Skip to main content

Ask iMechanica

Description

If your topic fits none of the following forums, post it in this default forum

Introducing iMechanica

Submitted by Managers on
Free Tags

Here is a post that you can email to a colleague to help publicize iMechanica.

Dear Colleague:

I'd like to tell you about iMechanica (http://www.imechanica.org), and hope to get you involved. Please register for a free account. It will only take you 18 seconds. You will receive a password in an email, and you are on your way to be an iMechanician. (Your email address will not be visible to other users.)

Finding more engineering and mechanics forums

Submitted by rsteif on
Choose a channel featured in the header of iMechanica

I am actually an Internet Marketer (and only have the pleasure of being involved with your forum through my affiliation with one of this forum's founders.) I find that many of my customers are in engineering, and I look far and wide for forums and blogs on their specific topics. Robotics, extrusion, and atomization are three of the areas where I look for forums/blogs but I almost never find any. Any suggestions?

If I have an imperfect or incomplete idea, shall I publish a paper?

Submitted by Weixu Zhang on

Recently I am very interested in a physical phenomenon. Although the physicsts have had some physical explanations. Their explanations are just quantitively analyses. I think without the description of a real mechanical constitutive equation, their theory is very difficult to use for the engineers.  So I give a phenomenological model with some  parameters need to be experiementally fitted. It needs a long time for me to accomplish my model,  and  this work has no relation to my research at this stage.

Why should I use my full name as my user name?

Submitted by Zhigang Suo on

iMechanica follows a long established tradition in scholarly publishing: most authors use their real names instead of pseudonyms.

Your user name will appear every time you post in iMechanica. To help others to recognize your name and remember you, you may want to use your full name as your user name, case sensitive and with spacing. For example, enter your user name like Jane W. Smith, rather than janewsmith or jws or smith2007.

Also, if you use your full name as your user name, you will never forget your user name!

Should I post an original idea in a comment?

Submitted by Zhigang Suo on

No.  Posting an original idea in a comment on a blog entry is not good for you for two reasons:

  1. iMechanica gives the time for initial posting of a comment, but does not give a new time when the comment is revised.  So, you cannot establish the priority of the idea posted in the comment.  By contrast, each revision of a blog entry is recorded, with its own time stamp.
  2. It appears search engines are less diligent in indexing comments as they are in indexing blog entries.

While both reasons are technical and changeable, we have not found ways to change them yet.  So, it is better for you to post your original ideas as blog entries. 

If you find an original idea relevant to blog entry A, you can make a comment beneath entry A with a link pointing toward blog entry B that contains the original idea.

Who can delete my blog entry?

Submitted by Managers on

You have the authority to delete your own blog entry. However, we ask you to refrain from deleting anything because it's not conducive to a flow of conversations. Many comments and replies get lost when you delete an entry. To read more on this, please see the discussion. The moderators can also delete any entries, but they will refrain from doing so unless the entry is obviously harmful.

I share the vision of iMechanica. How can I help?

Submitted by Zhigang Suo on
Free Tags

You share the vision of iMechanica. How can you help? The best way to help iMechanica is to make iMechanica help you. Let software and the collective behavior of users take care of the community. This principle is illustrated in the following examples.