Presswatch / Honeymooning at Williamsburg

...In Media terms, the point to remember here is that reporters demand harmony among allies...

...Assessing how well a President does in these meetings is something less of an exact science than reading entrails...

...After all, bickering isn't exactly in the best interests of any of the leaders...

...He attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate and received his graduate degrees from the same institution in the field of aerospace engineering...

...Reagan had written informal letters-you know, "Dear Francois" -to the other leaders, "bypassing the corps of diplomats and economic specialists that normally prepare the annual gatherings...

...Reporters had laughed derisively when they tried that at Versailles.Nor did they attempt to quash every evidence of dissent from the President's viewpoint...

...Avoiding what some of his advisers acknowledged could have been 'a disaster,' President Reagan impressed the other western leaders at the ninth economic summit here with his careful preparation and determination to come away with a statement of support for his approach to nuclear arms control...

...Jim Bennett and Mark Botkin have succeeded in integrating the process from description of the model through convergence to the optimum solution...

...The task then shifts to an "evalua-tor" who creates a mathematical model with which to test the design on another computer system...

...The researchers responded to this challenge by developing a geometric format based on a parametric description of the boundary...

...It is largely guesswork...

...The TV networks were unusually kind to Reagan, too...

...This optimization technique is based upon a sequential first-order Taylor series approximation of the 'Constraints and a feasible directions solution of the problem...

...Network honchos complained when Nancy Reagan showed up last spring at a mini-press conference to give a birthday cake to her husband...

...PRESSWATCH HONEYMOONING AT WILLIAMSBURG by Fred Barnes Not to belittle President Reagan's performance last month at the economic summit in Williamsburg, Virginia, but the nearly unanimous praise that he received in the press was as much the result of shrewd White House schmoozing of reporters as it was of painstakingly objective assessment by the assembled American journalists of his dealings with the leaders of the six other industrialized democracies...

...Reporters in Washington, like cuckolded husbands the last to know, started to sense that the President might be rolling toward re-election...

...Basically, the stars were in the right alignment for a reasonably tranquil Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...

...Even Franfiois Mitterrand, the troubled French president who first blamed the American recession for his country's economic decline and now blames the American recovery, didn't want to be too noisy in his dissents this time...

...He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Missouri at Rolla...

...The economic summit of 1982 in Versailles had been rancorous-real issues were thrashed out and disagreed on-and this meant that the session this year was likely to be relatively harmonious...

...A lengthy interaction between the designer and the evaluator is required to optimize the design...

...Amid the Williamsburg plaudits and new respect for his political skills, there lurks a problem for Reagan...

...By the next day, the Post had changed its tune...

...One of the nicest touches devised by the White House was to have Reagan meet privately, meaning without aides, with his six colleagues and take notes on the session...

...Shift back to the White House gang now...

...Wisely, Reagan aides didn't characterize his every action and utterance as heroic...

...In the last two decades, extensive research has been done in the area of computer design of structural components...

...Two days before the summit began, Hedrick Smith of the New York Times wrote that "President Reagan has given the gathering his personal stamp, taking on an unusually ambitious role as host, chairman, moderator, notetaker and reporter on the proceedings...

...After...

...a President can get along swimmingly with everyone, and especially the Soviets, if he knuckles under at every opportunity...

...Then, Kaiser sought to shoot down this idea, only in doing so he laid out rather compel-lingly the evidence buttressing the Reagan-wins-agaih talk...

...I think he [Reagan] is turning it around," McGovern told Watson...

...By taking an integrated approach," says Dr...

...As two Carter Administration officials, Ben W. Heineman, Jr...

...summit, whether Reagan was impressive in his contacts with the other six leaders or not...

...Back-to-back summits marked by discord help nobody, except maybe the Soviets...

...Because the boundary geometric description must be transformed into an analysis model not once but several times, some type of automatic finite element mesh generation is required...

...The culmination of the process introduces an optimization routine which directs the design toward a minimum mass configuration...

...Not bad for a Memorial Day weekend's work...

...Bot-kin, "that in the future this technique will become the standard way of designing structural components...

...Typically, a "designer" uses one computer system to produce engineering drawings of a given part...

...His Ph.D...

...I have always dated the end of the honeymoon period between President Jimmy Carter and the Washington press corps from that day in May 1977 when the Soviets responded loudly and negatively to his proposal for deep cuts in strategic nuclear weapons...

...The Washington Post overplayed the news that Reagan had failed to THE MEN BEHIND THE WORK Drs...

...This, of course, was aimed at doing battle with the notion of Reagan as a detached, aloof, basically out-of-it President, a notion popular with White House and diplomatic reporters...

...wards, the seven came and walked down Duke of Gloucester Street, a lovely bit for television that benefited the British prime minister the most...

...Not mighty damn often...

...The truth may be otherwise, say, that while the meeting went smoothly, the other six leaders found Reagan to be a lightweight and a lousy notetaker...

...Before coming to General Motors in 1973, he taught aeronautical and astronautical engineering at the University of Illinois...

...The combination of boundary data description and automatic mesh generation permits the system to accommodate major changes in shape from the initial design...

...If some disagreement doesn't pop up when two or more leaders are gathered together, reporters figure that they are being bamboozled...

...The sizes of the elements of the mesh are determined by a characteristic length selected for each problem and are related to the need for accurately describing the geometry...

...This guy can't get along with the Soviets, the press concluded, which led to the more sweeping conclusion that Carter didn't have the foggiest idea what he was doing...

...Most of this work has focused on individual aspects of the process...

...Think back, for instance, to President Gerald Ford's appearance in his kitchen to toast a muffin for breakfast-as a platoon of photographers recorded the scene of thoughtful husbandhood...

...Of course, this doesn't stop the press from arriving, on the basis of the skimpiest sort of evidence, at the broadest generalities and judgments...

...and Curtis A. Hessler, noted in their book, Memorandum for the President: "Although the media have traditionally been independent and critical of government, media attitudes now are unrelentingly adversarial...

...In an ongoing research project at the General Motors Research Laboratories, a system has been developed that automatically ensures that the design meets structural performance constraints...

...Optimal Shape Generation automatically optimizes the component shape in a single computer run...

...a nap...

...Not mighty damn often...

...The issues aren't too divisive, the resolutions are noncon-troversial, the public statements by the participants are upbeat, the private briefings are less so, but still no one assails the President-hence, he did a marvelous job and the summit was a breathtaking success...

...Prior to joining General Motors in 1978, he worked for four years as a consultant to computer applications engineers...

...What, no time-out for polynomial interpolation...

...Increasing darkness indicates increasing stress levels within the design limits...

...It doesn't happen often, despite the inflated sense that some presidential aides have of their ability to influence the media...

...The former approach has been taken, because it can be implemented automatically and does not require the formulation of new finite elements...

...Given the likelihood of good relations at Williamsburg, all the White House needed to do was go with the flow...

...Enormous their ability isn't...

...The press would conclude, though, as it did at Versailles, that the President flopped and the summit failed...

...in fact, they often demand it among adversaries...

...An judging how well the White House did in furthering favorable coverage, two myths must be dropped...

...In any case, this was hardly egregious news management...

...Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post went so far as to posit that "the conventional wisdom" had become that reelection was inevitable...

...Bennett, "we're able to combine the objectives of reducing the mass of the material and meeting structural performance requirements in a single automatic system...

...ADEQUACY of the triangular .meshes to calculate accurate stress levels was next addressed by the development of an adaptive mesh refinement scheme...

...Not so...

...Clark planned and Deaver leaked...

...The second myth is that reporters really know what's going on at,events like economic summits...

...If the election were held today, he'd win in a walk...

...Botkrn is a Staff Research Engineer...

...It's hard to imagine much of substance being accomplished in a meeting like that, but there's nothing wrong with a friendly chat...

...One is that Presidents and staffs manipulate the press and manage the news...

...So how did they succeed this time...

...thesis concerned non-linear vibrations...

...His graduate work was in the field of civil engineering, and his doctoral thesis concerned structural optimization...

...If the press begins to report that he's a shoo-in in 1984, that should make Reagan and his underlings wonder...

...COMPUTER-AIDED design sys-terns automate the processes of generating geometric data and engineering drawings of parts, but they do not determine whether these parts meet structural performance requirements...

...they couldn't have achieved that anyway...

...And as choreographed by William P. Clark, the national security adviser, and Michael K. Deaver, the deputy White House chief of staff, that is what happened...

...But life and journalism don't always make sense...

...But if a little emerges-at Williamsburg, it was pious talk by Mitterrand and others about the awfulness of American deficits-the press is reassured and able to swallow the dominant theme of harmony...

...Or perhaps the issues were thorny, the resolutions controversial, the statements and briefings none too sweet-sounding...

...The system can generate the mathematical model from the design data as the shape changes without requiring additional input, thereby turning the process from a multi-person, multimachine operation into a one-person, one-machine operation...

...The researchers adapted a mesh generation technique which divides a closed region into triangular elements based on a discrete description of the boundary...

...Bennett holds the title of Assistant Department Head...

...By evaluating the solution for the uniform mesh created by the choice of characteristic length and identifying areas where the strain energy density changes rapidly, the system selects the areas of the mesh that require mesh refinement...

...A mathematical optimization technique is used to change the design to that shape giving minimum mass within the structural constraints...

...Automatic triangulation is used to create a set of connectivities for the discrete points placed uniformly throughout the part's interior with approximately the same density as the boundary points...

...They'd love to do this if they could, and there are times in the honeymoon days of a fresh presidency when it is possible...

...The evaluator determines only whether or not the design meets the requirements...

...Defining the problem with geometric data is desirable because it describes the shape of the part in a the best out of a tough situation...

...But all the networks had to do was stop televising the event, and their correspondents didn't have to play along with the Reagans by gobbling pieces of cake...

...Conventional systems continue distinctions characteristic of age-old "build and test" methods by separating the tasks of design generation and design analysis...

...Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe flagged the emergence of "a conservative consensus" on most issues, even the economy, among the leaders at the summit...

...Reagan surely is a potentially strong candidate, despite his miserable record on unemployment and profound alienation of some voting groups (blacks, for example)," he wrote...

...The same day she appeared in a telegenic setting as the peer of world statesmen, her Labour opponent, Michael Foot, was on television warding off the bites of two dogs...

...Figure 1: Decreasing mass plotted as a function of design iterations for the component shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Black-and-white photographs of shapes which appear in color on the CRT screen...

...Since there is no interaction beyond the initial input, a flexible description of the problem is crucial to effective use of the system...

...When serious issues are at stake, the White House simply cannot manipulate the press...

...prognostications...

...News & World Report declared the Western alliance "more united than it has been for years" after the summit...

...Jim Bennett and Mark Botkin are members of the-Engineering Mechanics Department at the General Motors Research Laboratories...

...True, the get-along standard makes no sense at all...

...More telling was the encounter Jerome R. Watson, the capable Washington correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, had with George McGbvern...

...Indeed, the truth may be that the President stood forcefully for principle-that is, exerted real leadership-and made The Optimum Shape Researchers at the General Motors Research Laboratories have developed the first integrated system for computer design of mechanical parts with minimum mass...

...When has the press been right in its year-before prognostications...

...More important, Optimal Shape Generation provides the component shape with the minimum mass capable of satisfying structural demands in a single computer run, without requiring human interaction with the machine...

...form directly suitable for conceptual visualization...

...These refinements can take the form of either adding elements in the area to be refined or increasing the order of the finite element This was done brilliantly, getting across the idea of heavy, undetached Reagan involvement in the summit...

...Sometimes Presidents and their minions actually succeed in their relentless, obsessed efforts to shape the kind of news coverage the White House gets...

...Watson tended to agree with the McGovern analysis...

...And the hosannas for Reagan also contributed to the slow lifting of the cloud that obscured, at least to reporters, his improving political prospects...

...We expect," adds Dr...

...Later, at the summit, Smith reported details such as the color of the pencil (blue) with which Reagan took notes...

...Periodic mesh refinements are performed throughout the optimization, since the design is continually changing, and the system must predict the stresses and the behavior of the constraints as the design changes...

...Believe me, they don't...

...Its major assessment piece, by White House reporter Lou Cannon, dealt with the arms statement, not deficits...

...extinguish all fears about the impact of American deficits, bannering that revelation rather than the far more significant agreement among the allies that the deployment of Per-shing II and cruise missiles in Europe should proceed if Soviet and American negotiators fail to reach an arms accord...

...If they can't manipulate, at least they can provide a good setting for the President and fill, in a few of the blanks for fact-hungry reporters...

...Carter may have been a poor President, but he was also treated unfairly by the press...

...Optimal Shape Generation integrates the process from design generation through design optimization...