iMechanica - Internet - Comments

I did find the paper in the end --- it is published in JoMMS!

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:41:35 -0400

http://pjm.math.berkeley.edu/jomms/2008/3-5/p03.xhtml

Renormalizations in solid and fracture mechanics

H. D. Bui

Vol. 3 (2008), No. 5, 853-866

Abstract

We show how some inconsistencies and infinities arising in solid and fracture
mechanics can be avoided by renormalization techniques widely used in theoretical
physics. Some examples, already known in solid mechanics or recently discovered in fracture mechanics, are given as illustrations.

Keywords

fracture mechanics, divergence, renormalization, regularization

Authors

           H. D. Bui

           Laboratoire de Mécanique des Solides (CNRS UMR 7649)
École Polytechnique
Palaiseau Cedex 91128
France

LaMSID/CNRS UMR 2932
EDF Clamart
France

I've recently got

miket — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:13:49 -0400

I've recently got iMechaniaca working with joomla pretty nicely it took quote a bit of code modification and i hired another coder to do some php that i wasnt able to, im using a ready made joomla site that came preconfigured with plenty of addons which was nice to get up and running quicker.

HI all, The reviewer

hamanh — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:47:35 -0400

HI all,

The reviewer found the paper interesting because he reads the paper !. Until one does not have the paper, one cannot know how interesting it is !!

Hamanh

interesting?

Arash_Yavari — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

Dear Michele:

With all the due respect, I don't see why this review paper should be
interesting. The author calls something "strongly emotionally-based
disputes" without giving any reason for his/her claim. Other than that,
I see some trivial history and nothing more. Maybe I'm missing
something here?

Regards,
Arash

Hi Michele,

hamanh — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:13:35 -0400

Hi Michele,

Very interestingly. He is one of excellent mechanians works at Ecole Polytechnique. He is also the one pioneers th dual J intergral in Fracture Mechanics.

Hamanh

Internet/web lecture notes/videos

Xiaodong Li — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 16:38:10 -0500

Thanks Teng. This is excellent! As we come to this internet-age, more students are using the web to look up information for their homework and project papers. I used to give a project to undergraduate students, and I was amazed that they integrated puzzle-internet information into excellent papers. I support that a professor should be present in a classroom and do his or her best to teach, but I also see that the internet is revolutionizing the way of our school life from students to faculty. I am glad to see that iMechanica is leading the wave in the mechanics community.

Slides and videos on cellular mechanics

Zhigang Suo — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:50:38 -0400

Taher Saif has just pointed out this set of slides and vidoes of a recent summer course.

Indeed. On websites, like

Amit.Ranade — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:46:33 -0400

Indeed. On websites, like slashdot.org, asking moderated questions to a well-known tech personality.

visas and travel

MichelleLOyen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:27:53 -0400

I agree completely, the idea of a global economy is just not there yet--people and goods still do not move freely across country lines. Governments currently restrict the access of scientists to technical meetings and that is a shame, and thus the world could be flatter, to borrow a well-used recent phrase. My only point was that you have to work out the time zone thing to do "live" conferences sans travel. Do I think there is a place for non-live symposia? Yes, absolutely, especially if they ARE on a forum like iMech where questions can be posed to the speaker for days and even months after the event. I would think the technology to do this would not require anything different from what we already have--video the talk, upload to Youtube, link on iMech and allow anyone to start asking questions and discussing. It's a great model and one we could all practically implement tomorrow in our own respective seminar series. But for the moment I'm with Pradeep and still flying across oceans several times per year for "priceless" live interactions in real time.

re: time zones etc.

Biswajit Banerjee — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:56:51 -0400

The time zone problem is trivial compared to the hurdles citizens of non western countries have to face to get to a conference in a country other than the one they reside in. For a day trip to Sweden I have had to provide extensive documentation and spend more than 250 dollars just to get a visa. For my trip to the ICF conference in Italy I had to provide almost a hundred pages of documentation for a 5 day trip. It can be even worse if you want a US visa.

I have had to waste many days running aroung and getting the documentation for visas. I no longer think that's worth my time and will not apply for a European visa again unless someone else does all the work for me.

Also, if you work in a country like India, the $3000+ that it costs for a foreign trip is close to half of what you earn in a year in academia.

If you want to include the whole world in "international" conferences then we have the technology to do it. My suggestion is that instead of keeping the proceedings closed, make them open. People can pay a premium for real time interaction if they want, But those who can't at least get to see and hear in their own time.

Biswajit

Time zones and non-travel conferences

MichelleLOyen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:02:12 -0400

Although I like this idea, it's hard for me to see how to make it work. The idea hinges on live interaction in real time, else we are just talking about a web 2.0 forum for stashing canned videos of talks from hours ago. While there may be some use in having a live and ongoing comments thread after the video talks, I don't think this can replace interactions in person for one reason which never would have occurred to me before I "hopped across the pond": we have a time-zone problem. We want to get people in Asia, Europe and the Americas online at the same time? Impossible, or possible in only very limited time-frames for short times. Might work for a seminar but not an actual conference with back-to-back-to-back talks. While jet lag can be painful, trying to keep up with colleagues in an increasingly global research field is actually facilitated by "live" conferences where we are all captive in the same time zone and geographical vicinity. I am lucky in that Europe is sort of middle ground (7 hours difference from Singapore, 5 from the US east coast and 8 from the US west coast) but even then I find it difficult to schedule things like Skype calls with research colleagues in divergent time-zones. Unfortunately the travel cost burden is also larger for trans-oceanic travel than for that just within the US (where the time zone offset is not more than 3 hours total in the mainland)

Web conferences

Biswajit Banerjee — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:34:12 -0400

The problem of cost and, for some of us, time is a great disincentive for physically going to conferences. I feel that many conferences (though not all) are a waste of research money and, in the final reckoning, of taxpayer money. Consider a large conference in Los Angeles (or any other major city) of 2000 people, each of whom have to spend an estimated $2000-$3000 for travel/hotels/registration/per diem. That's almost 5 million dollars! Multiply that with 5 and you have $25 million essentially being spent mostly on face-to-face networking! Would this money be better spent in actual research? There is an interesting discussion on these lines at http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/ethical-aspects-of-professional-conference-going/

Clearly there is a need for remote conferencing. I would urge Pradeep and the organizers of the 2007 SES conference in Texas to pave the way and record some of the talks for posterity. Perhaps iMechanica or Youtube can be used to store and stream these videos on demand.

Biswajit

Future of Conference Post - Intro to ON24

Teng Li — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:23:17 -0400

With permission, I post the following email message I received from Cece Salomon-Lee at ON24, Inc.

Hi
Teng,

I came across your
posting (http://imechanica.org/node/2101#comment-5593).
I realize that you're considering using a free, web conferencing solution for a
small meeting but wanted to introduce you to my company - ON24, a webcasting
company.

We have experience
working with companies to hold virtual meetings with hundreds and thousands of
attendees. I thought you would be interested in our online FAQs
regarding web conferencing and webcasting (http://www.on24.com/abouton24_on24faq.html).
I
would also check out TheWebinarBlog (http://wsuccess.typepad.com/) - the
author looks into several solutions and explores the webinar
space.

There are also
some points to consider when you go from a small, collaborative meeting (0-50
people) to a large scale meeting with multiple topics presented in a typical
conference. Based on the online discussion, I believe part of your consideration
would include:

1) Do you want to
record the events for later playback?

2) How many
simultaneous, live viewers do you anticipate for each
session?

3) Will you have
audio with slides or require video? If the latter, than what quality are you
seeking?

4) We just
finished a project where the company held the live, face-to-face sessions, but
also recorded everything for those who were unable to attend live. This enabled
them to charge two prices: one for live + archive, and one for only virtual
attendance. Are you considering the same?

5) Be aware that
some software providers say they can scale quickly, but be wary of how they
will handle the streams over their technology backend. It can lead to quality
issues.

These are just a
few questions that came to mind. If this is something that you want to explore,
I can point you to the right person within my company to discuss. Please let me
know.

Good luck with
your event.

Best,

Cece Salomon-Lee

Marketing
Communications Manager

ON24,
Inc.

799
Market Street, 6th Floor

San
Francisco, CA 94103

p.s. Anyone interested in further contact with ON24, I'll be happy to share Cece's contact info.

Let's start web conferencing small. Now.

Teng Li — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:25:34 -0400

Zhigang,

I'll address your two questions in inverse order.

Q2:

Thanks for pointing out the talk by Fred Wilson. I enjoyed very much that video some time ago. I also agree with you on the effectiveness of the video+slides mode.

The video/sound quality of Wilson's talk is terrific, most likely done by the pros. But if one is ok with the quality of video chatting via Skype, then I think we are ready to conduct the presentation in a similar mode. I've been exploring the available softwares for a while and I did find a free one, called vRoom . It's a free version of a commercial product, with all the powerful functions but just with limited user number. So it's just ok for me to try with my students. It's based on Java, so no software is installed, just a pop-up window. This will be crucially great because the tech barrier is extremely lowered. It allows video sharing, real-time presentation, application sharing... I really like it so far. So I highly recommend you and anyone interested to give a try.

Q1:

Yes, we should start small. This is exactly what I've been thinking. For example, we can just run a small demo session with 2-3 talks. This is readily doable with vRoom. If anyone is interested, I'll be happy to initiate this effort. Then we can start accumulating experience on web conferencing at small scale. Upgrading to larger scales will be the matter of budget and community readiness. Softwares like vRoom can easily handle tens even hundreds of people.

Is anybody in now?

The future of conferences: start small

Zhigang Suo — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 08:07:34 -0400

Dear Teng:

Brilliant post! Pros and cons of offline conferences are all well said. I also agree with your prediction that offline and online conferences will co-exist, possibly forever.

Of course, they will also co-evolve. The current configuration is not optimal. By introducing the Internet as a new variable, we can substantially reduce the constraint. Let all configurations compete, and let an optimal configuration emerge. The new optimal configuration will surely combine offline and online solutions.

To translate your post to action, we can start small. We can begin with technologies that are readily available. Instead of starting with a whole conference, we can start with individual talks. Do you and others know what is the minimum effort that we need to start something useful?

For example, here is a talk by Fred Wilson on new business models of content distribution. By watching the video and the ppt simultaneously, I find that the effect is just as good as listening to him in the seminar room.

Are we ready to produce something like his talk?