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From: roberson@ibd.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca (Walter Roberson)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: Matlab Help needed that will allow you to compute the flow..
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:42:07 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: National Research Council Canada - Conseil national de rechereches Canada
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In article <1027578.1208548742294.JavaMail.jakarta@nitrogen.mathforum.org>,
uaeXuae  <range.ss@hotmail.com> wrote:
>The reason for me not to type a thing or an equation here is that if
>my class mates use google to do a search with differnt keywords
>everytime they will finally click and the google search pages will lead
>them up to here. The same solution as mines. We will all end up with a
>"0" Grade. Thats why im using picture in all threads that i have
>started. I hope im making sense.

That does make a bit of sense, in a way, but it does not happen to
take into account the nature of newsgroups such as this one.

Conversations in newsgroups such as this one are public, deliberately so.
We do not provide assistance just to the one person who happens to ask
the question: we write "for the record", knowing that the messages
will be archived and available for the edification of anyone else who
seeks out and reads the messages.

Our purposes here are not targeted at helping out individual students
with their assignments:  our primary purpose is to help as many people
as practical learn -- and that word really is *learn*. Sometimes
teaching consists of giving answers directly, and sometimes teaching
consists of refraining from giving answers directly, instead
guiding the questioner on how to uncover the answers for themselves.

For many of us, our purposes here are guided by the spirit of
scientific cooperation, the -sharing- of information and skills for
the advancement of knowledge; our answers are "open answers" for the
benefit of as many as can find them useful, and deliberately
restricting our answers to be of benefit to one person only would be
in stark opposition to the reasons why we volunteer our time, knowledge,
and intelligence.


When it comes to particular assignments: to the extent that we teach
how to -do- the work and do not actually do the work itself, there is
no conflict: if your classmates learn -how- to do the work by reading
the exchanges here but still have to do the work itself, then the
resulting programs will be different. Do not be too concerned that the
general methods will look too much the same in such cases: there are
only a relatively small number of efficient general methods to solve
the kinds of problems you have been posting, so the course markers will
be expecting to see the same broad outlines but different details.

In light of this, the effect of posting images of the questions rather
than the questions themselves, will only have the effect of obscuring
to your classmates that a discussion is taking place here. It is
anti-thetical to our purposes to obscure the dissemination of knowledge.
If one of your classmates finds their way here and learns from what
has been previously discussed, then as far most of us
are concerned, that will have been a *success* for the newsgroup's
teaching purposes. Do not expect us to take any particular care to
avoid using any particular words that might attract the notice
of your classmates.


You should thus consider that the primary risk to you is if you post
your code and that others might copy it. There are techniques to reduce
that risk. One of the most valuable of those techniques is not to post
assignments at all, and instead to ask us questions about the *MATLAB*
part of your work.

Questions such as "how would I sum a number of computed terms?" can be
answered with basic Matlab code applicable to any of a number of
programs. This newsgroup is, after all, not intended as a newsgroup in
which to study thermodynamics or fluid mechanics or the like: our
assumption is that if you do not understand the field of study you are
undertaking, that you will seek out sources and forums appropriate to
that field of study, and that you will post here when it comes to
matters of applying MATLAB to the methods you have already worked out.

If you encounter an error message you do not understand, it -usually-
suffices to post the complete text of the error message and a few lines
of context. If we are unable to figure it out from the sample,
then if you have posted enough to demonstrate that you are learning
and are not "asking for a hand-out", then it is considered acceptable
to post saying something like, "Sorry, this is part of a class assignment
that I am working on, and I cannot post the code because of concerns
over classmates potentially copying it; is there anyone who would
be willing to look at the code privately, via email, and see if they
can spot the error?" 
-- 
  "And believe me, I was very lousy yesterday.
   I had nothing to say, and, by God, I said it."
                                          -- Walter Wellesley Smith