About names and policies
Posted by Allan on January 26th, 2005First some information on nomenclature, and myths I’d like to help dispel.
The confusing names of local institutions, and myths they help spawn. Berkeley Lab is frequently mistaken for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Livermore Lab is located in the city of Livermore, California, which is southeast of here, although within commuting distance. They have a different mission from ours. All of Berkeley Lab’s work is unclassified, basic scientific research. Livermore Lab has a classified mission related in part to maintenance of the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, although they also conduct unclassified basic research.
Livermore Lab is in Livermore! And Berkeley Lab is, of course, in the city of Berkeley, California. (http://www.lbl.gov/)
Both Labs have ”Lawrence” in the name. And there is yet another institution named after E.O. Lawrence, the Berkeley physicist and inventor of the cyclotron (the device that was often called an “atom smasher” in the early days)—that institution is the Lawrence Hall of Science. The LHS is a wonderful science museum, high up in the Berkeley Hills that also trains teachers and helps develop science curricula for schools all over the country. They are not associated with Berkeley Lab. If you’re in the Bay area, I hope you have a chance to go and visit their displays. Check them out there: http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/
All three of these institutions are (at least as of this writing) operated by the University of California, hence the frequent confusion. I am hoping that, among other things, this blog will help form a unique identity for Berkeley Lab in the minds of its readers, and dispel some of the confusion about what we do up here in the Berkeley hills.
I also reiterate that I am going to be focusing on one of the Lab’s 17 Divisions only, the Environmental Energy Technologies Division. For information about the rest of the Lab’s work , see the wealth of information at http://www.lbl.gov/.
Our Division’s name. Some of you who have worked in this field for many years know that while we are called the Environmental Energy Technologies Division now, we have, at various times in the past, been called the Energy and Environment Division. Formal names aside, our research focuses on energy efficiency and environmental sciences.
I have chosen to call this the Berkeley Lab Energy and Environmental Research blog, in the hope of being appropriately descriptive about what we do, without using the Division’s actual name. Since I plan to mention research in other Divisions and other institutions from time to time, I think the generic name for the blog will be an accurate description of what you’ll find here.
A few blog rules and practices. I won’t belabor these, since there are plenty of other blog and web experts struggling to frame corporate blog policy conventions that the rest of us bloggers can adopt or adapt.
Obviously, any opinions expressed here are my own, not those of the University of California, or the Department of Energy, or any of my colleagues here. I do not plan to use this blog to express opinions or chat about daily life, but “editorial choice” is a form of opinion, and I’ll take all responsibility for my own.
We are a scientific research institution, so accuracy and correct information are among our most important values. I will correct any factual mistakes made in this blog that I become aware of.
Since my purpose is to draw your attention to the many reports and papers coming from our researchers, I will typically give you a report title, names of authors, and a way to obtain a copy of the report (usually, but not always, by web download). If it’s a journal article, you’ll get the standard reference citation, and if they are online, I’ll try to provide a web address. I’ll usually quote a line or two from the relevant abstract or executive summary. In this way, I hope to render an accurate impression of the report’s content.
Sometimes we’ll have whole new websites come online describing project results, where many reports are available, so I’ll provide a website address.
We plan to make it possible for you, the reader, to comment on my blog entries. This will be an experiment—if answering comments becomes too draining on my time, or if other problems crop up that we can’t solve, the blog will have to revert to a non-comment mode.
Nonetheless, I’m excited that blogging has opened up a new way for us to do a better job of disseminating research results, so I hope that we can turn this experiment into a successful enterprise, and perhaps pave the way for others at Berkeley Lab to do the same.