Applied Mechanics News

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Wikipedia and Applied Mechanics

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia founded in 2001 with a radical approach: anybody can create and edit (almost) any entry. Entirely created by volunteers, Wikipedia has come close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, according to a special report in Nature. The size of Wikipedia has long surpassed Britannica. Before weighing in on this news, perhaps you’d like to scan the 418 comments recorded in Slashdot.

A wiki is a type of website that enables many people to collaborate. I believe that Internet-centric content management systems like wiki will lead to a new discipline in mechanics, just as computer-centric technologies have led to the discipline of computational mechanics. I'll return to this point toward the end of the post.

To learn how Wikipedia worked, I found an existing entry on the Timoshenko Medal. The entry listed the names of past winners, but few were linked to biographies. I added one for Budiansky, drawing heavily on articles that I found online. You can wiki Budiansky now by simply typing in Google two words: wiki Budiansky. Incidentally, among teens, the word wiki is mostly used as a verb, meaning to look something up in Wikipedia. According to my sons, few kids in schools go to Britannica or any other traditional enclyclopedias anymore: they all wiki.

As another experiment, I added a biography of Hutchinson, which I converted from a pdf file downloaded from the AMD website. Wikipedia displayed the entry immediately, but then, after about half an hour, displayed a warning: “This article may violate copyright, and will be removed if no action is taken.” I took no action, and the entry soon disappeared.

The entry on Barenblatt has generated some activities. Click “history” at the top of the entry, and you will see all the authors and past versions.

When I wikied mechanics today, I found an entry started in August 2001 and last modified on 8 February 2006. In the list of sub-disciplines, I clicked solid mechanics, which led me to a short description and a wikibook on solid mechanics. When I remarked to my sons that the content of solid mechanics in Wikipedia is not as sophisticated as the article in Britannica written by Jim Rice, they were duely impressed that someone they knew wrote an article in Britannica. Such is the evanescent teenage culture.

Wikipedia, however, feeds on resources unavailable when Jim wrote his article. These resources will fundamentally change our approach to collecting, archiving and accessing information:
  • The hard drive is cheap. At about 50 cents per gigabyte, it’s absurd to be stingy about space.
  • The Internet bandwidth is cheap. It makes no sense for an individual or a library to own an encyclopedia.
  • Search engines are fast. Information explosion is no longer a threat to humanity. Anything is worth publishing if at least one other person may care about it.
  • Hyperlinks are much faster than turning pages.
  • Wikis enable people to collaborate online: creating, editing, and linking.
Technology is now available to start a wiki on mechanics (wikimechanics) to document in a useful way everything known about mechanics. I mean everything: from everyday experience to esoteric theories, and everything in between. It should also have an exhaustive collection of pictures and data, all properly hyperlinked. I also mean useful. How do we catalog everyday experience to make it useful for serious decisions? How about an open-source finite element code, with links to a materials database? What if Ashby's Materials Selector becomes an open-access, user-enriched, and ad-supported repository?

Many open-source wiki engines are available today; our wiki need not be part of Wikipedia.

The authors of the wiki could be from the entire international community of applied mechanics – professors, students, engineers, and amateurs. They would also be the users. Along the way, we'll figure out how to assign credits to individual authors in such a collaborative effort. This wiki would co-evolve with the subject of mechanics: they would influence each other.

Decades ago, when computers came into being, many mechanicians embraced the technology and created computational mechanics, a discipline that has fundamentally changed how mechanics is practiced. Today, as the new Internet-centric technologies emerge, mechanics is ready to reinvent itself again, into a form yet to be defined.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

PageRank of AMN goes up

In a previous post, I reported that AMN came at the top of the Google Search after its second week of existence. The PageRank of AMN, however,were frustratingly low: 0/10. Today the PageRank of AMN is 4/10. By comparison, here are the PageRanks of several other websites:
You can display the latest headlines of AMN, along with the headlines of New York Times, Science, Nature, Slashdot, etc., using a start page. Each headline links to a full article. No more email spams. You can glance at the headlines of sources of your own choice, whenever you like, using any computer around the world.

Whitesides on writing a scientific paper

George Whitesides wrote this handout in 1989, and then published it in Advanced Materials in 2004. It's a gem. He explains how to use writing to plan research. Although Advanced Materials does not give free access to this handout, a number of other sites do. See Google Scholar.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

2008 International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM)

The 22nd ICTAM will be held in Adelaide, Australia, in 24-30 August 2008. Held once every four years, these International Congresses have been organized by the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, an organization with a long history.

The ASME Applied Mechanics Division participates in a Summer Meeting every year. The principal organisers of the Summer Meetings rotate among several organizations, with a period of four years, as described below.

  • Year 4n (2008, 2012, etc.): International Committee of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
  • Year 4n+1 (2009, 2013, etc.): ASME Materials Division (joined with the ASME Applied Mechanics Division, The Engineering Mechanics of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Society of Engineering Sciences).
  • Year 4n+2 (2006, 2010, etc.): US National Committee of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
  • Year 4n+3 (2007, 2011, etc.): The ASME Applied Mechanics Division (joined with the ASME Materials Division).

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Free access to 3 mechanical engineering handbooks

The ASME website has been improving. I have not looked into all the new stuff, but have found a particularly valuable feature. If you are a member, you can access from the members-only site three excellent handbooks:
  • Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers
  • Handbook of Materials Selection
  • Mechanical Engineer's Reference Book

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Technology Review relaunched: infotech, biotech, nanotech, and biztech

Technology Review has recently relaunched its website, and reduced the print magazine from one issue per month to one issue every other month. According to its editor, Technology Review has done what many publishers yearn to do, but dare not: it has turned its business upside down. Technology Review has been a print magazine with a website; from now on, it will be an electronic publisher that also prints a magazine.

Owned by MIT, Technological Review has been reporting emerging technologies and analyzing their likely impact since 1899. The Magazine now has four channels: infotech, biotech, nanotech, and biztech.

The newsfeed of Technology Review is http://www.technologyreview.com/rss/main.aspx.
What does a newsfeed mean?

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

How to subscribe newsfeeds

A start page (also known as newsreader, RSS reader, news aggregator, or newsfeed reader, etc.) can update the headlines of Applied Mechanics News on your computer, side by side with the headlines of the New York Times, etc., with each headline linked to a full article. Whenever you like, you can view all the headlines at a glance, from any computer around the world. No more email spam.

An easy, considered by some the best, start page is Netvibes. Here is the procedure to get started:
  1. Go to http://www.netvibes.com/
  2. Click "Sing in" at the upper-right corner.
  3. Sign up with a combination of an email address and a password.
  4. Click Add Content at the upper-left corner.
  5. Click "Add my feed" at the top of the sidebar on the left.
  6. Paste http://amdnews.blogspot.com/atom.xml into the box, and then click "add"
The newsfeed URLs of severl sister blogs of AMN are
http://amresearch.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://amconferences.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://amjobs.blogspot.com/atom.xml

The newsfeed URL for the Applied Mechanics Google Group is
http://groups.google.com:80/group/
appliedmechanics/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml

Here are some of the best RSS feeds, including New York Times, Nature, Science, PRL, APL. Unfortunately, mechanics journals do not have RSS feeds now.

Bookmark the webpage http://www.netvibes.com, or simply use Netvibes as the default start page whenever you launch your browser.

Note added on 9 April 2006. 9 best online RSS readers.

Note added on 28 June 2006
. You can aggragate all Applied Mechanics Blogs into a single RSS feed. Right click RSS, and select "Copy Link Location". Paste the link into your start page.

Note added on 14 July 2006. Chris Anderson on RSS.

Note added on 27 August 2006. Netvibes secures a $15 million investment.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Nominations needed for nine Society officers

ASME's Nominating Committee will recommend nine of the Society's finest this year for leadership positions.

The offices are as follows: President (2006-2007), three members of the Board of Governors (2006-2009), and five Vice Presidents (2006-2009) for Financial Operations, Affinity Communities, Standardization and Testing, Public Awareness, and Professional Development, Practice and Ethics. read more...

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Researcher Spotlight: Professor Grigory. I. Barenblatt

An article by Xanthippi Markenscoff