Social Network & Research

The importance of Social Networks

Formerly, the profile of a researcher was private and somehow isolated, when working on a project. It was when an article was ready, or when a publication was about to be made, when links and connections with other researchers and colleagues were established.

Nevertheless, this profile is not suitable anymore, because nowadays research, and many other activities, have become very dynamics, and therefore researchers must adapt to this new situation.

One way of keeping in touch with other researchers, colleagues, friends,... is using Social Networks. Although they seem to be tools designed for sharing experiences, curiosities, interest,... the also can be used to share comments, investigations, results,... so the can be continuously discussed, commented, referenced,... 

There are some Social Networks, like Researchgate and Linkedin, that are specially designed for researchers and professionals. Facebook, G+ and Twitter can be also good tools for spreading knowledge, results,... if the information is well prepared and the audience is adequate and well selected.

For example, if I am working on a project, and I have stuck in a problem, or I am not able to have good conclusions from my results, I can use Researchgate. If I ask other users for their comments, a discussion can be stablished, and conclusions can be made quickly and even more precisely. This discussion can produce even more questions, or suggest new investigations,... so the project could grow more with the help of those interested colleagues than it would have grown if the project was held only by myself.

My opinion about Social Networks is that they are very strong and useful tools if they are correctly used and focused by the researcher. But they should be correctly managed, because the time spent on their usage shall not be too long, or the user will finally suffer Infoxication, as it was explained on a previous post.

Personal impressions about Research 2.0-University of Burgos

First, this course has been a good experience for myself. I was not used to access all the tools that have been displayed. Specially, I have found Blogger a good and personal way of showing the rest of the world some of the projects I am working on, my interest,... Not only that, Blogger also allows other uses to share their impressions about the posts I share, comment the displayed topics,... 

Lessons about infoxication were very interesting, and gave many advice on how to avoid that nowadays illness and its effects on Internet users. From my point of view, I did not used internet in an efficient way, and the tips given by those lessons are indeed helping myself with my everyday tasks as a researcher and engineer.

Finally, in order to avoid spending many hours updating web pages in search for news, visiting every Social Network I could be subscribed to, reviewing e-mail, and starting again, I am pleased to have been introduced to suites like Drive, Hootsuite and Symbaloo. Together, they are a good desktop that can help the management of the numerous tools, RSS sources and webpages. And in the end, they will help in increasing the level of efficiency of my work and researches.

Google Drive

Social software

Currently, there are many jobs that require that two or more persons have to work together. These teams, when writing a report, an article or any type document, need to agree which part of the document is going to be written by whom. This can be a problem because many copies of the same document may be used, and also many different versions of the same work can appear.

Tools that have been available for many years are shared folders. These folders are stored in servers located online, and documents that are saved in them are available for anyone that has been granted the appropriate permissions.

In recent years, social software have appeared. They allow not only saving and sharing document, but also editing them online, and not only by a single person at a time, but by as much users as needed.

Google Drive

Google tools can help researchers in their work, because they allow continuos access to any necessary document that has been correctly stored. This access allows not only reading, but also editing, creating new documents,...

If these documents, folders,... are correctly shared and organised, research teams can work faster and more efficiently, than if every researcher works by its own and access to documents is dependant on specific members of the team

Google has many different applications for those who create an account. These applications include Documents, Sheets, Presentations, Calendars, Drive,...

As a conclusion, a well organised team, where every member has a Google account, can work fluently in a collaborative way.

In my opinion, Google teams have work very hard in the last years to create all the applications that are available nowadays, and are continuously working updating them and creating new useful applications. Like any other tool, if they are used properly, they strengthen research and many other jobs. But if same basic security steps are not followed, work may be exposed to inappropriate users. Furthermore, being dependant of an external server is a risky way of working, so it would be desirable that security copies of folders and their content were made in personal hard disk, to be sure that work will be secured in case of any online server would fail.

Task-1: Google Documents

Task-2: Slides

Task-3: Google Sheets

Task-4: Forms

Some pieces of though about INFOXICATION

INFOXICATION

Current society uses Internet as an everyday tool for posting, gathering a sharing of information. Because a big percentage of the World population has access to the net, we can assume that there is a great number of sources of information, that work continuously feeding Internet.

If one thinks as a final user of this information, it is easy to understand that it is not possible for a single individual to read, understand, analyse, ... all the content that is available in the net. As a consequence, if we are not conscious of this fact, we will be facing a great problem of inefficiency, both because we spend great time reading all the pages that have interesting content for use, or because once we have finished reading our list of sources, we could be tempted to start from the beginning, just in case there has been posted anything new.

For these reasons, we could think in to steps that could help us to gather as much information as possible, but avoiding those factors that would lead us to a great loss of time, or that could prevent us from dedicating enough time to other tasks related with our jobs, researches,... 

The first step, is to be conscious of which sources are important for us, select them, and gather as much publications, news,... as possible. If it is possible, it would be desirable to first have all that unread information in a single box, or database.

The second step is selection. According to our own specifications, all those articles should be filtered. Any information that would not accomplish our specifications shall be trashed. Finally, the successful articles should be correctly ordered, organised and displayed if possible into a single desktop.  If these tasks were performed automatically by a program or script, the human user would lose no time everyday in searching the information that should be relevant for his purposes.

The third step is setting updating alarms. If a proper proceeding was established, there would be no need for the human user to continuously refreshing his main sources in search for possible news. For that reason, a program shall be used to scan the preferred sources, and if any new matched the filters, an alarm or message should be sent to the user inbox. 

Finally, research and many nowadays jobs are collaborative, so each user should have the opportunity to share not only his publications, but also any information that was important or interesting for him or any colleague that the former could think that he would find of interest.

Content curation

In order to avoid the negative effects that Infoxication can produce in our digital society as a general term, and in ourselves as users or citizens, there are some online tools that can help us with this task.

Storify is a tool that can gather articles, information, ... from many journals or sources into one single desktop or database. It can even produce a feed to insert this database in our own web page, blog,... Together with The previous tool we can find Scoop.it. The latter has similar characteristics than the former, but it is more dynamics regarding the topics selected or the filters stablished within the incoming news.

Readlist is another content curation tool. It is not as visually atractive as the previous ones, but it is simpler, and has a very important characteristic, that is able to export offline the content into a readable document. Furthermore, it also has the possibilty of exporting the content to another website as a RSS feed, the same way as it was explained with Storify.

Finishing with the tools dedicated to creating list of news or recently updated articles with special insterest, we can find List.ly. The list of content created by this tool can be filtered, ordered, and even commenter or voted by other users. Other users can even be invited to collaborate in creating the lists.

Pinterest is a tool that makes its effort in publishing images, instead of writed news or articles. This fact makes this tool very atractive for many users, and as a consequence it has become very popular in the last years. The contents of the users ar organized in desktops, named as topics.

Pearltrees is a collaborative tool that relates the content selected by other users with some labeled topics. This tools displays the content or topics in branches, that outsource from common nodes, or main topics. The final node, or branch, stores the link to a webpage, but the tool allows a to see a preview of the content, so there is no need to exit Pearltrees to read the article.

Alltop a a very extense tool whose database does not depend on the user. Instead, the user is able to select which topics and sources are interesting and relevant for him. This tool focuses its attention in blogs and information web pages, instead of social networks. From every source, Alltop displays the five latter publications.

Feedly

Feedly is a tool that helps with the gathering, filtering and displaying of information tasks. The user can have access to the most recent and relevant information, organised by projects, topics. It uses RSS feeds from journals or sources selected by the user. If a premium account is purchased, an RSS link can be provided, so the feeds selected or that belong to a desired group can be linked to another web page or blog.

The selected journals, which are considered to be important for my investigation are:

• APPLIED MATERIALS TODAY - Elsevier
• ENGINEERING FAILURE ANALYSIS - Elsevier
• INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FATIGUE - Elsevier
• MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING - Elsevier
• WEAR - Elsevier

Diigo

Diigo is a tool that allows its user to gather all his selected web pages, documents, sources,... in a single desktop. These data can be labelled, organised, commented, annotated,... 

Then, the user can group some of the data, that would be necessary or relevant for a specific project, into an ooutliner, and then order them hierarchically. Each of the lines of the outline store a link to the corresponding webpage, and if selected, an active window displays a preview of its content.

My personal profile can be seen following the link that is displayed below.

Perfil- Daniel Ballorca-Juez

The following link will drive you to the line generated to follow my doctorate research on high pressure dynamic seals.

Diigo- Daniel Ballorca-Juez

Introduction to Dynamic Seals

FIRST IMPRESSIONS ABOUT THE USE OF BLOGGER AS A RESEARCH TOOL

I have just started using this blog to share some of my research about the dynamic sealing problem. It is desirable to share my hypothesis, analyisis, conclusions and impressions with any reader interested in this topic. Internet is a great tool that alllow us researchers to help each other, share articles, papers, or recommend lectures. If this net would have not been stablished, research would be a slower, innefficient task. In the present world, it is a necessary activity for any researcher to use any search and share tool that is available, to contribute to worlwide investigation, both with his own work and supporting other colleagues studies.

INTRODUCTION TO THE DYNAMIC SEALING PROBLEM

Explosion engines, hydraulic pumps, pneumatic pistons,... are some applications that have some features in common: a reciprocating surface that has a relative movement against a fixed surface. Moreover, the three applications involve the fact that both surfaces form a closed volume, where a fluid is pressurized. 

This increase in the pressure of the fluid stablishes a pressure gradient between the fluid that is inside the volume, and any fluid that could be located outside. 

In some cases, it is desirable that this gradient is stablished, as it could be the application aim to pump fluid into a stream, a vessel, or even the final objective could be to accelerate the fluid to very high speeds, like in water-jet cutting.

But, in our field of investigation, the pressure gradient is a non-desired effect, because it stablishes fluid leaks, that reduce the efficiency of the system, or they produce wear on some of the parts that comprise the whole system.

Dynamic seals are parts, or assemblies, that have dual functions. On one side, the must provide low stiffness surface, so the volume that confines the fluid is always closed, even if any of the other parts is too strained. On the other side, they must allow the movable part to exert its reciprocating movement against the fixed surface. This second function can be very affected by the first one, because in order to have every borde surface closed, high contact forces are stablished, and as a cosequence, high wear can occure between the surfaces that move against each other.

Furthermore, if the fluid is very highly pressurized, its temperature is too high, or both pressure and temperature are high, the problem may combine special materials, designs,... as wear may greatly be increased because both high frictional forces, and material properties detrimental because of high temperature.

Finally, it is our objective to desing new seals that can provide a high reliabilty and durability, in order to increase the efficiency of the pumping systems. Efficiency is achieved both by reducing the spare parts cost, and allowing faster reciprocating movement and zero-leak working conditions.

Example: Trelleborg application using both static and dynamic seals.

Author introduction

In this post, I will introduce my ORCID, Google Scholar and About.me data

ORCID code

orcid.org/0000-0003-2031-4544

Using the given code above, you can always follow my publications, even if the displayed author name is not always the same, or if it has any small change. 

Google Scholar

Following the link provided below, you can find my profile at Google Scholar, where ya can also find my publications, continuously updated, and also meet some research colleagues, with whom we share some publications.

Google Scholar



About.me

This last link will drive you to my profile at About.me site, where you can find some extra data, apart from my publications information, like hobbies, interests or job skills.

About.me

Cohete de agua de dos etapas

En este video se muestran la preparación y el lanzamiento de un cohete de agua, basado en dos etapas.
En la primera etapa, se utiliza el empuje combinado de cuatro toberas, tres laterales y una central, para acelerar el conjunto. Cuando se consume el agua de los cohetes laterales, el cohete central sigue manteniendo una corriente de agua. Esta corriente central no proporciona tanta aceleración, pero permite mantener la velocidad del conjunto, compensando la fuerza de la gravedad y la fuerza aerodinámica. Esta segunda fuerza es alta, debido a la velocidad del sistema, pero gracias a la compensación del empuje, no produce deceleración en el conjunto.

Water Rocket with boosters- Axion G2

Explicación y desarrollo teórico

En el siguiente enlace, se encuentra un desarrollo teórico de las ecuaciones que describen la dinámica del cohete de agua.

WATER ROCKET PHYSICS

Feria de la ciencia 2018-Universidad de Burgos

Imagen del correo de Burgos. Taller organizado por DESMASA S.L. en el que se propuso la fabricación de cohetes de agua, por lo asistentes al taller. Posteriormente se dispararon cohetes de agua