opinion

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.

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 node/2996)

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?

My research topic is too different from string theory!. but i think this not so old opinion of Proff. Lee Smolin about world research system weaknesses is very beneficial to read. and have convincing arguments in neccessity of changes in this system. Read this. it is not related to string theory,

Roozbeh Sanaei, Cellular and molecular bioengineering, Bioengineering department, National university of singapore

Launched on 9 September 2006, iMechanica is the web of mechanics and mechanicians.  The mission of iMechanica is twofold:

News from the CNN.com/Technology: Digital library surpasses initial goal of 1 million books

I came across some content I used to have on my webpage a long time ago.

http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~amita/webpage_misc.html

Hopefully it is inspirational for that bright, young, graduate student waiting in the wings to usher in the revolution that shows us how to solve some of the outstanding theoretical problems of solid mechanics that we seem to put off  e.g. concrete, quantitative methods for calculating time-dependent microstructure in plasticity and its effect on time-dependent macroscopic properties.....

A new report has been published on the "leaky pipeline" question:

A persistent problem. Traditional gender roles hold back female scientists 

When I came to the institute, my collaborator Kay invited me for a dinner in the new town together with his friend Thilo and other guys. The city is wisely divided into two functioning areas, old town and new town. All the ancient buildings like King’s summer palace, women’s church and opera house are in the old town; while the restaurants, bars and other modern buildings are in the new town. Each is in harmony with its environment and cultural atmosphere.

Launched on September 11, 2006, iMechanica is the web of mechanics and mechanicians.  The mission of iMechanica is twofold:

Attending conferences is one of the essential professional activities for scientific researchers. Conferences take various forms, such as community-wide meetings (e.g., MRS meetings, ASME congress, APS meetings), and topic-focused meetings/workshops (e.g., Plasticity07, Gordon Research Conferences(GRC)).  While people have different preferences on the types of conference to attend (e.g., see a recent iMech poll initiated by Biswajit Banerjee ), here are some common positive driving forces to motivate one to attend a conference:

How does the cell know when to produce a protein? Why does it produce this protein? How does it produce this protein so accurately, in transcription, timing, and concentration? It is amazing that the cell functions as precisely as it needs to in response to various stimuli. What is more amazing is that the cell's actions are a result of stochastic processes.

In July 2007, my friend of a consulting company contacted me for recruiting a computational mechanics engineer. I told him that all my graduate students found jobs, and there are not many mechanics students in our small department. So, I posted his ad at iMechanica. Only after one week, he asked me to withdraw this ad! Why?

Because many high-qualified applicants contacted him in one week and, he’d give the offer right away.  I believe this example is an index of active user groups of iMechanica.