Earlier I blogged about where to find tax forms in print. Of course, you can also file online. And if your 2007 adjusted gross income is under $54,000, you can prepare and file your federal taxes online for free–aka Free File!
To take advantage of Free File you must start at the IRS web site. From there you can select one of the companies partnering with the IRS to provide this free filing service. Read each company’s criteria to be sure which companies you can use.
Among the advantages of Free File:
- a fast refund (within 10 days with direct deposit)
- 24/7 filing convenience
What if your adjusted gross income is too high to qualify for Free File? You can still file online, but not for free.
Wisconsin also has a free-file option. Go to http://www.revenue.wi.gov/ for more information, including a listing of circumstances/forms that render you ineligible for it.
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!
Today’s featured stuff is actually something that we got back in April - ScienceDirect College Edition from Elsevier. Recently (and without much notice or fanfare), our subscription greatly expanded. When we first acquired ScienceDirect, our collection included the most current four years of over 1900 journals. That’s not too shabby, especially since Elsevier published many of the top scholarly journals in a number of areas.
We now have access to all of the articles, in electronic full text format, for those journal titles back to 1995! That means that you can read more than eight million articles online! Wow!
You can get to articles from ScienceDirect by searching the collection directly (go to Find → Databases from the Library’s home page). The articles also come up in searches in EBSCOhost, Proquest and databases from other providers - just use the Find It! link to access them!
Each semester UWW faculty/staff provide a lecture series at the Fairhaven Retirement Community’s Fellowship Hall, easily walkable from campus (435 W. Starin Road). Lectures are on Mondays at 3pm, and they are open to the public. The spring series is called “Our Natural World:”
- Jan. 28 Impacts of White-tailed Deer in Wisconsin Forests (Stephen Solheim, Biological Sciences)
- Feb. 4 The Wolves of Yellowstone National Park (George Clokey, Biological Sciences)
- Feb. 11 History of the Wisconsin River (Dale Splinter, Geography/Geology)
- Feb. 18 A Radical View of Wisconsin Native American Effigy Mounds (Rex Hanger, Geography/Geology)
- Feb. 25 “Nature in the City”: Chicago’s Green City Movement (Jeffrey Zimmerman, Geography/Geology)
- Mar. 3 The Glacial History of Whitewater (Peter Jacobs, Geography/Geology)
- Mar. 10 Less Waste & More Efficiency: Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry (Paul House, Chemistry)
- Mar. 17 Real World Cases in Green Chemistry (Hassimi Traore, Chemistry)
- Mar. 31 Contaminants and the Fate of Wisconsin Waters (Elisabeth Harrahy, Biological Sciences)
- Apr. 7 Pollination Biologic Sciences in Two Wisconsin Plant Species (Neil Sawyer, Biological Sciences)
- Apr. 14 Earth and Fire: Volcanism Around the World (Juk Bhattacharyya, Geography/Geology)
- Apr. 21 Carnivorous Plants: Wonders of the Natural World (Terre Golembiewski, Biological Sciences)
More information on these and related topics could be found using Library resources–books, journal articles, government publications, and more. Here are a couple of examples, relevant to the first two lectures in the series:
- Article title: Direct and indirect effects of white-tailed deer in forest ecosystems
Journal: Forest Ecology and Management. (2003) vol.181(1-2): pp.165-176
Available online through the Library’s subscription to ScienceDirect.
- Book title: Yellowstone wolves in the wild
Publication info: Helena, MT : Riverbend Publishing, 2003.
Available in the Library’s 3rd-floor Main Collection QL737.C22 H343 2003
For assistance in researching these topics, please contact a Reference librarian (come into the Library, phone 262-472-1032, or email/chat).
It’s Friday! It’s pretty slow around here, but the blog migration to Wordpress (which is fantastic, by the way) is keeping me busy.
That doesn’t mean there’s no time for fun. Get this - this guy read an entire book! Who does that?!
Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book courtesy of the Onion
Thanks Carrie for the link!
Last semester I blogged about the value of reading a daily newspaper. That’ll get you the mainstream perspective on things. I also recommend reading Utne (previously Utne Reader), which is like a Reader’s Digest of “alternative” (non-mainstream) and independent press, meaning it collects, summarizes, synthesizes, cites and sometimes reprints material selected as the best from other publications. Although its mission is to provide “the best of the alternative press,” there are original Utne articles also. I think of it as a timesaver, kind of like getting a discussion list in digest mode. I’m interested in perspectives and issues that may not hit my radar otherwise, but let the Utne staff sift through 1,500 publications and just lead me to the top-drawer stuff–and give it to me succinctly please!
The bimonthly Utne issues are available in the Library’s 1st-floor Periodicals Collection. Sorry, no full text articles online in the Library’s databases, but you can scan the table of contents or search for topics using the online database Academic Search Premier: Click on “Publications” and in the “Browse Publications” box search for utne. A list of years will appear. Pick a year and the issues for that year will appear. Select an issue and the list of articles in that issue will display.
Topics of articles in each issue are all over the map, from the arts and media to science and politics, so there’s something for everyone. Each issue also has a featured topic, e.g., the March/April 2005 issue’s featured topic was “The Future of God” and July/August 2007 was “The Ugly Americans: What Will It Take to Win Back the World’s Trust?”
Examples of articles in recent issues:
- The dark side of soy - is America’s favorite health food making us sick? (July/August 2007)
- Redeeming America - what it will take to win back the world (July/August 2007)
- Vikings with amps - Norse mythology meets power chords in Tyr’s mighty music (July/August 2007)
- Shuck and jive - how industry and politicians are harvesting ethanol for all it’s worth (May/June 2007)
- Our furry, feeling friends - the difference between animals and humans isn’t as big as people think (May/June 2007)
- Midwifery’s renaissance (March/April 2007)
- Putting a stop to slave labor - a moral solution to illegal immigration (March/April 2007)
- Cairo’s man show - in Egypt, public male-on-male affection isn’t queer, it’s commonplace (March/April 2007)
- Grief goes online - the boon and bane of virtual bereavement (March/April 2007)
- Playing with our heads - why video games are making our kids smarter and more obedient (January/February 2007)
- Steeped in tea - the social significance of one hot drink (January/February 2007)
The Utne.com web site offers fare similar to its print articles, including enewsletter/blog categories Arts, Environment, Great Writing, Media, Politics, Science and Technology, and Spirituality. You can add your own replies and sign up to have new entries sent to your email.
Ahh, the joys of copyright. We deal with it everyday, whether you utilize e-reserves or download music to your iPod (hopefully in a legal fashion). But did it ever cross your mind that when you laughed at the Dramatic Prairie Dog for the millionth time (or one of the many remixes) that the creator of the videos may have violated the law by using copyrighted material? I know I didn’t think about it.
According to a report from American University’s Center for Social Media, parodies of copyrighted works may actually fall under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. The full report, entitled Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, features the work of communications professor Pat Aufderheide and law professor Peter Jaszi - they contend that the new works and their ability to stimulate dialogue afford them protection under fair use. What do you think?
original story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
link to full report from the Center for Social Media
Thanks to Joyce for the link!
In the world of constant moving from place to place, whether it’s from your dorm to the classroom or from the house to the office, we spend a lot of time traveling. For some, the commute is as short as ten minutes, while others take an hour to get where they need to go (don’t even get me started on the supercommuters). The back-and-forth eats up a sizable chunk of our day.
What if you could expand your horizons while you go about the daily grind? Have you tried multitasking? I don’t recommend putting on make-up or talking on your cell phone while driving, but listening to an audiobook isn’t bad, right? The Library is the place to go for filling the void that is commuting. We have plenty of popular titles available on CD, and we just got more in MP3-CD format (information about the format and what it means for you). For your convenience, below are catalog searches for locating our audiobooks.
More Than a Numbers Game:
A Brief History of Accounting
by Thomas King
HF5616 .U5 K53 2006
New Book Island, 2nd floor
In honor of the fact that I start my journey into accounting with Introduction to Financial Accounting, I thought that this book was appropriate for New Stuff Tuesday.
King, treasurer of Progressive Insurance and a native of Racine, uses More Than a Numbers Game to fill the void in the thousands of accounting texts published since Luca Pacioli wrote the first one in 1494. According to the reviews, he’s done a pretty darn good job of it too. The textbooks students and professionals utilize on a daily basis address the how-to part of compiling balance sheets and analyzing financial statements. King’s book confronts the why’s of accounting and examines six issues important to accountants and the managers, investors and other consumers of financial information: inflation, volatility, intangibles, debt, options and earnings. This text would serve as an excellent primer to understanding the reasons for the way accounting has evolved and what the future holds for the profession.
Senior Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr. will speak in the Irvin L. Young Auditorium at 3:30 p.m. on January 23rd. This is the 22nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Event on the UWW campus, and you’re all invited!
The Honorable Sterling Johnson, Jr., has been United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York since 1991, where he presides over a heavy workload of cases on criminal and civil matters. His previous experiences include a stint as a marine and service as a police officer, Judge Advocate General (United States Naval Reserve), and Special Narcotics Prosecutor for New York City. More of his background is available online at the web site of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Perhaps his most widely publicized case is his 1993 finding that the detention of Haitian asylum seekers due to their HIV status at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, without access to legal counsel, visitors, telephones, etc. was unconstitutional. To learn more about this case and the issues involved, you could use some of the Library’s databases:
An additional brief summary, with a note about the subsequent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Federal government’s actions and links to related resources is provided online by the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Also in honor of MLK, you may want to check out the tall display case in the Library’s lobby.
