IEEE Media Center

The IEEE Computer Society’s new media center is an excellent resource for podcasts, videos and interviews on a range of new technology subjects. It’s particularly useful for exploring new trends and hearing what the experts have to say about them. It features a regular ‘Silver Bullet Security’ podacst which publishes excerpts of conversations from the IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine.

You can also find the IEEE Computer Society on YouTube along with IEEETV.

Safari ebooks

You may have noticed that the interface of the Safari ebooks database has recently changed. Among the most siginificant changes is that, when you now search the database, you will be searching the University’s custom collection of electronic books. This means that all your results should provide the full text. If you simply want to view the available titles in our subscription, click on Custom Collection at the top of the screen. Remember to sign out after you have finished using the database. The Safari tipsheet has been updated so you can download a copy from the computing subject pages. Please contact us if you have any problems or questions.

IET Student Resources

Photo credit: Pragmagraphr on Flickr

The IET website has a section for Students and Apprentices which includes a wealth of resources for students studying technology and engineering subjects. Particularly useful are the study resources which include a revision toolkit and a final year project guide.

If you are approaching exams or writing your final year project, the Learning Centres have lots of useful study books, as well as study skills advisor appointments and workshops. See further details on our Skills for Learning website.

Research Blogging

A while back now, I posted about Blog Scholar, a site which acts as a portal to academic blogs. Another resource I have just come across is Research Blogging. This has similar aims to Blog Scholar but the focus here is on bringing together blog posts about peer-reviewed research. The site guidelines mean that blog writers use a “blogging on peer-reviewed research” icon when they are posting thoughts on research rather than a simple mention or link to the work. In addition, a full citation of the work being cited is generated.

You can view the latest Computer Science posts or view the available RSS feeds from the site to subscribe to areas of interest.

Gameology 2.0

Photo credit: Call To Adventure on Flickr

Gameology is a “scholarly community dedicated to the study of videogames”. The resources have been put together by a group of academics and iinclude essays, videos, and images. The site has a detailed bibliography of articles and other sources on the subject. The articles are likely to have a slant towards humanities rather than a technical approach as they note in the “about” page but other views are welcomed.

You may find the links section useful for further reading and, although they don’t appear to be tweeting much at the moment, you can also follow Gameology on Twitter.

Where is the SCIT software in Harrison Learning Centre?

There are 12 PCs in Harrison Learning Centre which have specialist computing software. These machines have the same software as those in MI building so that when MI is closed, or you are working late and need to access certain programs, you still have somewhere to come and work.

There are six machines on the ground floor and six machines on the third floor (the side with the books, not in the IT suite). Both PC clusters are labelled with SCIT/SEBE software.

Journal Info

I have received a few queries recently about how to choose journals to publish in. If you are a researcher, you may find Journal Info worth a look. Journal Info is a tool to assist researchers in choosing a journal for publication. Indexing major databases, the site currently covers around 18,000 journals, providing details such as cost, quality, and accessibility. Of interest to SCIT research are the information science, mathematical statistics, and numerical analysis and computing categories. For more information about the service, check the FAQs.

Welcome to and Welcome back

A very warm welcome to new SCIT students starting at the University this week, and of course to returning students back from the Summer break. It’s a busy time of year for everyone so this is just a short post about the new “Skills for Learning” webpages on the Learning Centre’s website. This has been revised and updated over the Summer and is now a one-stop place for study skills advice and appointments, details of this semester’s InfoBites workshops, full information about the University’s referencing systems, and the EndNote support webpages. Harvard referencing has been updated to include an example list of different sources which will hopefully make the system easier to follow.

As always, your feedback on the Learning Centre website is welcomed. Please use the online form for comments and suggestions.

IET TV

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) provide a service called IET TV offering webcasts from engineers, technologists, and key industry speakers. The IT channel currently has over 160 presentations. To keep up-to-date with new features, the RSS feed is available here.

View the most recent webcast below, a discussion about cloud computing from Wayne Horkan, CTO, Sun Microsystems:

Cloud Computing Interview Wayne Horkan, CTO, Sun Microsystems A Pre-conference Discussion on Cloud Computing 2009-02-25 03:34:22.0 IT Channel >> go to webcast>> recommend to friend

New Intute tutorial for Computer Science

The Intute Virtual Training Suite has had a make-over and a new tutorial has been developed for Computer Science and Informatics, replacing the previous ICT tutorial. The tutorial is a good place to start when learning how to search the web for academic sites, and to help you to develop your internet research skills, while picking up useful links along the way. The tutorial also features new sections on social media sites and tools in computer science subject area, bookmarking, and RSS feeds.