opinion

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.

Since I am an alum of the University of Minnesota, when I was a PhD student I lived only a few blocks from the site of yesterday's catastrophic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  The statics analysis of a truss is almost the first thing learned by every undergraduate engineering student, and appears to be relevant here.  It is interesting to see words like "fatigue crack" and "vibrations" in the news .  In light o

Within the last two weeks the US National Science Foundation (NSF) published not one but two studies on (a) the attitudes of scientists and engineers to the changing world of publication, and (b) the relative global productibity of US science & engineering as measured by journal publication.    



These are not dense 500 page reports, but short, readable (10-15 min.).  I think iMechanica readers will find them relevant and interesting: