Self Assessment. NEWSLINE :: News. Print-friendly version Lab report shows 2008 U.S. energy use dropped Energy flow charts show the relative size of primary energy resources and end uses in the United States, with fuels compared on a common energy unit basis. High-resolution image. Anne M. Stark Newsline staff writer Americans used more solar, nuclear, biomass and wind energy in 2008 than they did in 2007, according to the most recent energy flow charts released by the Laboratory.
The nation used less coal and petroleum during the same time frame and only slightly increased its natural gas consumption. The estimated U.S. energy use in 2008 equaled 99.2 quadrillion BTUs (“quads”), down from 101.5 quadrillion BTUs in 2007. Energy use in the industrial and transportation sectors declined by 1.17 and 0.9 quads, respectively, while commercial and residential use slightly climbed. Last year saw a significant increase in the use of biomass energy with the recent push for the development of more biofuels including ethanol. In which numbers lie – except when they flatter us | Mind the Gap. Bibliometrics have been making me cross recently. In the past month, I’ve stumbled across two instances where journal impact factors were being used in a grossly inappropriate way to assess the worth and quality of scientist colleagues. This exposure in turn has really hammered home the inanity of our profession’s obsession with measuring the immeasurable. I don’t want to compromise anyone’s privacy, so let’s call the two people involved Timothy and Anna (not their real names).
Timothy is an early-career researcher in another London university who went to speak to the person in charge of marshalling the troops for the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF), a national exercise used to assess the quality of a university’s research output. “The journals you’ve published these in,” she explained, “aren’t four-star.
Timothy was so shocked that he couldn’t think of anything to say to this; he just took his CV back and retreated, flushed with humiliation. Promoting yourself & your research. Part 1: Creating a personal website. I meet a lot of PhD students and early career researchers who are interested in establishing an online presence. Many are aware that communicating research online can give them a competitive advantage but are not sure where to start. Essentially, creating an online communications strategy for your research involves two activities: creating a space online that tells a story about yourself and your research, and driving traffic to this location. This blog post will provide a guide to choosing a content platform that will bring your research to life in the limited time you have available.
My next blog post will outline how to drive traffic to this content platform. Step 1. Starting a blog without a strategy is like commencing a research project without a proposal. Step 2. Think carefully about your website domain name because changing it later is not easy. Confession time! Tips for choosing a domain name Your blog name should be unique, easy to remember, and easy to spell (avoid hyphens). Airline Seating Charts - Best Airplane Seats - SeatGuru. Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics. This is a guest post by Miriam Posner (@miriamkp and miriamposner.com), Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in Emory University’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC); Stewart Varner (@stewartvarner), Digital Scholarship Coordinator at DiSC; and ProfHacker’s own Brian Croxall (@briancroxall and briancroxall.net), who also works with DiSC.
This post is an extended recap of a recent DiSC workshop on creating a web presence. You can watch a video of the whole workshop at the Internet Archive. Finally, this post has been adapted from one we posted on the Library Blog at Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. Thinking about how to create and maintain a Web presence might strike some academics as distasteful.
Chances are, however, that if you’re reading ProfHacker, you understand that being visible on the Internet can benefit your scholarship, pedagogy, and even service. Luckily, you don’t have to be a tech genius to whip your Google results into shape. The Basics To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Tips & Tricks – Teaching Scrivener to work with equations in LaTeX quality. Introduction After the success of the Scrivener & Zotero post let’s take care of the second big problem when writing for academic purpose: equations. Sometimes very complicated, they are a real problem when it comes to printing in high quality. Donald E. Knuth tried to solve the problem and invented TeX for a better typesetting at all, but with special focus on equations. The problem with LaTeX is, that it is similar to a own scripting language. For the average writer it is not very easy to concentrate on writing and learning LaTeX at the same time, same is for students and the guys who need good looking equations only on a few days in the year.
Whats my goal? At the end of this tutorial Scriveners should be able to put real LaTeX styled/compiled equations in their Scrivener document without even touching LaTeX once. Which OS platforms are covered by this tutorial? Windows and MacOS (The mac users may have a little bit better quality, due to the Vector-PDF export ability of LaTeXiT)
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