Why should CEOs blog? - New York Times

A previous entry in Applied Mechanics News, entitled Applied Mechanics in the Age of Web 2.0, talked about why we mechanicians should blog. A New York Times article today talks about why CEOs should blog also.

Wei Yang becomes the President of Zhejiang University

I had a dinner with Wei Yang the other day. He told me that he would accept the offer to become the President of Zhejiang University, starting this week.

Wei Yang obtained his PhD degree in Solid Mechanics at Brown University, in 1980s, under the direction of Ben Freund. Ever since Wei has been on the faculty of Tsinghua University. He has collaborated with many mechanicians world wide, and produced a large number of students.

Both his father and his son are alumni of Zhejiang University, but Wei himself has no degree from the University.

e-mail alert of journals and bookmarklet

I've just learned another good use of a bookmarklet described in a previous entry of Applied Mechanics News.

Some of us subscribe to tables of contents of journals, say IJSS and JMPS. When a new issue of a journal is online, Elsevier will send you an email. In this email, each paper is linked to the webpage of the paper. On the webpage is the familiar PDF button. Clicking this button, you will land on another webpage that asks you to pay for the paper, even though the library of your institution has already paid for the journal. To down load the paper, you will have to enter the journal through the gateway of the library.

This last step is annoying, but you can automate the step with a single click of a bookmarklet, as described in the previous entry in AMN.

Of course, there is an even better solution. Publishers can simply embed the proxy string of your library in every link. The cost for publishers to do so is zero, so far as I can tell. To avoid confusion, they can add a link "Find at Harvard" (or xyz) to each paper in the email, just as Google Scholar and Web of Science have already done.

These personalized links will significantly ease navigation, and might greatly increase the popularity of email alerts. It seems to be a win-win solution. What do you think?

Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?

In an early entry in Applied Mechanics News, I speculated on Wikipedia and Applied Mechanics. Since then, many colleagues have talked to me about their own initial reactions and subsequent experiences with Wikipedia. The strength and some of the issues of Wikipedia are described in an article by Stacy Schiff in this week's New Yorker.

Applied Mechanics Division call for normination: 2006-2007 Awards

The AMD Executive Committee is now seeking nominations for the awards listed below. The deadline for nominations is October 1, 2006 by 5pm Eastern Time.

Daniel C. Drucker Medal
The Daniel C. Drucker medal was established in 1997 and is conferred in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering through research, teaching and service to the community over a substantial period of time.

Warner T. Koiter Medal
The Warner T. Koiter Medal, established in 1996, is bestowed in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of solid mechanics with special emphasis on the effective blending of theoretical and applied elements of the discipline, and on a high degree of leadership in the international solid mechanics community.

Timoshenko Medal
The Timoshenko Medal was established in 1957 and is conferred in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics. Instituted by the Applied Mechanics Division, it honors Stephen P. Timoshenko, world-renowned authority in the field, and it commemorates his contributions as author and teacher.

Applied Mechanics Award
To an outstanding individual for significant contributions in the practice of engineering mechanics; contributions may result from innovation, research, design, leadership or education.

Young Investigator Award
Special achievement for a young investigator in Applied Mechanics.

A brief description of the award appears in the ASME Website. In addition, be sure to adhere to the requirements as outlined in the appropriate nomination form.

Nominations should be sent following ASME website directions and should also be sent directly to Thomas N. Farris by October 1, 2006 at:

Thomas N. Farris, AMD Chair
School of Aeronautics & Astronautics
Purdue University
315 N. Grant Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2023
Tel: 765-494-5118
Fax: 765-494-0307
Email: farrist@purdue.edu

Related entry: 2005 AMD Awards.

The long tail of papers

In an entry on pay per paper, I alluded to Chris Anderson's new book, The Long Tail. It should be straightforward to collect page views or down loads or citations of individual papers in a journal. You can plot the numbers of hits of individual papers against the rankings of the papers. Here is the curve for articles in Slate. (Not sure why data stopped at top 500 hits. Why not go further to see a really long tail?) Hope someone in Applied Mechanics will show the same data for JMPS, IJSS, MOM, etc. It will be fun.

Here is the gist of Anderson's observation: If you care about the total sale, as a publisher might, then what matters is the area under the curve; the contribution of the tail may rival that of the head. This much is objective, and should not be controversial.

Now allow me to play a variation of the theme, which is admittedly subjective and possibly controversial. Let's say the net contribution of a journal to new knowledge is proportional to the area under the curve (the subjective part). Then numerous less cited papers may make a significant contribution comparable to the contribution made by the best cited papers.

If you are interested in this argument, you might as well generalize the analysis from a single journal to all journals in a field, or to all journals in science, engineering and medicine. I'm not sure if such a curve has ever been plotted, but the job should not be too hard.

Now, if you are an individual author, surely you'd like to have a lot of hits for your own papers, just as Anderson is celebrating his book becoming a best seller. However, if your job is to increase the total knowledge, as the NSF is set up to do, then you might as well pay as much attention to the long tail as to the tall head.

Fracture and Failure Mechanics TC blog and activities

The Fracture and Failure Mechanics Technical Committee (FFMTC) would like to call your attention to some of our recent activities. In addition to our involvement in organizing sessions for the IMECE and summer meetings, we are developing a dynamic website or blog that will enable the greater community to share teaching experiences and resources. Please take a look at our blog; it is located at http://amd-ffmtc.blogspot.com and can also be reached through the Applied Mechanics Blogroll on the Applied Mechanics News blog.

Below are edited excerpts from our committee report in the Summer 2006 AMD Newsletter. We welcome your comments and involvement.

Regards,

John Lambros, Chair
Mark Walter, Vice-Chair
Jean-Francois Molinari, Secretary

--------------------------------------------------------------

Blog-based web pages have several advantages over static web pages and in particular, the FFMTC’s site offers the following:

• Streamlined content management (i.e., announcements, membership listing, meeting minutes,etc.),
• Dynamic discussion of fracture mechanics teaching through on-line discussion of syllabi and relevant books/articles,
• Posting/commenting about useful fracture and failure mechanics resources, and
• Access to a community of peers for discussion of issues relating to fracture and failure mechanics.

The quality and relevance of our blog is directly proportional to member participation. Please consider becoming an active contributor. E-mail “walter.80_at_osu_dot_edu” to request to be a contributor. In addition, since the content is dynamic, you should consider using a news aggregator that will alert you when there are new postings.

he FFMTC continues to be very active in organizing IMECE sessions. Many of these sessions are co-sponsored with the Dynamic Response of Materials and the Experimental Mechanics Technical Committees. This cross-committee cooperation has allowed sessions of broad relevance to be organized, which consequently have been very well attended. IMECE 2005 symposia that were (co)sponsored by the Committee included three sessions on the “Failure phenomena of inhomogeneous materials” (organized by Toshio Nakamura and Raman Singh), and one session on “Dynamic Fragmentation of Brittle Materials” (organized by Jean-Francois Molinari and Philippe Geubelle). The Committee is currently (co)sponsoring seven sessions for the IMECE 2006

Last but not least, we would like to thank the many individuals who have volunteered their time and work to bring the Committee efforts to fruition. In particular, the entire committee wishes to express its greatest appreciation to the outgoing Chair, Jack Beuth, for all his efforts during the past six years that he has been involved in the committee administration. Membership in the Committee is open and we encourage anyone interested to participate in the IMECE 2006 FFMTC meeting or to contact Committee officials directly.

Professor Frank Nabarro died at the age of 90

Pay per paper (P3)

I’ve just stopped subscribing to Science. The magazine is great, but few papers in it interest me. The signal-to-noise ratio of Science, I guess, is just too low to most individuals. Instead, I’ve now subscribed to the RSS feed of Science. If any paper looks interesting, I can access to the full paper online through Harvard Libraries. Outside my office, a color printer is free to use for everyone. A library of an institution seems to be an ideal home for a journal like Science. Nearly every individual paper in Science is of high enough quality to appeal to someone in the institution.

Few journals can make that claim, however. Most journals are only relevant to several people in an institution. Furthermore, few researchers read any scholarly journal from cover to cover. Rather, we all read individual papers. However, libraries subscribe to journals, or even bundles of journals. As a result, the libraries pay for many papers that nobody reads, and miss other papers that someone would like to read.

This business model is bad for authors and readers, and possibly even bad for publishers. Technology now exists to distribute information far more efficiently, in a unit consistent with how people consume the information. For example, many people now prefer buying individual songs to albums. See a recent book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, for a remarkably perceptive analysis of media industries.

The same business model may apply to scholarly papers. One may argue that journals, like albums, were invented as a packaging technology to suit the old economics of delivery. As scholarly papers are all online, the name of a journal becomes simply a tag to the papers published in that journal. Maybe a powerful tag, but a tag nonetheless. So far as how papers should be distributed, the name of a journal should serve the same function as all other tag-like entities: keywords, names of authors, etc: the tags help readers to sort papers and set priorities. It makes no sense for anyone to insist that papers with any particular tag be delivered as a bundle.

Many publishers already offer individual papers for sale online; for example, the cost is at $30 per paper for many Elsevier journals. Once a reader buys a paper, it seems reasonable to share this paper with his close colleagues, and it also seems reasonable to store the paper for future use. Perhaps we can formalize this practice.

How about we treat a paper just like a book? With one click, a reader will have the paper, and his library will automatically pay for it. Once bought, the paper is accessible to every user of the library. We can also collect statistics. If the users of a library buy many papers in a journal, the library should subscribe to the journal. Libraries will set up an algorithm to minimize the total cost. Publishers will set up their algorithms to maximize profits. However, libraries and publishers do have a common ground: they both want to help people to find papers.

To support such a business model, a third party may provide a web service. It seems to be too wasteful to make every individual library and every individual publisher maintain a separate web service. Something like Amazon.com or Last.fm for papers might do. The service can also be an extension of services like EZproxy or CiteULike.

Related blog entries:

• Libraries and Amazon.
• What if all papers become openly accessible?

Note added on 26 July 2006. I posted an entry on the long tail of papers.

Web tools for academics

Many entries of Applied Mechanics News have talked about personal experience with web tools of value to academics. A list of links to these entries might be useful. I've just created a tag called webtoolsforacademics in del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website. I'm now placing a link to the tag called Web tools for academics in the sidebar of Applied Mechanics News. I'll bookmark more links as people post their experience. You can contribute to this tag, too, if you register for a free del.icio.us account. Of course, you can also bookmark any websites of interest to you using other tags.

Google Scholar can localize your search to library links

Search globally, go locally. Starting from Feb. 2006, Google Scholar offers links to find papers in your local library. See here for details.

Study Cites Plan to End U.S. Oil Imports - New York Times

American imports of oil could be eliminated by 2030, a new study by an interstate consortium asserts, if the nation turns to an aggressive program of energy efficiency and commercialization of four already-demonstrated technologies for making transportation fuels.

Bookmarklet to localize a webpage of a journal paper

by Daniel C. Suo, Teng Li and Zhigang Suo

Most journals offer the title, authors and abstract of each paper online for free. This information is a foundation for many services. For example, Teng has been urging us to adopt CiteUlike, a free social bookmarking website created by Richard Cameron for managing papers. You can explore remarkable functionalities of CiteUlike by playing with Zhigang's Watchlist. As another example, RSS readers allow us to subscribe to abstracts of papers from some of the best journals. These services, however, often do not have access to full papers. Here we describe a solution to this problem. Read more

Hassan Aref's blog on vortex dynamics

Professor Hassan Aref, of Virginia Tech, has just started his own blog: Vortex Dynamics.

The LibraryLookup Bookmarklet

Quick link added on 12 July 2006. Here is a list of LibraryLookup Bookmarklets for many libraries, along with an instruction to use them.

In a previous entry on libraries and Amazon, I alluded to Jon Udell's LibraryLookup Project. The Project produces bookmarklets, which allow you to look up a book in your local library with a single click, while surfing on Amazon. See a screencast to learn how a bookmarklet works. Here I'd like to describe my own experience.

I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. The library of Lexington belongs to a network of 41 libraries known as the Minuteman Library Network. I draged the lookup bookmarklet of the Minuteman Libary into the toolbar of my Internet browser. (If your local library belongs to the Minuteman Library Network, click here for the bookmarklet.) When I am on the Amazon page of an individual book (e.g., Practical Internet Groupware by Jon Udell), a click of the bookmarklet in the toolbar lands me on a web page of the Minuteman Library Network, telling me if the book is in the collection of the Network. If it is, regardless which one of the libraries in the Network owns the book or if the book is checked out, another click on the web page of the Network allows me to request the book. The book will be waiting for me some time later at the counter of the Lexington Library, which is within walking distance from my home.

Harvard University also has a network of libraries. The catalog of the Harvard Libraries is difficult to use. It would be nice if I could avoid using the catalog and instead using Amazon to search for books. Some publishers also allow users of Amason to search inside books (e.g., William Feller). However, for some time I could not get Udell's Bookmarklet Generator to work for Harvard Libraries. I emailed Jon Udell for help. He replied quickly, but somehow his script didn't work. My son Daniel tweaked Udell’s script and finally obtained a working LibraryLookup bookmarklet for Harvard Libraries.

Once I find a book in the catalog of Harvard Libraries, I need to write down the call number, and go to the particular library that owns the book and look for the book among the shelves. Because Harvard has quite a few libraries, each having its own layout, I've got lost many times in the libraries, and will think twice if I'd take the trouble to check out a book from an unfamiliar library. The service at Harvard Libraries is not as good as that at the Minuteman Library Network.

As I argued in the previous entry, it makes little sense to spend resources on developing stand-alone catalogs of individual libraries. The libraries can leverage the power of Amazon, and focus on better serving the readers. The libraries can become labs to test new information technologies, and the librarians can be instructors to teach new technologies, and be innovators to design better ways to serve users.

See more ideas in this four-minute screencast by Jon Udell on yin-yang of content and services, and in this presentation by Chris Anderson at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association.

Tips to obtain the lookup bookmarklet of your own library

• You may Google the query "LibraryLookup Bookmarklet"+"minuteman library network". Of course, enter the name of your own local library.
• You may find the LybraryLookup Bookmarklet for your own local library in Jon Udell's list.
• You may generate the bookmarklet by using the LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator.

Tips to use LibraryLookup Bookmarks

Note added on 10 July 2006. I've just learned that the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) provides a list of bookmarklets that look up books using xISBN, instead of using ISBN. This enhancement is significant, because each edition of the same book has a unique ISBN. While Amazon places the latest edition of a book at the top of the list, your local library may only have an old edition. These xISBN bookmarklets locate all editions of a book in the query. This list contains bookmarklets for many libraries, including Minuteman Library Network and Harvard Libraries.

Note added on 11 July 2006. Stuart Shieber sent me the following information. Worldcat contains the union of the card catalogs for a huge number of OCLC libraries. It also integrates automatic linking to Harvard's collections through the "Find It @ Harvard" buttons. The coverage of this collection is much broader than what Amazon catalogs, as it includes retrospective collections as well as foreign published materials and scholarly materials that are not in the commercial purview of Amazon.

Note added on 14 July 2006. The state of Massachusetts has over 50 online library catalogs. Over ten catalogs are federated into a Virtual Catalog. A user may request items unavailable at her local library.

Note added on 15 July 2006. Here is an example of software that may serve as an interface between users and libraries. ELF allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of your requests and overdue books.

Online Journal Club on Flexible Electronics

For many years, people accumulate personal collections of academic publications of interest in paper form. As such collections grow with time, more file cabinets and book shelves are needed for storage. First, space becomes a problem. Second, finding a specific paper could be a headache, even if the collections are well categorized.

As more and more publications become available online in recent years, people gradually switch to collect electronic versions, e.g. PDF files of papers. These files are often stored in local hard drives. Space is not an issue anymore. But again, locating a paper from hundreds of files in tens of folders still might be a heck of efforts.

Besides the difficulty in searching, other common shortcomings include:

• Locally stored, limited access flexibility.
• Personally owned, not easy to share with other people. As a result, the scale of personal collections is often limited.
• Redundently collected. Consider this: a same gem paper is manually archived by thousands of people individually.
• Statically and passively maintained. Lack of interactions among people sharing common interests.

Any better idea? Here comes Web2.0, which is all about online collaboration. Among the numerous tools enabled by Web2.0, CiteULike could be the one able to solve the above issues for us. A previous post in AMN explored the possibility to form online journal club based on CiteULike. Here is an example.

Launched by www.macroelectronics.org, the Macroelectronics Journal Club focuses on the scientific publications related to flexible electronics, ranging from enabling technologies to fundamental sciences. Major features include:

• All publication information stored online;
• Free access to anyone and from anywhere with internet connection;
• Once posted by someone, the item is open to everyone. No waste of labor and time;
• Easy to discuss papers and share views among members;
• Locating a paper can be as easy as a couple of clicks away;
• RSS feed to keep you current with the latest updates.

For more details of the Macroelectronics Journal Club, visit www.macroelectronics.org.

Everyone is welcome to join. So give it a try and let's explore better ways to manage academic literature and conduct scientific research.

(via www.macroelectronics.org)

Update: (14 July 2006)
By default, CiteULike stores links to papers. To get full access of a paper, you often need to locate the paper within the subscription of your institution, instead of its original link. By using a scalable bookmarklet, now localizing the paper links can be only as easy as one click away. See a recent AMN entry for details.

50th Anniversary of the Timoshenko Medal (1957-2007)

As a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the Timoshenko Medal, the ASME International Applied Mechanics Division is attempting to collect acceptance speeches of all past recipients. The speeches collected so far can be found through the link Timoshenko Medal Lectures. The same link also appears in the sidebars of AMN and AMR.

Apparently, the AMD Newsletters started to print the acceptance speeches around 1985. It has been difficult for us to collect earlier speeches. If you have the text of a speech that is missing from the list, please contact Shaofan Li (shaofan@berkeley.edu), the team leader of AMR.