I have been receiving lots of anonymous comments on one particular post. I may be wrong, but these comments seem to be computer generated. I decided, therefore, to forbid anonymous comments, sorry for the trouble.
Anyway, I want to state that this blog is maintained by me, but it is not private. If you are interested in posting here, please contact me, telling something about your ideas.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Thursday, June 19, 2008
CALPHAD XXXVII - Fifth day June 19th 2008
The first days of CALPHAD were occupied (besides watching the technical sections, of course) with explorations of the environment at Saariselkä. Some of us went to the Urho Kekkonen nature Park, which starts just about 1Km from the hotel. The participants in this adventure are the three musketiers: André, Karin and José as the photo proves (Dartagnan here takes the picture).
The start of the trail is deceiving. What seemed to be a rather boring ladscape turned out to be a nice example of Scandinavian nature. We had even disturbed some locals, as these photos prove (including a rather daring activity by André).
After that we proved that God is Computational thermodynamicist, since the only days with sunshine in the whole time were the days (or, better said, night) of the Midnight sun party and the excursion day in Tankavaara. The first photo shows our special guest (i.e. the sun) shining at midnight in the Ka
unispää mountain, the second photo show our fellow calphadians searching for the samples of their next assessment. Next comes the banquet and the departure from Saariselkä.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
CALPHAD XXXVII - Third day June 17th 2008
So much for the daily basis, but at least now I have learned how to download my photos to the computer using the memory card directly. Most of us arrived at Helsinki on saturday, 14th. The first CALPHAD "meeting" then took place at Helsinki´s airport on sunday morning, waiting for the only flight to Ivalo. Some photos from the happening:
We arrived at Ivalo at lunch time and went to the hotel, transported by a sympathetic bus driver with excellent english skills (he received a compliment by John Cahn!). The rest of sunday was spent at looking for a place to lunch (the hotel restaurant, were I first tasted Renndeer meat) and visiting the "big" city of Saariselkä. We found what is important for a CALPHAD meeting, how the photos below proove:
Some of the highlights of the first day were:
- Tetsuo Mohri´s talk on CVM
- B. J. Lee´s talk on grain boundary energies
- John Agren´s talk on irreversible thermodynamics
We arrived at Ivalo at lunch time and went to the hotel, transported by a sympathetic bus driver with excellent english skills (he received a compliment by John Cahn!). The rest of sunday was spent at looking for a place to lunch (the hotel restaurant, were I first tasted Renndeer meat) and visiting the "big" city of Saariselkä. We found what is important for a CALPHAD meeting, how the photos below proove:
Some of the highlights of the first day were:
- Tetsuo Mohri´s talk on CVM
- B. J. Lee´s talk on grain boundary energies
- John Agren´s talk on irreversible thermodynamics
Monday, June 16, 2008
CALPHAD XXXVII - First day June 15th 2008
It was a long period of silence, but I am returning back with my regular posts. I hope to contribute in a daily basis while I am attending the CALPHAD XXXVII conference, which takes place this time in Saariselkä/ Finland. For now I have to report the arrival of all people in the very strange place, where the sun never goes down (at this time of the year). Next I will post more informations and some photos, stay tuned.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Labour productivity
A recent report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) entitled "Key indicators of the Labour Market 5th edition" is being throughly discussed in Brazil today. This report publishes a ranking of countries in terms of the productivity of the labour force. The reason for the noise here under the equator is that the position of Brazil in this ranking got worse in comparison with 10 years ago. To explain this "disappointing" performance, some analysts are blaming the low level of education of the brazilian population. I would like to launch an alternative hypothesis: the low level of education of the brazilian population is not the cause, but the consequence of the "disappointing" behaviour in this list. My intuition tells that the low level of technology in the brazilian enterprises allowed the desconstruction policy applied to the education in the last 20 years: an educated population is not interesting to these low tech industries, since this would require better salaries.
Think about this...
Think about this...
Friday, August 24, 2007
"Applied" versus "fundamental" research
From time to time we hear, here in Brazil, some bureaucrat (sometimes even governors and presidents) talking about "applied" (meaning, technological) research as a kind of opposite to "fundamental" (meaning, academic) research. Although this kind of nonsense is also observed in other countries (particularly I remember one of the last ministers of science and technology of the Kohl government in Germany saying something like that), it seems to be more widespread here under the equator.
In my opinion there are only two kinds of researches: good ones and bad ones. Of course some misguided minds of the academy may be doing research only for the sake of the research. This is not "academic", it is simply bad! As it is bad to do technological research funded only by government money, without a (paying) link from the industrial sector of the country. Should we do "free" research to foster our industry? This should be denounced to the WTO as a hidden economic subside!
I agree that a government should be allowed to promote research in some critical areas, like it was the case of the genoma project, but the creativity of the scientist should not be hindered by allowing only "meaningful" research to be funded.
Let us prove this by absurd, suppose we decide to fund only socially relevant science. Surely a noble intent. Who will decide what is socially relevant? It is my guess that this will be done by a committee of three to four people. Suppose the wisest scientists are chosen to form this commission (not likely to happen), even so we exchange about 10000 thinking heads by three to four! As the popular wisdom tells, 10000 heads think better than three to four.
Another reason to let the researcher do science at his/her will is the impact on the new generations. Once I was lecturing materials science for the freshmen's year of the Escola Politécnica and there was this exercise about carbon nanotubes. After the class, one student asked me who has working on that in my department. I answered that no one did and that the technology behind that exercise was so weird (it was an experiment by IBM, who built a CMOS transistor using a carbon nanotube as gate, mounting it using an AFM) that it was unlikely that this would become commercial anytime soon. But who knows? Suppose that a real breakthrough in microelectronic device technology would come by some similar technique. Should our engineers need to learn after the university what is a carbon nanotube to survive in the job market? Research in those areas, which are not directly linked to the country reality, is necessary for the sake of our students. They must be well prepared to face the competition and this can be done only by lecturers who are aware of the major developments in the world, and this is done using research.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
CALPHAD XXXVI
I just returned from State College-PA, where the CALPHAD XXXVI took place. As always it was a pleasant meeting, where not only the challenges and discoveries of computational thermodynamics where discussed, but also where friends could meet again. I will present here some of the highlights of the meeting , both scientific and social.
I was impressed by the large amount of presentations concerning the convenience or inconvenience of changing the description of pure elements, with the introduction of some physically based equation of state to handle the pressure/volume state variables. As mentioned by Larry Kaufman, these changes would require major changes in the thermodynamic descriptions of all systems, which surely is a huge task. In my opinion this is true, but someone will eventually start doing this. I believe that the actual descriptions will coexist with new, improved, physically-based models, until these acquire the same coverage of described systems and the same level of confidence of the existing models.
Another highlight of the last meeting was the elevated number of presentations dedicated to the use of the existing models and thermodynamic databases to modeling derivate thermodynamic properties, which are not usually experimentally determined, like viscosity of molten slags (Nicholas Grundy, using FactSage), surface tension (Risto Pajarre) and solder wettability (Zbigniew Moser).
As always Prof. John Morral´s presentation was a show! The "lecture" dealt with teaching phase diagram topology to undergraduate students. The techniques described have high learning potential for this arid topic (at least to our students).
The most impressive presentation was due to Prof. Dr. Byeong-Jo Lee, of the Pohang University in South Korea. He showed how standard thermodynamics, incorporation capillarity effects through tyhe Gibbs-Thompson equation was able to justify size-effects observed in nanotechnology. He exemplified considering two cases: the size-dependency of melting point in platinum nanoclusters and nanowires and the size-dependent composition of Si-Ge nanowires. His results clearly show that the usual thermodynamic tools are valid up to a quite small scale, which would not be accepted by most physicist as possible.
In the social side we had a pleasant meeting, as always. Most of the participants know each other from previous CALPHADs and the new participants are well received in general, so they quickly become part of the family. One anonymous (so nobody will be hurt due to the authorship, literally) quotation, which all participants agreed, clearly defines the CALPHAD meeting was "It was so much alcohol!" (referring to something that happened in last year´s CALPHAD, in Israel). Could not be perfectly realized in the present meeting due to the unusual closing time of the hotel bars (9 pm) and the long distance to the town, but even so we had our liquid amount available :-).
The conference excursion was to the Gettysburg battlefield. We were blessed with a sunny day as can be inferred from these photos. It was an unusual excursion, I had never visited a battlefield before. And sometimes it was a little bit awkward to walk literally over the grave of so many dead people. Our competent and passionate guide helped us to overcome this strange feeling and allowed to us, foreigners, to have some insight on the way that the Americans handle these historical events.
The banquett was very nice. The following photos show our table. As you can see, the motto was, "there is always one place more" ;-).
Finally, one has to mention our trip to the Mad Mex bar in State College. Of course, only some of us still had some energy after five days of drinking (err..., I mean, of congress), but nevertheless, it was fun. My congratulations to the "Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale", which could be easily renamed "Stone Arrogant Bastard Bitter Ale". I finish this report with some of the pictures of that night.
I was impressed by the large amount of presentations concerning the convenience or inconvenience of changing the description of pure elements, with the introduction of some physically based equation of state to handle the pressure/volume state variables. As mentioned by Larry Kaufman, these changes would require major changes in the thermodynamic descriptions of all systems, which surely is a huge task. In my opinion this is true, but someone will eventually start doing this. I believe that the actual descriptions will coexist with new, improved, physically-based models, until these acquire the same coverage of described systems and the same level of confidence of the existing models.
Another highlight of the last meeting was the elevated number of presentations dedicated to the use of the existing models and thermodynamic databases to modeling derivate thermodynamic properties, which are not usually experimentally determined, like viscosity of molten slags (Nicholas Grundy, using FactSage), surface tension (Risto Pajarre) and solder wettability (Zbigniew Moser).
As always Prof. John Morral´s presentation was a show! The "lecture" dealt with teaching phase diagram topology to undergraduate students. The techniques described have high learning potential for this arid topic (at least to our students).
The most impressive presentation was due to Prof. Dr. Byeong-Jo Lee, of the Pohang University in South Korea. He showed how standard thermodynamics, incorporation capillarity effects through tyhe Gibbs-Thompson equation was able to justify size-effects observed in nanotechnology. He exemplified considering two cases: the size-dependency of melting point in platinum nanoclusters and nanowires and the size-dependent composition of Si-Ge nanowires. His results clearly show that the usual thermodynamic tools are valid up to a quite small scale, which would not be accepted by most physicist as possible.
In the social side we had a pleasant meeting, as always. Most of the participants know each other from previous CALPHADs and the new participants are well received in general, so they quickly become part of the family. One anonymous (so nobody will be hurt due to the authorship, literally) quotation, which all participants agreed, clearly defines the CALPHAD meeting was "It was so much alcohol!" (referring to something that happened in last year´s CALPHAD, in Israel). Could not be perfectly realized in the present meeting due to the unusual closing time of the hotel bars (9 pm) and the long distance to the town, but even so we had our liquid amount available :-).
The conference excursion was to the Gettysburg battlefield. We were blessed with a sunny day as can be inferred from these photos. It was an unusual excursion, I had never visited a battlefield before. And sometimes it was a little bit awkward to walk literally over the grave of so many dead people. Our competent and passionate guide helped us to overcome this strange feeling and allowed to us, foreigners, to have some insight on the way that the Americans handle these historical events.
The banquett was very nice. The following photos show our table. As you can see, the motto was, "there is always one place more" ;-).
Finally, one has to mention our trip to the Mad Mex bar in State College. Of course, only some of us still had some energy after five days of drinking (err..., I mean, of congress), but nevertheless, it was fun. My congratulations to the "Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale", which could be easily renamed "Stone Arrogant Bastard Bitter Ale". I finish this report with some of the pictures of that night.
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