iMechanica - opinion - Comments

a recent paper on Timo beam

Cai Shengqiang — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:03:00 -0500

Here is a paper talk about timo beam

J R Hutchinson, J. of App. Mech, 2001,68,87-92

Re: How to prevent the trash ADs at iMechanica?

Teng Li — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:25:22 -0500

Dear Ying,

Thanks for the heads-up. User "ORDER..." has been blocked.

Yes, anytime you see malicious activities in iMechanica, please email me or Zhigang Suo asap. The helps from our moderators as well as iMechanica users are crucial in maintaining the health of iMechanica.

Another strike against Elsevier

Biswajit Banerjee — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:19:05 -0500

Via John Baez :

" El Naschie is editor in chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. This journal is published by Elsevier, one of the biggest players in the science publishing business.

But here’s where things get interesting: this journal also lists 322 papers with El Naschie as an author!"

....

" Together with the rate at which El Naschie is publishing these papers in his own journal, the bizarre blend of fashionable buzzwords in their titles instantly made me suspicious. To see if my suspicions were correct, I examined some.

Let’s look at just one: ‘Anomalies free E-infinity from von Neumann’s continuous geometry’.

This paper consists of undisciplined numerology larded with impressive buzzwords. It starts with a reference to von Neumann’s continuous geometries and the work of Alain Connes, but it makes no use of these ideas. ‘E-infinity’ is apparently the name of Naschie’s ‘theory’, but he doesn’t describe this theory. In short, the title and abstract have little to do with the actual content of the paper."

How common is that sort of thing in our field?

-- Biswajit

Civil Engineering Site

Haseeb Jamal — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:24:21 -0500

A new site that is under construction about civil engineering

www.aboutcivil.com

finance is a major

brook — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:33:08 -0500

finance is a major requirement for any country to stable economy within the country.

=========

Brook

http://mls.fastrealestate.net

Re: Mechanics thrives whenever it participates in advancing a ne

Teng Li — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:50:32 -0500

A little anecdote about this book. For those who read Chinese and got a chance to find the Chinese version of this book, you may notice the brief summary in classical Chinese poetry style at the beginning of each chapter. Sixteen characters only for each, these summaries recap the essentials in each chapter. Wei Yang spent quite some time to perfect these poetry style summaries, of which he was very proud as I recall.

Re: Latest update on LHC

Biswajit Banerjee — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:20:47 -0400

CERN has released a report on what happened at the LHC. The report can be found here.

It appears that it's taken a month for the tunnels to warm up enough for people to go in an inspect the damage. The damage appears to be extensive but the details are not clear from the report. The proximate cause seems to be the failure of some spring-loaded relief disks to contain the pressure at 0.15 MPa. The ultimate cause is still unclear.

A video of how the LHC works can be seen below.

Learning Earthquake-Resistant Building Design

David M. Cooper — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:55:41 -0400

At the least, the requisite education could be made more accessible. I remember trying to get into an earthquake engineering class as an undergrad, and there were a lot of prerequisites.

OOP: A MeshFree( ) Class

Alejandro A. Ortiz — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:08:46 -0400

Hello Everyone, I have read another post about a discussion on software design in computational mechanics motivated by the status of open source code:

http://www.imechanica.org/node/470

According to this post it seems that the future of software design in computational mechanics is migrating to OOP. One idea that is coming to my mind with respect to meshfree methods, motivated in part, by the previous comments in this meshfree blog is: if there are several meshfree methods according to the classifications in the above posts, can we think of a meshfree class which can be used to compute shape functions and its derivatives? With this type of design one could use the class independently of the "name" of the meshfree method and the procedures involved apart from the shape functions computation. I am curious to know if there is someone working on that.

Alejandro A. Ortiz

NYT --- China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users

Mike Ciavarella — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:21:12 -0400

China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users

China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million last month, ahead of the U.S., thanks to a powerful surge in Internet adoption in the past few years. By DAVID BARBOZA

By DAVID BARBOZA

Published: July 26, 2008

SHANGHAI — China said the number of Internet users
in the country reached about 253 million last month, putting it ahead
of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Diego Azubel/European Pressphoto Agency

An Internet cafe in China. The majority of the country’s Internet users are 30 or younger.

The estimate, based on a
national phone survey and released on Thursday by the China Internet
Network Information Center in Beijing, showed a powerful surge in
Internet adoption in this country over the last few years, particularly
among teenagers.

The number of Internet users jumped more than
50 percent, or by about 90 million people, during the last year, said
the center, which operates under the government-controlled Chinese
Academy of Sciences. The new estimate represents only about 19 percent
of China’s population, underscoring the potential for growth.

By
contrast, about 220 million Americans are online, or 70 percent of the
population, according to the Nielsen Company. Japan and South Korea
have similarly high percentages.

Political content on Web sites
inside China is heavily censored, and foreign sites operating here have
faced restrictions. But online gaming, blogs, and social networking and
entertainment sites are extremely popular among young people in China.

The survey found that nearly 70 percent of China’s Internet users were
30 or younger, and that in the first half of this year, high school
students were, by far, the fastest-growing segment of new users,
accounting for 39 million of the 43 million new users in that period.

With Internet use booming, so is Web advertising. The investment firm Morgan Stanley
says online advertising in China is growing by 60 to 70 percent a year,
and forecasts that by the end of this year, it could be a $1.7 billion
market.

China’s biggest Internet companies, including Baidu, Sina, Tencent and Alibaba, are thriving, and in many cases are outperforming the China-based operations of American Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and eBay.

“The Internet market is the fastest-growing consumer market sector in
China,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “We are
still far from saturation. So the next three to five years, we’re still
going to see hyper-growth in this market.”

Baidu, for instance,
said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81
percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s
search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo
trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm
based in Beijing.

Tencent, a popular site for social networking
and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one
of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30 billion.

One measure of the growth of the Internet here, and its social and entertainment functions, is the popularity of blogs.

The site of China’s most popular blogger, the actress Xu Jinglei, has
attracted more than 174 million visitors over the last few years,
according to Sina.com, the popular Web portal, which posts a live
tally. According to Sina, 11 other bloggers have also attracted more
than 100 million visitors in recent years.....

Re: Problems with WIkipedia

Biswajit Banerjee — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:10:54 -0400

You're right Mike.

A problem that I've run into is that some people tend to be very possessive of a particular wiki page. Sometimes a correction that I make is reverted back by the "owner" of the page. What's amazing is that Wikipedia still contains some valuable and accurate information - though I wouldn't bet anything on the accuracy bit.

-- Biswajit

Biswajit, these wiki people seem confused about other issues...

Mike Ciavarella — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:27:01 -0400

We really need some good people to deal with this wiki page, if you read my recent post Some news from WIKIMANIA / change in the system this is one case were we really need some "administrator" with better grasp on the field, before Wikipedia gets it published. Maybe you should contact the wikipedia top people to ask if "imechanica" can be in turn this "administrator" !

Read the other point and how poorly it starts :(

Brittle and ductile

I am skeptical about "By definition, brittle materials fail under
normal stress, and plastic or ductile materials fail under shear
stress." Don't ductile materials undergo plastic yield before failing
whereas brittle materials simply break? (I am in the midst of a stress
class; if nobody touches this, I'll come back to it later.)

Re: Seriously?

Biswajit Banerjee — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:07:41 -0400

Chad,

I had a brief glance at the page last night. But the more interesting point, in my view, was that he had managed to get his papers published! Now that we have had a few comments on iMechanica, I'll post a link to this discussion on the discussion page on Wikipedia for the benefit of other confused readers there.

-- Biswajit

Quite a rich comment. You are right, we need to ask ourselves...

Mike Ciavarella — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:58:27 -0400

... about the clarify of our "fundamentals" and indeed this guy has been asking himself so much that he is now all confused! ;)

iMechanica - opinion - Comments

a recent paper on Timo beam

Re: How to prevent the trash ADs at iMechanica?

Another strike against Elsevier

Civil Engineering Site

finance is a major

Re: Mechanics thrives whenever it participates in advancing a ne

Re: Latest update on LHC

Learning Earthquake-Resistant Building Design

OOP: A MeshFree( ) Class

NYT --- China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users

See also China Challenge on Nature

Re: Problems with WIkipedia

Biswajit, these wiki people seem confused about other issues...

Re: Seriously?

Quite a rich comment. You are right, we need to ask ourselves...