Opportunities for mechanics as seen from the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors

by Rui Huang, The University of Texas, Austin

Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program - Preproposal Meeting Announcement

Dr. E. P. (Tony) Chen at the Sandia National Laboratories has posted the following entry in the Applied Mechanics Discussion Group on Apr. 20, 2006:

The primary goal of the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) is to establish validated, large-scale, multidisciplinary, simulation-based "Predictive Science² as a major academic and applied research program. The Program Statement lays out the goals for a multiyear program as a follow-on to the present ASC Alliance program. This ³Predictive Science² is the application of verified and validated computational simulations to predict properties and dynamics of complex systems. This process is potentially applicable to a variety of applications, from nuclear weapons effects to efficient manufacturing, global economics, to a basic understanding of the universe. Each of these simulations requires the integration of a diverse set of disciplines; each discipline in its own right is an important component of many applications. Success requires both software and algorithmic frameworks for integrating models and code from multiple disciplines into a single application and significant disciplinary strength and depth to make that integration effective.

A pre-proposal meeting has been scheduled on May 16-17 at the Hyatt Regency at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. For details. please refer to the website:

http://www.llnl.gov/asci/alliances/psaap/

Essays on general education

These essays were written by students and professors as a part of preparation for the recent curriculum review at Harvard University. Most essays related to high education in the modern world. I particularly enjoyed reading the essay by George Whitesides.

Merlot: a catalog of online learning materials for high education

Several recent entries of AMN have discussed possible roles of the Internet in shaping the future of Applied Mechanics. Shriram Ramanathan noted that the Internet can be a platform for public outreach. Paul Steif considered broadening the reach of mechanics to users of mechanics in engineering practice. I argued for initiating a Wikimechanics Project to organize everything known about mechanics, from everyday experience to esoteric theories, and everything in between.

But who has time for all this work? And how can we build an online community? Teng Li has begun to talk about these essential issues.

Perhaps a good starting point for us is to learn from successful Internet projects. I've written about Wikipedia and Slashdot. In this entry, I'd like to talk about Merlot.

Standing for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, Merlot is a website that aggregates online learning materials for high education. Merlot was initiated in 1997 by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. Today Merlot lists 499 items in Arts, 2407 in Business, 2052 in Education, 2257 in Humanities, 1130 in Mathematics and Statistics, 5699 in Science and Technology, and 979 in Social Sciences.

To learn how Merlot works, I clicked “DNA from the Beginning”, the fourth item listed in the category of Science and Technology. Listed on this Merlot page was an excellent website created by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This item was added to Merlot in 2000 by a user named Jeff Bell, and reviewed in 2002 by the Merlot Biology Panel, which gave the item a rating of five stars. A total of seven users left comments, and all ranked the item with five stars. Four users created assignments to go along with the item. This item was collected by 104 users, whose personal collections I could also view.

I searched in Merlot using the keyword “mechanics”, and found 87 items, mostly on classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. I did find a number of items on applied mechanics, including ones on Strength of Materials, created by Mehrdad Negahban, of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln; and by Alan Zehnder, of Cornell University.

Anybody can view most of Merlot, but only members can submit new items, leave comments, etc. I signed on as a member, and submitted Applied Mechanics News as an item, which now has its own Merlot page. If you sign on as a member of Merlot, you can comment on this item, collect it, and submit new items.

You might want to explore the history of Merlot, and the structure of the Merlot community. To learn how to pronounce Merlot and hear a few sound bites, you might want to watch this short video.

We can learn many lessons from Merlot, but before we talk about these lessons, we ought to first spend more time to experiment with it. The number of excellent items is just astonishing, and Merlot has found ways to encourage users to participate.

Two reports on research directions in mechanics

New Directions in Mechanics, prepared by the participants of a workshop sponsored by the Division of Materials Science of the US Department of Energy.

Research in Fluid Dynamics: Meeting National Needs, prepared by a subcommittee of the US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.

Kevin Kelly speculates on the future of science

Dizzy speculations by the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. Also see 221 comments in Slashdot.

AMN will link to blogs of individual mechanicians

As a further experiment to build the cyberinfrastructure of Applied Mechanics, Applied Mechanics News will link to blogs maintained by individual mechanicians. (A 2003 report of a NSF blue-ribbon advisory panel articulated the need for a cyberinfrasturture – both as a word and as a real entity – and estimated that sustained new NSF funding of 1 billion per year would be needed to establish an Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program.)

As a part of the experiment, we’ll select each blog using the following criteria:

• The blog is actively maintained by one or a group of mechanicians.
• Entries of the blog are of interest to a large segment of the international community of Applied Mechanics.
• The blog will reciprocate by linking to Applies Mechanics News.

The first two blogs that we’ve linked to are Modeling Place, maintained by Professor Rui Huang, of the University of Texas at Austin, and his group members; and R. Salgado’s Blog, maintained by Professor Rodrigo Salgado, of Purdue University. You can access the two blogs from the links in the sidebar of Applied Mechanics News. Please tell us of any other blogs we should link to.

What can mechanics community learn from the success of Google?

A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine shows a boy asking his dad a question. The dad, reading a book, replies, “Go ask your search engine.” The cartoon was published in Feb. 2000, three months before Google officially became the world's largest search engine with its introduction of a billion-page index — the first time so much of the web's content was made searchable. If the boy asks again today, his dad will say, “Go ask Google.”

At $6 billion a year in revenue and $7.6 billion in cash, Google is a success. What’s more important to the rest of us, Google is running its business in a way that may change the world. Through its never-about-average products (i.e., Google search, Google Earth (and Mars too), Google Map, and more recently, Writely), Google is radically redefining the ways we obtain, organize, use, store, and share information.

So what’s Google’s secret to success? Quentin Hardy, of Forbes, interviewed Google CEO, Eric Schmidt and several VPs for answers. Here are excerpts from Hardy’s article:

• “The mission overall: to collect ‘all the world's information’ and make it accessible to everyone."
• “One true god rules at Google: data. The more you collect, the more you know and the more certain your decisions can be."
• “…this company loves to talk it out, jettison hierarchy, business silos and layers of management for a flatter, ‘networked’ structure where the guy with the best data wins.”
• “It shares all the information it can with as many employees as possible, encouraging debate but insisting on like-minded cooperation.”
• “Tackles most big projects in small, tightly focused teams.”

In a recent entry, Zhigang Suo brought up the possibility of Internet-Based Mechanics (or iMech). Here I’d like to ask, what can our mechanics community learn from the secrets of Google’s success?

The information world Google is dealing with is, of course, many scales larger than the knowledge we mechanicians possess. The subject of mechanics, as part of the information world, however, shares many self-similarities with its matrix, such as

• “…accumulated over millennia has remarkable depth and richness. This large quantity of knowledge has made it hard for any individual to master (and to add to) the subject.” as described in Suo’s post.
• the knowledge in different disciplines of mechanics are largely scattered, instead of networked.
• an effective platform to exchange knowledge and stimulate interactions among mechanicians is desired.

The Internet provides powerful tools to enable everyone’s knowledge and ideas accessible to the world, easily and at almost no cost. We mechanicians should also take advantage of the Internet, sharing the knowledge of mechanics, interacting among mechanicians, and broadening the reach of mechanics. For example:

• A startpage with Applied Mechanics News and its sister blogs keeps us updated with recent progress and latest events in our community;
• Applied Mechanics Discuss Group provides mechanicians a platform for information exchange and in-depth discussion;
• The Wikimechanics Project, when it is launched, will allow every mechanician to contribute in organizing the subject of mechanics.

We can also learn from another secret of Google’s success: Every Google employee starts the week writing five lines on what he or she did the week before. They are posted on an internal website for all to see. New product ideas circulate among thousands of engineers (comparable in number with the mechanicians in our community!) on an "ideas mailing list."

Since these engineers at Google may change the world by exchanging ideas on weekly basis, we mechanicians may revitalize our community if everyone makes a contribution to the Internet-Based Mechanics (or iMech) project on a monthly basis. Not hard at all, right? It’s our community, let’s just do it.

My daughter is now at her curious-about-everything age. Why can she blow out bubbles from soap water but not from tap water? Why can Curious George ride his bicycle with just rear wheel on ground? You can imagine my difficulty in rephrasing surface tension and gyroscope effects in kid's language. I hope, if she raises similar questions in several years, I can just tell her, "Go ask iMech."

Let us seize the greatest opportunity of our time

We've been hearing rumors that print is dead, killed by the Internet. What is the reality then? For example, how are newspapers doing? Not too badly, according to the numbers cited by James Surowiecki, of The New Yorker. He also made the following remarks, however.

"The popular conviction that papers are doomed may cause owners and shareholders to prefer the cash-cow approach, accepting eventual oblivion while continuing to harvest billions of dollars in profits. Settling for a tolerable short-term future, newspapers could end up writing themselves out of the long-term one. Yet it’s also clear that this moment of supposed doom represents a sizable opportunity for newspapers, a chance to reinvigorate their product and, eventually, improve the economics of their business."

The newspaper industry is not the only one that faces crisis. So do many other established industries, as well as many academic disciplines. I'm not the first one to realize that, in Chinese, the word crisis means "danger and opportunity". When I first came to the United States for graduate study, twenty years ago, a popular topic was China's population. How would the country feed so many people? Well, we all know how by now. Instead of dwelling on the problem of feeding people, China has turned the people into consumers and manufacturers of the world. The problem of a large number has now turned into a great opportunity, and not for the Chinese alone.

Another popular topic twenty years ago was information explosion. How can we hand down knowledge to the next generation? How can a piece of information serve the public if few know it? Now Google and others have turned this problem into a hugely profitable business. What we see today in search and data mining, of course, is just the tip of an iceberg. Again, the problem of a large quantity is turning into a great opportunity, not just for a few companies, but for us all.

Let us mechanicians stop dwelling on our problems, of which there are many, but few are unique to the discipline of Mechanics. Let us think of ways to seize opportunities. Quite a few opportunities have been touched upon in earlier entries of Applied Mechanics News: Mechanics in Biology and Medicine, Integrated Structures, Simulation-Based Engineering Science, etc. You can add more to this list.

To me, the greatest opportunity presented to mechanicians of our time is the Internet. Ours is a subject with a long and complicated history. The knowledge accumulated over millennia has remarkable depth and richness. This large quantity of knowledge has made it hard for any individual to master (and to add to) the subject. However, nobody has ever questioned the value of Mechanics to a broad range of human activities today and to our posterity.

In a previous entry, I argued for initiating a Wikimechanics Project to organize, on the Internet, in a useful way, everything known about mechanics, from everyday experience to esoteric theories, and everything in between.

I have since discussed the matter with a number of colleagues, who have made suggestions. As a starting exercise, we can build an online community of mechanicians by creating and editing entries on Applied Mechanics in Wikipedia. As another exercise, we can take a subject like Strength of Materials, which is taught almost at every university, and involve mechanicians of several institutions and with different expertise to produce an iBook that incorporates texts, equations, pictures, movies and, yes, simulations like the web-based finite element simulations developed by Paul Steif and co-workers. Such an iBook will not be a clone of a paper book, but a platform for integrated and evolving learning tools.

The goal of these exercises will be to help us mechanicians develop an architecture of online collaboration, an architecture that

1. motivates many mechanicians to contribute,
2. produces quality products, and
3. is scalable to more complex subjects.

Of course, we should also learn from communities that have already produced collaborative software. No need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to learn to recognize a wheel when we see one, and invent new ways to use it.

True, the opportunity of the Internet is not specific to Mechanics, but the opportunity is almost exclusively ours to use the Internet to organize Mechanics, bountiful and beautiful. Computer Scientists will not do it for us, although they have a lot to offer. Nor will anybody else.

The Internet will enable us mechanicians to turn a large part of human knowledge into a huge opportunity: an old, complex, and useful discipline has its own advantage. We may call this opportunity Internet-Based Mechanics (IBM; or iMech, to be in tune with time).

If well done, Internet-Based Mechanics will make enormous impact on industries, education and public outreach, for many years to come, on a larger scale than the finite element method has done. It will also fundamentally alter how we conduct research in Mechanics. It forces us to be young and creative again.

Allow me to paraphrase a better known Bostonian. And so, my fellow mechanicians: ask not what the Internet can do for you - ask what you can do for the Internet. Let us seize the greatest opportunity of our time. The opportunity is for us all.

Acknowledgements. I've benefited from discussions with Paul Steif, John Hutchinson, Joost Vlassak, and Shriram Ramanathan.

Now everyone can post to the community

We've set up an Applied Mechanics Discussion Group, a link to which is in the sidebar of Applied Mechanics News. Let's say you have an item of interest to our community - a piece of news, a point of view, a remarkable research paper, a job ad, or a conference ad - anything that you'd like to tell other mechanicians. Here is how you can participate in the Discussion Group.

• Using an email address and a password to create a Google Account (if you don't already have one).
• Click "Sign in" at the upper-right corner of the Applied Mechanics Discussion Group. This leads you to a page where you can fill in the email address and the password of your Google Account.
• To post an item in the Discussion Group, click “Start a new topic”.
• To discuss any existing topic, click "Reply" at the bottom of each topic.
• You can get the RSS feed of the Discussion Group.

Professors, professionals, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduate students - well, anyone who'd like to say anything to other mechanicians - are welcome.

If you have further questions, email me. Give this Discussion Group a try!

Note added on 5 April 2006: The Applied Mechanics Discussion Group uses a free service called Google Group. In exchange for this service, Google inserts into the Discussion Group many ads, from which we receive no revenue. The ads, however, looks relevant to our community.