iMechanica - web 2.0 - Comments

I've used drupal along with

miket — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:11:53 -0400

I've used drupal along with other CMS over the years and since i've found ready made joomla sites with preconfigured modules it's really helped speed up development for customer sites.

re: Medicine and Technology

MichelleLOyen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:06:07 -0400

Eric--

sounds brutal re: the NICU. I'd be quite interested to hear what happened off-line, I'd love it if you dropped me an email since a large part of my research in the last 7 or 8 years has concerned mechanical factors in premature birth. I have visited the NICU on many occasions and seen the ultra-preemies born prior to 28 weeks gestation, and have also witnessed the births of three mid-preemies in the 30-35 week gestation range.

Regardless of that, though, you make a great point about medical records. We find this to be particularly true in the context of pregnancy and parenting, that people are more likely that in other instances to have ownership of their own medical records and to carry them from doctor to doctor. One of the biggest problems in harnassing computer technology for this purpose has been privacy laws; the other issue that arises is one of storage space. High resolution x-rays and (even worse) 3-D data sets from CT, MRI or PET scanning require a lot more storage space than the plain text associated with other aspects of the medical record. But this is yet again one of the places where I believe the technology exists and the engineering challenge is to apply existing technology to healthcare.

Medicine is behind the times with technology

ericmock — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:46:33 -0400

Michelle,

Having spent 13 weeks with two of my children (nine for the first and four for the second) in the neonatal ICU, and my daughter already having nine surgeries with another one coming Tuesday, I can say for certain that in practice medicine is behind the times with technology. With education, I think they are probably about equals.

For example, it was only about two years ago that we stopped having to carry 'film' from the labs to the clinics (and this was at Penn State's Hershey Medical Center/School). Most medical records are still hand-written as this is still the fastest, most convenient, and private-from-the-patient way for doctors to take notes. Most hospital charts are still hand written. In fact, for the first time I saw charts kept electronically (using unique barcodes on medical bracelets) when my wife was recently (a month ago) recovering from a c-section at our small local hospital. Hershey Medical Center still records everything by hand.

Voice recorders were adopted pretty early by doctors but they just replaced tape recorders for dictating notes. The problem with these is that doctors don't always want the patient to hear what they're thinking. PDAs were adopted quite early and quite a few PalmOS applications were written with doctors in mind. In fact, I think one of the iPhone applications Apple demoed was aimed at the medical community.

There is also a lot of work in developing haptic surgical trainers for medical students and continued training. In fact I was once pursuing some work with surgeons about developing a computer model of the liver that students could interact with, i.e. cut, suture, and probe, through a haptic endoscope. Nothing came of it but it was an interesting issue on which I know many MD/PhDs are working. Real-time haptics are quite computationally intensive since you need a refresh rate of about 10ms.

I'd say in education, the medical community uses technology about like and to the extent we do.

Regarding the use of the web '2.0' it is really about where 1.9 ends and 2.0 starts. Other than the TinyMCE javascript editor used for composing messages, nothing in iMechanica counts as '2.0' in my view. Blogs are really just the marriage of usenet and html. I.e., we could have been having this very discussion 15 years ago in a usenet group. I think 2.0-features start with sending and receiving 'micro-content' without having to refresh a lot of static data. This allows for web applications, e.g. Google Apps.

As I've written before here and in two proposals to NSF (http://dssl.mne.psu.edu/nsfevo and http://dssl.mne.psu.edu/nsfcdi), I think recently (in the past five years) developed web technology finally enables interactive publishing. I think the Living Review Articles concept in the 'nsfcdi' proposal is a good place to start with mechanics in the Web 2.0 world.

Eric Mockensturm

I am not surprised at all: you forget in medicine they are ahead

Mike Ciavarella — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:52:53 -0400

In medicine there is a lot more money involved, a lot more ethics involved, and it is not a case that from Lancet it was where a strong opposition from the traditional and conservative oligopolistic Elsevier attack was launched, by funding

http://www.plos.org/ is a hugely growing nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

But in fact you know this, isn't this why we are trying to reach NIH kind of money with mechanics idea? We want to enter this rich world, also for its more direct usefulness for humanity.

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

Questions from the audience of a recent talk on iMechanica.org

Teng Li — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:08:33 -0500

Thanks Zhigang for the kind words. The talk would not be possible without all the creative explorations of our fellow iMech users. I've uploaded the powerpoint file of the presentation. Feel free to use them in any occasion.

I used Mike Wesch's video (now embedded in the original post above) as part of the interpretation of Web 2.0, which seemed interested the audience and also made the second part of the talk on iMechanica easier to digest. Here are some questions (rephrased) from the interactions with the audience:

How are the contents in iMechanica managed? Is there any routine content maintenance (organizing, deleting, etc..) How to find the contents I'm interested?

How to get students involved in such a platform?

How much is the running cost? How is iMechanica supported?

Will a Wiki-type platform work for iMechanica?

How much time is needed to manage iMechanica?

Thanks to all those experiences we accummulated together via iMechanica, addressing these questions and comments was indeed enjoyable.

Excellent slides

Arun Prakash — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:48:29 -0500

The presentation slides and the paper are very good. A few statistics were not known to me.

I have a feeling that imechanica cld become the next 'in' thing.

Re: Teng's fantastic slides on iMechanica.org

Xiaodong Li — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:23:38 -0500

Great! Thanks a lot Teng and Zhigang. I very much like this presentation. I plan to present your slides (with your consent) to my department faculty meeting and the ASME Chapter meeting in South Carolina. I think that we can use this presentation to promote our iMechanica. In this way, I also plan to put iMechanica membership in my self annual evaluation report (like we normally write society membership in our CV).

I think that iMechanica provides a new (novel, innovative) mechanism for us to participate in the mechanics community. See our iMechanica posts - bottom-up, self-assembly... These are the buzz words that catch up the current and upcoming waves.

Follow up Teng's post, I would like to suggest that we post our ASME slides (if you think it is appropriate) here, this will give you another opportunity to present your stuff at our iMechanica "conference" which reaches much more. The benefits are many folds. 1) you do not have time limit for your talk; 2) you can have in-depth feedback/discussions about your research that may in turn generate new ideas for your future research and new ideas for your proposals; and 3) you can easily find collaborative opportunities to promote your research with "multidisciplinary."

As we celebrate our new milestone - 4,000 more registered members, I cannot wait for a new, exciting year -2008.

Again, thank you so much for your great efforts!

very interesting I have

zhan-sheng guo — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 06:53:22 -0500

very interesting I have told my colleague and our students.

some of them very like it

Teng's fantastic slides on iMechanica.org

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:22:35 -0500

At the ASME Congress this November, in Seattle, Teng Li gave a presentation on iMechanica.org. I missed his presentation becuase I was giving a presentation on delamination at the same time.

Looking at the fantastic slides of his presentation, we must all feel proud of iMechanica, and of the energetic and thoughtful iMechanicians like Teng. He placed iMechanica in the broad context of Web 2.0, and focused on the use of iMechanica as a learning environment. The slides are truly exciting! So, please take a look at them.

Teng, could you please tell us about the reaction of your audience? Also, it would be great if you can post a ppt file of your talk, so that other people can use your slides in their talks. For example, Pradeep and Michelle may want to talk about their experience with jClub. As another example, many people can include a slide or two in their technical talks to promote iMechanica.

Incidentally, Teng put me as a co-author of the talk, but I did not contribute to the production of these great slides. He deserves full credit.

Reviewers' comments

Teng Li — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 14:16:03 -0400

The draft paper was accepted as is on 26 July 2006.

Reviewer Comments

Reviewer 1:

This is a very interesting concept and can have a significant impact on engineering education (at least in the field of mechanics). However, more people need to become aware of iMechanica.ORG for it to reach its full potential. Having this paper presented and published is one way to let it become more well known.

Reviewer 2:

Presenting this paper in IMECE2007 is a good venue to publicize iMechanica.org. I hope this concept extends to other Mechanical Engineering courses, such as, Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer.

Draft Recommendations/Comments

Comments

Good job!

Difficulty of Equations in Second Life?

Eloy Villanueva — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:12:06 -0400

I was very intrigued by the opportunities that Second-Life presents in education. It facilitates the meeting of students and professors in a virtual world without the burden of meeting in a physical location, and using the chat format as the means of communication it also allows for discussions. However, upon considering its particular use in the education of mechanics, I find a few limitations.

Precisely because the means of communications is through chat, it seems it would be difficult to write mechanics equations. This is the same trouble that we encounter in posting blogs in iMechanica. It's difficult to write equations and it usually proves very tedious to try to imitate the various types of greek letters and mathematical notations. This would make it difficult for the professor to teach and in return for the students to ask questions. It would require the entire class to be proficient in writing equations before the beginning of the course. I wonder if this Second-Life has considered facilitating this process.

On another note, I also worry about the social life of a student in the prospect of virtual education. Second-life is a great tool when one wants to have a couple of discussions with other experts in a field, or to teach a really popular class, which only ask the student for a small amount of time in front of their computer. It still allows the student to have a real life outside of the virtual world. However, using second-life for a full time course load will demand the student to meet all of his classmates and professors in a virtual world, never really requiring them to meet or know each other. It seems like a machine like world. It may ultimately be a matter of preference whether second-life catches on, but I think there will always be a demand for human relationships.

Our modest experiment with distance teaching

Zhigang Suo — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:29:15 -0500

Dear Michelle:

As you know, John Hutchinson and I are teaching a fracture mechanics course over a long distance now. We give lectures at Harvard to students from Harvard and MIT, and through the web to students at the University of Nebraska. Right now we have a total of 18 students. You can read about their self-introductions and why they take this course.

It took us some trouble and a lot of help from our IT people to get us wired. The essential problem is that few people are doing distance teaching, so that there is little demand. For example, the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard built such a classroom a few years ago, at a great cost, but nobody recall that it has ever been used for distance teaching. Now the equipment is outdated, and John and I cannot use it this time. The IT people told us that to convert a classroom for distance teaching, you need to spend about 100k. Even then the equipment is not ideal.

I suppose in future technology for distance learning will be perfected, so that we will feel no distance in class. Then we will be only concerned with the size of the class, long distance or short distance. For example, the largest class I have taught at Harvard had about 30 students. I could frequently ask students questions, and students could interrupt me. Many students mentioned in their feedback that they had a sense of participation in the class. I suppose that such interaction will be impossible if the class is much bigger than 30 students.

However, at Harvard, some of the classes are so popular that each class has hundreds of students. I suppose for such a class, it does not really matter if the class has 1000 or even 10000 students at a time. We could have a star teacher broadcast her lectures. Students can view the lectures at different times. When that happened, we would reconsider our job security, or perhaps find many reasons to have small classes. In fact, technology has been available for some time to broadcast lectures. Why isn't this idea catching on?

Of course, distance teach will bring some simple benefits. Some biology classes here are taken both by students at Cambridge (MA) and at Boston. The distance teaching save students some trouble to go between the two places.

It is an exciting time to be a teacher and a researcher, or be any profession specialized in knowledge. Even a theoretician can mess around with experiments on the Internet!

Distance leaning through Second Life is intriguing. I'm curious if any iMechanicians have any experience with Second Life and the like.