In 2010, 3.1 million jobs in the United States were associated with the production of green goods and services, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Green Goods and Services (GGS) jobs are found in businesses that produce goods and provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources. GGS jobs accounted for 2.4 percent of total employment in 2010. The private sector had 2.3 million GGS jobs and the public sector had 860,300. Manufacturing had 461,800 GGS jobs, the most among any private sector industry.

Among the states, California had the largest number of GGS jobs (338,400), accounting for 2.3 percent of employment in the state. Vermont had the highest proportion of GGS employment at 4.4 percent; the District of Columbia had the second highest at 3.9 percent.

For the full report:
http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/ggqcew.nr0.htm

 

In an article by Jason Mick, Daily Tech, we hear that CERN is breaking all the physics laws that I lived by.   Leave it to those CERN folks to turn everything upside down.  Hey, Captain Kirk and crew had (will have) it right!  Of course, more research is necessary.  Funds anyone?

The Philadelphia Science Festival begins next week! The festival kicks off on April 15 and runs through April 28. With over 100 events scheduled, the festival promises something for scientists of all ages.

Enjoy a science-filled Saturday at the Carnival along the Ben Franklin Parkway on April 16. On April 27 and 28, attend the Laureate and Luminary Symposium to listen to some of today’s greatest minds discuss current topics.

Other events of interest

• Fun with Physics with Bill Berner
• Towers & Catapults design competition
• Physics at the Ballpark
• Physics of the Art Museum
• Playground Physics at Franklin Square

To start planning your festival schedule, check out the events calendar.

Watch the official Philadelphia Science Festival video.

My colleague Jay Bhatt recently shared the response from the good folks at Access Science about properly citing an article from this worthwhile resource.  It is always a good sign when a student is serious about citing a resource correctly.  The question was about the correct date of the article.  Here is the response, which I think merits sharing further.

To answer your and your student’s question, the original article you ask about—”Hybrid automotive power systems”—was published in the 2008 print edition of the McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science & Technology and appeared online as a Research Update soon afterwards. Although the publication year does not appear in the online citation (if that is required, you may use the date of that you viewed or downloaded the article), there is a way to tell when a yearbook article first appeared. The secret is within the url itself: http://www.accessscience.com/content.aspx?id=YB080630

The end of that url has a unique id number. This one, YB080630, tells you that the article was from the Yearbook 2008 (“YB08”).

 The website itself is updated several times a week. This can involve adding brand new articles to the site; adding news or resource guides or links to the homepage; or republishing articles that have been revised since they were first published.

The numbers that you see at the end of the article (“DOI 10.1036/1097-8542.YB080630”) refer to the article’s “DOI” number, or digital object identifier. This is a unique and permanent way to identify and find a particular article wherever it moves. As one website below explains, the DOI is like your article’s social security number, rather than it’s home address (url), which may change. You can see in our case that our articles’ DOI’s also contain the id number.

Jessa Forte Netting
Senior Editor Online
AccessScience – McGraw-Hill
Encyclopedia of Science & Technology

Cornell University Library Engages More Institutions in Supporting arXiv
Collaborative Business Model Changes Funding Structure

ITHACA, N.Y. (Jan. 21, 2010) – In a move to expand support for sustaining arXiv, Cornell University Library is broadening the funding base for the online scientific repository. Nearly 600,000 e-prints – research articles published online in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines – now reside in arXiv, which is an open information source for hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers.

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv.

“Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution’s resources,” said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. “If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list.”

Go to for more info:  http://news.library.cornell.edu/news/arxiv

Come see the library’s new exhibit showcasing the geology of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Pennsylvania display contains geological samples and fossils donated by Dr. Leonard Finegold of the Physics department and Phillip Getty, a local Geological Society member. It is housed in a display case near the stairs on the first floor of W.W. Hagerty Library.

The New Jersey State Museum has loaned us some very interesting specimens to accompany our New Jersey geologic display, which can be found at the top of the stairs on Hagerty’s 2^nd floor. We’ve also highlighted some books from the library collection that can teach you more about the specimens displayed or help you plan your next fossil-hunting trip.

Dig it!

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) today announced the launch of Release 2 of the AIP UniPHY (aipuniphy.org) professional networking site for physical scientists. Developed in partnership with Collexis Holdings, Inc., a leading developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, this latest release sports an enhanced design and new, more powerful features to further assist physical science researchers worldwide to connect and collaborate.

From Knowledgespeak

Cornell University’s

arXiv project, which includes an e-print archive of scientific papers, is looking to covert the existing simple database to a more interactive one. It is being projected as a place where authors, articles, databases and readers talk to each other to help users identify a work’s main concepts, see research reports in context and easily find related work. The project is funded by a three-year $883,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, with federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).The arXiv currently contains close to 600,000 papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics, with some 5,000 new papers submitted each month.

Researchers submit their work as ‘preprints’ before formal publication.

New tools will link papers by concepts, not just by the citations they contain. This is expected to help users without advanced expertise including some outside the scientific community – understand the significance of new research. The system will also identify related databases and commentaries.

It has just come to my attention that Nature has “obtained” Scientific American.  Immediately arises concerns of access and subscription costs.  We currently access SA through EbscoHost.  Content may be pulled from this vendor.  From other institutions, I have heard as much as 145% increase for current subscription rates and a $5000 fee for archive access.  NPG base rates on FTE.  I must be realistic.  If our rate is increased to these levels, electronic access to SA may jeapordized. 

Here is the NPG announcement:

“2010 promises to be a landmark year for NPG, as we continue to build our consumer media division with Scientific American at its heart. Scientific American became part of NPG in 2009, after many years as a sister Holtzbrinck organization. My colleagues and I feel privileged to be able to offer our customers the two iconic brands of Nature and Scientific American. We are looking forward to introducing institutional site license access to Scientific American on nature.com later this year, offering the functionality, support, services and interlinking with the NPG portfolio that you have come to expect from us. As we move forward, our goal is to become the authoritative and comprehensive science media group, from consumer to researcher, from London to New York to Tokyo.”

Project Tuva, the new interactive video application developed for Microsoft Research, is featuring Richard Feynman’s 1964 Messenger Lecture Series presented at Cornell University.

Project Tuva (for Microsoft Research) from Stimulant on Vimeo.