Can’t take the time in the morning? Listen anytime to recordings (or watch videos) at the University of Utah’s Western Soundscape Archive. You can search for your favorites (I recommend the indigo bunting or house wren). The site provides information about the bird (or animal) including scientific name, kingdom, phylum, etc. There are non-animal sounds here, too, such as thunder at the Grand Canyon National Park or alpine stream in Albion Basin, Alta, Utah. And you can also find videos with birdsong at YouTube, such as this one of a house wren:

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Magazines like Audubon (current issue on 2nd-floor magazine racks)
• Reference titles including The birds of North America (2nd-floor Reference Collection QL681 .B625)
• Many, many 3rd-floor Main Collection books like The Sibley guide to bird life & behavior, Living on the wind: Across the Hemisphere with migratory birds, Birder’s conservation handbook: 100 North American birds at risk
• Federal and Wisconsin government information such as “For the birds” from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which can tell you everything you need to know to feed and house birds in your backyard, and the Great Wisconsin Birding & Nature Trail maps from the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources.

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

A complete bracket of the teams playing will be available. The Library will show all the games that are on while we’re open. The games also will be streamed for those who can’t make in to see them on our TV. For live streaming see: http://mmod.ncaa.com/

2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Schedule
Opening Round Game March 16
1st Round March 18-19
2nd Round March 20-21
NCAA Sweet 16® March 25-26
Elite Eight® March 27-28
Final Four® April 3
National Championship April 5

Where the tournament will be played
(note some games will be played in Milwaukee, Providence & Syracuse)
Opening Round: March 16
UD Arena, Dayton, OH

First and Second Rounds: Thursday and Saturday, March 18 and 20
New Orleans Arena, New Orleans, LA
Dunkin Donuts Center, Providence, RI
HP Pavilion, San Jose, CA
Spokane Memorial Arena, Spokane, WA

First and Second Rounds: Friday and Sunday, March 19 and 21
HSBC Arena, Buffalo
Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena, Jacksonville, FL
Bradley Center, Milwaukee, WI
Ford Center, Oklahoma City, OK

Regionals: Thursday and Saturday, March 25 and 27
East: Carrier Dome, Syracuse, NY
West: Energy Solutions Arena, Salt Lake City, UT

Regionals: Friday and Sunday, March 26 and 28
Midwest: Edward Jones Dome, St. Louis, MO
South: Reliant Stadium, Houston TX

Final Four: Saturday and Monday, April 3 and 5
Lucas Oil Stadium, Indianapolis, IN

More information is available from the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Physics Laboratory. (The Division “maintains the standard for frequency and time interval for the United States, provides official time to the United States, and carries out a broad program of research and service activities in time and frequency metrology.” Who knew?!)

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

• Take the Council for Economic Education’s 20-item economic literacy test.
• Take the 5-item portion of the FINRA survey related to financial literacy, on pages 28-29 (items M6-M10) of the survey questionnaire.

You can search HALCat (Andersen Library’s online catalog) for materials about personal finance, investments, or financial literacy. Some titles are intended to guide and educate you, such as The road to wealth: A comprehensive guide to your money (2nd-floor Browsing Books, HG179 .O758 2008). Others are about better educating our children, such as Financial literacy education: What do students need to know to plan for the future?: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Education Reform of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives (online or in print in the 2nd-floor Federal Documents collection, Y 4.ED 8/1:108-39) and Planning curriculum in personal financial literacy (2nd-floor Wisconsin Documents collection, ED 6/2:C 87/P 47/2009). The latter title is intended to help Wisconsin teachers implement the state’s standards for students’ personal financial literacy.

Search article databases for information also, and find articles such as “Integrating Personal Finance Concepts into the Financial Accounting Course” (Business Education Forum, Oct. 2009, vol. 64:no. 1, pp. 17-22 — available in the 1st-floor Periodicals Collection) and the Sept. 4, 2009 issue of CQ Researcher on “Financial Literacy” (which includes a discussion of whether courses that cover personal finance should be mandatory in schools).

There also are a number of web sites for improving your financial knowledge. Here are just a few:

• The FINRA foundation web site has some educational materials,
• Morningstar Investment Research Center database has a “Help & Education” tab,
• FDIC offers “Money Smart” computer-based instruction about banking and credit, and
• The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants offers “360 Degrees of Financial Literacy” segments.

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

Andersen Library has information, and so does the federal government.

Search HALCat, Andersen Library’s online catalog, to find titles such as Apocalypse: Earthquakes, archaeology, and the wrath of God (3rd-floor Main Collection, CC77.N36 N87 2008) and After the Earth quakes: Elastic rebound on an urban planet (3rd-floor Main Collection, QE539.2.E42 H67 2006).

Search Library article databases to find articles such as “Geologists to evaluate future Haiti risks” (Nature, January 21, 2010, vol.463:no.7279, pp. 276-277) and “Effects of recent environmental changes on global seismicity and volcanism” (Earth Interactions, 2008, vol. 13:no.4, pp. 1-14).

The U.S. Geological Survey has materials on earthquakes, such as Earthquake hazard in the heart of the homeland (including a shaking-hazard map for the U.S.), and there’s even a “Did You Feel It?” web site for you to report whether you felt Wednesday’s earthquake.

Please ask a librarian for assistance with finding materials.

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!

Wikirage tracks the topics in Wikipedia that are being edited the most (during the last hour, 6 hours, day, 3 days, week, and month). The web site refers to it as “monitoring the hive mind through Wikipedia edits.” you can even follow it on Twitter.

Some of it makes absolute sense, if you follow the news. Topics getting a lot of editing earlier this week included “Nancy Kerrigan,” “Conan O’Brien,” “2010 Pro Bowl,” and “Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409.” But “Attachment theory”…hmmmm.

• Feb 1: Beer, Guillotines, and Sunrises: Musical Storytelling in the Late Romantic Period (Mike Allsen, Music Dept.)
• Feb 8: Putting the Bayeux Tapestry in its Place (Chris Henige, Art Dept.)
• Feb 15: Competitive Speaking Examples from the UW-W Forensics Team (Jeanine Fassl, Communication Dept.)
• Feb 22: Narrative in Music from Around the World (Alena Holmes, Music Dept.)
• Mar 1: What Costumes Say to an Audience, Part 1 (Marshall Anderson, Theatre/Dance Dept.)
• Mar 8: What Costumes Say to an Audience, Part 2: The Collaborative Process between Choreographer and Costumer and the Resulting Costumes (Tracey Lyons, Theatre/Dance Dept.)
• Mar 15: “Once Upon a Time…”: The Power of Storytelling in Public Speaking (Anne Mancl, Communication Dept.)
• Mar 29: That’s My Story, But I’m Not Sticking to It: Compositional Conversations (Robert Mertens, College of Arts and Communication)
• Apr 5: Digital Storytelling: How Journalists Are Adapting to the Internet (James Kates, Communication Dept.)
• Apr 12: Works on paper: Whitewater to Oaxaca, Mexico–A Cultural Narrative (Art Dept. faculty panel talking about their cultural exchange)

Videos and podcasts of previous lecture series are available:
Fall 2007 “Big Ideas at UW-Whitewater”
Spring 2008 “Our natural Wonders”
Fall 2008 “Election 2008″
Spring 2009 “My Favorite Lecture”

And if you are interested in doing research on these topics, Andersen Library may have materials! Look for books using HALCat (Harold Andersen Library’s catalog) and look for articles in article databases. Please ask a librarian for assistance.

If you don’t want to purchase Kindle books, you can find some available for free. Amazon offers thousands of free books at the Kindle Store.

The iReaderReview Blog has more information on how you can get many more free books in the Kindle format.

The Global Information Industry Center, housed at UCSD, has come out with their latest report, stating that Americans “consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day.” The study, aptly titled How Much Information?: 2009 Report on American Consumers, goes on to offer more statistics about not only the time spent consuming information, but also about the sources of information. The researchers report that while traditional media (television and radio) still command much of our attention spans, the computer, not surprisingly, is challenging that by providing interactive exchange of information.

You can read the full report (PDF) and see for yourself. Take it all in.

Check road conditions ahead of time. The Wis. Dept. of Transportation’s 511wi Travel Information web site can provides a map showing driving conditions on interstates and other major highways in Wisconsin, info on work zones, links to traffic cameras and congestion maps for Madison and Milwaukee, and links to weather sites. Other states may have similar sites, e.g., Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and Michigan (or MI Drive.

In WI, you also can dial 511 from landlines or cell phones for information.

And don’t forget to prepare for cold weather by dressing appropriately and having winter weather supplies in your car, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control.

The University Library is a federal depository with many federal, state, local, and international documents on a variety of current and relevant issues available to you in print, microfiche, CD-ROM, and electronically. Come check out your government at the University Library!