Applied Mechanics News

We are migrating to iMechanica.Org

2006-09-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

We are migrating AMN to iMechanica.Org.

In January 2006, with the encouragement of the Executive Committee of the ASME Applied Mechanics Division, several volunteers initialed Applied Mechanics News (AMN), a blog of news and views of interest to the international community of Applied Mechanics, accompanied by sister blogs covering research and researchers, conferences, and jobs. Within weeks, AMN topped the list on Google, Yahoo and MSN for the query of applied mechanics news. By late August 2006, the four sister blogs had a total of over 65,000 page loads, and on average over hundred unique visitors every day, from all over the world.

The Internet has enabled AMN to be international and inter-organizational. The news can be updated continuously by many volunteers. Some of the initial thoughts of AMN was collected in the entry Applied Mechanics in the Age of Web 2.0.

AMN is hosted by a free service, Blogger. The service is easy to get started, but does not serve our needs well. For example, people cannot become contributors by themselves, and Blogger offers no tagging. The contributors cannot upload files, and the resolution for images is low. The software is proprietary and allows limited customization. Also, Blogger is not accessible in China, a country that has perhaps more mechanicians than the US and Europe combined. The platform of Blogger has severely restricted the growth of AMN. The experience of AMN has taught us in our adolescent months, but we have grown.

We will migrate AMN to iMechanica.Org, a far more effective many-to-many communication platform, with the following initial features:

Without signing in, everyone can read every entry.
Everyone can sign in.
Upon signing in, each user has a blog.
Moderators may promote new entries to the front page of iMechanica.
A user can subscribe to the RSS feeds of the front page, individual blogs, individual tags, and more sophisticated combinations.

These and other features can be customized. We will experiment with various options of moderation. While iMechanica will never replace conferences, it will enable people who do not go to the same conferences to communicate with each other. In particular, we will make a special effort to bring industrial practitioners and students into this online community.

The initial features are adopted with particular emphasis on ease of use. If you know how to send an email, you know how to post a blog entry. So why not leran more about iMechanica, and join us today in this exploration of the brave new world of the Internet.

Plan activities of the Applied Mechanics Division at 2007 ASME Congress

2006-09-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

The ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) will be held in 11-16 November 2007, in Seattle, Washington. As the 2007 Program Chair of the Applied Mechanics Division (AMD), I hope to get you involved in planning activities at the Congress.

IMECE is a place where you can meet people and attend talks in Applied Mechanics, as well as in other fields, such as Materials, Electronic Packaging, Tribology, and Heat Transfer. For many mechanicians, a highlight of the Congress is the Applied Mechanics Annual Dinner, where old acquaintances are resumed, new friends made, awards announced, and the Timoshenko lectures delivered.

Also, as many of you have discovered, the Congress provides a venue for people to get involved in the profession by organizing activities.

What can you do to help planning the 2007 Congress? The year 2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Timoshenko medal. You may want to nominate an outstanding mechanician for this and several other awards. The deadline for nomination is 1 October 2006. The AMD Executive Committee, in conjunction with the Committees for the individual awards, will select the finalists at the 2006 ASME Congress on Thursday, 9 November 2006, in Chicago.

You may also help organizing technical sessions. Each session is 90 minute long, and has about four speakers. Related sessions may form a symposium. Before you go about organizing sessions for the 2007 Congress, you may want to look at the program of the 2006 Congress.

All technical sessions at the ASME Congress are organized by volunteers--educators, practitioners and researchers like you. If you are thinking of organizing a symposium for the 2007 Congress, ask yourself a few questions:

What is the title or theme of your symposium?
Does the theme open a new area of research, or fill a long-felt need?
Who will be potential speakers?
How many sessions would you like to request?

Once you have answered these questions, you should contact the chair of one of the 17 Technical Committees in AMD. At the Chicago Congress, most Technical Committees will hold open meetings. The Executive Committee will hold a general meeting on Friday, 10 November 2006, 10 am-12pm. These meetings are open to all. A major item at these open meetings will be the planning for the 2007 Congress. If you would like to organize a symposium for the 2007 Congress, please contact the chair of a technical committee before November 2006, and try to attend the open meetings.

What else can you do now? Mark the dates 11-16 November 2007 in your calendar, and plan to spend the days in Seattle. Of course, you are always welcome to contact me to talk about Applied Mechanics at the 2007 Congress. If you have any suggestions, please leave comments below. To help us advertise, please e-mail this message to your friends.

Thank you.

Zhigang Suo
suo@deas.harvard.edu

MS Office killers: productivity software in the age of collaboration

2006-08-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Get Wiki With It - Wired Magazine

2006-08-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

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:

What if all papers become openly accessible?
The new open-access scientific journal PLoS One.
Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.
A conversation on open access between Jon Udell and Peter Suber.

Registration for the 2006 ASME Congress

2006-08-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Malcom Gladwell on The Case of Geothermal

2006-08-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

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?

GEM4 Summer School "Cell and Molecular Mechanics in BioMedicine"

2006-08-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the last day of GEM4 summer school on "Cell and Molecular Mechanics in BioMedicine", held at MIT. From what I have seen, it is a great success. There are approximately 50 students from all over the world attending the 2-week course. It is quite intense, starting everyday at 8:30AM and ending 5PM, including three afternoon lab sessions.

The course notes are posted at:
http://openwetware.org/wiki/GEM4labs

Next year the summer school will be held in Singapore.

NSF Dear Colleague Letter: Supplements to NSF Centers

2006-08-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

From Ken Chong, National Science Foundation:

The Dear Colleague Letter for NSF-SIA/NRI Graduate students and Postdoctoral Fellow Supplements to NSF Centers in Nanoelectronics (NSF06-051) has been released. Supplement requests are due November 17, 2006.

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

2006-08-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

16-18 August 2006, Providence, RI

Gordon Conference on Thin Films and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior

2006-08-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Gordon conference on “Thin Films and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior”, which started on July 30, concluded less than two weeks ago on the 4th of August. You can find the lists of talks and posters online. It was quite an event and since there may be many in our community who may not be familiar with the Gordon conferences, I though I should post a brief news item on it. I hope other attendees can add a few tid-bits of their own as well.

By design, Gordon conferences are by invitation only, consisting of a mixture of senior and junior researchers. This series of conferences started in 1931 and it seems that one is held on all conceivable scientific subjects (e.g. superconductivity, tribology, reproductive tract biology; see the complete list: http://www.grc.uri.edu/06sched.htm). The conference chair decides on the invitees. A few of the conference invitees are selected by the Chair to give lectures that are intended to be partly tutorial, partly reporting on cutting edge research and (hopefully) thought-provoking. Typically there are 2-3 lectures in the morning (each roughly an hour long along with substantial time devoted to discussions). The afternoons are kept free for networking and social activities such as hiking, canoeing among others. After dinner, there are additional 2-3 presentations. To keep the cost low and foster communication, the participants all live together in a dormitory where they also share their meals. The attendee cost of the GRC last week stood at $725 including lodging, registration, and meals---not to mention lots of beer served during the pre and postprandial poster sessions!

In the conference held last week more than 170 people attended including a sizable fraction being students. It is worth mentioning that about 40 students received travel fellowships provided by the National Science Foundation. The Conference also received financial support from the Gordon Research Foundation, Intel Corporation, Sandia National Laboratories, National University of Singapore, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.

This was my first GRC and left quite pleased with my visit (notwithstanding the heat wave hitting the east coast at the time of the conference). In particular, I thought, the poster sessions and the informal technical discussions were the major highlights. The attending students formed a very dynamic crowd and, in my short career, I have yet to see such a spirited interaction among senior and junior researchers. Over 110 posters were presented at this conference and six student prices were announced for the best ones. In my opinion, the Gordon conference (and mechanics specific Thin Air Philosophical Society series organized by Demitris Kouris) much better provide (compared to some of the “canned” society conferences) the true spirit of a scientific gathering i.e. unhurried, detailed scientific debate and discussion.

The chair and vice-chair for the next GRC-Thin Films and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior are Richard Vinci (Lehigh University) and Oliver Kraft (Institute for Materials Research, Karlsruhe), respectively.

Active Nanostructures and Nanosystems

2006-08-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

From Ken Chong, National Science Foundation.

The FY 2007 solicitation "Active Nanostructures and Nanosystems" has been published (NSF 06-595, ANN) . The proposal submission deadline is November 15, 2006.

The Wealth of Networks

2006-08-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Mechanics of Biological and Biomimetic Materials at Small Length-Scales

2006-08-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

A special focus issue on small-scale biomechanics has just been published as the August, 2006 issue (Volume 21, No. 8) of the Journal of Materials Reseach. The issue contains three invited review papers:

"Mechanical response of human red blood cells in health and disease: Some structure-property-function relationships" by S. Suresh

"Fracture, aging, and disease in bone" by J.W. Ager, G. Balooch, R.O. Ritchie

"Nanoindentation: Application to dental hard tissue investigations" by L. Angker, M.V. Swain

The issue also contains a wide variety of contributed articles examing a wide range of materials and using a broad range of experimental and modeling techniques. Guest editors for the issue were Andy Bushby, Adrian Mann, Christine Ortiz and Michelle Oyen.

Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior

2006-08-03T04:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Why should CEOs blog? - New York Times

2006-07-30T05:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-07-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

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.

NINTH U.S. NATIONAL CONGRESS ON COMPUTATIONAL MECHANICS, San Francisco, July 22- 26, 2007

2006-07-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

BACKGROUND AND SCOPE

From their inception in 1991, the biennial congresses of the United States Association for Computational Mechanics have become major scientific events, drawing computational engineers and scientists worldwide from government, academia, and industry. The Ninth U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics (USNCCM IX), hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, will feature the latest developments in all aspects of computational mechanics, and will broaden the definition of the discipline to include many other computation-oriented areas in engineering and sciences. From applications in nanotechnology and bioengineering, to recent advances in numerical methods and high-performance computing, the technical program will reflect the Congress theme of ``Interdisciplinary Computation''. In addition to plenary lectures and minisymposia that highlight the latest trends in computational mechanics, pre- and post-conference short courses addressing advances in multiscale and multiphysics methods, as well as other topics, will be held. Numerous vendor exhibits from Bay Area and national companies and organizations are also planned. Detailed information on USNCCM IX can be found at:

http://me.berkeley.edu/compmat/USACM/main.html

LOCATION
USNCCM IX will be held at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, located in downtown San Francisco, with convenient access from San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose International Airports.

CONGRESS REGISTRATION FEES
Early (by June 1, 2007) Late
Participant: $595 $695
Student: $250 $300

The participant fee covers the conference abstracts, a conference program, the reception, banquet, all break refreshments, and a twoyear membership in USACM and IACM. The student fee does not include the membership dues.

ACCOMMODATION
Block room reservations with special room rates are available at the conference hotel: single occ. double occ. cutoff date
Hyatt San Francisco $195 $195 June 28, 2007
Reservations can be made starting July 1, 2006 (please mention ``USNCCM9'' to receive the conference rate). Government and student rates are also available on a first-come, first-served basis.

IMPORTANT DATES
Website open for minisymposia proposals August 1, 2006
Deadline for minisymposia proposals January 15, 2007
Final selection of minisymposia February 1, 2007
Website open for abstract submission February 1, 2007
Deadline for abstract submissions April 1, 2007
Final selection of abstracts April 15, 2007
Deadline for print-ready abstracts June 1, 2007
Deadline for early registration June 1, 2007
USNCCM IX technical program July 23-26, 2007
Pre- and post-conference short courses July 22 & 26, 2007

CALL FOR MINISYMPOSIUM PROPOSALS
A wide variety of minisymposia forms the backbone of the Congress' technical program. A minisymposium consists of one or more technical sessions that focus on a specific topic or research area associated with computational mechanics. The technical sessions provide a flexible format that accommodates keynote
lectures, invited, and contributed papers. Volunteer minisymposium organizers will develop each minisymposium individually. The organizers are responsible for the technical content of their minisymposium; they select invited participants,
and review abstracts of contributed papers. The Technical Program Chairs invite proposals for minisymposia from the Computational Mechanics community. All proposals
must be submitted electronically via the Congress web site. There should be at least two organizers for each minisymposium; it is desirable that they represent more than one institution. Teaming of U.S. and international co-organizers is encouraged. The
minisymposia proposals deadline is January 15, 2007. Notification of the final selection of minisymposia will be given no later than February 1, 2007.

MINISYMPOSIUM TOPICS
The Ninth U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics will feature symposia in several emerging and mature areas: Biophysics, Mesh Generation, Error Analysis, Meshfree Methods, Finite Element Technology, Failure Analysis, Applications in
Engineering Practice, Optimization and Sensitivity Analysis, Computational Dynamics, Stochastic Finite Element Methods, Inverse Problems, Coupled Problems, Computational Acoustics, Computational Electromagnetics, Granular Materials and Discrete
Element Methods, Automotive Problems, Advances in Commercial Finite Element Software, Multiscale Methods in Materials Modeling, Computational Advances in Modeling Heterogeneous Materials, Geotechnical Applications, Contact-
Impact Problems in Nonlinear Mechanics, Discontinuous Galerkin Methods, Computational Combustion, Methods and Applications in Coupled Engineering Simulation, and Computational Fluid Dynamics.

CALL FOR TECHNICAL PAPERS
All technical papers, including keynote, invited, and contributed presentations, will be presented within one of the Congress's minisymposia. One-page abstracts in PDF format are required for all papers. Abstracts must be submitted to one
of the accepted minisymposia organizers for review. All abstracts must be submitted electronically using the abstract submission system that will be available on the Congress website, beginning February 1, 2007. The deadline for abstract
submission is April 1, 2007. Authors submitting abstracts of contributed papers will be notified of a decision on acceptance no later that on April 15, 2007. Following the notice of acceptance, authors will have until June 1, 2007 to revise their
abstracts.

HONORARY CONGRESS CHAIR
Robert L. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley
CONGRESS CHAIRS
Panos Papadopoulos, University of California, Berkeley
Tarek I. Zohdi, University of California, Berkeley

LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
F. Armero (Berkeley), P.P. Collela (LBNL),
D.C. Chrzan (Berkeley), C. Farhat (Stanford),
R.M. Ferencz (LLNL), R.E. Jones (SNL),
A.J. Lew (Stanford), S. Li (Berkeley),
M.R.K. Mofrad (Berkeley), P.M. Pinsky (Stanford),
C.A. Taylor (Stanford)

Applied Mechanics Division call for normination: 2006-2007 Awards

2006-07-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-25T05:05:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-25T04:59:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Pay per paper (P3)

2006-07-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

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:

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

Web tools for academics

2006-07-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-21T06:46:00.000-07:00

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

MechTube - applied mechanics outreach for children

2006-07-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

Professor Suo suggested that I share this speculative idea!

In the future, we would like to reach out to children as early as their elementary school years to get them excited about topics drawn from Applied Mechanics. One approach to this goal takes inspiration from the successful "Le main a la pate", or "hands-in-dough", program in France ( http://www.lamap.fr/ ), but extends the idea of hands-on science to take advantage of the internet.

Initially, we would gather ideas from the members of our Applied Mechanics online community for inexpensive and spectacular hands-on explorations of mechanical principles that would be safe and fun for children to carry out in their first science-oriented classes. Then we would encourage elementary school teachers to visit our website, choose projects that seemed interesting, try them in real classrooms, and post accounts of their successes and difficulties for everyone in the Applied Mechanics community to see and discuss.

If the students and teachers enjoyed these projects, we would encourage teachers to help their students produce short videos of the crucial moments of their experiments, and these videos could be shared online and ranked by viewers around the world such that the best ones would rise to the top. (Sites such as http://youtube.com/ and http://videosift.com/ have recently pioneered this democratic video-distribution-and-ranking mechanism. In our application, great care would be taken to protect the privacy of the children.) Here is a very simple but exciting science video already on YouTube - be sure to watch the ending!

http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=CH6-2UizHfI

Ideally, the video-sharing system would become self-sustaining: teachers could invent new projects themselves, asking college professors for help, and they could follow the best examples set by other teachers in their own classrooms. The children would learn how exciting Applied Mechanics can be at an early age, they could proudly show their parents their best experiments in action on any computer at home, and they would be more likely to be engaged by science classes later in their education.

Zak

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

2006-07-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

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

Cellular and Molecular Mechanics

2006-07-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

I was invited by Dr. Zhigang Suo to write a short piece on “Cellular and Molecular Mechanics”. I am writing this informally to introduce this subject matter rather than talk in vernacular such as mechanotransduction, phosphorylation, etc. I have more formal papers if someone is interested in more detailed discussions on this subject area. This is a field in which I have been working for over a decade now and I find it more exciting every day. The question always is how does mechanics affect biological processes. This is a very interdisciplinary subject matter as mechanists, engineers, physicists, chemists, and biologists have been investigating this process from various perspectives. I am obviously not the first to study this process. For most of us, it is realized from an empirical perspective that mechanics matters to biology, but exactly how mechanics specifically alters biochemistry continues to be highly debated today. Mechanics of course matters in many physiological areas. Your blood flows, your heart pumps, your bone and muscle feel mechanics. Not only does the body experience mechanical stimulation, but it reacts biochemically to it. A wonderful example is when people go into space (NASA) for long periods of time. The bone in one’s body begins to resorb in a similar response mode to what one experiences in aging (osteoporosis). This is primarily due to just the change in the gravity (mechanics). Other diseases are related to these issues including the two biggest killers: heart disease and cancer. While biomechanics on this scale has been studied for awhile (Leonardo Da Vinci, who was interested in mechanics, also wrote one of the first texts on anatomy), the movement to the cellular and molecular scales has brought a tremendous amount of excitement. I consider the cell as one of the ultimate smart materials exhibiting these characteristics. The cell has evolved over millions of years and is designed better than almost any system that we can personally build. Just as the biological eye provides a beautiful template for optics based lenses, much can be learned about building technology (“nanotechnology” and “microtechnology”) through examining the behavior of cells and molecules.

The cell has an amazing structure called the cytoskeleton (“cyto” from cytoplasm within the cell and “skeleton” like our body’s skeleton), which can be thought of like a truss structure. At least this is the way that I imagined it when I first started studying this subject. The interesting part is that many years later, I still think of it this way except it has thousands of elements and they can disappear and reappear at any given time (these structural elements are actually biopolymers that can depolymerize and repolymerize constantly). I describe it like this: if I take a building and remove the walls, the ceilings, and the floors out of the building, does the building collapse? No, because the structural supports such as I-beams continue to give it mechanical support. If I take a cell and remove the cell membrane, the cell does not structurally collapse either (as a note, many of us were basically taught in high school that a cell has a membrane and a nucleus as the structural elements). This structure is fascinating as the elements (actin filaments, microtubules, and intermediate filaments) are each optimized for their response. For example, if I was building a vehicle to send into space and I wanted to incorporate an element that resists compression, how would I design it? I would likely use a hollow tube. The amazing part is that the microtubules, which are known to be compressive elements, are hollow tubes….that are around 25 nanometers in diameter! And no person said: let’s build it this way! This is only one example of these interesting structural elements.

While the cytoskeleton provides structural support, it also provides organization. This should not surprise any of us as a cell, which has billions of molecules yet is only tens of micrometers in diameter, must have an amazing organization structure to accomplish all of its complex tasks. I feel that the cytoskeleton in this context is similar to a transportation highway system as it provides the mechanism for transport to move cargo. For example, there are motor molecules within a cell such as kinesin, dynein, and myosin, which move along these cytoskeletal elements and can carry molecules, vesicles, etc. along with them. These motors are highly efficient mechanics based machines that are driven by a biochemical reaction. The efficiency of the motors has been calculated to be up to 50% and if you scale the size of these motors to the size of a car, these motor molecules would travel up to 1000 miles/hour (they travel up to 60 um/sec on their size scale). Furthermore, this movement along the cytoskeleton is like a roller coaster within a cell where the cytoskeleton is the track and the motor molecules are the carts. The cytoskeleton also has the ability to help with the efficiency of accomplishing processes through being an anchoring point (or the cell scaffolding) within the cell. This is somewhat similar to the improvements that the assembly line made for automobile production. Just as the assembly line created a line along which processes where sequentially accomplished at specific stations in a highly efficient manner, many molecules that have specific functions attach to this cytoskeleton and thus have spatial organization when modifying molecules in a sequential and efficient process. This is contrasted with solely a random distribution of molecules reacting with each other through just diffusion within a cell based on solely aqueous characteristics.

These are only a few examples of the amazing mechanics and associated structures that exist within a living cell. Understanding this can not only help address disease-based questions, but can also be leveraged to potentially produce devices and technologies at extremely small size scales. I believe that this continues to be an area where individuals from a mechanics perspective can provide tremendous insight into a fascinating and evolving area that is being pursued by individuals in a diversity of arenas. Please feel free to contact me about this.

Philip LeDuc

Related entries

The LibraryLookup Bookmarklet

2006-07-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

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.

AMD Newsletter on new Biomechanics TC

2006-07-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

The Applied Mechanics Division of ASME has recently established a new Technical Committee (TC) on Mechanics in Biology and Medicine.

Recent advances in cell and molecular biology and biotechnology have increased the need to study mechanics as related to biology and medicine. The behavior of cells and tissues as complex biological systems results from integrated and regulated interactions among many components such as receptor-ligand binding, signal transduction pathways, the cell cytoskeleton, extracellular matrix, gene expression, and protein production.

Mechanical forces and deformations may play an important role in all these aspects, and in regulating cell behavior and function including cell proliferation, differentiation, and death (apoptosis). Furthermore, mechanical analyses can provide useful tools for modeling and quantitative prediction of these biological responses. To understand mechanics issues at the cellular level, it is necessary to analyze specific force-bearing, force-generating, and force-sensing elements in cells. In addition, we need to better understand the mechanisms of mechanochemical coupling and how mechanical forces regulate cell behavior and function. Mechanical forces are also involved in many disease processes such as cardiovascular disease.

All these present a unique opportunity to mechanicians. This new TC aims to bring together mechanicians who are, or are interested in, conducting research in biomechanics and bioengineering, to identify critical issues and challenges in developing the field of Mechanics of Biology and Medicine, and to exchange experiences, ideas, and approaches.

The new TC will organize symposia on the Mechanics in Biology and Medicine for the 2007 Summer Applied Mechanics Conference and the 2007 IMECE Congress. I would welcome the participation of the applied mechanics community in the activities of this new TC, and appreciate your suggestions, support and help.

Gang Bao
Chair
AMD Technical Committee on Mechanics in Biology and Medicine

Online Journal Club on Flexible Electronics

2006-07-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

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.

RSS feed for all Applied Mechanics Blogs

2006-06-28T06:02:00.000-07:00

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. Learn more about start page and RSS feed.

2006 Summer Newsletter of AMD

2006-06-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

The 2006 Summer Newsletter of the ASME International Applied Mechanics Division, edited by Professor Ken Liechti, has just been placed online.

16th US National Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics

2006-06-26T17:54:00.000-07:00

The 16th US National Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics will be held June 27 to July 2, 2010 at Penn State University. Save the dates!
Contact:
Judith A. Todd - jtodd@psu.edu
Charles E. Bakis - cbakis@psu.edu

Libraries and Amazon

2006-06-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

Libraries take premium spaces, which will not grow and will likely shrink. As more and more books are stored in off-campus depositories, people miss the serendipity of browsing among shelves and discovering books that they don’t know they’d like to read. They can browse the catalogues of the libraries. However, a typical catalogue of a library contains meager information: the online catalogue is a clone of its ancestor on cards. Creating an information-rich and user-friendly online catalogue is too expensive for a library.

These problems have a solution. The primary source of data on books is Amazon. It contains publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Searchable full texts are within reach. Perhaps even more valuable, Amazon contains comments of users on books. Based on collective behavior of users, Amazon also recommends books to users. Amazon will no doubt continue relentless innovation.

In an ideal world, a user should not waste his time on the catalog of a library, nor should the library waste its resources on maintaining a stand-alone catalog. The user should simply browse on Amazon. Once he finds an interesting book, a single click should tell him if the book is in any of the libraries accessible to him. In this ideal world, to enter a book into the catalog of a library, a librarian only needs to enter a single number: the call number of the book. All other data of the book are not library-specific and are already in Amazon. What if the library owns a book not in Amazon? The librarian should enter a detailed description of the book, as if she were the publisher of the book.

This ideal world may not be far different from our world. The LibraryLookup Project allows a user to generate a bookmarklet, so that with one click he can look up a book in a library, while surfing on Amazon. The creator of the Project, Jon Udell, has developed a screencast to guide you through the process of generating your own bookmarklet.

A deeper integration of Amazon and libraries would harness more power. The statistics of borrowing books could be aggregated from all libraries and be used to recommend books to users. Amazon, libraries and some third party could collaborate on the business of print on demand. Libraries could send even more books to depositories and greatly simplify efforts in cataloging books. Users would have a seamless experience with books. Oh, if a book is not in a library, users could suggest, with a single click, that the library order the book.

Ending added on 26 June 2006, after reading a message from Zak Stone. Amazon.com is named after the Amazon River, the largest river in the world, carrying more water than the next six largest rivers combined. May the rivers of libraries and the streams of users contribute to the River of All Books. May Amazon.com nurture the civilization without drowning us with commercialism.

Note added on 10 July 2006. An entry describes my experience with LibraryLookup Bookmarklets.

Note added on 15 July 2006. Wall Street Journal (13 July 2006) on Rice University's Press on line and print on demand (POD). For an example of comercial POD, see lulu.com. Also see a recent product annoucement of e-reader.

Note added on 17 July 2006. OCLC and Amazon: A Connection Revealed.

Note added on 27 July 2006. Springer will offer all new titles in e-book form.

Note added on 20 August 2006. Amazon introduces library processing.

Note added on 31 August 2006. Google offers free download of books.

Note added on 31 August 2006. Stanford's vision for library.

Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy - New York Times

2006-06-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Horacio Espinosa brought my attention to this article on Wikipedia in the New York Times. The content on Applied Mechanics in Wikipedia is still very limited. Here are a few entries that will lead you to most other entities on Applied Mechanics.

To develop more substantial content in Wikipedia on Applied Mechanics, more mechanicians need to participate.

Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate

2006-06-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

Nature is undertaking a trial of a particular type of open peer review. In this trial, authors whose submissions to Nature are sent for peer review will also be offered the opportunity to participate in an open peer review process.

Progress Report: JOURNAL OF MECHANICS OF MATERIALS AND STRUCTURES (JoMMS)

2006-06-16T05:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Colleagues:

This is to inform you of the progress of:

JOURNAL OF MECHANICS OF MATERIALS AND STRUCTURES (JoMMS), (ISSN number 1559-3959) http://JoMMS.org

You may have received my message from September, 2005, announcing the formation of JoMMS. Marie-Louise and I resigned from the editorship of a large mechanics journal with a commercial publisher. Twenty-one of the twenty-three members of the Board of Editors resigned with us, along with George Herrmann who was founder and senior editorial advisor. Together we have formed JoMMS, which is published by the nonprofit Mathematical Sciences Publishers (MSP).

The response to the announcement of JoMMS has been strong. We have received a substantial number of manuscripts from around the world, and reviewers have been diligent. Consequently, Volume 1 (2006), Issues 1, 2, and 3 are now available on the web site. Ten issues are planned for 2006. The papers in the first three issues consist of: 8 from North America, 12 from Europe, and 5 from Asia. The print version will soon be distributed to subscribers.

Detailed information is on the web site, but a brief summary of the advantages of JoMMS may be helpful:

Direct advantages to authors of JoMMS with MSP:

(1) Quality - The editors and the Editorial Board of JoMMS make it their primary goal to have this new journal as an outlet for quality research free of commercial interests. We continue the philosophy of broad coverage of mechanics with stringent peer review, which is shown in the first three issues by the variety of topics and the quality of the papers. Moreover, we are equally committed to providing maximum access to your papers. You may also see that MSP takes pride in the final polishing of the language and format. In this modern age of rapidly changing priorities, few publications put quality at the head of the list

(2) On-line submission is easy - after initial problems, there have been no complaints. No hassle of reviewers - we find that most reviewers are conscientious without computer-generated repeated and irritating reminders. Nevertheless, our processing time is reasonable, with an average of 44 days from submission to first editorial decision.

(3) No page charge to the author. No extra charge for color figures, which are strongly encouraged. (Consider the charge to the author of $500-$1000 for one color figure by many society, university and commercial publishers.)

(4) Free e-access to the world for papers accepted for publication during the first year, through December 31, 2006. Papers are readily accessible from Google and other search engines. (Consider the charge of $25-$120 for one download from commercial journals.)

(5) For papers accepted after the first year, members of the subscribing institutions have exclusive e-access for a period of one year past publication. Subsequently the papers will be free to the world for e-access, similar to the new NIH policy. (This affects you, since the citation rate is higher for papers with free e-access!!)

(6) Downloaded pdf versions of the paper have complete linking between text, equations, and references. References have linking to the source journal. Forward linking to papers published subsequently that refer to the downloaded paper will be continually updated. MSP is the only publisher that offers the reader the links where they are needed, inside the PDF file. Try this by downloading the pdf file for a paper from the January issue. Despite the short time that JoMMS has been available, there have been some 500 downloads, an average of 25 per paper.

(7) Author retains copyright, and so can distribute the final version of the paper and place it on a personal web page. The author gives MSP a license to publish the paper. (Consider what you have been giving away.)

And most important:

(8) Cost: The institutional subscription cost is $500/year for print and e-access ($400 for e-access alone). Consider the price of $4000 - $8000 per year for some leading mechanics journals, with yearly increases of 5-20%, which is choking access. Subscriptions may be placed on the web page.

We are leading a standard for publication in the 21st century. There appear to be few present journals that come close to our benefits to you and the community.

Please feel free to ask any questions and/or offer suggestions. We remain completely open to new ideas.

Best regards,

Charles Steele
email: JoMMS.steele@stanford.edu

See also a previous entry in Applied Mechanics News on JoMMS.

Fellowships to attend Gordon Research Conferences

2006-06-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

Two fellowship programs are still open:

Opportunity for Participants from Developing Nations
Underrepresented Minority Fellowship Program

Quite a few Gordon Research Conferences are related to Mechanics and Materials, including

Physical Metallurgy, 23-28 July 2006, New Hampshire
Thin Film and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior, 30 July - 4 August 2006, Maine
Adhesion, 6-11 August 2006, New Hampshire
Ceramics, 13-18 August 2006,New Hampshire

Raising funds to establish the Thomas K. Caughey Medal

2006-06-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

Wing Kam Liu
Chair, Executive Committee, ASME International Applied Mechanics Division

A small fund-raising committee, chaired by Paul C. Jennings, Provost of Caltech, has been recently established to raise the $45,000 required by ASME to establish a permanent award in memory of the late Professor Thomas K Caughey, Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology, who passed away on 7 December 2004, at the age of 77. This society-wide award would be given annually to a deserving individual in the broad field of dynamics, and would be called the "Thomas K. Caughey Medal."

Professor Caughey was, for many years, heavily involved in ASME activities. He was a former editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics. In recognition of his major contributions to the Applied Mechanics field, he was honored with the ASME Den Hartog Award in 1995. Professor Thomas K. Caughey was without a doubt one of the most influential members of the vibration community. His contributions are without equal, and have touched every engineer currently working in the field.

Even before the formal launching of the activities of this committee, more than $20,000 of the needed funds have already been donated. Individuals wishing to contribute to this endeavor can send their contribution to:

ASME Foundation
Attn: "Thomas Caughey Award Endowment"

Inquiries: Wing Kam Liu, w-liu@northwestern.edu

CiteULike: Your online library of scientific literature, and more...

2006-06-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

CiteULike is an online service to help academics to share, store, and organize the scientific literature. When you see a paper or a book on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details (e.g., title, authors, abstract, and DOI). Currently, it supports more than 30 pubishing websites, many of which are of interest of mechanics community, e.g., ScienceDirect, AIP Scitation, Science, Nature, SpringerLink and Amazon.

Searching in your CiteULike library can be very easy. The surnames of all authors in your library are automatically tagged. You can also tag the papers and the books in your library as you like. All these tags appear in a tag cloud. Therefore, locating a paper in your library will be only one or two clicks away. Also, because your library is stored on the web server, you can access it from any computer.

You can also form a group, and integrate every member's own library to a group library. CiteULike also allows everyone to add note on papers or books. By combining the group and the note functions, you can easily form an online journal club among colleagues, collabarators, students, or any group with common interests, no matter how far away from each other.

Programmed by Richard Cameron and generously hosted by the University of Manchester in England, CiteULike is a free service to everyone. You just need to register to use its full functions. It all works within your web browser, no extra software is needed. So give it a try and enjoy.

Note: Nature publishing group also provides a similar service named Connotea. After experimenting both of them, I share the same feeling of many other users: while more attractive at the first sight, Connotea currently offer less flexible functions than CiteULike. I personally vote for CiteULike. You may want to share your experience with CiteULike or Connotea by commenting this entry.

Update on 4 July 2006:

Macroelectronics Journal Club, an online journal club focusing on flexible electronics and running on CiteULike platform, has been launched by www.macroelectronics.org. See a brief introduction here and detail announcement here.

Update on 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.

2007: the 80th Anniversary of the Applied Mechanics Division

2006-06-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

The ASME International Applied Mechanics Division was founded in 1927. As the 2007 Program Chair of the Division, I cordially invite you to suggest ideas to mark the 80th Anniversary of the Division.

In 1977, the Division celebrated the 50th Anniversary with a program of two presentations:

A historical review by P.M. Naghdi, of Berkeley
An overview of the formative years of the Division by J.P. Den Hartog, of MIT

The presentations were followed by a reception. Naghdi later published a well illustrated verstion of his review [Journal of Applied Mechanics 46, 721-748 (1979)].

Incidentally, I've just created an entry in Wikipedia on the Applied Mechanics Division. You are welcome to edit, expand, and hyperlink.

Reorganization of NSF Engineering Directorate

2006-06-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

Among many changes (effective 1 October 2006), two are important to Applied Mechanics:

The divisions of Civil and Mechanical Systems (CMS) and Design and Manufacturing Innovation (DMI) will merge to form the division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI).
Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) will be formed.

Current membership of ASME in basic engineering

2006-06-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

Of thirty-some divisions in ASME, six are grouped under Basic Engineering. We've just received the current membership:

Applied Mechanics: 5202
Fluid Engineering: 3134
Bioengineering: 1963
Materials: 2024
Heat Transfer: 3680
Tribology: 567

There are currently about 90,000 ASME members. By comparison, there are about 365,000 IEEE members.

nanoHUB: online simulations and more

2006-06-05T18:40:00.000-07:00

The nanoHUB is a web-based initiative spearheaded by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). Based at Purdue University and partnered by eight other universities, nanoHUB provides a web interface to numerous resources relevant to students and practitioners in nanotechnology. The cyber environment includes online courses and tutorials, proceedings of seminars, collaborative tools, and an interface for online simulation.

For example, you can view research seminars on nanoHUB through online slideshow with audio, powered by Breeze technology. You can go over the outline of the seminar, choose thumbnail views of the slides and even search text within the titles of the slides, then locate the content of interest and save some time. Another type of resource on nanoHUB is the online simulation tools, which run realtime on nanoHUB. No installation is needed.

The nanoHUB resources are open to public for free. You just need to register to use. In the last eight months, nanoHUB has served more than 10,000 users, with about 60,000 simulation jobs run and more than 10,000 videos viewed. The web server hits of nanoHUB reach 1 million in May 2006.

2007 ASME Winter Annual Meeting

2006-06-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

The ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) will be held in 11-16 November 2007, in Seattle, Washington.

Sessions at IMECE are organized by volunteers. If you are considering organizing sessions for the 2007 IMECE, you might begin to think about it now. For example, to gauge the interest in a theme, you might talk to people you meet at conferences during the summer. You should look up chairs of the 17 Technical Committees and make the initial contact. At the 2006 IMECE (Nov 5-10), chairs of the Technical Committees will meet with the Executive Committees to discuss possible sessions for the 2007 IMECE. So you should contact chairs of Technical Committees before November this year.

Simulation - Based Engineering Science

2006-06-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

by Ken P. Chong, National Science Foundation

The Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation commissioned a blue-ribbon panel of experts, chaired by J. Tinsley Oden of University of Texas - Austin, to produce a report on Simulation-Based Engineering Science. The final released report is now available

Other members of the panel included Ted Belytschko, Jacob Fish, Thomas J.R. Hughes, Chris Johnson, David Keyes, Alan Laub, Linda Petzold, David Srolovitz, and Sidney Yip.

The report contains findings and recommendations to advance the discipline of Simulation-Based Engineering Science. The report discusses applications of computational simulation in several different areas, such as medicine, homeland security, the environment, materials, and industrial and defense applications.

Research opportunities are described in areas like multiscale modeling and simulation, verification and validation, uncertainty quantification, and data-driven simulations. NSF coordinator and contact is Ken P. Chong.

New Book: Nano Mechanics and Materials: Theory, Multiscale Methods and Applications

2006-05-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

A new research monograph: Nano Mechanics and Materials: Theory, Multiscale Methods and Applications, authored by Wing Kam Liu, Eduard G. Karpov and Harold S. Park, has recently been published by John Wiley & Sons, in 2006, ISBN: 354059903Written by respected researchers in the field, Nano Mechanics and Materials informs researchers and practitioners about the fundamental concepts in nano mechanics and materials, focusing on their modeling via multiple scale methods and techniques. The book systematically covers the theory behind multi-particle and nanoscale systems, introduces multiple scale methods, and finally looks at contemporary applications in nano-structured and bio-inspired materials. The authors begin by explaining the potential of nanoscale engineering, and the rationale behind the multiple scale modeling method in a comprehensive introduction. They then follow this by providing theoretical information on the mechanics of a system of particles, molecular forces, and lattice mechanics. The next chapter introduces the reader to potential methods used to analyze these materials, which most importantly includes the multiple scale modeling method. A substantial section is taken up with introducing the bridging scale method, which is backed up with a chapter on numerical examples using this technique. Analysis of materials applications and bio-inspired applications, using and testing the multiple scale modeling method, concludes the text.

2006 ASME Applied Mechanics Division Honors and Awards

2006-05-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

We are delighted to learn from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers the winners of following honors and awards:

YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD
Jian Cao

APPLIED MECHANICS DIVISION AWARD
Lewis T. Wheeler

DANIEL C. DRUCKER MEDAL
Alan Needleman

WARNER T. KOITER MEDAL
Pierre Suquet

TIMOSHENKO MEDAL
Kenneth L. Johnson, Cambridge University

Description of these awards, along with nomination forms, can be found at the AMD website

Executive Committee of the ASME International Applied Mechanics Division
Wing-Kam Liu, Chair
Tom Farris, Vice Chair
Krishnaswa Ravi-Chandar, Program Chair
Dan Inman, Program Vice Chair
Zhigang Suo, Secretary

The Biological Frontier of Physics - Physics Today

2006-05-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

By Rob Phillips and Stephen R. Quake

Problems at the interface between biology and physics offer unique opportunities for physicists to make quantitative contributions to biology. Equally important, they enrich the discipline of physics by challenging its practitioners to think in new ways.

Six strategic issues shaping the global future of Mechanical Engineering

2006-05-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

The ASME commissioned the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF), a nonprofit futures think tank, to scan the world for the future of ASME. The IAF report, dated on 30 June 2005, listed the following six strategic issues:

Global Harmonization of Standards
Technology Innovation Networks
Systems Thinking
Attracting and Educating Tomorrow’s Engineers
Collaborative Learning Communities
Bioconvergence: Biology Meets Engineering

All these big words made me dizzy. I started with Issue 5, Collaborative Learning Communities, an issue that I was thinking about. This section of the report talked about blogs and wikis, and concluded with the following paragraph.

“Publishing under the current model is ASME’s second largest source of revenue and the association’s dependence on it impedes its ability to consider alternative approaches. ASME should take care not to become a closed system in a world favoring open systems for learning and publishing. As public attitudes shift, ASME will need a viable balance between its “bricks and mortar” programs and electronic channels. These collaborative learning communities are appealing to young engineers who need technical information on demand to do their jobs and appreciate the chance to stand out for their expertise. Members may also value access to discussions with a wide variety of experts.”

I found the 2004-2005 annual report of ASME. The top three sources of revenue were

Codes and Standards (40 millions)
Publications and conferences (16 millions)
Member dues (8 millions)

These strategic issues tied the financial security of ASME to the large trends of our time: the rises of Asia, open access, the Internet, and Biology. These trends pose significant challenges to ASME as (primarily) an American organization, with revenues derived principally from proprietary codes, standards and journals, and of a discipline based on physical sciences.

If you ever wonder where Mechanical Engineering might be going and how you and your organization might fit in this brave new world, this IAF report is a fascinating read. The big words in the titles aside, the report is very lucid. Understanding the challenges is the first step to innovation.

The IAF report is online.

PLoS Biology: a peer-reviewed open-access journal

2006-05-20T03:23:00.000-07:00

May 16, 2006

Dear Colleague,

I would like to draw your attention to a research paper published online today in PLoS Biology, entitled "Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles" by Gunther Eysenbach (University of Toronto).

The Study

In this study, Eysenbach compared the rate of citations of open access (OA) with non-OA articles from the same journal, PNAS.

Key findings include:

OA articles are twice as likely to be cited 4 to 10 months after publication and almost three times as likely between 10 and 16 months.
Self-archived articles are cited less often than OA articles from the same journal.

Read the full text of this article—freely available online.

The Editorial

In an accompanying Editorial, PLoS editors discuss the careful evaluation of and decision to publish this paper in the context of our own vested interest in open access publishing.

PLoS Biology

PLoS Biology uniquely blends the very best peer-reviewed research from all the life sciences with a comprehensive and readable magazine section. It is the world's premier open access biology journal as indicated by the ISI Journal Citation Reports. Read more about PLoS Biology's mission, scope and achievements.

To keep the latest research constantly at your fingertips, we encourage you to sign up for PLoS Biology e-mail table of contents today. The first 50 to respond will receive a free PLoS laser pointer. (First-come, first-served, one per individual.)

If you find these articles of interest, you can:

Sign up for regular e-mail table of contents alerts. We will send the first 50 respondents a laser pointer (one per individual) just to say thanks for joining us.
Read additional articles online.
Submit your next great paper to PLoS Biology.
Forward this e-mail to colleagues—all PLoS Biology papers are free to everyone.

With best regards,

Hemai Parthasarathy
Managing Editor, PLoS Biology

18th Annual Robert J. Melosh Medal Competition

2006-05-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

by John Dolbow

What's wrong with Applied Mechanics?

2006-05-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

Applied Mechanics is a discipline that studies the response of matter to external forces, such as flow of a liquid, fracture of a solid, sound in the air, and vibration of a string. Applied Mechanics bridges the gap between fundamental physical sciences and wide-ranging applications. Representive questions are how a gecko climbs, how an earthquake occurs, how a computer chip fails, how an airplane flies, or how the Twin Towers fell. Major approaches include formulating concepts and theories, discovering and interpreting phenomena, as well as developing experimental and computational tools. For well over a century, Applied Mechanics has been a flagship discipline in the innovation of research, eduction, and community building in many branches of engineering, including Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Materials Engineering, and Bioengineering.

Despite the intellectual depth and practical utility, the discipline of Applied Mechanics is in a state of crisis, largely due to its own success. Like many sophisticated fields of science and engineering, Applied Mechanics constitutes a large chunk of knowledge, accumulated over millennia, represented by texts, equations, graphics, photos, audios, videos. This large quantity of knowledge has made it hard for any individual to master (and to add to) the field, a fact at least partially responsible for turning many talented young people away from the field. However, nobody has ever questioned the immense value of Applied Mechanics to a broad range of human activities today and to our posterity. Furthermore, new problems constantly emerge that requires ingenious use of existing knowledge, or fundamental progress in Applied Mechanics.

Still, the question remains, How do we impart this large chunk of knowledge to individuals within a reasonable amount of time, so that they still have time left to innovate?

A classical answer to this question dates back at least to Stephen P. Timoshenko, considered by many the father of modern Applied Mechanics. Starting early last century, Timoshenko and his followers divided the field of Applied Mechanics into subfields (such as strength of materials, theory of elasticity, theory of vibration, plates and shells, structural instabilities), and then summarized the "essential knowledge" in each subfield in a textbook. The success of this divide-and-conquer approach is immense, as attested by the rising importance of Applied Mechanics in engineering curriculum, by the fundamental progress (e.g., in fracture mechanics and in nonlinear continuum mechanics), and by pervasive use of Applied Mechanics in engineering practice.

This approach, however, is not scalable. As more results accumulate in a subfield, its textbook becomes thicker and more abstruse. As new subfields emerge, new textbooks are added to the pile. Furthermore, what is considered essential knowledge for a practicing engineer is very different from that for an undergraduate student. This and other idiosyncrasies of people lead to more textbooks, each with smaller audience. Individuals agonize over which cherries to pick, leaving most fruits untasted. Sadly, few mechanicians today consider writing textbooks professionally rewarding. Sadder still, the approach has led the discipline to fragment.

The fragmentation has been partially mitigated by the rise of computational mechanics. Over the last half century or so, the use of computer to solve complex, nonlinear boundary-value problems in the field of Applied Mechnaics has flourished, leading to commercial software like ABAQUS. Using such software, an electrical engineer, say, with a rudimentary understanding of mechanics, can analyze the strain field in the channel of a transistor. While computational mechanics has begun to unify Applied Mechanics, this unification is incomplete. For one, not all problems are suitable for numerical computation; many problems are solved by experiments combined with scaling laws, and by relating to previously solved problems. Some problems are solved more sensibly by trial and error. (Nobody learns to ride a bicycle by numerical simulation.) Also, to make a fundamental contribution to Applied Mechanics, one has to go beneath software and acquire a holistic understanding of the field.

I believe that the Internet will further unify Applied Mechanics by going beyond numerical computational aspects of mechanics, by making the labor of discovering and synthesizing knowledge more efficient and meaningful, and by making Applied Mechanics useful to more people.

Major Research Areas in Molecular Biomechanics

2006-05-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

Over the last decade or so molecular biomechanics has emerged as a new field consisting of at least three major areas: (1) the mechanisms of mechanotransduction as related to cellular behavior and function; (2) mechanical behavior of biomolecules; (3) biomolecules as engineering materials and devices. Although these three areas are related, they have different focuses:

Mechanotransduction as Related to Cellular Behavior and Function: This concerns with how cells sense mechanical forces or deformations, and transduce them into biological responses. Specifically, it is important to reveal and understand how mechanical forces alter cell behavior and function including growth, differentiation, movement, signal transduction, protein secretion and transport, gene expression and regulation.

Mechanical Behavior of Biomolecules: This area plays a central role in molecular biomechanics and includes quantitative measurement and analysis of the structural rigidity of DNA, RNA and proteins under stretching, twisting, bending and shear, or their combinations, and how the structural rigidity and mechanical deformation of biomolecules affects DNA condensation, gene replication and transcription, DNA-protein and RNA-protein interactions, protein function, protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions. This is the most challenging area in molecular mechanics; its advencement requires the development of new experimental and computational tools.

Biomolecules as an Engineering Materials and Devices. With the advent of nanotechnology, there is an increasing need to understand the mechanochemical coupling in biomolecular motors, to decipher the structure-function relations of proteins as nanomachines, to use DNA and proteins as components of hybrid nanosystems; and to address interfacing issues in organic/inorganic nanodevices. This also involves the uncovering of engineering design principles of molecular machines in living cells, and application of these design principles to the development of engineered nanosystems.

Since molecular biomechanics is still in its infancy, extensive discussions on how to best develop these areas will be very helpful.

All about flexible macroelectronics

2006-05-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

In this new blog, Dr. Teng Li talks about flexible electronics, an active area of research in which he has just completed a doctoral thesis at Harvard University. He will join the faculty of the University of Maryland this Fall.

Knowledge processing and the Internet

2006-05-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

By knowledge processing I mean all modes of interaction between humans and knowledge, including discovery, synthesis, dissemination, acquisition, and application of knowledge. The technology of knowledge processing has been refined since the dawn of civilization. A list of milestones might include the inventions of language, printing, library, computer, and the Internet. On this long time scale, the Internet is only with us very recently. Considering the impact of earlier innovations, it is safe to say that what we see today is just the beginning of a revolution in the technology of knowledge processing, and that it is presumptuous to predict the future. Nonetheless, it is useful to briefly reflect on the past and speculate on the immediate future.

To describe the established best practice of knowledge processing, I can do no better than quoting Ziman (1964).

"The Frontiers of Knowledge (to coin a phrase) are always on the move. Today's discovery will tomorrow be part of the mental furniture of every research worker. By the end of next week it will be in every course of graduate lectures. Within the month there will be a clamor to have it in the undergraduate curriculum. Next year, I do believe, it will seem so commonplace that it may be assumed to be known by every schoolboy.

"The process of advancing the line of settlements, and cultivating and civilizing the new territory, takes place in stages. The original papers are published, to the delight of their authors, and to the critical eyes of their readers. Review articles then provide crude sketch plans, elementary guides through the forests of the literature. Then come the monographs, exact surveys, mapping out the ground that has been won, adjusting claims for priority, putting each fact or theory into its place.

"Finally we need textbooks. There is a profound distinction between a treaties and a textbooks. A treatise expounds; a textbook explains. It has never been supposed that a student could get into his head the whole of physics, nor even the whole of any branch of physics. He does not need to remember what he can easily discover by reference to monographs, review articles and original papers. But he must learn to read those references: he must learn the language in which they are written: he must know the basic experimental facts, and general theoretical principles, upon which his science is founded"

To update on the changes in the last forty some years, we might note the following. Ziman's timelines were figurative speech. Even today we cannot process knowledge that fast, but the Internet has greatly accelerated the pace. We email a preprint to colleagues the moment it is written, and soon we will be able to download anything existing in any media. We all Google, and some of us wiki.

The first wave of the Internet has solved one problem in knowledge processing: it has made knowledge rapidly available (nearly) world wide. The solution, however, has made other problems in knowledge processing more evident. The bottleneck is no longer accessing knowledge, but is our own time: the speed at which our brains process information has not accelerated.

Then came the second wave of the Internet, known in the popular media as Web 2.0 or the Read/Write Web. Riding the second wave are millions of bloggers, wikians, social bookmarkers, and podcasters. They create, edit, annotate and vote on the content on the Internet. They organize knowledge by doing what scientists and engineers have been doing for centuries: large-scale asynchronous collaboration, irrespective of borders of nations and idiosyncrasies of people.

But the second-wave riders collaborate using new tools, tools that are created for the Internet, not merely closes of old tools. The new tools have fundamentally changed who can collaborate, as well as how and why they collaborate. The second wave has also lead to different products of knowledge. For example, Slashdot, an aggregator of news for nerds, feeds on all blogs, as well as on mainstream media. Anybody can submit news from any source, and each submission is reviewed by editors before inclusion. Once an item appears in Slashdot, hundreds of readers visit the original source, and many return to Slashdot to leave comments, which are often more informative than the original article. It is not uncommon that a piece of news published in venerable sources is found false by the users of Slashdot in hours. Slashdot may serve as a model for a new breed of scientific journals.

A second-wave rider can be a student, teacher, practitioner, researcher, and scholar, all at the same time. A high school student becomes a published researcher when she writes an entry in Wikipedia on the history of Chinese monetary system. A Microsoft engineer becomes a teacher to thousands of fellow users of Slashdot when he posts a critique on a Google service.

If you’d like to learn how to use tools like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarks and podcasts to enhance teaching, read this great book by Will Richardson (2006).

Ending added on 11 May 2006: In hindsight, perhaps the approaches of Wikipedia and Slashdot are not that radical after all. All humans since the dawn of civilization have participated in knowledge processing by large-scale asynchronous collaboration. In particular, one scientist can freely comment on the work of another, or completely rewrite it by publishing another paper. Large scale asynchronous collaboration is the first law of knowledge processing, if such a thing exists. No previous innovations violated this law; they have all reaffirmed the law by greatly easing collaboration. The Internet will further ease collaboration, in its own particular ways, now unfolding in front of our screens.

Over 100 biomechanics classes on the Web

2006-05-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

Andrew Karduna, of the Department of Human Physiology at the University of Oregon, maintains a website that catalogs biomechanics classes found on the Internet.

In early entries of the Applied Mechanics News, I described the creative approaches of three other websites of online learning:

Connexions hosts over 2900 modules and 138 courses for high education.
Marlot lists about 10,000 teaching modules for high education.
Wikipedia, a free online encylopedia that allows anybody to edit anything.

It is time for us mechanicians to build the cyberinfrastructure of Applied Mechanics for the 21st century.

We are attempting to post all Timoshenko Medal Lectures online, but we need your help

2006-05-06T06:58:00.000-07:00

The year 2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of the Timoshenko Medal. Every November at the Annual Applied Mechanics Dinner , the medalist of the year delivers a lecture. Taken together, these lectures provide a long perspective of our field, as well as capsules of the lives of extraordinary individuals.

Applied Mechanics Research and Researchers (AMR) is attempting to post all Timoshenko Medal Lectures online. You can locate the posted lectures by using the link Timoshenko Medal Lectures. The same link also appears in the sidebars of AMN and AMR.

If you have the text of a lecture that is missing from the list, please contact Shaofan Li (shaofan@berkeley.edu), the team leader of AMR. An electronic file will be great, but we can also use an optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert a text on paper into an electronic file.

Impact of Mechanics on Reliability of Interconnect Structures in Microelectronics

2006-05-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

This links to a recent lecture given by Professor Paul Ho, of the University of Texas at Austin.

A profile of Henry Petroski in the New York Times

2006-05-03T04:19:00.002-07:00

Henry Petroski, Professor of Engineering and Histroy at Duke University, has written remarkable books on topics ranging from inventions of everyday objects and causes of infamous accidents. Jimmy Hsia, of the University of Illinois and the National Science Foundation, brought my attention to this profile of Petroski, published in The New York Times on 2 May 2006.

Incidentally, articles in the New Yorks Times are free online for a week. However, by entering the temporary URL of an article into a software, you can generate a permanent URL. The link of this blog entry to the profile of Petroski was generated this way.

Knowledge as commodities

2006-05-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

A twelve-year old found a blueprint to assemble a computer in a magazine, and ordered parts on newegg.com, a website that listed parts from all vendors and comments on each part by customers. Both features were reassuring. When the parts arrived in mail a week or two later, the boy assembled the computer himself. In the process, he saved a substantial amount of money. He also learned a lot about computers, and about dealing with his parents.

The boy could do all these because computer parts are commodities, products that are produced by different companies but conforming to the same standards: all parts fit. Websites like newegg bring the parts from the companies directly to boys and girls of all ages, skipping middlemen like Dell.

Commoditization has also occurred in the software industry, largely due to the open-source movement that has produced the Linux operating system, as well as a large number of other software systems.

Can we also commoditize knowledge? This is precisely the mission of the Connexions Project, founded by the electrical engineer Richard Baraniuk, of Rice University, in 1999. The Project has been funded by the National Science Foundation and private donors, and has produced a system of software to enable anyone to author parts of knowledge (called modules). It also enables anyone to assemble parts into a functional product of knowledge (called a course), free of charge, under a Creative Commons open license. By January 2006, Connexions hosted over 2900 modules and 138 courses.

Connexions will likely have tremendous impact on the textbook industry, which has an annual revenue of 10 billion dollars in the US alone. The Project is also bringing free, up-to-date knowledge to developing countries, including North Karea.

Connexions will also likely to change the practice of scholarship. If you'd like to learn how Connexions works, you may visit the website of Connexions, or look at a course, or read a white paper written by the Connexions staff, or simply enjoy a video of an inspiring talk given by Professor Baraniuk to Google engineers.

Notes added on 15 July 2006. Wall Street Journal (13 July 2006) reported on Rice University's Press on line and print on demand.

Detroit Chinese Engineer Association

2006-05-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

Detroit Chinese Engineer Association (DCEA) recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.

Established by enthusiastic engineers and researchers working in the automotive industry and academic institutions in the metro Detroit area, DCEA grew steadily over the years in an effort to promote science and technology, professional networking, culture diversity and career development. DCEA now has more than 300 members. DCEA’s trademark events include annual automotive technical conference, career development seminars, high school student awards and future engineering awards etc. More about DCEA can be found at www.detroitengineer.org.

Hua He, May 1, 2006
(2005 President of DCEA)

NSF travel grants for the 7th world congress on computational mechanics

2006-05-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

Note from Wing Kam Liu, Chair of the 7th World Congress on Computational Mechanics

Travel grants up to $800 will be awarded to attend the 7th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (July 16 - 22, 2006) and the short course Multiscale Computational Methods and Applications (Sunday, July 16, 2006).

Applicants must be associated with a US university or college; in addition, faculty and post-doctoral fellows must be USACM members. Applicants must already have an accepted abstract for the World Congress and must register for the short course no later than May 31, 2006.

To apply for the travel grants, submit the abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae, before 31 May 2006, to Jacob Fish (fishj@rpi.edu), Acting-President of USACM.

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

2006-04-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

by Rui Huang, The University of Texas, Austin

Mechanics of Materials Research Impacts US Aluminum Industry, Energy, and Environment

2006-04-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

Hot rolling from ingot is the dominant fabrication method of producing plate, sheet, and foil aluminum products. It is a striking fact that the total rolling-plant recovery of aluminum process from ingot to final products is typically about 50%. This recovery loss causes enormous amount of energy waste both as remelt energy and energy to process material that is just recycled. Assuming the annual US domestic net shipments of sheet and plate products being 10,500 million lb, 10% improvement of the hot rolling recovery will result annual savings of $126 million per year for the US domestic aluminum industry. The annual domestic energy savings would be 2.54 trillion Btu. The environmental benefits include annual reduction of 2.32 million lb SOx , 1.01 million lb NOx, 303.2 million lb CO2, 0.67 million lb of particulate, and 11000 lb VOCsd .

The fundamental inability to reduce or eliminate these recovery losses is “lack of the integrated models that relate structural properties to manufacturing processes”. Currently, processing parameters are determined by trial and error and largely based on experience. This makes it difficult to optimize the process even on the macroscale level, and almost impossible from microstructure level. Research in the following areas are desirable:

Develop integrated models to link microstructures to macroscopic properties of aluminum and rolling process parameters.
Predict temperature, stress, strain, strain rate history, and damage revolution in hot rolling.
Optimize processing parameters to reduce scrap in hot rolling, and validate the integrated models.
Demonstrate the predictive ability of integrated model as a process optimization tool for hot rolling.

NSF Call for Proposal: Cyberinfrastructure Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring for Our 21st Century Workforce (CI-TEAM)

2006-04-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

"The practice of science and engineering at the research frontier has changed markedly in recent years, owing in large measure to the impact of increasingly powerful and pervasive information technology (IT). Today, simulation and modeling are as important to discovery and innovation as are theory and experimentation ..."

This NSF solicitation supports "Demonstration and Implementation Projects", e.g., research over multiple scales or across multiple disciplines.

see details

Due date: 5 June 2006

Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program - Preproposal Meeting Announcement

2006-04-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-23T18:12:00.002-07:00

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

2006-04-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-21T06:56:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

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

AMN will link to blogs of individual mechanicians

2006-04-15T04:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Ramblings on Solid Mechanics-Quantum Mechanics Link

2006-04-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

In between writing proposals (—which apparently is what assistant professors mostly do now-a-days!), I read the entry by Professor Zhigang Suo on our identity as mechanicians. I found it very interesting and thought provoking. My senior mechanics colleagues inform me that this topic has, over the time, quite frequently been a subject of debate—as evident in Professor Budiansky’s Timoshenko speech in 1989. Zhigang’s particular blog post led me to think of the “mechanics” in another big mechanics area: “quantum mechanics”. While as a mechanics group we have been very active in seeking inroads into diverse fields (e.g. bio, electronic) it is interesting to note that with a few exceptions we have left untouched this fertile research area of quantum mechnics. There is a lot of “solid mechanics” to be done in “quantum mechanics”. A simple example is how mechanical strain impacts the band structure and hence opto-electronic properties of the exotic quantum dots. Ben Freund from Brown and Harley Johnson from UIUC were perhaps the first mechanicians to foray into this and, despite its extraordinary importance to nanotechnologies, applied and fundamental physics, only a few other mechanicians have since looked further into this. This example is symptomatic of a bigger issue. In recent years, physicists have become very preoccupied with mechanical effects and their coupling to quantum mechanical phenomena (and not just in quantum dots). Many essentially have become elasticians in a different guise; same subject but speaking a different language! –as evidence by numerous elastic effects articles that now appear in physics journals. Sometimes the solid mechanics is handled correctly but, in many instances, it is quite clear that the weight and might of decades of progress in solid mechanics (not readily on the radar screens of physicists) could be brought to bear on some of these problems.

Of course a major hurdle is that most mechanicians are not routinely trained in quantum mechanics. I contend though that if we can learn elasticity, quantum mechanics is yet easier! As an interesting aside, I note a beautiful and relatively lesser known paper by the famous mechanician, J.D. Eshelby (“The Interaction of Kinks and Elastic Waves”—Proc. Royal. Soc. Lond. A, Vol 266, n1325, 222, 1962). In this work he analyzes the movement of a dislocation kink. After a “conventional” mechanics approach---employed in typical Eshelby style to “extract maximal insights with minimal work”, he proceeds to analytically solve the same problem using quantum mechanics. That brief section in his paper, while perhaps obvious to many, was an epiphany moment for me that forever provided a link between the quantum and continuum world.

Although strongly biased (and constrained by my limited knowledge) I list here a few topics (among many others) that I think straddle quantum mechanics and elasticity. Hopefully other blog-members can add to the list or make one of their own fashioned after their own interests.

(1) Mechanical strain effects in quantum confinement in quantum dots, wires and wells—the easiest starting point is the book by Davies, (The physics of low dimensional nanostructures). Extensive work is available on strain effects on quantum dots in archival literature. In the mechanics community, Johnson and Freund have a few articles that are a good starting point. I have a review article on my webpage but that unfortunately only talks about strain calculations and not really the coupling to quantum effects. To my mind, given the all pervasive effects of strain in nanostructures in general, quantum dots are where solid mechanics meets head-on with quantum mechanics.

(3) A somewhat related issue to #1, is spin manipulations using strain. Traditionally, spintronics or possibly making advanced computers using electronic spin has been based on the use of magnetic fields. Two nice articles appeared in Nature that suggest how to manipulate spintronics using elastic strain: Flatte, “Relativity on a chip”, Nature, Vol 427, p 21, January 2004 and, Kato et. al., “Coherent Spin Manipulation without Magnetic Fields in Strained Semiconductors”, Nature, Vol 427, p 50, January 2004.

(3) Despite the passage of almost seventy years (when this topic first emerged), the precise definition of “quantum stress” still remains controversial. Here I am not referring to the so-called virial definition of stress used in empirical molecular dynamics but a quantum notion of stress. There is certainly a lot of scope for mechanicians to weigh in on this matter. The landmark paper on this appears to be, Nielsen, O.H. and Martin, R.M. ” Quantum-mechanical Theory of Stress and Force.” Phys. Rev. B 32(6), 3780-3791, 1985. The paper apart from clarifying several issues also gave rise to some controversies (some of which still remain unresolved as far as I can tell especially the issue of uniqueness of stress). Interested readers my wish to look at a review article I co-authored recently on this topic (available on my website). More recently, Rogers and Rappe have made a nice attempt to provide a geometric definition of the quantum notion of stress: Rogers, C.L. and Rappe, A. M., “Geometric formulation of quantum stress fields.” Phys. Rev. B 65(22), 224117 -224124, 2002

(4) What happens to Helium close to 0 K? At such small temperatures, liquid helium becomes a so-called “super-fluid” i.e. it can flow through narrow pores without resistance. A more exotic “supersolid” phase has been predicted theoretically with some controversial experimental evidence. Elasticity is expected to play a major role although I have not seen anything yet which puts this issue to rest—perhaps a mechanician can oblige? A good starting point and recent reference is: A. T. Dorsey, P. M. Goldbart, and J. Toner, ``Squeezing superfluid from a stone: Coupling superfluidity and elasticity in a supersolid,'' Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 055301 (2006)

Interesting online course on structure

2006-04-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

This link contains interesting course notes on structure and defects. lots of information available online in a course format.

What can mechanics community learn from the success of Google?

2006-04-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

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."

Internet as a platform for public outreach

2006-04-11T04:25:00.000-07:00

Recent entries in AMN have explored Internet-Based Mechanics, and called for broadening the reach of mechanics. Here I wish to further discuss one particular aspect: The Internet as a platform for public outreach.

The National Science Foundation has long been urging researchers to reach out to the public. The cause is noble and important, and most researchers love to share knowledge with others. However, developing successful modules takes time, which few are inclined to spend, especially if the modules are only used once or twice. As a result, many outreach efforts do not reach very far, if not outright perfunctory. This apparent problem seems to suggest an opportunity.

The use of a central repository such as the Internet to create, store and disseminate knowledge is truly a unique opportunity that has recently become available to millions of people of all ages. As a young academic interested in developing new ways to teach and also interest students in the sciences and engineering at an early stage, I am convinced that the Internet can play a significant role towards this effort.

The idea of creating webpages that discuss science to the non-scientists (or to students interested in identifying interesting fields outside of their core disciplines) can be a great way to interest school kids and undergrads to learn about applications of science and engineering in daily life. The Internet can thus be used as a popular means to introduce education early on which can often be very helpful to engage children and develop long term interest in the sciences.

In addition, the Internet can be used as a means to disseminate prepared information to a wide audience in multiple locations at different times. For example, a short presentation on device principles that are used to make a popular consumer electronics product such as iPod memory component can be used at schools or museums to discuss the contribution of an electrical engineer or a materials scientist to a young audience. This can in turn motivate students to potentially learn more about the science behind commonly used technologies that can in the future not only attract more students to pursue advanced studies in science or engineering but also in general to develop a scientific bent of mind. This can also help in general problem solving.

While the Internet already has a lot of information on many topics, it will be helpful to create well-designed portals of short courses that contain basic principles of a scientific discipline that can in turn be developed over a period of time by contributions from academics, students and teachers.

This entry includes suggestions from Zhigang Suo.

Broadening the Reach of Mechanics

2006-04-09T19:25:00.000-07:00

I agree with Zhigang Suo: the Internet offers our community an amazing opportunity. And, things will evolve whether we guide them or not. Let’s think of where we can channel our energies to bring about maximum impact and benefit. So, rather than discussing how to use the Internet to accomplish goals, I want to raise the question of what our goals should be.

Who is touched by mechanics? Here are some obvious ones: mechanics academicians, students, regular users of mechanics in engineering practice, and workers in other fields that could benefit from mechanics insights.

Better educating students in engineering, and in mechanics in particular, is certainly one area that can benefit from the Internet. But, I want to offer thoughts on the last two groups, which get even less attention than students.

Once our students graduate and become engineering practitioners, are they served in any continuing way by the research output in our field? I suspect not, but perhaps this was not always the case. A friend, who is a retired VP from an aerospace company, has told me that he would follow the technical literature early in his career in industry, after completing his PhD. Later, he found less and less that spoke to his needs, and he eventually abandoned it. If that is the norm (and I suspect it is), are we happy? Maybe that is the norm in any mature field, with scholarly contributions far ahead of (but hopefully not irrelevant forever to) practice. But there is a gap, and only we can fill it.

Here is what I have believed is at least a part of the problem. Mechanics is a field that is broad and deep; not often do we push the edges in ways that are fundamental and broadly useful. But, we try. Still, why is that the only work product we value? This partially keeps us from serving practitioners. In my own experience, problems often arise in practice that do not demand a fundamental advance in mechanics or engineering science generally. They do require skill (sometimes approaching artistry) in integrating and adapting existing ideas and approaches. Could that knowledge and experience be recorded and retrievable (aside from issues of confidentiality)? Perhaps this becomes more feasible as we move to publishing modes that go beyond journals and include larger repositories. There is also a separate, non-negligible issue that the academy would need to devise some way of recognizing and rewarding insightful contributions that advance practice.

Why should we be concerned with researchers in other fields? I’ll pick on a personal example: my colleagues and I work on the problem of fracture during cryopreservation of biological tissues . (Others can point to their own examples of fields outside of mechanics that intersect their work.) Many of our papers are published in the cryobiology literature, and are intended to serve the community of cryobiologists. While the problem we address is viewed as highly significant by cryobiologists, we have a long way to go in helping them to understand our findings. More generally, how can we help potential scientific collaborators take advantage of the lessons of mechanics and be more effective collaborators with mechanicians? Of course, we should learn about their domain. But we must also make our ways of thinking more transparent to them.

In sum, I think we need both discussions: how our field can leverage the Internet and what goals should be served. One goal might be to make the insights of mechanics more widely appreciated. To do that, we must learn to better communicate what we do.

Let us seize the greatest opportunity of our time

2006-04-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

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

motivates many mechanicians to contribute,
produces quality products, and
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

2006-04-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

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.

What is Applied Mechanics?

2006-03-31T14:34:00.000-08:00

While our colleagues at the University of Illinois and their students are fighting to save the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, I’m writing on an airplane flying from San Jose to Boston. I’ve been thinking about this entry for some time, and hope that the elevation excuses me for disconnecting this entry from the burning issues on the ground.

So, What is Applied Mechanics? It seems that useful answers ought to depend on who you are talking to. If you are persuading your dean to hire a new faculty member in Applied Mechanics, perhaps you’d like to point out promising research in one area or another. If you are explaining what you do for living at a dinner party, assuming that the party has heard enough of Iraq or intelligent design or entropy, perhaps you’d like to point out Applied Mechanics helps to understand how a gecko climbs, or how an earthquake occurs, or how a computer chip fails, or how an airplane flies, or how the Twin Towers fell. You’d pick an example that you know well, keep it short, and be ready to answer obvious questions. If you are talking to an aspiring student, in addition to pointing out promising research areas and great applications, perhaps you’d like to point to a book that she’d gain an inspiring, yet technical, overview of our subject. A book similar to Courant’s What is Mathematics would be excellent. Such a book on Applied Mechanics, however, has not been written.

Your aspiring student will not wait for The Great Book, and must have searched on the Internet. She’d most likely be disappointed of what she has found. The Google Search of “Applied Mechanics” hardly yields anything useful for her purpose. It has been fashionable for academics, along with the mainstream media, to dismiss the Web as a credible resource. Perhaps we have been unfair. We are mechanicians. It is our responsibility to educate the public what Applied Mechanics is.

To this end, I have just started an entry of Applied Mechanics in the Wikipedia, with hyperlinks to existing entries (blue), and nonexisting ones (red). Like many entries in the Wikipedia, this one is a work in progress, and admittedly inadequate. Please feel free to delete, add, rearrange, and hyperlink.

(If you are new to the Wikipedia, you may want to read a previous entry in AMN, Wikipedia and Applied Mechanics. You may also want to read a few entries in the Wikipedia, such as Trusses, Nanotechnology, Information technology, and Computer science.)

Let us hope that we will soon have enough material in the Wikipedia for anyone to learn about Applied Mechanics, on any occasion and for any length of time.

Time too good to be true - Physics Today

2006-03-30T00:40:00.000-08:00

Daniel Kleppner, an MIT physicist, mused over the physics, practice and politics of keeping time.

How to make long distance phone calls for free

2006-03-29T19:30:00.000-08:00

Like many other communities, we mechanicians are scattered all over the world, often separated from families and colleagues. The Internet has promised for years to make long dstances irrelevant: anybody anywhere is just a click away. While nothing will ever be the same as being together in person, many Internet services can facilitate distant communication and collaboration. For example, Skype, an Internet phone service, allows you make free phone calls around the world. The sound quality is excellent.

To call a friend, you'll need to download a small piece of software from skype.com. Your friend needs to do the same. Of course, both his computer and yours need be connected to the Internet, although skype allows you to call from a computer to a regular phone, or the other way around, for a small fee.

If your computer comes with both a microphone and a speaker, as most laptops do, you can make phone calls without any other equipment. However, when you call your friend over a very long distance (e.g., from US to China), as the sound from the speaker of your computer feeds into the microphone, the time delay is long enough for your friend to hear echoes of his own voice. To eliminate the echoes, both of you should use headsets. Of course, you’ll need a headset if your computer lacks a speaker or a microphone.

Once you set your commputer up, making a phone call is as easy as a click, or maybe two. I have skyped my parents and bother in China, as well as colleagues around the world. To have an effective technical discussion, you may want to send powerpoint files to each other by emails, before or while talking.

Conference calls are free and just as easy. The other day, my wife made a four-way conference call with her two brothers and their father. If you are active in a committee, with members in several places, Skype will be a way to hold a committee meeting.

Debates on TAM merger at the University of Illinois

2006-03-28T05:19:00.000-08:00

Note added at 5:30 pm. One of our readers, Harish Cherukuri, pointed out a website, savetam.com, maintained by the students of TAM Department.

Windows is so slow, but why? - New York Times

2006-03-27T06:29:00.000-08:00

Note added at 6 pm, March 28. This article appeared early this morning on Slashdot, and generated over 700 comments. Now you can view the wisdom of crowd in action.

Statistics of Applied Mechanics News and its sister blogs

2006-03-25T05:32:00.000-08:00

Applied Mechanics News (AMN) was launched on Sunday, 8 January 2006, with an entry about Kyung-Suk Kim winning the Ho-Am Prize. After some initial experiments, we soon settled with four sister blogs: AMN, Applied Mechanics Research and Researchers (AMR), Applied Mechanics Conferences (AMC), and Applied Mechanics Jobs (AMJ). Today these blogs contain the following numbers of entries: AMN (51), AMR (59), AMC (39), AMJ (18). Let us hope that the last two numbers are merely accidental, and do not imply that our community has more conferences than jobs.

There is no need to memorize the web address of AMN. All you need to do is to type Applied Mechanics News into the box of a search engine and hit return. AMN appears as the first result on all three popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. (Click these links, and you will find that the three search engines differ about the second result.)

In late January, we installed StatCounter, a free software that tracks statistics of websites. The numbers of unique visitors each week for the past 8 weeks (starting from the most recent week) are as follows.

AMN: 715, 1013, 339, 341, 294, 211, 217, 316.
AMR: 430, 507, 277, 220, 190, 166, 182, 285.
AMC: 82, 121, 66, 35, 38, 35, 39, 53.
AMJ: 122, 125, 60, 71, 73, 51, 45, 61.

In the morning of Wednesday, 15 March 2006, the Executive Committee of the ASME Applied Mechanics Division sent an email to invite the members of the Division to explore AMN and its sister blogs. This email led to a spike in activities, as seen from the daily page loads of that week: Sunday (69), Monday (109), Tuesday (136), Wednesday (924), Thursday (453), Friday (294), Saturday (179).

Although we cannot send mass emails to invite people outside the Applied Mechanics Division, these blogs are for everyone in the international community of Applied Mechanics. As discussed in a previous entry, AMN is a platform to explore new ways for members in a mid-sized community like ours to communicate with each other. Each one of us in the community is part of this experiment, and can participate in many ways. If you have an experimental idea, please let us know.

Basic Energy Sciences Workshop Reports

2006-03-24T19:04:00.000-08:00

This website provides reports of workshops sponsored by the Basic Energy Sciences (BES) of the Department of Energy (DOE).

Future of computing

2006-03-23T12:25:00.000-08:00

This Nature web focus, published today, discusses how computational science may transform mainstream science by 2020. All the articles are free online.

Whither nano or bio

2006-03-23T04:26:00.000-08:00

by Rob Ritchie

While the nano revolution may fade away in a few years, the bio revolution is, to use an Americanism, for real. A significant proportion of the next generation of students will be biomaterials scientists, and this can only be good for our field. Read more.

Summer School on Advanced Thermostructural Materials, UC Santa Barbara, 6-19 August 2006

2006-03-21T16:05:00.000-08:00

Application is still open online.

No registration fee.
Housing and meals will be provided.
Participants may request travel support.

We are Mechanicians

2006-03-21T07:22:00.000-08:00

In his Timoshenko Medal Lecture, Bernard Budiansky remarked on why applied mechanics lacked visibility. The full text of his lecture will be posted in Applied Mechanics Research and Researchers in a few weeks, along with the Timoshenko Medal Lectures of other recipients, but here are two paragraphs from his lecture:

“There are two obvious reasons for this lack of visibility, one sublime and one ridiculous. Our very success in promulgating the role of applied mechanics within such a large number and variety of fields has led to the seamless integration of substantial parts of applied mechanics into the various fields I mentioned. This, of course, is very welcome. But as a natural consequence, subsequent research in such an incorporated segment of applied mechanics tends to assume the identity of its host. The absurd reason for our lack of status is that we still don’t know what to call ourselves! Can it be that this is the crux of the problem? We are not the only group whose activity cuts broadly across traditional disciplinary boundaries, but mathematicians, engineers, physicists, biologists, and computer scientists proudly retain their identities, no matter how scattered and diverse their working environments, and, of course, their titles provoke instant recognition. But what are we? In informal conversation, “applied mechaniker” is all right, but is clearly too whimsical and slang-ey for general acceptance. Some years ago, Norman Goodier urged the adoption of the appellation “applied mechanicist” but this never really took hold, and “applied mechanician” doesn’t seem to make it either.
......

“So if we agree that we should burst the bonds of anonymity, perhaps we should begin by coming to grips with the question of our job description. I could live with either “applied mechanicist” or “applied mechanician”. Why not boldly start using one or the other at every opportunity, and let the better one survive! Then – let’s lobby scientific and technical societies, honorary or otherwise, that have not yet seen the light, to establish applied mechanics divisions! In universities, reverse the slide into oblivion and recommend that establishment of applied mechanics committees across standard departmental lines, maybe empowered to grant degrees as well as give courses! Preach to funding agencies about the merits of interdisciplinary sections of applied mechanics! Give interview, or write popular articles, about applied mechanics and its practitioners! Run for Congress!”

To gain name recognition is hard, especially for people with no names. This much we know. In this blog, I'll start to call ourselves mechanicians, and not the timid phrase "people in the community of Applied Mechanics". Thus the title of this entry.

Budiansky gave the lecture in 1989. Now we have yet one more way to let the world know who we are: the Internet. Here is an idea, borrowed from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, an online genealogy of mathematicians. You can get the basic idea of the project by looking at the page of William Prager, the PhD advisor of Budiansky. Perhaps someone in our field can start such a project for us mechanicians. We may even set it up as a wiki, to be updated by the entire community. (Alternatively, we can simply submit data to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, as the Mechanics of Deformable Solids and Fluid Mechanics both belong to Mathematics Subject Classification.)

Note added on 29 April 2006: I've started an entry titled Mechanicians in Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to edit.

My favorite RSS feeds

2006-03-19T17:41:00.000-08:00

If you haven’t heard of RSS feeds, you soon will. A previous entry in AMN described the few clicks needed to set up a RSS aggregator. Once you set it up, you can view many news at a glance, from any computer connected to the Internet.

In addition to AMN and AMR, here are several of my other favorite RSS feeds:

New York Times offers RSS feeds for most of its sections. My favorite is the Technology Section.
Slashdot.org is devoted to news for nerds.
Physical Review Focus offers selections from Physical Review and Physical Review letters, explained for students and researchers in all fields of physics.
Scientific American has recently launched podcast.

At least one aggregator, Google Personalized Home, also allows you to subscribe to the results of Google News Search, using any combination of keywords. For example, a Google News Search of "web 2.0" gives these results. If you add the URL to your Google Personalized Home, it updates the results automatically, with the most relevant ones at the top. This feature in effect allows you to create a journal on any topic, so long as it is discussed online.

Notes

An analysis of the use of RSS among scientific publishers.
The role of RSS in science publishing.

Registration for the 2006 Gordon Research Conference is now open

2006-03-17T12:13:00.000-08:00

Updates (28 July 2006)

Driving direction to Colby College, 4000 Mayflower Hill Drive, Waterville, Maine 04901.
Registration: Foss Hall (see pdf of campus map). Phone: 207 859 4745.
Dining: Roberts Dining Hall.
Lectures: Keyes Auditorium.
On-site management: Jon Joseph and Claire Deeley, email cbc@grc.org, phone 207 859 4745.
Please take a look at a list of frequently asked questions and pre-conference readings. I've invited some participants to help evolving this list, using Writely, a Web-based word processor. If you'd like to contribute to the list, let me know (suo@deas.harvard.edu), and I'll invite you as well.
An updated program has been posted on the GRC website. All original speakers have confirmed their participation. Due to conflict with other commitments, however, three of the original discussion leaders, Jun Liu, Helena Van Swygenhoven and Reiner Dauskardt, are unable to participate; they have been replaced by Taher Saif, Wei Cai and Kevin Hemker.

I am writing to tell you about the upcoming Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior, to be held in July 30-August 4, 2006, at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. To apply for attendance, click a button at the bottom of the program.

As you can see from the program, this conference will focus on some of the most exciting new areas of research in applied mechanics and materials science. Also featured in the program is a new group of attendees called rapporteurs – people who have done distinguished work and are also not shy about raising stimulating questions. The rapporteurs will add to the excitement of the conference by their comments and suggestions throughout the meeting. If you could make the time for this conference, I am sure you would enjoy it and would come away knowing some of the new people in the field and possibly having ideas for future research.

There will be plenty of opportunities for all attendees to actively contribute to the conference and interact with one another. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by 20-minute discussion, and attendees will share all meals in a dining room on campus. There will be no talks in the afternoons, so that people can form small groups to discuss, or go for swimming, or just relax in their dorms.

Poster sessions at this GRC have always been a hit. Individual presenters will outline their posters to the entire audience of the conference, and subsequently people will gather in front of posters with drinks and snacks. There will be a competition for poster awards.

During the week, you can stay connected with the world (if you wish): every room in the dorm has free, fast Internet connection.

Many past attendees have found that GRC is an excellent venue to meet with collaborators from different institutions. So plan this event ahead with your collaborators.

The $725 registration fee covers lodging and all meals. The fee will increase by $25 after 8 July 2006. Registration will be closed when the number of registrants approaches 150, a number set by the available facilities at Colby College.

suo@deas.harvard.edu

ASME seeks federal fellow applications

2006-03-17T04:37:00.000-08:00

ASME International was the first engineering society to establish a Federal Government Fellows Program, and is seeking applicants for

Fellowship with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
Fellowship with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Congressional Fellowship

2006 NSF CAREER awardees in mechanics

2006-03-16T10:40:00.000-08:00

Post from Ken P. Chong, National Science Foundation

Recently, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program has made awards to the following people in the area of mechanics:

Wei Cai, Stanford University
Pradeep Guduru, Brown University
Rui Huang, University of Texas at Austin
Jeong-Ho Kim, University of Connecticut
Jamie Kruzic, Oregon State University
Kai-tak Wan, University of Missouri-Rolla

Laboratory earthquakes

2006-03-16T03:45:00.000-08:00

For years, Ares Rosakis, of Caltech, and his collaborators have been studying earthquates in labs, using small specimens and high-speed cameras. They have just finished a review article on the subject.