The Getting Started with Abaqus series contains several “Workbooks”. Why, asked one inquisitive reader, didn’t you just call them tutorials?

Two reasons.

The first is “formal”. A tutorial, says the dictionary, is

a period of intensive tuition given by a tutor to an individual student or to a small group of students

The label doesn’t fit the books, for several reasons. In the first place the books are intended for self-paced learning (but why design them for self-paced learning in the first place? I’ll come to that in a minute). Next, I don’t expect these books to be used for “intensive” learning. That’s not quite the best way to learn finite elements, to learn Abaqus, or to learn pretty much anything else for that matter, excepting of course the kindergarten child with a looming poem recitation competition. It’s also not for a group of students as such. So no, it would have been misleading to label the books “tutorials” for Abaqus.

A workbook, on the other hand, is defined by the same dictionary as

a book designed to guide the work of a student by inclusion of questions, exercises, etc.

So it’s no contest – a workbook it is.

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I’m referring, of course, to this article reported in the press today, snapshot below.

Words of wisdom

The lines I’ve highlighted say this:

• “projects should not be made mandatory unless the students took sufficient interest“
• “Not every student is motivated. We can’t force motivation“

A little further down the report is this other gem:

“it is time the engineering colleges in the State followed the IIT-M footsteps by not insisting on the final year projects as most of the students in city colleges walk into Ritchie Street to get their projects done. … It is time the affiliating universities looked at the necessity of the projects“.

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“Alternative are / Conspicuously absent”, I concluded here, after outlining how to use HyperMesh to model enforced-motion for Nastran. I’ve since spent some time with Patran, and am modifying that conclusion a bit. Here’s the current mantra:

 “GUI Alternatives are / Conspicuously absent / The best alternative is / Notepad++”

I think this is pretty much true of every CAE pro-processor on the market. For instance, I have spent a fair amount of time outlining Abaqus’ INP files in this Abaqus Workbook. I like Abaqus/CAE more than any other pre-processor I’ve used, but comes a time. I have a theory on why this is so, but that’s for later. For now, I’ll outline my way to setup and solve a transient problem using Nastran – using a text-editor to do the stuff that’s so hard for a GUI.

I’ll stay with enforced excitation for consistency with the earlier GUI-based description: the advantage of editing the text input file is stark. I think you’ll agree – it’s hard not to, once you’ve got the hang of it.

Note that this is only for direct-integration solutions of transient problems. That is, when the excitation is prescribed in the time domain and the period of interest is small. There are lots of other areas which are baffling, but one brick at a time.

The problem with using a GUI is that the solver’s terminology is bizarre. Why on earth should the same keyword be usable both in the case-control section and in the bulk-data section? Why on earth should the same “id” be usable across different items? Why …

The approach outlined uses these Nastran keywords: SPC (Case control), DLOAD (Case control), TSTEP (Case control), SPC1 (Bulk), SPCD (Bulk), TLOAD1 (Bulk), TABLED1 (Bulk), TSTEP (Bulk), PARAM/G and PARAM/W3.

You can look them up in the Quick-Reference Guide. (Can’t readily access your copy? MSC seems to have posted its manuals on the web – or the pirates have started masquerading as MSC.)

The article also shows why you should always setup a small problem first, to check your solution approach. There’s no other way to guard against keywords being interpreted the wrong way.

I’ve posted the article as a PDF – read it here.

Why not just insert the prose here? Because there’re quite a few figures, and I’ve used some fancy annotation that’s easier with a word-processor than with WordPress.

I thought of posting the Nastran data files (DBFs) but figured there’s not much point in doing so. You can copy the text from the PDF and paste them in your text-editor, can’t you? Let me know if you have trouble with that.

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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