texts to use in coursework or research.
We say, “Keep on searching!”
New World Cinema includes full-length feature films as well as award-winning short films. Many are award-winning (collectively the films have won more than 1,000 awards). Films are indeed from all over the world and many different genres. Happy Together by Wong Kar Wai, Tran Anh Hung’s The Scent of Green Papaya, and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher are among the internationally known.
Award winning teacher and mechanical engineering professor Sanjay Sarma has been named MIT’s first Director of Digital Learning. His job will be to assess how edX and other online tools can be used on campus alongside traditional classroom teaching. In an email to the MIT community, President Rafael Reif noted that Sarma will “serve as experimenter-in-chief, assessing what is working best in MIT’s current educational model, what we could do more effectively and what kind of changes we should pursue.” Sarma, whose research includes RFID and computational geometry, won the MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, MIT’s highest teaching honor, in 2008.
Explore Professor Sarma’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.
Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.
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