Those of you with online access to Science magazine should definitely check out this week’s news feature “A Sea Change for U.S. Oceanography” at www . sciencemag . org/content/339/6124/1138 .
Short version: As research budgets shrink and technology improves, oceanographers are spending less time at sea and relying more on data from remote sensing.
This sounds neat! Can’t see it now, but will try on monday when I’m on campus–not sure if they have a subscription, but it’s more likely than the apartments. I love Ireland, but I do miss my access to things like this and JSTOR.
I’m pretty sure you can access it from anywhere if you log in with your college id number and password. Maybe it varies from college to college. It works for me, though.
Oberlin doesn’t let you set up vpn connections?
This is an interesting change. Personally, I always thought that field research sounded like the most interesting part of science, despite not having the opportunity to actually experience it for myself. Although I will, hopefully, if my study abroad application goes through.
Actually, when I was filling out my course plan for study abroad, my advisor told me that students in the Environmental Studies department often waited till the last minute to complete their field course requirement. And this article had a link to another one that mentioned how fewer students were even signing up for shipboard research. So I wonder if this is part of some greater trend towards indoors-ness in the natural sciences.
For some of them, certainly. In astronomy, for example, many astronomers now analyze data from a few centralized sky surveys without having to go near a telescope.