Click here to view or download a 4-page pdf version (385kB) of the Cruncher, with the same stories.
Click
here
to view or download a 4-page pdf version (385kB) of the Cruncher,
with the same stories.
We plan to send out to our clients up to 6 newsletters per year by e-mail. The format of e-mailed newsletters will be compatible with most e-mail systems, and will not contain large amounts of HTML, bulky attachments, or other material likely to attract the attention of spam blockers or other e-mail restrictions. HRS eNews will be designed to allow you to quickly see if there is any material that might interest you, to show you the key points in the e-mail, and to allow you to follow up if you wish.
We recommend that people who use any of our products stay on the mailing list because it will be the preferred method to notify people of bug fixes, upgrades, hints and other information necessary to make full use of our products. However, you can opt out at any time.
Demonstrations Seminars Webinars Training
For the last few years we have travelled NZ several times per year running seminars to present our products to interested clients. We will continue to do this, but we will also implement technology that allows us to demonstrate software via the Internet. One way to do this is by “webinars”, where a group of people go to a web site that shows the product being demonstrated while at the same time they are on a conference telephone call that lets them hear and talk to the demonstrator. We will also be encouraging people to participate in something similar on a one-on-one basis. Send e-mail to products@hrs.co.nz to request a personal on-line demonstration of any of our products.
We have chosen a web conferencing service that does not require installation of software, and expect that most people will be able to use this method of product demonstration, despite restrictions on the use of their computers.
Seminars and webinars will only be announced in HRS eNews, the Cruncher, and on our Web site. Make sure we have your e-mail address and do not opt out of the HRS eNews if you want notification.
@RISK seminar Mathcad seminar STATISTICA seminar Survey Seminar More information
We will be presenting overviews of @RISK, Mathcad, STATISTICA and Survey software at our physical seminars in February. All four seminars will be held on one day, in Wellington (2 March) and Auckland (4 March). Details of these free seminars and a registration form are available at www.hrs.co.nz/seminars.aspx.
The Treasury and Transit NZ require the use of risk simulation on large proposals. This seminar is a discussion of the uses of @RISK and a demonstration of a manufacturing model. A must for anyone who is trying to estimate the cost of large projects.
Come and see why Opus and many other engineering companies are training their staff to use Mathcad. Organisations use Mathcad when it is important to create mathematical documents that they are sure are correct, when time to create the document is an issue, and when they want to be able to re-use their calculation documents on new jobs.
Many local organisations have moved from better-known products to the new STATISTICA.
This is because data analysis using statistical and graphical methods in STATISTICA is flexible and interactive. You can also build customised interfaces and macros to assist with routine analysis. Let us show you STATISTICA 7!
Small and large companies are using our software, to carry out both surveys on paper and Web surveys.We will show you two products – SurveyPro for paper surveys, and SurveySolutions for web surveys. It is much easier to do surveys with these products than it is to use the combination of products supplied in MS Office.
Go to our web page www.hrs.co.nz/seminars25.aspx.On that page you will find links to descriptions of each seminar, plus also links to short demonstration viewlets for each product. This is also where you can register for each seminar.
We will be presenting free Web-based demonstrations on Thursday 24th Feb - one to introduce STATISTICA and one to introduce Mathcad. The material will be similar to that in the physical seminars, but will be abbreviated. If you would rather attend a seminar by watching your computer screen while listening to your phone, then register now at www.hrs.co.nz/Webinars.aspx.
We are planning training for several products and techniques, starting in April. Topics will include:
Trainer: Donald Bailey and Associates, Location: 6-8 April 2005, Massey University Campus, WELLINGTON
Trainer: Dr. Ray Hoare, Location: 15 April 2005, AUT, AUCKLAND
Trainer: Associate Professor David Wilson, Location: 18 & 19 April 2005, AUT, AUCKLAND
Trainer: Helen Quekett, Location: 26 April 2005, AUT, AUCKLAND
Trainer: Kathy Boardman, Location: 14-15 July 2005, AUT, AUCKLAND
Get detailed information on the courses and register for them at www.hrs.co.nz/training.
Indian Ocean tsunamis are a long way from us, but engineers in NZ have been preparing for similar incidents here for many years.
One of the more interesting examples is the Te Papa museum, which was redesigned after a study by Dr A. Barnett using AULOS showed significant flooding danger from tsunamis at the museum site. As a result, the site ground level was raised, and all exhibition material is held only on the higher floors. See ://www.auloshydraulics.com/museum.html.
Use R with SDM STATISTICA for process control STATISTICA Data Miner Printing tip SAS files
Many people involved in data mining will have already developed their own applications, often using the R programming language. Examples exist in the area of bioinformatics, where there are many algorithms written in R and freely available. These applications can be used within the STATISTICA Data Miner environment as “custom nodes”, as explained in the following white paper. www.statsoft.com/support/whitepapers/pdf/STATISTICA_Integrating_R.pdf.
Businesses selling product on the world market must use SPC techniques to show their clients that they have the process variability under control. However, just having the Shewart charts is not enough – you must also have the tools to help you locate and fix sources of unexpected variation. SEWESS from StatSoft is an enterprise-strength tool to perform this sort of work. A case history from the USA is given here: www.statsoft.com/company/success_stories/pdf/casestudy_gp_sewss2.pdf.
STATISTICA Data Miner is a powerful and cost-effective product with many potential applications in NZ. We expect to make several sales in 2005, but the clients will take some time to get to the stage of being able to tell us their stories. In the mean time, here are links to two European examples of the use of SDM in the communications industry.
www.statsoft.com/company/success_stories/pdf/argonauten360.pdf
www.statsoft.com/company/success_stories/pdf/connex.pdf
Some people have found that when creating PDF files or printing STATISTICA graphs on Postscript print¬ers there is a problem with symbols or 3D text not printing properly. This can be fixed by going to the “Graphs1” tab on the “Options” menu, and ticking the checkbox “Do not use bitmap copy operations when printing”.
For a couple of years we have been having discussions with several major NZ organisations about using STATISTICA Data Miner, and one issue has always been the import of existing data. These discussions have taken a great leap forward now we have shown that STATISTICA 7 can read several SAS file formats.
The Survey System has introduced a new user interface, direct importing of questionnaires from Word, and new reporting and respondent management features in the CATI environment.
The new release of LINGO includes a wide range of solver enhancements that improve performance and robustness, as well as a number of new features that make expressing and solving models easier and more flexible.
See details of this leading optimisation program at
www.lindo.com/cgi/frameset.cgi?leftnews.html;newsltrf.html
With the LINDO API, you can plug the power of the LINDO solvers for linear, nonlinear (convex & nonconvex), quadratic, quadratically constrained, and integer problems right into customised applications that you have written.
The LINDO API can also be run as a MATLAB callable function, so that when using MATLAB’s modelling and programming environment, you can build and solve models and create custom algorithms based upon the LINDO API’s routines and solvers. Contact Darrel.
@RISK is a powerful risk analysis tool. ModelAssist is a self-contained training database with full navigation and search facilities, which guides the user in how to approach a risk issue, how to perform a technically correct risk analysis that provides real management insight, and how to present the findings.
With over 500 risk analysis topics, many videos, quizzes and over 140 example models, ModelAssist will help you to realise the full potential of your @RISK software, and to confidently develop accurate, defensible and useful risk analyses.
Contact Darrel to be sent a demo version, or to discuss purchase of the right number of copies for your organisation.
FLEXnet, formerly known as FlexLM, is the licence manager behind several of our products, such as MATLAB, Mathcad and now STATISTICA and @RISK. We don’t sell it separately, but we do end up supporting the use of it to clients with concurrent network licenses. Two of the features that are very useful are that you can “check out” individual licenses from a network for use on a laptop, and that you can reserve or partition licenses for particular groups of users.
There are various ways to find which people are using licences at any moment, so you can contact them to make way for a more urgent need. Contact support@hrs.co.nz if you want some of our ideas on this.
You can see the results of a set of benchmarks tests on Windows platforms at www.polyhedron.com/compare.html. Tests on Linux and other platforms are also available on the Polyhedron site. A simple conclusion is that Intel Fortran 8.1 is great for performance, but that Lahey Fortran is great for diagnostic messages. You can also download the benchmark suite from www.polyhedron.com/compare/polyhedron_benchmark_suite.html.
Delphi 2005 combines the familiar power of Delphi with more productivity-enhancing features for designing Web, database, and rich-client applications.
It has support for both C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework, while the rapid application development environment has Win32 support for GUI, Web, database, modelling and ALM.
For a detailed review go to www.devsource.ziffdavis.com/article2/0,1759,1734365,00.asp
Red sprites Distributed computing SimDriveline Video/Image BS RF design FEMLAB demo
Red sprites are seen as luminous streaks above thunderstorms, and are associated with lighting flashes.
Richard
Dowden’s studies on these streaks (started at Otago University)
have led him to set up a system to locate and record lightning
flashes around the world. Universities who participate in the WWLLN
program get lightning stroke locations on monthly CDs which include
code written in MATLAB for extracting location data for any region
and for any time window they choose. However, most of the lightning,
and so many of the sensor hosts, are in the tropics, and many of the
universities in that region do not have access to MATLAB.
Professor Dowden tells us that these institutions will now greatly benefit from a standalone application he is creating by applying the MATLAB compiler to the MATLAB source code. He also noted “I am impressed that the new lightning analysis code in MATLAB, despite being much more sophisticated than the old code in C, is just as fast.”
For more information on the lightning program go to http://flash.ess.washington.edu/newwebpage.html.
The Distributed Computing Toolbox enables you to execute coarse-grained MATLAB algorithms and Simulink models in a cluster of computers. You can prototype and develop applications in the MATLAB environment and then use the Distributed Computing Toolbox to divide them into independent tasks. The MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine (available separately) evaluates these tasks on remote MATLAB sessions. A typical job might be divided into tasks that operate on unrelated data sets or individual sections of very large data sets, greatly speeding up your data-intensive applications.
SimDriveline extends Simulink with tools for modelling and simulating the mechanics of driveline (drivetrain) systems. These tools include components (such as gears, rotating shafts, and clutches), standard transmission templates and engine and tyre models.
The Video and Image Processing Blockset extends Simulink with a rich, customisable framework for the rapid design, simulation, implementation, and verification of video and image processing algorithms and systems.
The RF Toolbox extends the MATLAB technical computing environment with functions and a graphical user interface (GUI) for working with, analysing, and visualising the behaviour of radio frequency (RF) components. The toolbox lets you specify RF components such as filters, transmission lines, amplifiers, and mixers by their network parameters and physical properties.
The RF Blockset extends Simulink with a library of blocks to model the behaviour of radio frequency (RF) filters, transmission lines, amplifiers, and mixers.
Would you like to apply MATLAB to electromagnetics, fluid mechanics, structural dynamics, heat transfer or earth sciences, but do not know how to handle PDE’s? The FEMLAB third party MATLAB toolbox (www.femlab.com ) makes this easy.
HRS, in collaboration with Technic, the Australasian distributors of FEMLAB, are preparing a University Road Show to demonstrate MATLAB’s latest features and how to extend its functionality with FEMLAB. Please contact femlab@hrs.co.nz if you are interested and we will send you the details when we finalise the dates.
The most apparent changes in this new version are the improved connectivity between Chem3D and ChemDraw. A review at www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/comment/free/CW00410R066d.htm concluded “Overall, ChemOffice 2005 is a vast improvement on an already excellent software suite. If you are looking for an integrated system to improve the quality of structural and chemical analysis, data handling and storage then ChemOffice Ultra is second to none.”
The Carbohydrate Chemistry Team at Industrial Research Limited recently upgraded to a 40-user license of ChemOffice Ultra 2005, in order to facilitate sharing of chemical information among their staff. See what they do at www.irl.cri.nz/carbo
Version 5.1 adds a host of new capabilities, especially for working with large-scale, diverse types of data. Complementing these new capabilities are enhancements to Mathematica’s unique Automatic Algorithm Selection - the inherent intelligence that automatically applies the best algorithm to each task. There are more than 50 new functions, toolkits, and performance improvements in Mathematica 5.1.
For details, go to www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/newin51/.
This review is explicitly from the viewpoint of an OR professional, but it was so well written that others may find it of use. www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-12-04/swr.html. It is especially explicit when dealing with accessing Web services, building graphical user interfaces and accessing databases and spreadsheets.
Concurrent licenses are great value for products where you have many people who only use the software occasionally. A 5-user concurrent license can often support 20 or more users quite comfortably.
However, what if you only have 5 people in your office who would use the product? After a great deal of pressure from non-American distributors of Mathcad, Mathsoft have acknowledged the existence of relatively small industries in much of the world and now allow as few as one concurrent user instead of their previous minimum of 5 concurrent users.
We encourage people to start with a small number of licenses and then expand the number as the usage grows.
Our
new support person is Glenn Tootill, pictured. He replaces David
Schurmann. We wish David well, and are sure our customers will find
that Glenn is an able replacement.
We encourage everyone to use our technical support services, because often you will only get the most out of the software by letting us get beside you. E-mail to support@hrs.co.nz to contact Glenn.
David is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrotechnology at Auckland University of Technology and before joining AUT was a senior lecturer for over a decade at Karlstad University in Sweden, working on control and modelling of pulp digesters, paper board machines, and CMC production.
He is keen to see NZ engineers use products from The MathWorks to apply advanced methods of design and simulation, particularly in the industrial control environment, and is working with HRS to provide public training courses on these topics.
David can also provide basic or advanced training in control system design or simulation in your own premises. Contact marc@hrs.co.nz to discuss your needs.