Applied Mechanics News

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

MS Office killers: productivity software in the age of collaboration

Office contributed $11 billion in revenue in 2005, accounting for 30 percent of Microsoft revenues—and about 60 percent of profits.

But over the years stuff happened. The Internet, intranets, and email transformed workflows. Globalization and outsourcing dispersed people to satellite offices and partner companies. Collaboration tools became critical.

More on these changes in an article in Red Herring on web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software, and a report in Information Week on the launch of Google Apps.

Update added on 2 September 2006.
Anil Dash argues that Google Apps do not compete with MS Office.
Donna Bogatin's rebuttle.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Get Wiki With It - Wired Magazine

Getting published in the illustrious British scientific journal Nature is, frankly, a bitch. It's not just the years you spend designing the perfect experiment, or the hustling for grant money to collect the data. It's not even the long nights of trying to figure out how to express all that work elegantly in the cold language of scientific communication. No – the real trick is getting the editors at Nature to like it. Read more of this article in Wired.

Related websites:

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Registration for the 2006 ASME Congress

The deadline for early registration is 25 August 2006. Early registration will save you $50.

If you are a presenting author, ASME now requires that you register before 25 August 2006. Otherwise, the paper will not be included in the final program.

To register as a presenting author, you will need to find the paper number of your presentation in the technical program, and then register on this site.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Malcom Gladwell on The Case of Geothermal

Using an RSS reader, netvibes, I subscribe to blogs of a few writers. Whenever one of them posts an entry, its title appears in my RSS reader. I can read the entry when I have time.

Here is an entry by Malcom Gladwell on The Case of Geothermal. I’m no energy expert, and cannot evaluate various points that he made. Gladwell himself is no expert, either. But the comments of his readers give me a better appreciation of issues.

Wouldn’t it be nice if papers in Applied Mechanics be discussed this way?

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

A symposium to celebrate the 60th birthday of Alan Needleman and Viggo Tvergaard

16-18 August 2006, Providence, RI

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The Wealth of Networks

For the past 10 days, I've been traveling in China. I brought with me a single book, The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler. The book is a careful analysis of peer production, and is closely related to various discussions in Applied Mechanics News on the future of scholarly publishing. You can read a synopsis, look at a wiki, or download the full text of the book.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior

About 170 of us are meeting this week in Colby College, in Maine. Participants will describe the Conference in some detail. For now, let me report that we have elected the chairs for the next two Conferences:

2008 Conference Chair: Rick Vinci
2010 Conference Chair: Oliver Kraft (oliver.kraft@imf.fzk.de, Institute for Materials Research, Karlsruhe)

Time and place of the Conferences have not been set. Stay tuned.