Zero Waste

Waste disposal is a big problem in today’s world. There is no doubt that every country wants to make the most use of sources. Hence, zero seems to be the best way of waste disposal. However, my opinion is that zero waste is not suitable for some countries.
In our country, China, the main method of waste disposal is incineration instead of zero waste. The advantage of incineration is that it costs much less money than recycling the rubbish. Especially for a developing country, many kinds of rubbish are expensive to be recycled. Thus, the government of China chooses to burn them rather than recycle them. Another advantage is that incineration is easier to manage, so the harm of incineration can be controlled. For China, the more advance the system is, the poorer the management becomes. Since zero waste system is much more complicated than incineration, the poor management of it can bring us much more harm than just burn the rubbish. With poor management, some wastes such as gypsum can be add into food just like tofu and make it poisonous. With poor management, some materials we use can emit poisonous gases to harm us. In contrast, though incineration is not environmental friendly, the negative effect can be brought to the minimum if it is well managed. Hence, comparing to recycling, incineration is more suitable to deal with rubbish in China.

Brain Mapping

Brain mapping is a new technology aimed on understanding of the relationship between structure and function in the human brain. In that case, scientists in this field can seek to gain knowledge of the physical processes that underly human sensation, attention awareness and cognition. (Brandmapping, 2007) Yet this technology is still a cause of ethic problems since it has many negative sides. In order to avoid that, the most important thing is not to abuse the using of brain mapping.
Firstly, I believe brain mapping should not be own by the public or society. For some employers, brain mapping can give them a view of their employees’ brain activities and they may fire anyone who seems less useful to them. I believe this is the abuse of brain mapping since we do not know whether it is accurate all the time. If not, it is unfair for those employees who are fired. Moreover, even if brain mapping is always accurate, reading a person’s brain encroach those employees on human right. Hence, brain mapping should not be introduced to the public or society.
Secondly, it is still not sure that whether brain mapping can be use in providing evidences in criminal cases. The biggest problem is still the accuracy of brain mapping. If brain mapping can be considered as a technology to read criminal or suspect person’s mind, it must be very accurate to avoid incorrect judgments. However, the fact is that it cannot be sure. As a result, brain mapping cannot be used as a main method in solving criminal cases.
Lastly, the cost of brain mapping is very expensive. The abuse of this technology can cost lots of money. In case of that, the government cannot afford it and the people will not accept it since the high cost.
In conclusion, brain mapping is still under developing and cannot be widely use in either society or solving criminal cases. It still has a long way to go.

References


Brandmapping(2007) Retrieved November 6, 2008, from http://www.brainmapping.org/

Difficulties in engineering classes

Basically, I believe the main cause of these difficulties in engineering classes is the language problem. Since I have not an English-speaking background during my childhood, sometimes I have problems in both the vocabulary and accents. I also find that I am not very good at explaining my ideas. These problems make the several parts of the lecture hard to understand and may have a negative influence in my grades.
Firstly, since the limitation of vocabulary, sometimes it is difficult for me to understand what the lecturer is talking about. The module MLE1101 is a good example. Sometimes we just did not know the names of the materials the lecturer talked about, which may make us harder to get the knowledge. Secondly, some lecturers have heavy accents and the direct result is that I cannot understand what they said at times. For some Indian lecturers, their way of speaking English is quite different from us and we cannot even diagnose their words. Lastly, poor explanation can cause me to lose marks in the examination, especially in MLE1101, which needs more explanation than calculation.
For the first problem, I believe it is a problem caused by myself. The only way to solve it is to increase the vocabulary. Also, I need to memorize some specific material names. For the second problem, though we need to try to adapt to the lecturer’s accent, it is impossible for us to solve this problem only in this way. We should communicate with the lecturer and let him know the problem so that he may speak more slowly to make us understand his lecture. Anyway, there is still a long way to go and we need to overcome our language problems.

One of the Fourteen Grand Challenges for Engineering

This is a summary of the article “First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved”. As the title shows, it is about capturing of carbon dioxide, which is one of the 14 grand challenges for engineering in the 21^st century.

The first part talks about the developers of this carbon capture technology and its importance. This technology was developed by Global Research Technologies(GRT) and a professor named Klaus S. Lackner at Columbia University. And the importance of this technology is that it can reduce the amount of CO2 to help protecting the atmosphere of the earth.

The second part tells the special function of the device using this technology. From the article, we know that the device extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and store the pure carbon dioxide which can be transformed into energies. Moreover, this device can extract carbon dioxide regardless the zone limitation, which means a device at anywhere on the Earth can reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide of the whole world. As a result, this technology can be the best one to prevent the global warming amount other technologies.

The third part shows the challenge of the technology. One is that Since the technology needs to store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it may prevent the carbon recycling. As a result, the capture amount of carbon dioxide must be equal to CO2 emission. Another challenge is that is it too expensive to make the carbon dioxide into eco-friendly gases. These two challenges need to be solved.

In conclusion, this technology developed by GRT will play an important role in capture carbon dioxide and can both produce energy and make carbon dioxide into eco-friendly gases.

Reference:
PHYSORG(2007), First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved, Retrieved http://www.physorg.com/news96732819.html

Common mistakes

One of my common mistakes in grammar is the misusing of words. There are two main causes of this mistake. Firstly, since my vocabulary is poor, sometimes I may not be able to come up with the most correct and proper words to let others know what I want to say. For instance, in my last work I wrote “the opinion of not taking risk” while the word “opinion” should be replaced by “preference”. On the other hand, I meet the problem of not knowing the correct way to use some words, even some words that I know very well. For instance, in my last essay I have written a sentence: “they choose to resist buying the new products in order to avoid being bamboozled”. The word “bamboozled” is slang and not considered to be proper in academic writing. Another example is that sometimes I put “however” as the start of a sentence, which is considered informal. In order to make a change, I believe I should not only improve my vocabulary, but also read more articles to have some general ideas of how to use these words.

Exercise:
Sales slowed down but I think I know why that is. I didn't keep up with my regular listing. On Tuesday I was so distracted by the election I didn't list at all. I updated my Etsy avatar and am spending a little more time posting in the Etsy forums- usually I just read- but it's really a time suck and I don't know if it's worth it.
Also I didn't list any new items last week. A huge downside of Ann Arbor is that there are no art stores near by. There's a little one above the Michigan Book Store but the screen printing section is tiny and overpriced. The closest major art store is 40 minutes away in Detroit, so I now have to rely on the Internet for my supplies. I run out of a bunch of ink last week and had to wait for it to arrive before I could get to printing more holiday wrap for the shop. My goal is to have all my gift wrap for the holiday season in my shop by November 15. At that time, I'll probably send out a notification to my email list and family and friends. I can't decide if it's better to time that email before or after Thanksgiving. Any suggestions?
I'm also planning to send an email to some of the bigger blogs that have historically given me nice mentions, alerting them to the new stuff in my shop. I'm sure I'll reach 1000 hearts within the next few weeks but I'm not sure how to turn those hearts into sales，a heart means someone has seen my shop and likes what they see enough to "heart" me. But what would give them that extra push to buy? Do I need more diversity of patterns? More diversity of products? A bigger price range? Different colors?
It's nice for people to admire my work but I am trying to make this a sustainable business. I've really tried to steer away from trends and do something original but maybe I need to think about incorporating more trendy things if that's what will sell. I realize stationery isn't for everyone, even if they do like what I do and T-shirts and tote bags seems to always do well at craft shows so I'm now thinking about whipping some up for the Shadow Art Fair in December, the only fair I'm doing this holiday season. In the new year I'm also planning to add more patterns and do more fabric goods to keep things fresh.

Why people resist new technologies
There are various reasons why people resist new technologies. Firstly, many people resist new technologies because of their ethical conception. This phenomenon is more obvious among the older people. They have formed their own views of life and do not want to be disturbed by the new technologies. They also believe that new technologies will not help them substantially; instead of that, they have to suffer from the adapting to the new technologies and change their way of life. For instance, old people do not like shopping online. They think it can ruin their traditional way of shopping. Secondly, many people resist new technological products today as they do not know which one to trust. It is a fact that in a world of advertisements, people can hardly tell which claims are true and which are fake. Since most people cannot tell a beneficial new technological product from a fake one, they choose to resist buying the new products in order to avoid being cheated. As a result, some products such as the near-sight treat machine can never be sold out since people do not believe in it. Lastly, some people resist new technology as some technologies have potential dangers. One example is nuclear power. The most famous nuclear accident is the Chernobyl disaster. After the Chernobyl disaster, large areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people( Wikipedia, 2006). Nowadays, many people do not want to take risk using new technologies that have potential danger because they do not want such horrible disaster to happen in their life. In conclusion, many people resist new technologies because of ethical conception, distrust and the preference of not taking risks.

References:
Wikipedia. (2006). Chernobyl disaster. Retrieved September 3, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Make the most and best use of resources
After reading these two articles, I believe that making the most and best use of the resources on Earth is the most important to engineers. As the Earth is a world with finite resources, it is important for engineers to avoid wasting of them and misusing of them.

As the resources on Earth are far from enough in today’s world, engineers should avoid wasting of them. It is mentioned in the article “Introduction to the Grand Challenges for Engineering” that the earth is a planet of finite resource, and its growing population currently consumes them at a rate that cannot be sustained. It is true that human beings require more and more clean water and food to live. Human beings also need more products such as mobiles, televisions, laptops and cars to enrich their life. However, because of the limitation of resources, it is important for engineers to avoid wasting of the resources and find out solution to satisfy the requirement.

On the other hand, engineers should avoid resources to be misused. Some resources on Earth have a negative effect on our environment, such as fossil fuels. The article “Introduction to the Grand Challenges for Engineering” has mentioned that evidence is mounting that the carbon dioxide pumped into the air by burning fossil fuels is increasing the planet’s temperature and threatens disruptive effects on climate. Hence, we cannot over use fossil fuel and also those resources that have negative effect on our environment. As a result, it is engineers’ duty to find out other resources that can replace those ones. Only in this way can we avoid resources to be misused.

Engineers play an important role in today’s society. With their help, I am sure that human beings can make the most and best use of the finite resources on Earth.