I'm saddened by the recent resignation of Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at MIT. By all accounts she has been an excellent employee, but she lied about her degrees when she first applied for an entry-level job 28 years ago.
I do think that lying is wrong, and I can't blame the administration of MIT for taking actions. However, I'm uneasy about the general practice of employment.
Upon hearing the painful news of VPI tragedy, I am deeply saddened that we lost our young students and fellow faculty, in particular, Liviu Librescu, G. V. Loganathan and Kevin Granata. I would like to share the sorrow with the family and friends of the victims who lost their lives in the senseless crime. I am deeply compelled to write this message, since I am a faculty teaching young students applied mechanics/engineering like professors Librescu, Loganathan and Granata, and belong to a small community of Korean Americans. I feel helpless and guilty that I could not mentor our young people and hear such incomprehensible tragic news.
Terence Tao (one of the Fields Medal winners this year) has started blogging. He has a detailed discussion on the Navier-Stokes equations here. It's long but definitely worth reading - particularly because of the wide range of ideas that he talks about.
As many of you know, last year we had a lively debate prior to the launch of the j-club regarding the rules and regulations governing the functioning of the j-club. This continued in a more low-key fashion this year. One of the more important topics under discussion has been the selection of the future editors (which is to be done each year). I, and perhaps a few other people, had reasoned that the editor should be elected by popular vote. It was proposed that candidates will either self-nominate themselves or be nominated by other mechanicians.
The New York Times Magazine this weekend featured a Harvard undergraduate student from China, and her work to shake up education in China. The article is long, but if you grew up in China, it should be a quick read, and fun. If you grew up in US or Europe, perhaps this is a helpful read, just to learn how other people live.
First post on here so I would like to thank whoever it is that has made imechanica.org possible. I have tried the editor and find it very instinctive, certainly easy and above all functional. Again my thanks go to those who have made it possible.
As somebody who has invested both time and money in this concept I am very pleased to see it gaining momentum and it is very helpful when a site such as this becomes available to the general public. Well all I can wish for upcoming users is that may all you have website of your own soon. I designed mine from www.webdesigningcompany.net , hopefully all of net bees here get a step better ,may we shall have a very healthy discussion on this plateform.
Hopefully the site can receive some good exposure over the coming weeks, months as the scenario here gathers pace. Good luck and good fortune to everyone.
It was recently pointed out that much of the technical literature is inaccessible to the English speaking world, having been published in other languages such as Russian or Chinese. At the moment iMechanica is primarily an English-language website and we are therefore potentially limiting the discussion based on language.
Since iMechanica went official on 9 September 2006, its growth has always been accelerating. As of 22 February 2007, the total number of hits on iMechanica reaches 1,000,000+, iMechanica has 1252 registered users, 908 posts and 1308 comments.
Eric Mockensturm has just posted a publication agreement proposed by provosts of several universities. In structuring iMechanica, we have tried to avoid the question of open access, and simply asked the question what if all papers are already openly accessible. Many mechanicians have discovered iMechanica, and the registered users have recently passed 1000. Recent discussions of copyright on iMechanica have prompted Eric to post his entry, which has just led to this one.
As a member of Penn State's Faculty Senate Committee on Research (SCoR), the attached document was presented to us for endorsement. This comes from the CIC (basically the BigTen plus UChicago) provosts. I have seen a few posts in various threads concerning publishing and copyright issues so I thought I would see how y'all feel about it. In brief, the document encourages authors to think when signing that copyright transfer form. The members of SCoR obviously span a very wide range of disciplines and were generally agreeable to endorsing the document.
