Snell Library

Local Boston Designers Recognized by Smithsonian

Being a native Massachusetts girl and a graphic design student at Northeastern, I am always excited to hear about different opportunities in the design world that pop up around the historical city of Boston. Just the other day I came across an interesting article from Boston.com, which announced that the Smithsonian recently awarded three local MA designers for their recent and lifelong achievements in typography, interactive and product design. One designer, Matthew Carter, received the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Lifetime Achievement Award, a prestigious award recognizing him for his years of work on numerous typefaces for Microsoft, Yale University, and the Boston Globe. Additionally, the Boston.com article features a short interview with designer Gianfranco Zaccai who says he believes Americans are becoming more design-savvy and excelling in the design world. He states, “We live in a much more global and connected world…. and I think a lot of it is due to some design companies communicating to people more”. Needless to say, this recent recognition of local designers certainly makes me excited to see what other opportunities lie within our beloved city!

Argo Tea Coming Soon to Snell

We are excited to announce that Argo Tea will be replacing the Cyber Cafe on the first floor of Snell Library this Fall! As Dining Services has announced, construction will begin this month to ensure it is ready for the first day of classes in September. For those of you who haven’t heard of Argo Tea, the business originated in Chicago in 2003, and was created by Arsen Avakian, Daniel Lindwasser, and Simon Simonian. Their cafes offer a variety of black, white, green, and natural herbal teas, coffees, and an assortment of baked goods and small entrees. In addition to their healthy menu options, Argo Tea has made continuous donations of white teas to the University of Chicago’s Hospitals to contribute to Cancer Research efforts. To read more about Argo Tea and their menu offerings visit www.argotea.com. Stop by this fall and check it out!

IEEE Xplore upgrade brings new content and features

On Wednesday, IEEE upgraded the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Here are some of the new features: 1. Addition of VDE VERLAG Conference Proceedings: One of the largest technical and scientific associations in Europe, VDE VERLAG now integrates its conference proceedings into IEEE Xplore bringing new and important content that was not available to us before. There are 3,100 VDE conference papers from 20+ annual conference titles and 1,000 new articles anticipated to be added every year. 2. Sort search results by “Most Cited”: This new feature allows you to sort your search results by “Most Cited” and a citation count will be displayed on each article so you will be able to find articles of high impact quickly. 3. See more search results with scitopia.org: Scitopia.org is a search engine that surfaces content from 15 leading scholarly society publishers in science and technology. Now, when you perform your search in IEEE Xplore you will see additional relevant results from scitopia.org. Enjoy the new IEEEXplore upgrade, and we hope it makes your research easier!

Northeastern Researchers Study Gossip

Northeastern researchers recently published a study on the impact that negative gossip has on the brain’s ability to remember a person or face. According to their research, test subjects were more likely to remember a person if they heard a piece of negative gossip about them when they were shown a picture of that person’s face. If volunteers spent more time hearing positive connotations about a person they were more likely to forget their face. Interestingly, Dr. Lisa Barrett, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, believes that the result of this study directly helps people remember and avoid people who may cause them harm. Snell Library also contains some resources on the subject like the online report, The Relative Effect of Positive and Negative Humorous Gossip on Perceptions of the Gossiper and the Target of the Gossip, which discusses a study on the perceptions and effects of gossip and gossipers. Other related articles can be found by doing a Discovery or NuCat search on the library’s homepage (www.lib.neu.edu) for subjects like “gossip”, “psychology of the brain”, “memory”, etc. You can also view Northeastern’s recent interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett discussing her study on YouTube. In addition, you can find more of her work in IRis, Northeastern’s Institutional Repository.