Teacher, Scientist, or Engineer

From thinking about the 'I'd Love to Change the World' discussion, I have concluded that my dilemma stems from the (basically) three career paths from which I can choose.

A teacher that can have a great deal of influence on a select number of other individuals' lives and can take great pride in helping others achieve their potential, and possibly make great contributions to society.

There has been some discussion about the low ratio of replies to reads on iMechanica.  While it's nice to think that a lot of people are reading our posts, I wonder how many of those 'reads' are really bots indexing the page.  For example, I posted a blog entry last night around 11:00 and nine hours later it says it has been read 45 times.  A couple of those can be attributed to me but I'm sure 40 real people have not read the post.  Add to this the fact that the post is already showing up in Google.

...But I Don't Know What to Do...

 ...So I Leave It Up to You

 by Ten Years After (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_After or on iTunes)

I recently stumbled across the patent that is attached to this post.  It's title 'Simulation of String Vibration' obviously caught my attention.  Hoping there was more to it, I downloaded and read it.  To save you the time, I'll summarize.  It basically reads like a conference paper that would probably not get accepted into any respectable journal.  What is patent is a little more specific than the title would imply but nothing that is any more than a trivial extension of existing research.  Essentially the patent describes a way (finite elements) to simulate the planar vibration of a string (actually a tensioned beam) that is excited by a cross-flow.  The concluding

Vin Crespi (Penn State physics) and I are looking for a post-doctoral student to continue a National Science Foundation supported project studying the use of multi-scale modeling methods for predicting instabilities in nano- and micro-scale structures.  The position would be for one year given satisfactory progress.  There are many different directions and aspects, from quantum to continuum mechanics, of the project and we are willing to take it in any direction.  Thus, if you have a strong background and Ph.D. in mechanics or theoretical physics, please send your CV to emm10@psu.edu and I can give you more details about the project and what has already been done.

As a sample of what I have in mind for an open source publication is now online .  The HTML is typeset on the fly with a Mediawiki extension I wrote.  You can click on 'edit' at the top of the page (no need to register) to see the 'source code' for the paper (which was recently accepted in PRL).  Those familiar with LaTeX should recognize the markup (which is a mashup of LaTeX and WikiML and can/will evolve for user friendliness).  Also note that this paper is extremely equation dense making the markup difficult to read.  I plan to improve this by displaying the equation images in the editing area much like the emoticons are included in the iMechanica editing area.  Clicking an equation will allow you to edit it. 

I am putting together a proposal in response to NSF's Engineering Virtual Organizations solicitation regarding what I call Open Source Publishing.  The proposal can be found (and edited if you setup an account) here.  I would encourage you to register and edit if you're interested.  All revisions are saved so there is no risk of messing something up.  The proposal is fairly unstructured at this point and consists of mostly just my thoughts.  I am working to organize it better and any suggestions would be appreciated.  If you're interested in officially becoming a part of the proposal, let me know.

With a great many ties to VT, I have been following the tragic shootings there closely. While my former student (Nakhiah Goulbourne) and my former department head (Dick Benson) are both safe, I am afraid we may have lost one of our own this morning. From an AP report, a student stated that the instructor teaching a 9:05am mechanics class in 204 Norris Hall was killed. According to the timetable of classes at VT, this instructor would have been Liviu Librescu. I certainly hope the AP's report is wrong. As someone very interested in shell theories, I have spoken with Prof. Librescu many times and followed his work. His loss would be a great loss to our community.