iMechanica - super-mechanician? - Comments

Few ideas for imechanica challenges

Mike Ciavarella — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:51:20 -0400

I think I have posted more than 2 years ago some PROPOSALS FOR IMECHANICA

My idea at that time, sligthly improved today (of course all this corresponds to some degree of gentlmen agreement about not spoiling copyrigth and exclusive): but most of the papers today are not Nobel prize winners, so who cares?!!

a) post draft papers in imechanica, not like arXiv.org
e-Print archive which incidentally has been a huge success, but with the option for anyone to make comments, and if these are good, improve the paper, and add authors in the final submission

b) research proposals. How much would be gained
if people were better in writing proposals, and could explore their
ideas discussing it with top people? I think they explored this for
proposals in EU, and they got reasonably good feedback, as people want
to improve their papers before final submission.

c) if a particular paper or just "idea" seems successful, should a "wiki" session start within Imechanica? If god papers emerge, let
imechanica administrator submit the paper to Editors of journals
automatically with the authors list defined by the people who
contributed to the discussion?

Some practical ideas to start with

1) We have noticed that Zhigang Suo has excellent lectures on imechanica, on fracture. There have been some comments, including a long debate with me on Fatigue. Why not set up a commettee, and write a wiki book

2) there have been many journal themes, none of these have produced any good idea, a single paper, even just a review? Perhaps time to look back and make again a wiki-based team of discussion

3) we could search into imechanica at this point for good ideas hidden somewhere.

Just few thoughts.

we need something like BRIC is doing

Mike Ciavarella — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:37:45 -0400

An
interactive chart showing patents granted to China and India

Michele Ciavarella, http://poliba.academia.edu/micheleciavarella
Editor, Italian Science Debate, www.sciencedebate.it
blogs http://rettorevirtuoso.blogspot.com/
YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/RettoreVirtuoso

So Marcus you launched the challenges, and you give up fast ??

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:54:49 -0400

Please give us some feedback... now that we're curious!

But EngineeringChallenges is also good start

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:59:29 -0400

The White House Office of Science
and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council have released a request
for information on Grand Challenges for the 21st Century.

Grand Challenges K-12 Partners Program
Learn how to become a partner in this program, which seeks create an
awareness of and involvement in the NAE Grand Challenges for the K12
community in order to (1) strengthen the STEM pipeline; (2) develop
technical literacy and motivation needed to be successful as a society
in solving Grand Challenges; (3) educate the populace on the engineering
mindset and the role of engineering in addressing Grand Challenges and
improving the quality of life.

National Grand Challenges Summit
The second national NAE
Grand Challenges Summit will bring together hundreds of leading
scientists and engineers, educators, policy leaders, innovators and
forward-thinking corporate executives to address society’s most pressing
problems.

The Summit Series on the Grand Challenges
This series
represents a commitment to sustain critical dialogue and engagement with
grand challenge problems and to change the way we educate our students
in order to better prepare them for the challenges ahead. With events
across the country scheduled for 2010, the goal of this program is
to:

1. Enhance student interest in engineering and science.
2. Increase the visibility and importance of engineering and science
to society.
3. Underscore the importance of recognizing that engineering
education must be coupled to policy/business/law and must be
student-focused.
4, Enhance student interest in engineering, science, and
technology entrepreneurship.
5. Foment future collaborations of interested scientists, engineers,
policy makers and researchers in business, law, social sciences and
humanities needed to successfully address these complex societal issues.

Grand Challenges Scholars Program
The Grand Challenges Scholars Program is a combined curricular
and extra-curricular program designed to prepare students to solve the
Grand Challenges facing society. Learn how the program prepares the next
generation of engineers and apply for this program at the Grand
Challenges Scholars Program website.
Business
Week Reports on Grand Challenges for
Engineering Summit at Duke University

Nominate a student for the "Extraordinary Stories Award"
at the April 21 Grand Challenges Summit.

Grand Challenge of Providing Access to Clean Water Chosen as the Theme
for JETS
High School Competition.

Get a PDF of the Grand Challenges booklet here.

Watch the video (6:27)
Download
high-quality version [100MB]

With input from people around the world -- much of it on this website
-- an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked
to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century.
Now their conclusions are revealed on this website.

From urban centers to remote corners of Earth, the depths of the oceans
to space, humanity has always sought to transcend barriers, overcome
challenges, and create opportunities that improve life in our part of
the universe.

In the last century alone, many great engineering achievements
became so commonplace that we now take them mostly for granted.
Technology allows an abundant supply of food and safe drinking water for
much of the world. We rely on electricity for many of our daily
activities. We can travel the globe with relative ease, and bring goods
and services wherever they are needed. Growing computer and
communications technologies are opening up vast stores of knowledge and
entertainment.

As remarkable as these engineering achievements are, certainly just
as many more great challenges and opportunities remain to be realized.
While some seem clear, many others are indistinct and many more surely
lie beyond most of our imaginations. Today, we begin engineering a path
to the future.

One starting point is wikipedia of course

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:59:04 -0400

Mechanics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation,
search

"Mechanic" redirects here. For other uses, see Mechanic (disambiguation).

This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding
citations to reliable sources.
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2009)

Mechanics (Greek Μηχανική)
is the branch of physics concerned with the behaviour of physical
bodies when subjected to forces or displacements, and the subsequent
effect of the bodies on their environment. The discipline has its roots
in several ancient civilizations (see History of classical mechanics
and Timeline of classical mechanics).
During the early modern period, scientists such as Galileo, Kepler, and especially Newton,
laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics.

The system of study of mechanics is shown in the table below:

Branches of mechanics

Contents
[hide]

I think I suggested that long time ago. Make 10 challenges!

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:05:11 -0400

This sounds like the famous Hadamard conjectures of 1900's conference in Paris.

Make at least 1, and we go on.

For me, one start of course is the NAE www.engineeringchallenges.com, but these are quite complex.

Another in general is whether in US people are pushing too much into nano and bio, forgetting old problems, and viceversa, in Europe. Also, what is India and China (more in general, BRIC) countries doing? What are their top priorities -- related to mechanics of course?

In other words, in fact, what we could do is the WORLD MECHANICAL CHALLENGES project, to select 10 problems to be solved.

Mike

super-mechanician?

Temesgen Markos — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 11:34:56 -0400

This month's issue of SIAM news had a beautiful story of how one hard problem in mathematics was solved in less than six weeks using online collaboration. SIAM's story is not online yet, but here is another link to the same story . SIAM news refers to a "super-mathematician" coming out of several individual mathematician spread all over the world.

I was just wondering if a similar thing is possible in applied mechanics. imechania seems ideally suited for that.