Transport Phenomena Archive: Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How can I contribute to the Transport Phenomena Archive?
A: You should start by just sending editable material (usually LaTeX or Word files) to Adam Powell, along with copyright and license information, short description, keywords, and if a problem/exercise, then include difficulty (appropriate undergraduate year), and time required to solve it. If you send a collection of problems, he will separate them to create separate entries. If you don't give descriptions, difficulty, time required or keywords, Adam will assign them.
Q: What file formats do you use, and where can I get viewers for them?
A: Printable formats are in PostScript and PDF, with sources from LaTeX to OpenDocument to Microsoft Word. PostScript files can be viewed using Ghostview and GSView, the latter of which can be downloaded as a self-extracting archive for Windows, and requires a second download of Ghostscript. LaTeX originals often use Unix line breaks, which are just line feeds (LF); DOS/Windows uses CR-LF, and Mac just CR, so some text editors may not break lines properly (e.g. Notepad gets it wrong, Word gets it right). When sources involve multiple files, they are given both in directories and .zip archives. Metadata are currently in plain text files including at least a title, author, copyright, license, and filenames and MD5 sums for source and printable data forms; metadata files are signed by the author using clearsign. Metadata for problems/exercises are considerably more extensive than this, as described in that section.
Q: Why are you putting the solutions to problems/exercises on the Archive, where students can see them?
A: Though everything presently on the Archive is open for anyone to download, we are planning a password-protected solutions area. In the meantime, the problems/exercises here are mostly taken from Adam Powell's MIT subjects Transport Phenomena in Materials Engineering and Materials Processing, whose materials including problems and solutions have been on the web since he was a TA back in 1994. Thus, they are already widely available, and this doesn't change that. Even if they were not on the web, MIT students collect and hand down old notes, problem sets and tests, so taking them off of this archive would only disadvantage those without such access. Besides, this is an electronic resource; you can be sure that if we don't post solutions here, someone else will post them elsewhere, distracting people from this resource and defeating the purpose anyway. Of course, this does mean that you should not use these materials to make your exams, unless they're of the type "Your exam will have some subset of these thirty problems, so if you learn them all very well, you'll get an A..."
