Zhigang Suo's blog

At a meeting of the Editorial Board of IJSS, on Sunday, 3 June 2007, in Austin, Texas, the representatives from Elsevier, the publisher of IJSS, told the members of the Board that all articles published in IJSS will be freely accessible 24 months after publication.  The first of these articles will become available in October 2007.  That is, all IJSS articles published after October 2005 will become freely accessible after a delay of 24 months.

In response to a NSF call for proposal on Cyberinfrastructure Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring for Our 21st Century Workforce (CI-TEAM), in June 2006, several of us submitted a proposal entitled "iMechanica:  Leveraging Cyberinfrastructure to Evolve All Knowledge of Applied Mechanics"

I wish that this thought had come to me earlier, so that I could have posted it on April First.  No, I'm unaware of such a program.  Instead, Harvard faculty have just emerged from a multi-year review of curriculum, and reaffirmed the commitment to liberal education, after voting out a president not too long ago.

After testing for some time, Lesley Lam has just upgraded iMechanica to Drupal 5.  She has tried to make every function exactly the same as before, so that users should not see any abrupt changes.  If you do find any unfamiliar behavior of the new version, please leave a comment below.

On Wednesday morning, I received an email from Anastassia Paskaleva. She was unable to create an account on iMechanica, because CAPTCHA kept telling her that she typed the letters wrong. Lesley Lam, iMechanicia user number 1, has just fixed the problem. Now new users can register once more. We apologize for the inconvenience that this problem might have caused you, and thank Anastassia for letting us know the problem.

• Free energy and generalized coordinate. Equilibrium and stability
• Control parameter
• Configurational transitions of two types
• Critical point of configurational transition of the second type. Bifurcation analysis
  
• Behavior near a critical point. Post-bifurcation analysis
• Load-displacement relation near a critical point
• Koiter's theory of imperfection sensitivity
• A family of systems of many degrees of freedom
• Mode of bifurcation
• Vibration in the neighborhood of an equilibrium configuration