I've mostly had quite helpful responses from iMechanica participants whenever I've asked questions on this forum.  However, I've noticed that questions from several posters have gone unanswered.  I feel that there are two main reasons for that lack of response:

1) The questioner has not provided an adequate details by which they can be identified.  I generally don't like responding to a question posed by someone called xyz1983. 

2) The question itself is vague or too general to be answered in anything short of a book length discussion. An example may be "I want to do FEM on RF-EMW.  Can someone help?" 

Remember when I spoke of the Easterlin paradox (a key concept in happiness economics postulated by Richard Easterlin in the 1974 paper "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence."[1]
It finds that, contrary to expectation, happiness at a national level

From ESOF, an interesting presentation, attached. 

Mars and Venus
How Europeans and Americans
View and Use Science<
Part 1: The European Perspective

Dr Roland Schenkel, Director General, European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)

 Some quotes

EU is theworld’s largest producer of scientific output
Share in world total of peer reviewed scientific articles:
1.EU: 38 %
2.US: 33%
3.Japan: 9 %
4.China: 6%
Challenges: USproduces significantly more scientific publications per million populationand per university researcher.
EU also behindin terms of overall citation impact.

I was browsing the discussion page for Stress in Wikipedia when I came upon this interesting comment:

"

Refutation of Cauchy stress

The theory of stress based on Euler & Cauchy is now refuted. The profound incompatibility of this theory with the rest of physics, especially the theory of potentials and the theory of thermodynamics, has been documented in

http://www.scienceblogs.de/lindaunobel/english-reports/

July 13, 2008, 7:31 pm

Schwarzenegger Says He Would Accept Obama Appointment

Melanie Trottman reports on the presidential race.

Guests on the Sunday newsmaker shows, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain adviser Carly Fiorina, spotlighted energy and the economy and paid tribute to former White House press secretary Tony Snow.

Peer review
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

For Wikipedia's Peer Review area, see Wikipedia:Peer review.

For other uses, see Peer review (disambiguation).

Teacher, Scientist, or Engineer

From thinking about the 'I'd Love to Change the World' discussion, I have concluded that my dilemma stems from the (basically) three career paths from which I can choose.

A teacher that can have a great deal of influence on a select number of other individuals' lives and can take great pride in helping others achieve their potential, and possibly make great contributions to society.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/137512

How Many Friends Is Too Many?

One MySpace exec has even surprised himself by friending a potato. This particular russet has 2,965 friends.

There has been some discussion about the low ratio of replies to reads on iMechanica.  While it's nice to think that a lot of people are reading our posts, I wonder how many of those 'reads' are really bots indexing the page.  For example, I posted a blog entry last night around 11:00 and nine hours later it says it has been read 45 times.  A couple of those can be attributed to me but I'm sure 40 real people have not read the post.  Add to this the fact that the post is already showing up in Google.

...But I Don't Know What to Do...

 ...So I Leave It Up to You

 by Ten Years After (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_After or on iTunes)

i'm try to do a dynamic analysis by abaqus and i faced some problems.any help is appreciated.

The structure is a 3 layers plates,a viscoelastic material sandwich between 2 steels.i modeled the 2 steel as sheel 'S8R"and the rubber as contiuum  "c3d20r",rubber is not thin. Now i don't know how to set the parameters requried by the Code.I hove some parameters abuout the viscoelastic material.,includeing shear storage modulus G(f)=exp(-2.69292)*f^(0.6937),and loss factor of the material L(f)=exp(0.60503)*f^(-0.08807), Possion ratio=0.49, where f is frequency in Hz.

I joined imechanica almost a year ago and I've been frequently following its interesting discussions, even the most animated ones. I think that a place like this is ideal to foster the exchange of ideas in the scientific community;

Moreover it is fantastic as a simple student like me can interact and easily ask questions to the most important researcher in the field of mechanics.

Hence, I thought it would have been the right place to pose a question which I believe is quite controversial. The debate I would like to open is about the future of meshless methods, are they still valid? It is worth to keep investigation in this area?

many researchers in industrial countries think the only problem of third world researchers is money but it is not true. I worked as a researcher for four years in one of this third world countries.

Computational and Theoretical research dont need much money as like as lab dependent research. because freeware and opensource became popular and (the copyright laws are not strict in these countries unfortunately).many experimental works also can be done with available facilities in these universities.

In Singapore, I have seen students who lost their relatives in last earthquake. I am very sorry about this, but I think there should be lessons for us in such disasters.  Is'nt any cheap and easy way to reinforce building in the face of earthquakes? I hope such disasters make researchers concentrate on such important topics.

One of the things that I've thought about often in relation to mechanics is:

 1)  There's a paucity of heroes. Growing up, my heroes were not mechanicians. Certainly not any of the mechanicians in the last 100-150 years. Physics has it's heroes: Feynman, Hawking, Einstein, Wheeler, Bardeen, Oppenheimer etc. etc.

The research funding environment we are all experiencing is extremely frustrating, and has the potential for long-term damage to academics and the nation. You may be interested in reading the letter to the Wall Street Journal by two Nobel Prize winners, David Baltimore and Ahmed Zewail.

iMechanica has gone a long way since its launch in September 2006.  The number of registered users is approaching 7,000, and the number of entries (posts and comments) has exceeded 10,000.  iMechanica is created and maintained by volunteering mechanicians, and is not funded by anybody.  The remarkable growth of iMechanica has surprised even the most optimistic among us.  Many have noted, however, that iMechanica is predominantly used by junior mechanicians.  This demographics is unremarkable for any web site, but many feel that we can benefit tremendously from the participation of established mechanicians. 

The US National Academy of Engineering has published a list of Grand Challenges for Engineering. Ths US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics is interested in developing a discussion on the implications of these Grand Challenges to the Mechanics community.

Zhigang Suo posted a link to this: http://www.imechanica.org/node/2908; this post will be on the top of the front page for the foreseeable future in to keep this on the "front burner" and to promote discussions within the community. Please look into these Grand Challenge problems and provide your input on this page. Zhigang and I will moderate these discussions and then integrate and distill our thoughts over time.

The second law of thermodynamics is ubiquitous, which can explain many phenomena from the ink diffusion in the water and the heat conduction from the hot to the cold etc. Or simply put, order is always decreasing in nature. Even an ancient Chinese philosopher, Laozi once said “ It is the nature’s law nature's law to decreases those who have more than they need and increases those who need more than they have. it is not so with man. Man decreases those who need more than they have and increases those who have more than they need”. It seemed that nature always destroys the order and evens out everything in the world. Then how could life maintain its order? Why life is so unique? What are the differences between the matters with life and without? Order is important for life because losing order of life means that the atoms made of life will mix up with others in the universe. It is nothing but death.

I think it would be useful to collect a list of most useful sites, to start with iMechanica-look-alike.  Not exactly similar but a good site for CFD is http://www.cfd-online.com/.  This incidentally suggests us some "ways" to improve iMechanica.  (see my other blog PROPOSAL for iMechanica http://imechanica.org/node/2996)

If you have a curious child at home, you will hear no end of Wikipedia.  In 2005, Michael Suo introduced me to Wikipedia, which has since become a source of inspiration for iMechanica.  

Hello imechanica users: I launch a few ideas. Can we improve imechanica stealing ideas from successful web systems like google, amazon, wikipedia, myspace, youtube? Taking the best of the various worlds to improve our imechanica?