How to decide on attending a conference (or not)?

Time to time, we receive announcements of conferences. That includes a statement such as: "abstracts are due DATE XXX, join this wonderful meeting of the top of the community". Wordings may change, but the content is the same --as in real life clothes & cars may change, however the spirit stays the same.

Well, if you are interested in the content of the conference, you probably would like to consider attending, be it by writing to it, or by just examining.

Graduate students like conferences for only one thing: free food & drinks. (I know, that makes two, but still, the destination is the same: the stomach.) This is a neverending joke of phdcomics.com.

Let's come back to the serious question of whether to join a conference or not. Several times I have examined the announcement of a conference, to see "what it is all about". And I found out that many of the conferences I encounter are start-ups. Which means, the content of the conference is just a blur picture. And the result is strictly dependent on the cumulative chance of the attendants. It can be successful, with lots of good critics/comments to your work, or it can be a show-off where people are there solely for commercial marketing.

Therefore, it is very important that people do consider whether to START a new series of conferences or not. Because, the new conferences are sharing the supplies (papers, scientists) of the existing ones. And thus, the organizer should firstly, think of joining powers to an existing conference.

Take aerodynamics for example. There must be trillions of conferences on aerodynamics. So, assume I work on low reynolds number flows. Here's a bunch of questions that comes to my mind at first instant:
Can i see all of these conferences? (NO!)
Which one is best for me? (DUNNO)
What is the best way to find a conference where I can be in a real good network of scientists? (CHANCE!).

Unfortunately, the only advice from this short blog can be that the potential attendant should try to find out the detailed program (better the abstracts of submitted papers), the list of participants, and then see if it suits with his research or not.

A new conference might be a chance to take part in a new foundation, and I would highly encourage that attendance, if the topic is not a generic one, and if the conference is not a fax-copy of an existing one. If it's something totally new (e.g. "intergalactic travel accidents, how to avoid"), then it's a must to be there. Nobody would like to miss the chance to listen to Feynman's 1969 speech on micro machines.

Yeah, right. I finish here. Still not satisfied? Flip the coin!

Helicopter dynamics: how fun can it be?

I've been jungling with MATLAB for the helicopter dynamics course...

En route, I've learned a lot. Especially at some point, I learned how little I knew (cite Descartes, respectfully, here) about dynamic system solving.

I was confused about how I could solve a system, with 8 state variables and 4 control variables. And the simple and clever idea of re-forming the system matices, didn't show up. Instead, I went for the brutal way of solving the equation using a cost-function minimizer method. (do not give the name of the method, be spicy, be mysterious)

En fin, finally, at the end, I could get to the results, however it took quite some efforts. But the solution is possibly one of it's kind, unique.

Now, leave the solution of the system aside, I'm looking forward to interfacing my game-pad with MATLAB, to watch my simple helicopter fly. With a simple 1st order finite-difference scheme I'm able to walk in time. And my code is fast enough to give realistic outputs.

Regards tout le monde!

Backward Facing Step visualization using Rubber Dust

These days I'm working on the CFD of backward facing step. And suddenly, while I was in class, I remembered a game I have been playing since 4th grade at primary school.

I knew that by blowing I could blow away the rubber dust, as long as I've known myself. But one day I had realized that, when I blew air over a think notebook, the rubber dust on it would fly away, whereas the rubber dust just behind the notebook would come towards me not away!

I've been examining this "weird phenomenon" whenever I was to blow rubber dust or automatic pencil leads...

Lovely thing, that now I can understand it's because of the circulation behind the backward facing step. And the game I've played for that long is just a simple way of visualizing flow structures, wall-shear in this case.

Curiosity

I wonder, how much of scientific works are done for the sake of curiosity, and what proportion of scientific research is simply pragmatic and how much is done for academic promotion. Any ideas? Drop a comment.

Zen Navigation

This is a text I copied from a fantastic product of Joke.

see: http://ai.ia.ac.cn/alife.santafe.edu/%7Ejoke/encore/www/puzzle.htm

ZEN NAVIGATION:

A methodology with a tremendous propensity to get lost during a hike from A to B. Zen Navigation simply consists of finding something that looks as if it knows where it is going, and following it. The results are often more surprising than successful, but its usually worth using for the sake of the few occasions when it is both.
Sometimes Zen Navigation is referred to as "doing scientific research," where A is a state of mind considered as being pre-PhD, and B is a (usually a different) state of mind, known as post- PhD. Your time spent in state C, somewhere inbetween A and B, is usually referred to as "being a nobody."

Science develops on leaps of lazy frogs!

Don't say that! Don't tell me that you never thought of this, or that this never happened to you. Sometimes, progress does not come out of hard-work but a short period of over-concentration or even by chance!

Take my thesis work. I had done a certain calculation for a few parameters. Then, I slept on it for a long while. And one day, I just returned to my calculations and started doing several calculations and graphing them. With this kind of manual work, I could work on optimizing the set of parameters.

However, by some chance, I came across a nice Genetic Algorithm tool on the Internet. Having downloaded it, I played it late at night, and found an optimum set of parameters. In this paragraph, we see that there's chance, and there's focusing for a short period of time on one thing.

Surely, these sorts of things happened to all of you. But how about a duét?

Me and my friend had been talking for a very long time (like 6 months) on using an optimization package to optimize the parameters. And we had taken no steps (there are reasons for that). But, today, while I was telling him the late-night focus session of the Genetic Algorithm, we started working on the Optimization package. It took around 1 and a half hour to work it out.

As a conclusion, within 12 hours I have already applied two different methodologies using two calculation environments (MS Excel and Matlab, namely).

What's the result? Now, my thesis has new pages and results to be included.

Now I can sing the song:

I am a lazy frog
With one tiny song
leaping leaping leaping long
I am a lazy frooooooooooog.

Meaningful representation of a big domain

Well, supercomputers allow crunching tons of numbers and modelling the nature. Of that much required and processed data, not every bit is useful to the applicator, be it an engineer or a scientist. Therefore, postprocessing can be seen as an act, which resembles preparing a “wishable” mixture (e.g. say a sandwich) from the ingredients available at a big supermarket.

 

I like sandwiches, and to share my sandwich, i should not be obliged to carry a whole supermarket with me. As an ordinary daily user of computational engineering products, I was very excited when I saw a new feature which allows sharing 3D images of the solution (or problem) that is being worked on. Congratulations go to ANSYS CFX, and the creators of the feature.

 

Science needs innovation, and some fun.