Hi all,
[Warning: The writing is long, as is usually the case with my posts :)]
It all began with a paper that I proposed for an upcoming conference in India. The extended abstract got accepted, of course, but my work is still in progress, and today I am not sure if I can meet the deadline. So, I may perhaps withdraw it, and then submit a longer version of it to a journal, later.
As a consultant in computational mechanics, I currently help write some FEM-related code, and while doing this job, an episode from a recent past came to my mind. Let me go right on to the technical issue, keeping aside the (not so good) particulars of that episode. (In case you are curious: it happened outside of my current job, during a job interview.)
If you are a design engineer, FE analyst, researcher, or any professional dealing with stress analysis in your work, I seek answers to a couple of questions from you:
Question 1: