Presentations 4/25

The topic for the presentations on 4/25 was "Psychological and Cognitive Sciences". The three presentations covered using music as a tool for leaning, the use of equine-facilitated psychotherapy (EFP), and the genetics of suicide. All three of the presentations were done very well and had lots of good information. Before Lyndsey's presentation on EFP I had never known it was even a form of treatment. It makes sense though, I know animal therapy with dogs and cats is quite popular especially with the elderly, but I never thought a horse would be all that great a comfort animal. I've also never really been around horses much, and am quite wary of them. I was even more surprised to find out there was an EFP clinic in Bentonville. Matthew explained the difficulties of determining the role of genetics in suicide. Because the event is so devastating, the environmental factors are overwhelming. It's also surprising to remember actually how little we know about brain functioning, and that really we are in the infant stage of understanding how the brain works at all. Nick explained how music can be used as a tool for learning, and in fact we could all sing the ABC song even after first learning it 15-plus-years ago. I feel that music could be integrated into all sorts of areas in the academic curriculum. I remember when we had a substitute teacher in the 4th grade who brought his guitar and let us write songs for what we were doing in class in either English or mathematics. To this day he was the coolest sub I've had for a class. Not only did the music help make things creative and interesting, guitars are also just plain cool, and really helped engage a bunch of rambunctious fourth graders. I definitely think we need to bring more music into schools, as a musician myself, I find that I can wrap my head around more abstract concepts and just "think out of the box" more, so to speak.

Changes in writing process blog post

I don't feel that my writing has changed in any particularly profound ways throughout the semester, however my organization is progressively getting better. In the beginning of the semester I had a hard time setting up an argument. After a couple papers I was finally able to get the idea down for a strong topic sentence, followed by evidence, and then a discussion of how that evidence supports my argument. Simply getting my argument into that model improved my papers significantly.

By doing different types of research over different areas of our project I've gotten a lot better at finding the articles I need in the library databases. The trick I learned was to do multiple searches with subtle keyboard changes. For example I would do a search on "commercial spaceflight", another on "private spaceflight", "private sector, space", "spaceflight companies", so on and so forth. I still have a problem keeping my paper under some sort of umbrella topic. Once I start doing research, I tend to get really distracted by learning new things and forget what I'm wanting to talk about specifically. By the time I get to the end of my paper I have to go back and change my thesis to something more appropriately related to the sources I found.

I still am having trouble starting my papers, but my strategy seems to be working out well enough. I spend a few days reading over article, getting a sort of mental grid of how each topic relates to one another, then just start writing the body paragraphs. I like to make a list of topic sentences in my Word document then go through my sources and see what I can back up and have enough material to discuss. Often there will be a couple topic sentences that seem great, but are too distant to the "umbrella topic", and could potentially be topics for other papers.

I've also grown to really value the input from other people reading my papers. Peer review always helps me make sure I keep a forward enough paper so my reader knows what I'm talking about, and also get to understand my more common grammar/structure mistakes. I was never big into writing papers for school, but now I've finally learned the formula for academic writing more-or-less, so I feel a lot more comfortable and feel that I've started to find my voice in writing.

Blog Post: Ethical Research

The general public looks to the scientific community for explanations about everything from genetics to cosmology and what conclusions the scientific returns is how the general public perceives the world we live in. Since the public is not knowledgeable in the whichever field they are reading about, they put a great deal of trust in the scientist to report accurate and truthful data. During our exploration of scientific writing, I have some to discover that scientists are just as effected by their personal bias as the general public, and may unknowingly create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which they only recognize the data that supports their theories. We've also learned that in more extreme cases a researcher will even go so far as to falsify data for their own means. Another problem is that science accommodation writers will report one anecdotal situation as a representative of an entire population, such as the article we read on Autism and vaccines. The study was based on a group of 12 children, and made a sweeping generalization that MMR vaccines caused Autism. This is most certainly not something one could conclude from 12 patients when tens-of-millions of people are getting vaccinated.

When scientists aren't ethical in their research serious consequences can occur; in the case of Autism and vaccines, diseases once thought eliminated are returning due to the loss of "herd immunity" due to the fears of parents. Once scientists release misleading or false information, the media runs with it, making sure to sensationalize the information enough to start a controversy. Then John and Jane Doe read it in the newspaper and believe that their child is at risk (in the former case described). The real problem then arises; the parents believe they have adequate information to determine the safety of their child based on one study they read in the paper.

Scientists and researchers need to be more aware of how their data is going to transmit to the public. Careless reporting will lead to negative opinions about the validity of scientific research, and implants incorrect thoughts into the public's mind. Whenever I read an article or listen to news about scientific claims, I now know not to immediately believe anything (especially if it has anything to do with gender studies or psychology in general). I don't believe that A causes B in any situation; there are countless variables in any study that do not get accounted for. Also I understand that our knowledge is limited (we don't really know anything) and that purple unicorns from outer-space could appear at any time and completely shatter our current beliefs of reality (however unlikely). Like the old saying goes we only truly know two things: we're each going to die and pay taxes until we do. Unfortunately not many people have such a scrutinizing view of what others tell them and groups of people start believing falsified data.

Reflective Journal Blog Post

When I first made my proposal I just knew I wanted to study man-made objects in space from propulsion, solar systems, re-entry, spacecraft materials, and many others. With continued research on my topic, I have been able to narrow down to robotics in space, and have grown more excited about the topic than ever. I've found some really cool projects in development concerning autonomous programming for robots including the ability to intercept and course-correct orbital satellites, calculate a path through rocky terrain on Mars, and potentially even construct structures in space. In my proposal I wasn't quite sure what area of space robotics I wanted to research. Putting a search in ebsco for "space robotics" came up with a wealth of stuff, so I've narrowed my topic down to first why we need robots in space, the robots we have functioning now, and what applications we can use robotics in. A very large problem right now is "space junk". NASA's Orbital Debris website states that "[a]pproximately 19,000 objects larger than 10 cm are known to exist. The estimated population of particles between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is approximately 500,000. The number of particles smaller than 1 cm probably exceeds tens of millions". Also when we paired up today to talk about our project I got a lot of really good questions from my partner to further explore, so I've been able to define my topic a lot better. Another thing I want to talk about is how people interact with robots, known as teleoperation. Someone literally controls the robot from Earth or a spacestation, and is able to manipulate the environment just as if the operator had been there. This has incredibility fascinating potential to be "the next big thing" in space technology development. It reminds me of the book "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card where children were controlling fighter planes in space in what they thought a "game" but were really piloting actual craft in a war against bug-like extraterrestrials. I can imagine thousands of avid video-gamers would love to get their hands on the controller of some of the world's most advanced technology. I sure would like to.

ENGL Blog Post

What objectivity? After reading Fine and "106 Science Claims [...]" I don't trust anything I've ever learned about science. Fine has countless examples of researchers skewing the conclusions of data to fit their bias and what they want the data to reveal. Now anytime a friend tells me about some study I demand for more information than "some guys concluded this". Without details, empirical data, or repeated experiments conclusions mean nothing. I feel that the general public doesn't scrutinize scientific claims nearly enough and that can be very dangerous because people start believing incorrect data as fact. It's scary what people will believe and how easily.

Now I'm not saying there aren't any reputable scientists, they're the ones that keep to themselves and don't try to spit propaganda through faulty science. The problem is they aren't the ones reaching out to the masses and changing social policy. I also feel a big part of the problem is caused when research is accommodated and the uncertainty researchers have of direct correlations gets completely thrown out the window. Even if the researcher had objectivity in the beginning, the results of the study get into the public and carried away. I remember in grade school we would play this game where one person whispered something into another student’s ear, then that student passed the message to another student, and so on and so forth. By the end of the line the message was horribly altered into something not even close to relating to the original message. I find this to be a very appropriate example of what the general public ends up doing with scientific claims.

Every day I hear information that people claim as “true” that I know for a fact to be incorrect just by doing a tiny bit of personal research. One of my favorites is the use of Taurine. First time I heard about it my friend said, “oh yeah that stuff in Red Bull comes from bull testes, that’s why they call it that.” In reality Taurine was first extracted from bull bile (Marshall, ML. "Taurine." Nutritional Perspectives: Journal Of The Council On Nutrition 32.4 (2009): 33-34. CINAHL with Full Text.) and that “fact is that the taurine in Red Bull is produced synthetically by pharmaceutical companies and is not derived from animals” (Red Bull’s website). That took me a whole fifteen minutes to find out for myself and now I’m that much less ignorant.

Basically, people need to be more aware that scientists have agendas too and not to immediately credit what anyone says. A questioning mind is a healthy mind.

The Evolution of Metal - Genre Analysis Part 1

In my journey to promote my band I keep getting asked "so what's death metal anyway?" and I'm stumped. My first thought is, "well...it's metal....heavier than thrash, and they started it screaming about death and zombies and whatnot". Then go on to explain how a band called Death led by Chuck Schuldiner (a huge inspiration in my guitar playing) that started it all. I'm deciding to write up a more comprehensive overview of the origin of metal. This will be a telling of my own rise through metal as well as heavily supplemented by information from wikipedia. Since I could seriously write forever about this and start it at the part where man learned to smack a stick on a rock in time to create a pleasant rhythm I'm going to do this in parts. Fair warning it may take me a while to get through it all but I'll try for some sort of consistent release. Anyway, without further adieu...

So when your average Joe thinks about metal music, I'm sure the first few things that come to mind are violence, Satan, incomprehensible vocals, and dudes stabbing each-other at concerts. Or they don't think anything at all because they've never heard of this "death metal" they just know it doesn't sound friendly. The problem lies in the mainstream media (as always, misinformation is their way of life). The things I listed do apply to metal, but are far more anecdotal than some over-arching philosophy. Philosophy of Violence....kick ass song name... I digress. When I try and talk to my friends about metal, they always seemed to be concerned with the vocals the most. Yes. A lot of metal is "grr-grr-grr" sounding until you actually open your ears and start listening. In that lies the fact that metal tends to be very loud and busy, and I think the average listener has a hard time sorting out the "noise". I personally enjoy noise. Want to really go outside the box? Check out Sunn O))) (the band took the name from the amplifier brand they use: Sunn). In many of their songs they only have guitar feedback as "music". I find they're a great band to listen to while doing homework. There's stuff going on, but you're not actively listening to it. Also to give myself some ethos, I play guitar in a death metal band and I have been studying metal now for four years. I'm still years away from knowing every band that lead up to this point, but projects are always going to fall to the way-side while the big names get all the credit. I also listen to stuff other than metal such as world music, alt rock, classic rock, tribal, classical, flamenco, . Recently I've been studying the evolution of hip-hop and gangster rap. Funny enough I just now got to where I can tolerate rap at all. For years it all sounded the same but it's all in the subtleties, as with any genre.

So where did this metal junk come from? Well as we learned in class genres evolve from other genres. Metal arose out of heavy metal (odd that "heavy metal" bands are the classics, then just "metal" arose angrier and faster, but I guess they didn't expect it to get any heavier than "heavy metal"). Heavy metal arose from rock and roll along with punk, and that arose from the blues.




I think these fellows would get along just nicely since they came from the same "musical mother" :)

It all begins with jazz and the invention of the electric guitar. Jazz was specifically more a New Orleans tradition compared to the blues which was regionally more spread out and founded it's own subgenres (i.e. Mississippi delta blues or Texas Blues). Jazz took the rules of classical music and threw them out the window, creating very unique, personalized, and improvised music.

Jazz has evolved exponentially since its formation and has dozens of subgenres. Early British Rock bands such as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin took these blues tunes along with the emergence of rock and roll in the 1940's from greats such as Chuck Berry, and mixed em together to create blues rock, or classic rock as we consider it now.

One huge influence to the creation of metal is Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath (originally a blues band called Earth) introduced a very dark atmosphere and occult lyrics to the music leading to Ozzy's wonderful profiling, as well as a sound in music unlike any before it. A while genre of metal is based on Black Sabbath called "doom metal"; characterized by very slow tempos, droning guitar, sung lyrics, and blues type riffs.

Along side the formation of rock and blues rock, hidden in dingy smoke-filled bars was punk rock which was not only just a music genre, but an explosive sub-culture in the UK and US east coast (and Australia). Bands that let this revolution included Iggy Pop, The Who, The Kinks, and ended the golden era of punk with bands like the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Clash. Punk is most recognizable from its Do-It-Yourself lifestyle such as homemade clothing and anti-establishment lyrics. As with any genre, many subgenres sprouted up out of punk including hardcore, Oi!, pop punk, crust punk, anarcho-punk, and even emo music (before emo turned into what it is today, thanks a lot record companies...).

That's a nice beginning to our tale of music. I plan on spending a lot more time on individual bands when I get up to ones that I know stuff about. When we return in part two we'll be looking at the 1970's rise of New Wave of British Heavy Metal and the formation of speed metal and trash metal. Thanks for reading!

Inquiry Contract Abstract

Inquiry Contract Proposal Abstract

In my article I’m going to explore the present and future technologies in the area of space robotics. Major projects currently underway include two rovers exploring the surface of Mars and conducting research as well as the first ever “robonaut” working at the International Space Station. I’m going to explain how the technology currently works along with new ideas still in the lab for robotic interaction. Also I’m going to look at some of the big questions such as will robotics replace manned spaceflight and in what other applications we can use robots for research or even building space structures and repairing satellites.

Scientific Genres

So far I've encountered a couple different types of scientific genres through internet research on assignments for class varying in complexity. The most interesting one was the most recent, "Transformational Technologies To Expedite Space Access And Development." by John D. G. Rather. The article was about creating new methods of sending stuff into space, but there was a lack of endless mathematical equations that one would expect from such a topic. The author decided to create the paper as a calling to stimulate space research and development. I don't really know what sort of genre the article would fall under. It was published through the American Institute of Physics so not really readily accessible to the general public and the lack of jargon put the article in a field of its own. The author put a lot of personality in the article and you can tell he's very passionate about the subject, it's unlike any article I've read before.

Another genre of scientific article I've encountered is featured in Louisiana Agriculture a quarterly magazine published by the LSU AgCenter. The article I read featured many tables and graphs of fertilizer contaminants in Louisiana's wetlands. The authors explained the graphs very well and the article was quite comprehensible even though I didn't know much about the subject. The genre of that article is for Louisiana farmers, environmentalists, and water management facilitators. I've stumbled upon the highly-technical scientific paper through online databases and they were pretty brutal. I enjoy looking at advance mathematics and pretending to understand what's going on, but unfortunately could not understand the article enough to use it as a resource.

Since I'm going into mechanical engineering, with dreams of specializing in astronautical engineering I imagine I'm going to be writing a lot of research papers about new technologies and designs for spaceflight. Also relating to what we just read in "Writing for Science" and "Accommodating Science" I imagine I'll be writing lab reports, memos to colleagues, and conveying results to a more general audience. So far I've written one abstract in my scientist career, but I have a feeling I'll get more experience before the semester is over. I've also written a few lab reports in my high school chemistry class, but that was a while ago and the teacher laid out the guidelines very specifically so it was hard to error.

Paper One Reflection

(Sorry this is late)

I feel that I explained one point pretty well, and another two points not so well. I found that I was mixing my information up, and didn't have clear separations in thought. Also neither my paper nor abstract were the required length, so I could have added more content for sure. I'm still having a hard time figuring out when to be concise and when to elaborate and I find myself assuming the reader can fill in the gaps. I do feel that I understood the article well, and knew exactly who my authors intended audiences is, I just failed to communicate that very well. One thing I'm going to do for next assignment is get an earlier start on it. When I had the time to sit there and think about my argument for a couple hours is when i figured out what exactly I was trying to write, but if I had started earlier I would have had more time to revise. Also next time I'm going to try and outline my argument better. During paper one I would come up with new points of argument in the middle of trying to explain something else and got off track and just kinda skimmed a couple different ideas in one paragraph. I have a feeling my grade isn't going to be too wonderful on this paper but hopefully I will be able to improve on my strengths and weaknesses from the first paper.

Paper One Summary and Outline

The paper I chose is:
Rather, John D. G. "Transformational Technologies To Expedite Space Access And Development." AIP Conference Proceedings 1208.1 (2010): 137-146. Academic Search Complete. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
(Pretend it's MLA formatted).

********************************************************************************
Summary:

"Transformational Technologies To Expedite Space Access And Development" by John Rather is a suggestion on how superconducting wires can be used to support an electromagnetic launch tube capable of sending spacecraft and building materials out of the atmosphere without the use of on-board fuel. This would significantly decrease the costs of spaceflight, therefor allowing much easier access into space. The author explains that the tube would function like an upside down suspension bridge (140). The launch tube would gradually slope upwards to a height of roughly 12 miles above sea level at the end. The author explains that although the land usage would be high, there are many suitable locations in the U.S. and other countries (142). Near the end of the paper the author also suggests more "futuristic" ideas such as capturing asteroids for building materials, radiation shielding, and even to deflect other Earth-bound celestial rocks (145), and "power beaming" (143). Power beaming is a concept where an concentrated electron beam sends energy from Earth to facilities on the moon or on Mars or vice-versa.

Paper Outline:
I. Introduction
Thesis: This article is aimed at college students and beginning researchers interested in different ideas for the future of space travel.

II. Body
A) Author's style.
--->Very inspiring
--->Calling for a new wave of technological development
--->Defines terms/limited jargon
B) Elements used.
--->Historical background
--->Pictures
--->Hypothetical situations

Unnecessary science?

I was sitting there watching television with my father and an ad comes on for match.com. Instead of explaining it here's the link to video on youtube, it's only sixteen seconds. The study was conducted by a company called OkCupid, another online dating site. Maybe they're partner companies? I found the original blog post by OkCupid, titled "Don't be ugly by accident", with this study and a handful of other studies to make people more insecure. Here's that link. Fun note: The founder of OkCupid also started SparkNotes.

OkCupid asked 9,785 smart phone users how many sexual partners they had over their lifetime, and here's the nifty graph that came about


I gave away my opinion with the title of the blog, but seriously, why should we be telling people these things? How is it benefiting mankind in anyway? Women age 30 who owned iphones clocked in around 12 sexual partners. Is that supposed to be good? I don't understand...

I believe the media has perpetuated this idea of "fun casual sex" for far too long now. Now more recently the media has turned to sexual violence as a means for entertainment. My mom watches Law and Order pretty much anytime it's on, and one particular branch of that series is "Special Victims Unit", which means every episode is about rape in whatever horrifyingly twisted manner that sadistic bastard Dick Wolf can come up with. It's people like Dick Wolf that are destroying society from the inside out, feeding us fear until we jump at our own shadow then rush to the phone for ADT. Unfortunately it's people like my mom (I still love her though haha) that sit there and buy into that crap. I've asked her why, and the best I've gotten is "we need to know about these things the world isn't safe". I do happen to know that already without watching Law and Order. There's worse going on in Tibet, and let's not forget Mugabe's friendly gang of chaps

Yeah I've mostly ranted about more stuff. I think I'm done for now. Thanks for reading!

Aliens surf on quasars

I found an article on nasa.gov (seems reputable even though they did fake the moon landing) detailing the discovery of a mass of water "equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean" (Clavin 7.22.11) found just a mere 12 Billion light-years away. The article is called "Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water" and is written by Whitney Clavin and Alan Buis. The main attraction of this study is our new friend APM 08279+5255 a quasar powered by a black hole. Here's the link. I'm no astronomer, but how I understand it, a quasar is like a lighthouse being powered by a black hole. The black hole consumes space dust and gasses and releases energy as super-luminous light, x-rays, radiation, all that fun stuff, but in this particular case the black hole is feeding off of water vapor.

I feel the article has been written for a general audience ages seventeen and up. You'll want to have an open-mind and be able to think of very large things, very far away. As I continue to revise this now I'm beginning to think maybe one would have to do some research to really understand what's going on, but the authors do help a bit. The first thing I observed is that the writers compared multiple statistics of this black hole to our sun (ex. "...20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns" (Clavin 7.22.11), instead of stating raw scientific data. Another big indicator was when the writers defined what a quasar is, "A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust" (Clavin 7.22.11).

I found this article mind-blowingly interesting; I mean come on, water in space. What else do we know about water? 'You can surf on it?' Indeed so. I imagine instead of traveling to the beach for vacation, aliens fly over to quasars for spring break. Also you might say 'It provides for life as we know it', so there's the potential... Scientists have found quite a bit of water in our own galaxy, but mostly frozen under the surface of extraterrestrial polar caps. I've also always been a fan of space in general, it's fascinating. I would like to think one day mankind will bond together for the pursuit of knowledge and happiness and we will really learn about the universe. If only we spent less time and money thinking of new ways to inflict harm on one-another, but I digress (as if my rhetoric had continuity).

The only problem with the article is it got me thinking too much! I found myself with a dozen or so tabs open explaining subatomic particles, string theory, the theory of everything (that's a fun one), general relativity, dark matter, dark energy, the mass of a black hole, you name it, I had the hardest time even writing the article because my thoughts were so far in the clouds (space clouds mind you, highly toxic).

I also understand how none of what I have written displays characteristics of scientific writing or plain English, and that I mostly ranted about stuff. I enjoy playing with language...coming up with odd ways to phrase things...breaking up my thoughts into small segments with ellipsis...

Thanks for reading!

*Special thanks to Psiopradio.com for the picture of the alien and universetoday.com for the picture of the black hole that I so eloquently combined to give you a completely realistic view of what's going on in space right now. Also a big thank you to SOPA for failing so I can post these pics without getting sued (I might still be able to get sued I don't know...that would be lame)

Goals for class

When I signed up for scientific writing, I had no idea what to expect, it just sounded like an interesting alternative to Composition II. Going into Engineering I figured anything to do with science will help my future career, so I signed up. I'm already happy with that decision. The first piece we read was "106 Science Facts and a Truck Full of Baloney", and it was an eye opener from the beginning. I never really thought about how science is presented to the masses, and sadly the information is quite skewed and at times blatantly silly. So to be informed is one of my main goals in this class. The article showed me that even though I would like to think I wouldn't been fooled by phony science, it can still happen. I always knew that advertisers are the main source of regurgitated scientific claims, but I never really understood how bad it is until now. The one that startled me the most was how companies are allowed to put claims on packaging, that though true, have nothing to do with the product. One example was "gluten-free yeast". What's stopping companies from making claims such as "hormone free spinach" or "polyethylene-free beef"? Those things aren't supposed to be in there anyway! After I'm finished in this English course I hope that I can view scientific claims with professional scrutiny and delve deeper into the "why" and "how" of the claims. Besides that I just hope to do really well in the class. The resources are available, I'll just have to stay focused and get my work done ahead of time so I can get it checked over. So other than doing well in the class, and staying informed, I can't really think of anything. I'm sure I'll get a lot more out of the class once the material starts getting assigned and we're writing papers. I feel that I am already a pretty good writer, so I don't think I'll have to work on too much in that department. I do want to make sure that I keep my writing interesting to the reader. The scientific writing area has always been plagued by stereotypes of being "dry and boring" but science is a lot more than that, it's happening around us at all times, and now more than ever we're seeing new scientific breakthroughs that are going to vastly alter our perception of reality.