We are migrating to iMechanica.Org

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

16-18 August 2006, Providence, RI

The Wealth of Networks

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

Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior

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

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

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

Why should CEOs blog? - New York Times

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

Wei Yang becomes the President of Zhejiang University

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

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

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

e-mail alert of journals and bookmarklet

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

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

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

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

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

Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?

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

Applied Mechanics Division call for normination: 2006-2007 Awards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related entry: 2005 AMD Awards.

The long tail of papers

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

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

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

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

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