Blog posts

Posts on mechanics in industries may attract considerable interest. The audience will be mechanicians working in industries, students planning industrial careers, and academics looking for industrial collaborations.

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, Assistant/Associate Professor

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant or Associate Professor level in CAD/CAM. The starting date will be July 1, 2007, or as soon as possible thereafter.

The successful candidate will hold a Ph.D. degree or equivalent in Mechanical Engineering or a closely related field and will be expected to register as a Professional Engineer in British Columbia. The Department has an Industrial Research Chair (IRC) in High Performance Virtual Machining supported by NSERC and Pratt & Whitney Canada. In addition to the regular faculty appointment, the successful candidate will be appointed as NSERC-Pratt & Whitney Canada Associate Industrial Research Chair for a five-year period following the successful renewal of the IRC. He/She will be expected to participate in virtual machining research. We are particularly interested in candidates who have strong practical engineering skills and experience, and who are keen to teach Engineering Design courses at the undergraduate level and CAD/CAM courses at the graduate level. Further information on the department is available at www.mech.ubc.ca, and information on the employment environment in the Faculty of Applied Science is available at www.apsc.ubc.ca/careers.

The University of British Columbia hires on the basis of merit and is committed to employment equity. All qualified persons are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority. The position is subject to final budgetary approval. Applicants should submit a detailed resume, a statement (1-2 pages) of research and teaching interests, and names and addresses (fax/email included) of four referees to Professor Nimal Rajapakse, P.Eng., Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z4. The deadline for receipt of applications is November 30, 2006. Please do not forward applications by email.

Search globally, go locally. Starting from Feb. 2006, Google Scholar offers links to find papers in your local library. See here for details.

For many years, people accumulate personal collections of academic publications of interest in paper form. As such collections grow with time, more file cabinets and book shelves are needed for storage. First, space becomes a problem. Second, finding a specific paper could be a headache, even if the collections are well categorized.

As more and more publications become available online in recent years, people gradually switch to collect electronic versions, e.g. PDF files of papers. These files are often stored in local hard drives. Space is not an issue anymore. But again, locating a paper from hundreds of files in tens of folders still might be a heck of efforts.

Besides the difficulty in searching, other common shortcomings include:

• Locally stored, limited access flexibility.
• Personally owned, not easy to share with other people. As a result, the scale of personal collections is often limited.
• Redundently collected. Consider this: a same gem paper is manually archived by thousands of people individually.
• Statically and passively maintained. Lack of interactions among people sharing common interests.

Any better idea? Here comes Web2.0, which is all about online collaboration. Among the numerous tools enabled by Web2.0, CiteULike could be the one able to solve the above issues for us. A previous post in AMN explored the possibility to form online journal club based on CiteULike. Here is an example.

CiteULike is an online service to help academics to share, store, and organize the scientific literature. When you see a paper or a book on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details (e.g., title, authors, abstract, and DOI). Currently, it supports more than 30 pubishing websites, many of which are of interest of mechanics community, e.g., ScienceDirect, AIP Scitation, Science, Nature, SpringerLink and Amazon.

Searching in your CiteULike library can be very easy. The surnames of all authors in your library are automatically tagged. You can also tag the papers and the books in your library as you like. All these tags appear in a tag cloud. Therefore, locating a paper in your library will be only one or two clicks away. Also, because your library is stored on the web server, you can access it from any computer.

You can also form a group, and integrate every member's own library to a group library. CiteULike also allows everyone to add note on papers or books. By combining the group and the note functions, you can easily form an online journal club among colleagues, collabarators, students, or any group with common interests, no matter how far away from each other.

Programmed by Richard Cameron and generously hosted by the University of Manchester in England, CiteULike is a free service to everyone. You just need to register to use its full functions. It all works within your web browser, no extra software is needed. So give it a try and enjoy.

Note: Nature publishing group also provides a similar service named Connotea. After experimenting both of them, I share the same feeling of many other users: while more attractive at the first sight, Connotea currently offer less flexible functions than CiteULike. I personally vote for CiteULike. You may want to share your experience with CiteULike or Connotea by commenting this entry.

Update on 4 July 2006:

Macroelectronics Journal Club, an online journal club focusing on flexible electronics and running on CiteULike platform, has been launched by www.macroelectronics.org. See a brief introduction here and detail announcement here.

Update on 14 July 2006:

By default, CiteULike stores links to papers. To get full access of a paper, you often need to locate the paper within the subscription of your institution, instead of its original link. By using a scalable bookmarklet, now localizing the paper links can be only as easy as one click away. See a recent iMechanica entry for details.

I was notified today that my Web site (http://www.ae.utexas.edu/~ruihuang/) has been included in the E-print Network (EPN). EPN is a fast-growing searchable scientific network of over 20,000 Web sites containing research conducted by researchers - from Nobel Laureates to post-doctoral students - who are offering e-prints of their work via the Internet.

Developed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) to facilitate the needs of the Department of Energy (DOE) research community, E-print Network enhances dissemination of important research and helps to create opportunities for productive professional contacts.

E-print Network indexes over 900,000 e-prints. Most documents included in the network are recent scientific literature. Functions available to users include conducting full-text searches, searching for documents by contributing author, establishing a personalized alert service to keep abreast of new e-prints, and exploring laboratory Web sites for further details about selected research programs.

Once users find a paper of interest, they can download it from the site hosting the paper. This way you control distribution of your e-prints and can more readily track Web interest in your papers.

My page is listed under both Engineering and Materials Science.

Starting from January 2006, my group has been posting in Modeling Place as a blogspot to share research experience and ideas. We will gradually migrate to iMechanica for better publicity and more web functions.