iMechanica - students - Comments

Ph.D. study of fracture mechanics at Harvard University

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:50:00 -0400

Sorry to see this message so late. Yes, fracture mechanics is a traditional strength here at Harvard. Quite a few projects are concerned with fracture. There will be some changes in coming years:

David Clarke, an expert on the mechnaical behavior of materials, will join the faculty of Harvard in January 2009.
John W. Hutchinson will retire in the Fall 2009.
We have just started a search for additional faculty members in mechanics.

A Good article by HA van der Vorst

Donald X. Chen — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:13:30 -0400


Henk A. van der Vorst: The Australian Mathematical Society Gazette, 31 (2), pp. 94-100, 2004

Weitzlab Guide to Good Paper Writing

Zhigang Suo — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:02:47 -0400

Quan-shui Zheng told me about this short guide on writing papers at the IUTAM Congress last week. On my way back from Sydney to Boston, I happened to be on the same flight with David Weitz. We had a nice, long conversation at the San Francisco Airport. David is known for his clear, concise, and energetic presentations. He is the Director of Harvard MRSEC, which has just been renewed under his leadership.

David promised to improve this guide when he finds time. But when will that happen? Meanwhile you might as well read his guide as is, and try to make a single point, and tell a story in your paper.

A rare opportunity

gautambalaram — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:50:09 -0400

I am a masters student presently from Imperial College London. I am working on alternative modeling of fracture and more specifically the Rice-Tracey model. I am using this to model adhesive fracture on a DCB specimen using FEA. I have a very keen interest in pursuing a PhD in the field of fracture mechanics and specifically in modeling of fracture. I would be glad if you could enlighten me whether there are any openings in this field. If yes, then I would be honoured to apply for this rare opportunity.

Re: Thoughts on iMechanica, Students and Leaders

Biswajit Banerjee — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:14:58 -0400

Hi Dhruv and others,

I've been waiting eagerly to see the first instalment of the classical paper discussion group that had been proposed. What's the latest status on that? Please get the discussion started as soon as possible.

On a lighter note, for those of you who are or have been foreign students in the US, here's a clip from PhDComics.

-- Biswajit

MIT students are very clever and understood it all long ago

Mike Ciavarella — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:26:37 -0400

Automatic Paper Generator

A group of MIT students wrote a computer program capable of creating "random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations."
They then used this program to create a paper that they submitted to an
academic conference: the World Multi-Conference on Systemics,
Cybernetics and Informatics, which sounds like a thrill a minute. The paper was accepted, which isn't really surprising since as the students point out conferences such as this are really 'fake' conferences "with no quality standards, which exist only to make money." The students hope to travel down to the conference (if they're still allowed to attend) and deliver a "completely randomly-generated talk."

Posted By: Alex | Date: Thu Apr 14, 2005 | Permalink |
Total Comments: 5
Category:
Literature/Language,
Science

If you've been to any
academic conferences, or tried to read many academic journals, you'll
swear that most of the content is ramdomly generated.

I remember once my graduate school convened a panel discussion on how
to get published in journals. Suffering, as usual, from a terminal lack
of tact, I stood up and said, "Isn't it true that many of these
journals have few or no readers, and that if professors didn't need to
publish in order to get tenure, they wouldn't exist at all?"
To my amazement, none of panelists denied this claim (all the panelists
were editors of, and major contributors to, academic journals). One of
them offered the justification that, "At least my articles will be
there in the university libraries if anyone in the future should ever
want to read them."

Posted by Big Gary C in Dallas, Texas on Fri Apr 15, 2005 at 01:17 PM

I am in TOTAL DISAGREEMENT !!! Automatic paper generator?

Mike Ciavarella — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:14:44 -0400

Start writing a research paper when ? At the
same time you start a research project. Every thinking person should
read this essay, and give the process a try.? This is crazy!!! Why not then BEFORE you start a research project?

The decline and the final corruption will be definitive when we never start ANY research project, and we just engage ourselves to write papers!

When then a ROBOT to write papers? WhAutomatic paper generator?

You should write a paper WHEN YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!!

M. Whitesides, sorry, but I am in TOTAL DISAGREEMENT! Maybe you are a prolific professor, but how cited?

Of course you can make a good career still for some few years with this method, but not for long:

Read instead

And read why Google Scholar will silently stop this crazyness

Scientometrics

Vol: 74, Issue: 2, February 2008

pp. 273 - 294

Title:

Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines

Authors:
Kousha, Kayvanb, a; Thelwall, Mikeb, a

Affiliations:
b. University of Tehran, Department of Library and Information Science, Jalal-Al-e-Ahmed Ave.
P.O. Box 11455/6456
Tehran
Iran

a. University of Wolverhampton, School of Computing and Information Technology, Wolverhampton
UK

Abstract (English):

For
practical reasons, bibliographic databases can only contain a subset of
the scientific literature. The ISI citation databases are designed to
cover the highest impact scientific research journals as well as a few
other sources chosen by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).
Google Scholar also contains citation information, but includes a less
quality controlled collection of publications from different types of
web documents. We define Google Scholar unique citations as those
retrieved by Google Scholar which are not in the ISI database. We took
a sample of 882 articles from 39 open access ISI-indexed journals in
2001 from biology, chemistry, physics and computing and classified the
type, language, publication year and accessibility of the Google
Scholar unique citing sources. The majority of Google Scholar unique
citations (70%) were from full-text sources and there were large
disciplinary differences between types of citing documents, suggesting
that a wide range of non-ISI citing sources, especially from
non-journal documents, are accessible by Google Scholar. This might be
considered to be an advantage of Google Scholar, since it could be
useful for citation tracking in a wider range of open access scholarly
documents and to give a broader type of citation impact. An important
corollary from our study is that Google Scholar’s wider coverage of
Open Access (OA) web documents is likely to give a boost to the impact
of OA research and the OA movement.

Re: strain is the basic mesurable physical quantity

Michael A. Graham — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:59:22 -0400

I'm not sure I agree that there are only those three physical quantities. In particular, temperature, electric current, and luminous intensity come to mind. It is certainly the case that stress can be represented by length, time and mass (ie: mass / length / time^2), but I am not sure I believe those are all that is needed in all of physics or even all of mechanics.

That being said, I believe your genral point is correct—straiin is the fundamental quantity. At least that is the one we observe. No one has ever observed a force. We hypothesise forces to explain the motions we observe.

strain is the basic mesurable physical quantity

chao — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:04:40 -0400

This is an interesting topic. Without reading the long contributions by so many experts here, let me just point out that in Physics 101, there are (only) three basic physical quantities, length, time and mass. Strain is the change of length and therefore a basic physical quantity that can be measured. Stress is derived from strain through a formula. As such, for a given strain (which is the deformation of a body) one can get any stress value depending on what formula is used, e.g. linear elastic, visco-elastic, plastic. NIST has the standard to measure length, not stress !!! In the class of Experimental Stress Analysis, one in fact does "experimentally determines the strain".

Bill Y.J. Chao

Thoughts on iMechanica, Students and Leaders

Dhruv Bhate — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:36:55 -0400

Michael,

We proposed some of these ideas almost a year ago - at the time, crystallized with the benefit of hindsight, there was one key argument in my mind: Folks who are students now, will tomorrow be Professors, industry members etc. and potentially represent iMechanica's future contributors. Therefore, if we want to increase the impact and progress of iMechanica, we need to bring in more students and excite them about iMechanica.

Making a separate page for Students was just one of the ideas towards that goal. We believed that such a page would make it more likely for students to post their ideas, start threads, and develop it independently. Who is to say that the creation of a new page for Students is "not organic"? After all, we came up with the idea ourselves quite naturally (which is perhaps why we still don't have a page for students, but that is another story) :-)

I also disagree with your comment on the entries in the Education section being inappropriate. Most of them are very relevant and best fit in the Education section. For now, I believe this remains the best page for students to post their ideas to.

However, many questions do go unanswered in the "Ask iMechanica" section. Many papers are posted with no comments received in return. I believe we still do not have the numbers. I would like to believe that if we have more visitors to iMechanica than we do now (say 100x the present number), this would not be the case. Students are a great group to attract and arguably easier to get involved than most professionals.

Also, I do not believe a separate page for students will necessarily translate into more student activity - and I agree with you there, and am contradicting something I said previously on this thread. This very thread garnered 20 odd posts and there are perhaps a thousand or more students registered. In my humble opinion, and this may sound flippant, we need to increase our student membership by one or two orders of magnitude to have enough participation to justify a student page. And for this we need several students to take the lead, an area where I myself have not done as well as I had planned.

I think Prof. Suo's idea of a Journal Club for students is a good starting point and is easier to get going than say, marhsalling students across universities to promote iMechanica. I will try and set this up in the coming days, but anyone reading this, please feel free to take the lead.

Finally, on a slightly philosiphical note, we are all students. I just graduated and joined the industry, but I certainly don't feel any smarter! I think iMechanica and the people who post here, must realize that a significant percentage of their audience is a "student" when it comes to their research. This means every poster must make the extra effort to address this "student" base. Taken in this spirit, we would not have to distinguish "student" from "non-student".

I hope my ramblings are useful. To summarize my thoughts:
We don't need a "Students" page. We need everyone to recognize that a lot of us are students. And we need more people, students above all, if only due to the fact that they represent the future. And finally, like all endeavours great and small, we need passionate leaders. Why don't you take it on? Who knows, it may look good on your Resume too.

Regards,
Dhruv

Comment, as requested

Michael A. Graham — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:29:46 -0400

I am commenting because you requested that students who read this comment.

As to the topic at hand, I don't think much action is required. I do not think that the community here is going to make any large shifts because of a special effort to attract us students. I do not think that a section called Students would be very effective. It is of note that the similar section you mentioned—Education—has many entries that do not seem to have anything to do with education.

Forgive my cyncicism, but I am sharing what I think is most realistic. I don't think iMechanica needs to change to suit students; it has currently formed into what it is naturally and organically, and it doesn't make sense to change it to try to suit such a goal. Publicity among students is another issue, but I do not think it makes sense to try to make this a different place to attract people who otherwise would not be interested.

henry.tan@manchester.ac.uk

Henry Tan — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:17:57 -0500

henry.tan@manchester.ac.uk

hi I am interested in this position

nusmayq — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:10:28 -0500

Dear Henry:

I am quite interesed in the provided position, could you let me know your email? I can send my cv to you. thanks

Post Doctoral Research Associate (numerical simulation)

Henry Tan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:14:33 -0500

Need a Post Doctoral Research Associate to work on numerical simulation (Material Point Method) of wave propagation and scattering in composite materials.

Starting date will be around October 2008. The salary will be at scale up to spine point 6, which is at the range from £27,466 to £33,780.

Post Doctoral Research Associate (analytical solution)

Henry Tan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:13:39 -0500

Need a Post Doctoral Research Associate to work on analytical solution of wave propagation and scattering in composite materials.

Starting date will be around October 2008. The salary will be at scale up to spine point 6, which is at the range from £27,466 to £33,780.