Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter

Lessons From the Library of Congress for Researchers

Rachel — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:19:27 +0000

Three buildings, two librarians, and six hours into my first “real” Library of Congress visit, I’m no closer to getting the research done that I wanted to do.

When you’re doing science writing it’s only common sense to look at the literature that’s out there. Most of the time I can access the academic journals I need through Google Scholar (bless you Google) or through the public libraries here (rarely) or my alma mater’s library system (even more rarely, but sometimes they do come through).

Last week I came upon a journal article that I couldn’t find through any of these sources. Worldcat (another great resource) told me that I could either go to Bethesda or the Library of Congress. The LoC seemed like it made more sense—after all, I already had a borrower’s card from a different, abbreviated adventure a few months ago.

Well….refer back to the lede if you’re wondering how that went.

Based on my “adventure” I’d like to share what I’ve learned with anyone else out there considering doing research at the monster of a library that is the LoC.

See, the Library of Congress is confusing, and not just because of their filing system (though that’s confusing enough—will someone please explain to me why it’s superior to Dewey?). It’s spread out over three buildings. They have strange and unfamiliar policies (mandatory coat check). And most of their material is a) not accessible to the general public and b) not where their catalog says it is.

First of all, you need a borrower’s card. I mentioned I already had one; this was a pretty painless process where you go to the registration room, get your picture taken, and promise not to steal any books (please don’t steal rare books from the LoC!) and your card is printed posthaste. If you plan on heading into the stacks right away, hit up the coat check next to the registration room and leave everything there. You’re allowed one small plastic bag (they will provide it) to hold your wallet, phone, pencil, whatever. You’re allowed a laptop. You’re not allowed a laptop bag. This is probably to prevent people from walking out with priceless items, or to prevent klutzes like me from turning around and knocking stacks of books off their shelves with an errant backpack. Or both.
Go to the main reading room. I don’t care what the card catalog said. I even checked with a librarian online before heading over and asked “What building should I use? Which room?” He (or she?) told me to go to the periodical reading room, which turned out to be wrong. No slight against any of the LoC librarians. It’s a very complicated place. So just go to the main reading room and let a librarian help you figure out where you need to be. They have about eight million separate catalogs depending on what you’re looking for (and what search privileges you have) so you shouldn’t even try to make sense of this unless you have a degree in information theory.
Bring a book…or two. Once you’ve determined the material you need, you fill out a slip and a librarian goes dashing into the stacks to retrieve it. Since the collection is spread out over three buildings this could take a long time. I was told 30 minutes for my first request, and that turned out to be accurate. I was told 45 minutes for my second request and I waited more than two hours. The reading rooms (more like waiting rooms since you do more of that) are equipped with blazingly fast free wifi, but no power outlets that I could find.
If you only need one or two articles, this process probably isn’t worth your time. Once you get there, go through the coat check, walk to the reading room you need, fill out the request form, etc etc etc you’ve eaten the better part of an hour, and that’s before you got any work done. I think I’ll use the Library of Congress only when I need at least 5-10 articles.
Sometimes…the stuff just isn’t there. Two separate requests came back “not in stacks” which means….who knows? It could be that somebody else requested the journal, or that the issue was taken to be bound, or that it was bound but never returned to the stacks, or that it’s lost….the only thing you can do then is ask for a “special search” which takes, I was told, up to a week. (Ouch!) Turns out you can alleviate some of this madness by searching the catalog online and placing holds on the material. You can only place a hold on the material if you’ve set up an online account with the Library of Congress. You can only set up an account if you’ve been given a temporary password by showing up in person, so consider doing this on the same day you get your ID card. I suppose it would be possible to call and ask very nicely for the temporary password but probably you have to be there in person. So if you have your card but didn’t get the account set up on the same day, which is what happened to me, you’re SOL.
Oh yeah…and the building has an employee cafeteria that is open to the public in the underground tunnel linking the main building with the Adams building. It’s not very good, but it is cheap. There is apparently a better cafeteria on the 6th floor, which I will use next time I am there.
Last…turns out librarians are fascinated by ketchup. At least three people commented on my shirt, an unusually high ratio even for a shirt that is known as a conversation starter.
Last for real: Are there any academic libraries in DC that provide access to their online databases to non-students? I would pay a small fee for guaranteed access to JStor, ScienceDirect, etc. I would pay a larger fee for remote access (my alma mater’s library has remote access for some journals for alumni, but not all, and figuring out which ones are covered is a pain). Maybe I can enroll in a night class and then just never go. Seriously. All suggestions entertained.

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Comet Seen Vaporizing in Sun’s Atmosphere—A First

Rachel — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:27:46 +0000

For the first time, a death-diving comet has been observed as it vaporized in the sun’s atmosphere, thanks to new data from a NASA satellite.

More than a thousand known comets are so-called Kreutz sungrazers, a family of icy bodies that pass very near to the sun’s surface on their orbits through the solar system.

Using NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), astronomers are able to spot many of these sungrazers as they get close to our star.

That’s because SOHO carries a key instrument that has an occulting disk, a circle that blocks out the glare of the sun’s main body so scientists can study the star’s faint upper atmosphere, or corona.

So far, most of SOHO’s documented sungrazer deaths involved comets breaking up at a distance or simply vanishing behind the occulting disk.

“Some of them made it behind the disk, and none of them came out on the other side,” said solar physicist Karel Schrijver, a fellow at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California.

But this comet was different. Here’s why.

Sharks Eating Songbirds in Gulf of Mexico

Rachel — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:33:10 +0000

What’s a songbird doing in the belly of a tiger shark?

The predators are eating land birds affected by offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (map), according to new research.

Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, he pulled a tiger shark onto the deck of his boat to tag and release it.

“He coughed up some feathers,” Drymon said.

That in itself wasn’t unusual, he said. Tiger sharks in other parts of the world are known to eat marine birds. But once Drymon analyzed the feathers in the lab, he was fairly sure they had come from a terrestrial bird.

So Drymon and his team launched a project to study the sharks’ diets. Over two years the team caught 50 tiger sharks—mostly within 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 kilometers) offshore—and dissected their stomachs.

In about half of the sharks, Drymon found “feathers, or beaks, or bird feet, or some kind of bird part.”

All the parts were later found to originate from land birds such as woodpeckers, tanagers, and meadowlarks.

Speech Synthesizer Could ‘Resurrect’ Dead Singers

Rachel — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:35:43 +0000

In a few years, you could be listening to an album of new songs featuring a duet between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. No, the two never cut a record together, but engineers and computer programmers are getting closer to being able to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs.

Yamaha’s been developing voice synthesizers for years — think Mac’s text-to-speech meets AutoTune — under the brand name Vocaloid. But to build a Vocaloid “voice library,” a singer typically had to sing every possible syllable, one at a time, in the target language. A computer later would synthesize the fragments into songs.

But now the Vocaloid team has announced that it has succeeded in building a library based on the voice of someone who couldn’t participate in the painstaking process: Hitoshi Ueki, a popular Japanese vocalist who died in 2007. The initial results were revealed on a Japanese video-streaming site earlier this year.

(Creepy, yes? Read on…)

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Small Spiders Have Big Brains That Spill Into Their Legs

Rachel — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:14:37 +0000

They’re not fat, they’re just big-brained: Tiny spiders have such huge brains for their body sizes that the organs can spill into the animals’ body cavities, a new study shows.

Such big brains may explain why very small spiders—some less than a millimeter across—are just as good at spinning webs as bigger arachnids.

For the study, a team led by Bill Eberhard, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a professor at the University of Costa Rica, examined nine spider species from six web-weaving families.

The researchers found that the smaller the spider, the bigger its brain relative to its body size.

In some spiders, the central nervous system took up nearly 80 percent of the space in their bodies, sometimes even spilling into their legs.

(Read more here.)

It Doesn’t Add Up

Rachel — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:50:04 +0000

Much attention has been given to the gap in performance between boys and girls in mathematics skills. In a new study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and Janet Mertz, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, examine this gender gap and test several popular explanations. Their cross-cultural analysis seems to rule out several causal candidates, including coeducational schools, low standards of living, and innate variability among boys — a proposal made famous in a 2005 speech by Lawrence H. Summers, who was Harvard University’s president at the time. “We have pretty clear data debunking the greater male variability hypothesis,” Mertz says.
What, then, is the cause of the gender gap? Like the gap itself, the cause varies, the authors conclude. Mertz and Kane, who are married, don’t rule out the existence of very small biological difference, but, by comparing test scores across cultures, they indict local social factors as the likely primary culprit. Gender gaps vary from place to place, showing that cultural factors swamp biological ones.
Read more….

Photo on this page is from Jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Can Russia’s Stuck Mars Spacecraft Be Saved?

Rachel — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:22:25 +0000

Russia’s latest shot at Mars suffered a setback shortly after launch yesterday when its upper-stage thrusters failed to fire, leaving the Phobos-Grunt probe stuck in orbit around Earth instead of on its way into deep space.

Details are still hazy about what went wrong, but the problem appears to lie with an instrument called a star sensor.

The spacecraft should have “known” when to fire its engines after using the sensor to orient itself to the stars, thereby setting its course for Mars. Either a software problem stopped the star sensor from working, or the sensor itself failed.

The craft is scheduled to pass over Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly, and technicians there will attempt to communicate with Phobos-Grunt to determine whether the failure is fixable.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, originally said they had three days to get the stranded craft working, but mission managers have since changed that estimate to two weeks, giving them more time to fix the problem.

Read more, but know that in early January 2012, the craft plunged into the Pacific ocean. Bummer.

Male Spiders Give “Back Rubs” to Seduce Their Mates

Rachel — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:32:29 +0000

When a male golden orb-weaver spider Nephila pilipes wants to get busy, he pulls out a special trick: He gives his mate a “back rub,” new research shows.

For many spiders, females of the species are much bigger than the males—N. pilipes females are up to ten times larger—so mating is always a risky proposition. An unlucky suitor might get interrupted in his carnal embrace when a female kicks him off and eats him.

(So then what?)

The Ultimate High School Curriculum

Rachel — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:13:30 +0000

Inspired by The Oatmeal’s fantastic take on high school classes I began thinking about what the most useful classes I took in high school were.

Besides the hard science courses, which have turned out to be serendipitously useful (but I really can’t suggest everyone run out and take physics just because they might decide to be a science writer one day), the course that I’ve used most in my daily life was civics. Knowing how the government works has made living in this country so much more enjoyable. I’m glad I can turn on the news and understand basic stuff like how a bill becomes a law. It means that I can have decently intelligent conversation at parties (forget that “never talk about politics” rule, it doesn’t apply in DC). It means that I feel slightly less helpless when reading about a piece of legislation I don’t like. But only slightly. This is DC after all.

The point being: civics class makes life richer. I’m sure basic understanding of history, literature, and science does the same, and I’m glad I took all those classes, but I’m most glad I was forced to take government.

If I had to design a high school curriculum, it would include, in addition to basic reading, writing, and math, the following courses. Perhaps this list will generate controversy among anyone who remembers their high school basket weaving class fondly, but you can make your own list. This is mine:

Government
20th Century World History
Personal Finance (Credit cards, mortgages, and what health insurance is and how it works)
No, You Can’t Wear That To A Job Interview
Public Speaking/How To Use Powerpoint Correctly
How To Get Things Done Instead Of Working On Your Blog

Digging in the dirt…the formation of a story

My 2 Suns: Bounty of New Exoplanet Discoveries Includes a World Orbiting a Binary Star

Rachel — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:36:16 +0000

The hundreds of distant worlds, some large and some small, that are known to dot the galaxy provide plenty of intrigue for the scientists who hunt them. But the catalogued planetary population has just gotten a lot larger and more diverse, thanks to word this week of a newly identified planet orbiting two suns, more than a dozen newfound “super-Earths,” and strong indications that the Milky Way Galaxy is home to an almost unfathomable number of planets awaiting discovery.

The most exotic of the latest batch of exoplanets is the world with two suns, like Tatooine of Star Wars or Dr. Who’s Gallifrey. The planet, named Kepler 16 b for the NASA Kepler spacecraft that spotted it, revolves around two stars locked in a tight binary pairing; the planet’s wide, nearly circular orbit keeps it well outside the stars’ orbital dance. The trio is not the only so-called circumbinary system known, but it is the first for which researchers have been able to measure the properties of both stars and the planet so precisely, and the first system where the planet has been directly detected, rather than inferred.

(So?