The Nastran manuals are remarkably well written, for the most part, but the nomenclature is often simply wild. And this makes it that much harder to follow the thread. Finite Elements is hard enough as it is!

A struggle – helped somewhat by many internet searches – to figure out how to enforce a displacement at the base of a structure (to simulate vibration testing) is the genesis of the brief tutorial that you can find (in PDF form) here. The notes outline enforced-displacement, enforced-acceleration and enforced-velocity – using the more “modern” method that consigns the large-mass method to the dustbin.

For some background on the theory, read Dr.Meher Prasad’s presentations (they’re at slideshare, here).

The effort to verify the solution is on, currently. I’ll update this post (or add another) after that’s done. Until then, view the results with some scepticism – as you must view the results of any simulation.

The tutorial’s been done using Hypermesh, and works with Radioss/Linear too since it uses the Nastran syntax

“I prefer a not-so-attractive car that sells well than an attractive car that sells less. People who are buying Logan are looking for a family car with lots of space and not necessarily for racing. However we take feedback from customers. Second generation of Logan would address concerns.”

Sounds to me as if Ghosn was saying the Logan is aesthetically challenged in the first place, and under-powered in the second. Describing it as a family-car (an unfortunate phrase that reminds me of that favorite malapropism of matrimonial ads – “homely looks”) only seems to take him one one step further down the road to calling it a weak pig, then smearing cheap lipstick over it.

To make things worse, they don’t seem to have been watching the market’s feedback closely enough. See the comments here. These date back to Nov 2008. And if this article in the Business Line 8 months later is accurate, it looks like whoops, back to the drawing board.

A designer once wrote:

Engineers tend to think of design as something added to a product. Less of it, surely, would reduce the cost of an entry-level vehicle.

That was Jerry Hirshberg, who went on to point out that design adds to the product’s value, not to it’s cost.

Yes, he was from Nissan. The key word is “was”. He retired in 2001.

Read this article for a little more about JH. The last para is plain marvellous:

I am not someone who is elitist about the design process or about design. We are all born creative. We reach our peak at age five. Then education and the workplace get a hold of us. And the people there inadvertently kill it–and do so while talking about how important creativity is.

Interested in industrial design and how designers worked at the Z cars? Check out the interview with Ajay Panchal and Diane Allen here, and some background on the heritage here.

For the man who green-signalled Hirshberg’s Z-car design scheme, Ghosn has come a long, long way. What price the gap between Allen’s “We didn’t want the car to be seen as cute, friendly or just handsome. The new Z needed to have somewhat of a sinister quality. ” and Ghosn’s “Family Car“?

Ghosn’s famous “frugal engineering” line itself, by the way, is nicely analyzed in this blog-post.

The Principles of Management course taught to us in our undergraduate engineering curriculum was woefully short of context. Examples like the Dreamliner mess should be a gift from god to teachers trying to emphasise these principles to aspiring geeks.

It’s widely documented – see it here, here and here.

It’’s the last that has a particularly arresting telling paragraph:

The company’s chief, W. James McNerney Jr., concedes that Boeing lost control of the process by farming out more design and production work than ever and not keeping close tabs on suppliers. He says the company is retaking control.

And even more educating:

“The idea was to get the risk off their books and get other people to do the heavy lifting for them,” Mr. Aboulafia said. “But the flaw was that led to a kind of ‘engineering light’ approach, and the problems on the 787 can be traced to that.”

“Engineering light” In an aircraft? That’s going to take some explaining to the students. And with an estimated 10 Billion Dollar overrun that’s some education.

The figure is from the article, whose author can be forgiven for rounding off accounting sums to a nice, resounding figure. You can read some  more gloom-and-doom on costs here, but there’s no arguing that Ten Billion Dollars has a nice weighty sound to it.

And Michael Crichton’s Airframe looks even more appealing as a must-read textbook for engineering students of courses like “Principles of Management”.

The U.S. could therefore achieve a far greater energy subsidy by outsourcing production to the massive potential labour forces of Asia, than by trying to achieve productivity growth on its own.

Much of the logic in the book is compelling, though it’s principally about credit-crunches and not about the costs or benefits of outsourcing.

There are human costs, of course, to this urge to reap greater “energy subsidies” as related in this article in the New York Times. The heartbreak is that much harder to stomach when you read about the current Dreamliner mess. More about that in another post, but check out Andy Lees’ book linked above. It’s been a hard read for this engineer, but well worth it.

Since it’s not accessible on the internet as far as I can tell, the document itself is mirrored here (and will be removed if it’s a copyright violation, so please let me know if you own the copyright).

Do read it. Not only are the illustrations excellent, so are the diagnosis and the end product.

Requirements Analysis

The Cube

Engineering education is among the key enablers of growth for transforming India’s economy. The quality of teaching and research in this sphere will play a critical role in the emergence of our country as a global knowledge leader. It will also provide vital inputs for enhancing productivity across sectors. In the past two decades, we have seen an eight-fold increase in the number of institutions imparting engineering education at the undergraduate level. Yet, there are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed.

But a little further down, he aims his ire at that old whipping horse – the curriculum. “Several recent studies“, he writes, “have flagged the problem of unemployability of engineering graduates, largely because curriculum and syllabi are not quite compatible with industry requirements.”

Methinks the industry doth protest too much.

Don’t forget that this is the same industry which told us that the dawn of the knowledge era means that it’s not what you know, but how fast you can learn. Either the industry was wrong, or it’s trying to shoot the wrong dawg. And since I haven’t heard much in terms of U-turns from the knowledge-industry votaries, it does look like this is a case for PETA.

Also, don’t forget that things in engineering’s Sad Cafe change very slowly if they ever change at all. Galerkin goes all the way back to the century before last, and even Harrington and Horowitz & Sahni go back several decades. Timoshenko’s books wouldn’t be classics if they were obsolete already, would they? We can go on and on in this vein, but that’s another argument for another day.

Coming back to the Knowledge Commission’s letter, I disagree with all the 9 recommendations they make. Sure, they’re all correct, but fixing them won’t fix the problem. Students follow the quality law, which, if stated explicitly anywhere, would be on the lines of the Law of Minimum Potential Energy.  Most degrees are earned in order to get a job. So until the industry votes with its wallet and shows a clear economic benefit to a better quality of education – which involves more effort on the part of the student, the teacher, the managers, etc. etc. – why on earth would anyone in his or her right mind pay the price?

For instance, the software industry pays good bucks for things like CMMI-certification. Why? Because the buyers speak loudly and carry a big stick.

“We believe“, ends the letter, “that the changes and reforms proposed in this letter are necessary to bring about a qualitative transformation in engineering education to meet present and future needs. We look forward to being engaged in consultations for their speedy implementation.”

I’ll wait and watch. But I won’t hold my breath.

Be that as it may, Mary Eisenhart’s article – read it here – was written exactly 2 years before I happened on it, which has to be an unexplained coincidence.

Discussing the “sad state of music education” she recounts David Wish’s approach to teaching. He gives the kids what they want, turning it later into what he thinks they need. The success of this method is a little intriguing since it’s used at a child-education level. Using the instant-gratification-to-motivate is a fairly well accepted approach in adult education, but most theorists frown on treating kids the same way. The usual mantra is to get them to learn-it-right, probably based on the principle that unlike adults, the little nippers have no alternative.

The article / interview is well written, and there’s a lot in it that a teacher can learn to successfully show that La VIda Luca is not so Luca, given the sad state of so many other fields of education.

Not least this nugget:

I took it on myself to start giving guitar lessons to the kids in my 1^st and 2^nd grade classes. That was the sum total of my aspiration: I felt it could be done, I felt it should be done, and it was something I could do.

Well written, sensible and stirring.

This is an interesting way to look at things.

Employer inflexibility relates to the level of skills they want, the price they’re willing to pay for it and their tolerance of variations from that expected level. Sample this extract:

“Whenever employers want a more vulnerable workforce, they declare a labor shortage,” says Ana Avendaño, chief counsel and director of the immigration worker program for the AFL-CIO. She has a point.“

Indeed, she does. And “higher pay“, Coy points out, “is no panacea“. And rather than leave it at that, he takes some time to draw out a line of argument.

Employee inflexibility relates principally to a reluctance to learn new skills, a reluctance to relocate.

I can sympathize with the employees on this one. I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of intransigent idiots masquerading as engineers, so it’s not like I’m soft at heart. It’s just that I think that some truths are self-evident. First, that it can be terrible to work at something you hate. How, in all seriousness, can you expect a 40-something machine tool operator to switch to becoming a part of the health-care support system simply because this line is less likely to be “outsourced”? Second, it can be hell to learn new skills, knowing all the while that the skill you’re learning may depreciate faster than you acquire it.

I can do worse than quote Vijay Nambisan on this (though his context was slightly different – read about it here).  Describing the attitudes of the more-successful few who are convinced the “lazy” many need to be kicked, he writes

“Those who said it were, of course, the ones supposed to do the kicking. I never heard any of the kickers volunteer: ‘Kick me, I want to get on in life’“

You really should see the movie to appreciate the level of detail that’re in the article by J.P.Huffman, but even if you haven’t, this article is a must-read for aspiring designers. Particularly for those working with CAD, and able to build and modify compute models with ease.

You could dislike Bill Gates for more than just the fact that he’s richer than you, but you have to admit he’s not afraid to put his money where his mouth is. Watch the video here, or read the transcript here. I recommend the latter, since you can skip over the initial part faster than on the video. The point I liked about his talk comes when he asks “How do you make a teacher great?“. I’ll skip his statistics, which I have little faith in since I’ve read too many books on law in action, and cite the one item that caught my attention. Roughly 2/3rds of the way down the page, he says

“Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.“

Seems a lot easier for students to appreciate that last statement than for administrators who seem intent – at least in India – on insisting that even that Master’s degree is inadequate, insisting on a Ph.D. Anyone who thinks differently is, of course, a dummy. They could learn a lot, as they say, from a dummy.  More so if the dummy’s called Bill Gates.

And to go back to the initial question of salary and performance, you don’t need to pay anything for my answer: Those who can teach will. So no, a higher salary won’t get you a better teacher, but it will make it easier for that teacher to teach.

]]> http://www.kfourmetrics.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=388 0