ACD/Labs Star Pick Award Winners - 2000

Puzzled by a certain term used in spectroscopy? Wanting to get an overview of a basic concept in UV-Vis, IR, Raman, NMR, Mossbauer, X-ray, ... or basically, any technique involving photons? The creators of the Photonics Directory provide an on-line Dictionary of over 5700 spectroscopic terms at the Photonics Dictionary. We tested it on some of the terms to be found in ACD/UV-IR Manager such as "Kubelka-Munk" and "derivative" and found it to be quite comprehensive, especially for terms related to apparatus. We are pleased to honor their efforts with the December 2000 Educator's Star Pick Award.

The November 2000 Educator's Star Pick Award goes to the Organic Structure Elucidation Workbook. This online workbook has been developed by the group of Prof. Bradley D. Smith at Notre Dame University for senior undergraduate and graduate students learning to solve the structures of organic compounds from spectroscopic data. Most problems contain an IR spectrum, a 500 MHz 1H NMR spectrum, a 125 MHz 13C NMR spectrum, and a 70 eV electron ionization mass spectrum. Select a problem number from the "checkerboard," and a menu will appear, thereby allowing you to choose a spectrum for the unknown. A neat feature is that most of the NMR spectra are image mapped so that clicking on a peak will display an enlargement of that region. This site is great for testing your wits... or for testing expected output from our very own structure elucidation software!. Click here to read about a recent award to our structure elucidation team leader...

The October 2000 Star Pick Award winner is The Organometallic HyperTextBook. The OMHTB is a pedagogical delight, with lots of well-organized in-depth material. Its 200-odd pages are bursting with lots of clearly presented "classic" and new material. The self-test pages give immediate reinforcement. It's very well maintained, and the graphics are outstanding--simple, fast-loading, yet highly informative. A nice touch is that the hyperlinking even includes home pages of pioneering researchers, thus giving the reader a sense of a vibrant area of research.

The Macrogalleria, billed as
"a cyberwonderland of polymer fun", is propelled by an engaging narrator who brings unbridled enthusiasm and a treasury of knowledge to his topic, namely polymers. The Macrogalleria is a fine showpiece for the Polymer Science Research Center, set up at the University of Southern Mississippi. The page design is very simple, and there are many "Side trip" pages so that a page that is simple enough for a typical grade school student to understand can be just as informative for a graduate student, thanks to hyperlinks to pages of in-depth information. The polymers around us; varieties of polymers; how they work, how they are made and how they are studied: this is the basic organization of a fun, clear and highly informative site. Macrogalleria, we are glad to have "travelled" you!

The winner for August 2000 is "Back to Basics", a primer on mass spectrometry written by Prof R A W Johnstone and made available through the Micromass web site.
The primer is ideal for the novice, who can select the "Main Text" setting to read the full pages, and it is also ideal for the advanced user, who can select the "Quick Guide" or "Conclusions" setting to quickly read the salient points. The primer is well organized, and covers Ionization Processes, Interfaces and Ion Techniques, Instruments, Ion Optics, Ion Collectors, Special Ion Manipulation methods and Applications. As with any good textbook, it provides a Glossary and Index (search tool) although at the time of writing its Search tool seems to be broken. The primer can be viewed as frames of text with the web browser or it can be printed as a PDF file. The writing is clear and direct and the illustrations are models of simplicity. Thank you, Professor Johnstone, and thank you, Micromass, for making this available to netizens of the world!

Dr. Joseph Hornak is a Professor of Chemistry and Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology where he teaches courses in magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and analytical chemistry. At the "Basics of NMR" site, he presents 13 hyperlinked chapters of clear concise text on the fundamentals of NMR. Many statements are followed by small symbols which, when clicked, illustrate the point with a static or even a dynamic image. It is colorful and inviting to the reader. At any time, there is quick access to a glossary and list of symbols. Navigation is a breeze and reading these pages is a true pleasure. Congratulations, Professor Hornak! We salute you with an ACD/Labs Educators' Star Pick award for July 2000.

This is a site hosted by Molecular Arts Corporation which allows visualisation of 3D structures of a wide range of molecules using VRML 2.0 players and JavaScript. Presently there are over 175,000 molecular models available on-line and the entire database is both fully indexed and searchable. WebMolecules is great for the classroom when students want to examine the 3D nature of molecules and download structures for use in other molecular modeling programs. The site also has sectioned its structures including the Top 100 pollutants, Top 100 commercial chemicals and Top 200 pharmaceuticals. Webmolecules provides a wonderful service to the chemical community at large and deserve the recognition they have achieved.

Congratulations, and a sincere thank you to Warwick R Bailey, the webmaster of World Chemistry, for producing such a pedagogical resource for the Chemistry arena. There are numerous tools available at this site which will both amusing and stimulating. In particular I am impressed by the Java Applet collection which matches the visual capabilities of "web-well-done" to the need to deliver such tools to academia. The site delivers resources including interactive tutorials with animations as well as interactive molecular models. The VRML viewing shows off the willingess of the webmaster to make use of available tools to the benefit of his viewers. The site is definitely designed by a skilled educator with a passion for communication with clarity. With these comments one may envisage that this site would be of value only to the chemist in learning but this is far from true. There are many pages here to entertain and stimulate even the most experienced and I suggest bookmarking it now. I encourage you to fly to the World Chemistry site.