Tag Archives: education

Floods: an everyday example

Leave a reply

floodingI wrote this post before going to the concert at the Philharmonic Hall which inspired the post on February 5th [Rhapsody in Blue].  So, this post is not quite as timely as planned originally but it is still raining frequently here and the Somerset levels remain flooded.

Since before Christmas news bulletins in the US and UK have been dominated by reports of extreme weather events.  Earlier this month the sea on the south coast of the England swept away a substantial length of the main railway line between London and the South-West of the country.  Large areas of the south of the UK have been flooded by storms that rolled across the Atlantic having first caused disruption in North America.  There seems to be plenty of everyday evidence from these events that our climate is changing and this appears to have been confirmed by the Chief Scientist at the UK Metrological Office.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.  The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.’  They go on to say ‘It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century’.  Despite these assertions, our governments have been unable to make significant progress towards limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.  The delegations from most of the developed countries walked out of talks at the Warsaw climate conference last November, followed by representatives from the Green groups and NGOs the next day.  As a consequence, Kofi Annan [Climate crisis: Who will act? in International NYT  November 25, 2013] has called for a global grass-roots movement to tackle climate change and its consequences.  We need to act as individuals whenever we can to reduce global warming and mitigate its impact both directly in our personal and professional lives and indirectly by lobbying our political and industrial/commercial leaders.

In the UK, politicians and the media are beginning to talk about the need for engineers to protect us against flooding and some engineers are responding by highlighting that the cost will be very high and that if climate change continues then we will have consider abandoning some areas.

At a simpler level, those us working in the classroom can use the flooded roads and overwhelmed drainage systems to create topical, and perhaps increasingly everyday, examples focused on flow in drainage ditches, gutters etc., as in the lesson plan below.

5EplanNoF10_open_channel_flow

See also the Everyday Examples page on this blog for more lesson plans and more background on Everyday Examples.

Mining data

2 Replies
Random winter scene: Old Mission Point Light, MI, USA

Random winter scene:
Old Mission Point Light, MI, USA

Last week I went to a one-day conference in London on High Performance Computer and Big Data.  We were talking about computers with 96,000 processors and datasets in the exascale, which means the number of pieces of data they contain is one with eighteen noughts after it.  We were just across the street from the Houses of Parliament and David Willetts, the UK Minister of Universities and Science, addressed us and told us that ‘future scientific advances are dependent on our ability to accumulate and analyse big data’.  For the industrialists amongst us the slogan from the Director of the UK’s biggest computer was ‘to compute is to out compete’.

Suzy Moat and Tobias Preis of Warwick Business School made a great presentation about the link between online behaviour and economic decision making around the globe.  They have found that the frequency terms such as ‘debt’, ‘stocks’ and ‘portfolio’ are predictors of subsequent stock market movement.  They performed some of their research by mining data available from Google Trends – if you have never visited this bit of Google’s domain then I recommend a visit, its interesting at all sorts of levels.

Another Google data-miner is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz who has revealed that American parents want their boys to be smart and their girls skinny.  Parents are two and half times more likely to ask Google ‘Is my son gifted?’ than ‘Is my daughter gifted?’ despite the fact that in American schools girls are 11 percent more likely to be in gifted programs.  And conversely, parents are twice as likely to ask ‘Is my daughter overweight?’ than ‘Is my son overweight?’ even though roughly equal proportions of girls and boys are overweight in the USA.  In his article in the NYT, Seth concludes by asking ‘How would girls’ lives be different if parents were half as concerned about their bodies and twice as intrigued about their minds?’

Perhaps, one answer is that they would be more likely to opt for what are perceived at school as the hard subjects, i.e. mathematics and physics.  See my earlier post entitled ‘Chemical Imbalance’ on October 2nd, 2013, in which I bemoaned the low proportion of girls taking A-level Physics at school.  As professional engineers and university teachers many of us are working hard to redress the gender imbalance in engineering but now I wonder if we are have identified a new handicap, i.e. parents are undermining their daughters’ confidence to enter the ‘problem-solving’ professions.

Sources:

Seth Stephens-Davidovitz, ‘Is my son a genius?’ in the International New York Times on Monday 20th January, 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/google-tell-me-is-my-son-a-genius.html?_r=0

Pries, T., Moat, H.S., Stanley, H.E., 2013, Quantifying trading behaviour in financial markets using Google Trends, Scientific Reports 3, 1684. www.nature.come/strep/2013/130425/srep01684/pdf/srep01684.

Silence is golden

7 Replies

118-1804_IMGThe digital age has led to us being overwhelmed with sources of information and entertainment.  It is unfashionable to suggest that it might be unproductive to take advantage of multiple data streams to interact with the virtual world, listen to your favourite music and study simultaneously.

However in 1973, Kahneman proposed that the amount of attention that an individual can deploy at any time is limited.  It is known as the ‘capacity model of attention’ and is based on the assumptions that attention can be freely allocated to activities based on their arousal level and that your total attention is finite.  The model has been used to explain research findings on the effect of background television on cognitive performance.  While recent research has demonstrated that students read and study better in silence; though if they must listen to music then certain types are better than others, for instance light classical music has a less deleterious effect than hip hop music – maybe because it has a lower arousal level.

So multi-tasking is not conducive to high quality output or efficient working.  Many people have arrived at this conclusion by the time they graduate from University or have spent a few years in a mentally demanding job.  However, it is an uphill task to convince young people that they would perform better and finish tasks faster without the distractions made readily available by the digital age.

Or that is safer not to cross the road while listening to music and texting your friends!

Sources:

For many references to the research literature see Chou, P. M-T., Attention drainage effect: how background music effects concentration in Taiwanese college students, Journal of Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 10(1):36-46, 2010. http://josotl.indiana.edu/issue/view/158

Kahneman, D., Attention and effect, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973.

Knowledge-economy

1 Reply

bigagSmall landholding farmers often have a wealth of local knowledge about their landscape and crop varieties that allows them to deliver food to the mouths of local customers more efficiently than industrial agriculture [see my post entitled ‘Productive Cheating on November 25th, 2013].  This has been termed ‘knowledge-based agriculture’ as opposed to the ‘energy-based agriculture’ used by agri-business with its dependence on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers, which are also fossil fuel based.  Mark Bittman [in the New York Times on October 15th, 2013] argues it is easier to achieve sustainable food production using a knowledge-based rather than an energy-based approach.

The same is true of engineering design for sustainability.  Engineers need to exploit their creativity and knowledge to generate elegant designs with minimal ecological footprints, i.e. designs need to be knowledge-based or intensive rather than energy-intensive.

Politicians are fond of extolling the virtue of having a knowledge-based economy. I am not sure many of them would articulate it in terms of knowledge-based agriculture or engineering, as I have above, but it is probably the best available route to a sustainable society.

Happy New Year to all my readers and followers.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/how-to-feed-the-world.html?ref=markbittman&_r=0