This question came up in a recent discussion with an engineer who is a part of a team that has completed several assignments in FEA using “lesser” FE applications than Abaqus. While he knew his way around these applications, he was not quite comfortable with the theory of the finite element method. He was wrestling with some calculus from a textbook, and when asked why, said it was because he figured he needed to know all this stuff to use Abaqus. The question in the title of this post came up during the ensuing discussion.

I was reminded of his question while watching this presentation on Mathematica. One of the points the presenter makes is that the software has “lots of functionality that you may never need, but it’s good to know it’s there“. The image he uses to illustrate the complexity brought to mind Abaqus – and several other software applications too, but I’ll stay for the moment with Abaqus.

Is it much good to know what Abaqus can do, or is that just marketing-babble that you can safely ignore? Is there much functionality in Abaqus that you will never use?

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This article outlines the potential problems with using a graphics-heavy Workbook on a Kindle.

Here, let’s see what the workbook looks like on a smaller smartphone-like device: an iPod, which is about as small as devices can get.

First, I emailed this preview to my Kindle.

Then, I installed obtained Amazon’s Kindle-for-ipod app (from here).

After setting it up on the iPod, I opened the Kindle reader. It asked for my Kindle account, so I entered it and – voila! – the preview was available on the iPod too. This synchronizing between different devices is neat, but obviously works only if you already have a Kindle. However, you can use the reader on your device without buying a Kindle too – just don’t supply an existing Amazon account when the reader starts on your device.

Obviously, though, you can only read DRM free stuff (like the preview) . You also miss out on synchronization-between-devices. I can think of several situations where synchronization is a plus, but that’s another story.

Let’s get back to “using” the book on the iPod.

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The “Getting Started with Abaqus ” series includes several workbooks, each of which contains many images of the software itself. Abaqus, like most CAD applications, looks best on a large screen and makes full use of color. So what’s the point of releasing the Workbooks on a Kindle, with its puny screen? Not only is the Kindle (at best!) no more than 520×622 pixels, but it’s black-and-white too.

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The British Education Secretary propounds a strange principle – and wears a strange expression on his face – in this article.

By rights, his audience’s expressions should have been the focus of both the article and the photograph. Showing him surrounded by what appear to be kindergarten children, while the headline talks of his “being inspired by the military” to suggest how the curriculum should be drafted, can only be Monty-Pythonesque humor at work.

Mr.Gove  suggests, apparently, that teachers “and experts” collaborate on “tailoring” lessons for schools. The logic is that ” if we can do it in something as critical as the role of the military, then there is a huge potential to do it in education”.

Yes, it beats me too. And the idea certainly gets a thumbs down from me, for what that’s worth.

Why? For a variety of reasons.

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It’s pretty much the done thing to tout figures of studies asserting that graduating students are unfit for hire. I used to think this was an India-centric fashion (look here for a recent article).

But the trend is more widespread, in actual fact. Here’s what Google dished up when I searched for “unemployable graduate”:

Gone. All gone.

The India-related number merits another story indeed, as the search-summaries above indicate. 50% engineering graduates, 75% IT graduates … score another for lies, damned lies and statistics.

If you can’t beat ‘em … so let’s apply some basic statistics here. My search returned “about 1,200,000″ results (things change pretty significantly if you search for “unemployable graduates”, by the way, which explains the strange grammar in the title of this post). I only looked at the first 10. Of these, 5 relate to the UK, 2 to India, 1 to the US, 1 to Malaysia, 1 to Saudi Arabia. So it’s not quite an Indian thing, as I’d presumed. OK, correction 1 noted.

Now let’s look at the arguments in favor of damning the potential employees. From these 10 articles, the reasons are

1. a lack of “soft” skills
2. skills not “suited to the requirement”
3. lack of “technical” knowledge
4. inability to work as a team
5. lack of integrity (I’m not making this up, honestly!)
6. inability to communicate with the “opposite gender” (I’m not making this up either, though I wish I were)
7. unaware of “latest” industry practice
8. don’t show up at the office on time
9. useless degrees in “non-serious” subjects
10. inadequate “numerical skills”
11. poor written English (and this in England!)
12. over-qualified
13. laziness
14. arrogance
15. …

In other words, the entire kitchen sink.

What explains the lack of articles from the other side – that is, from the perspective of the student? Are the expectations of the employers realistic?

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When writing the Cloud-computing related book in our Getting Started With … series, (“Getting Started with Cloud Computing“) little did I realize the path I was treading. To illustrate the problems demand-supply mismatches can cause for both suppliers and consumers (and to explain that awful IT-term “provisioning“, which is in the same class as Anglophobe-specials like the noun-usage of “invite”), I wrote

Anyone who has tried to hail a cab in the pouring rain knows the feeling: in the language of economics, if demand exceeds supply, some consumers will either have to do without, or will have to pay a much higher price for the scarce resource.

Elsewhere in the book I also wrote how credit-cards and low-value transactions make pay-per-use that much more likely.

Imagine my surprise when the NY Times described (click here to read the article) “surge pricing”. The article starts with the tale of a hapless passenger paying USD 135 for a 1-mile taxi ride. It goes on to relate that

customers are not shown their fare until the end of the ride, when it is automatically charged to their credit card

Customers, says the NYT, were not happy (!). I, for one, can see why. “Automatically charged” – ouch.

My interest piqued, I went on over the the web-service that’s named by the NYT – uber.com. And if you’re even mildly considering using the cloud for more traditional pay-per-use requirements such as storage, it would be a good idea to do so yourself.

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Faced with analyzing – or worse, designing – for wind loads, you can’t blame the poor mechanical engineer for blanching at the immensity of the problem. Dynamics, vibrations, fluid mechanics, CFD, random loads, PSD, Coriolis forces, … the swirl can very easily become a vortex. (If you’re certain there’s no difference between a swirl and a vortex, you’re beyond the pale).

The Civil Engineer, who has been put through the Wind-Design-Codes grind, is much more relaxed. Why, you just look up the code and apply the values. What could be easier? Ah, what could be easier indeed!

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“Latency”, writes The Economist, “is the delay caused by a network as a packet of data makes a round trip.” (The article is here.)

The journal’s language is almost invariably a delight. Its wit – always. Still (perhaps in the momentum of the praise of Djikstra?) a quibble is in order in this case. The Economist’s definition is the truth, but – regrettable for a purist but perhaps deemed acceptable if the “reader” is lumped in the same class as Djikstra’s “user” – not the whole truth.

What is latency?

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