This is all in celebration of TSN’s 25th anniversary.

Nominations come from the public via this special website, and nominations close at 5:00pm eastern time this coming Friday, June 12.

We’ve noticed that one community has made an all-curling application.

The East Hants Curling Association in Lantz, Nova Scotia has been looking to build a four-sheet curling facility since 1988 (!) and geez, for pure stubborness alone, we think Lantz should make it into the top 10!

Don’t you?

Brier competitor (with Team Shawn Adams) and EHCA Director Kelly Mittelstadt is heavily involved in the drive for a curling club.

“We’ve secured government funding sufficient to allow conceptual drawings to be completed,” Mittelstadt told The Curling News.

“Once these drawings are finalized our next, and largest, hurdle will be getting funding from all three levels of government to build this facility.”

Here’s the EHCA nomination under which TCN readers are invited to comment – positively, of course!

What else for a Tuesday?

• There’s not much to say about the the appearance of curling on last night’s TV episode of The Bachelorette. The skill level was, of course, abysmal. One of the bachelors – who had clearly never stepped on ice before – declared the sport “terrifying.”

And to some surprise, the Canadian Curling Association sent out an email urging people to tune in to watch, prompting this blogger to wonder how the organization got her email address …

• Marie-France Larouche: skip et professeure?

• Yeah, yeah, yeah… everyone knows about the spoof story re. an IBM Supercomputer competing at the 2010 Worlds… but here’s the link in case you missed it …

• And finally, Eric Deckers is the latest newbie to utter the obvious: Curling is Harder Than It Looks …

Exactly one year ago today, we posted this story on the first Canadian Curling Association NCC (National Curling Congress) helmed by new CEO Greg Stremlaw.

Another Congress has now come and gone, and today’s news release reveals that another $880,000 surplus has been committed to the long-term reserve fund.

“Financial performance is the item that stands out,” said Stremlaw, in an interview with The Curling News.

“This puts us at $1.7 million in accumulated surplus.”

Indeed, as the CCA newser mentions, a Senior Program Officer with Sport Canada noted that the CCA’s financial performance has been particularly outstanding and that some of the results are hard to believe, given where the organization was only a few short years ago.

There were tons of interesting presentations, workshops, breakout sessions, discussions and notices of motion throughout the week. Items catching our keen TCN eye include:

• a new “Curling For Life” document, which closely examines the “paradigm shift” between curling as a lifetime recreational sport and curling as a high-performance athletic endeavour;

• an embracing of new social marketing efforts, from Facebook to Blogger to Twitter and whatever techno-stuff is still to come;

• plans to “Leverage 2010” and thus ensure that curling clubs are prepared for an expected avalanche of phone calls, walk-ins and other outreach from the general public during February’s Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games;

• an “investigation of the possibility of establishing” a Canadian Mixed Doubles Championship;

• implementation of a single competitor’s fee, starting in 2010-11, that will allow competitors to enter all disciplines which require the payment of a fee;

• a Member Association code of conduct, that will be developed for presentation and approval at the 2010 National Curling Congress.

In terms of elections, 2008-09 volunteer boss Fran Todd of Ontario (CCA photo above) has been replaced by her former Vice-Chair, Graham Prouse of Grande Prairie, Alberta, who now serves as Chair of the Board of Governors. Jack Bowman (Victoria, B.C.) is the new Vice-Chair.

CCA Governors Lew Andrews (St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador) and Beth Sullivan (Bathurst, New Brunswick) have retired from the Board, while three newcomers are on board: Elaine de Ryk of Greenfield Park, Quebec, Ron Hutton of Saint John, New Brunswick and Georgina Granchelli of Sydney, Nova Scotia.

For his part, Stremlaw seems pumped about just how smoothly the curling landscape is rolling out before him.

“I am personally witnessing a collaborative spirit with the stakeholders,” said Stremlaw.

“Truth be told, it hasn’t always been this way. At times the sport can become political.

“We’ve got 14 member associations and they’re all diverse, all different, but there seems to be a genuine interest in working together, getting ourselves to where we want to go.”

Anything else, you ask?

• CCA Governor and longtime curling leader Bernadette McIntyre does have other interests besides the Roaring Game… such as her very cool job …

• Monsanto Canada has renewed its sponsorship agreements with CCA through to 2013. The news release indicates that the Continental Cup, which will not be contested in the upcoming Olympic season, will return for another run of events from 2011, 2012 and 2013 …

• Monsanto, of course, also supports western-based curling clubs through the “A Better House” grant program, which disbursed some $80,000 in funding directly to prairie clubs this past season …

• Another curling mover and shaker has taken a step back from the sport. Fast Eddie Lukowich, the former Brier and world champion skip, has resigned his position with the United States Curling Association after nearly 10 years, and just eight months prior to Vancouver 2010. Canwest has the story here …

• Winnipeg’s Jill Officer made a recent appearance in Thunder Bay, Ont. on behalf of Olympic sponsor RBC …

• World Senior men’s champion skip Eugene Hritzuk is on the air via The Curling Show …

• And finally, this brief YouTube video asks the question “What’s curling all about?”
Well, gee, didn’t you know the answer…?

On the [New England Journal Of Medicine] beta site, we pursue new ideas in publishing and showcase innovative ways to present information for use in medical education, research, and clinical practice.

[http://beta.nejm.org/]

The MESUR data base now contains 1B usage events (2002-2007) obtained from 6 significant publishers, 4 large institutional consortia and 4 significant aggregators! The collected usage data spans more than 100,000 serials (including newspapers, magazines, etc.) and is related to journal citation data that spans about 10,000 journals and nearly 10 years (1996-2006). In addition we have obtained significant publisher-provided COUNTER usage reports that span nearly 2000 institutions worldwide.

The data is being ingested into a combination of relational and semantic web databases, the latter of which is now estimated to result in nearly 10 billion semantic statements (triples). MESUR is now producing large-scale, longitudinal maps of the scholarly community and a survey of more than 60 different metrics of scholarly impact.

Quick Facts

Funding: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / Timeline: October 2006 – October 2008

Principal investigator: Johan Bollen / Institution: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) / Team: Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library

People: Johan Bollen is the Principal Investigator; Herbert Van de Sompel serves as an architectural consultant; and Aric Hagberg of the LANL Mathematical Modeling and Analysis group serves as modeling consultants.

Marko A. Rodriguez, a recent PhD graduate at the University of California Santa Cruz and now LANL post-doc at the LANL Center for Non-Linear Science, has supported the project’s research and development. Ryan Chute of the LANL Research Library is now the project’s main developer and database manager.

Source

[http://www.mesur.org/]

Documentation

Overview Papers / Lectures and Slides / MESUR Timeline / Metrics / MESUR Official Summary

[http://www.mesur.org/Documentation.html]

MESUR Publications

Articles / Lectures and Slides

[http://www.mesur.org/Publications.html]

Contact

[http://www.mesur.org/Contact.html]

Related

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/12/final-impact-what-factors-really-matter.html]