E Potfolio 7 (a)

I have two common difficulties that have being annoying since long time ago. One is I always have discontinuity in my logic flow, and another is that, that expression of ideas and sentences is either influenced by my mother tongue, or by the dearest Singlish.

These two difficulties are definitely easy to solve.
First difficulty: discontinuity in the logics.
This can be overcome by writing a essay outline or draft. I took a marketing module last semester, and I was very interested in the module, the lecturer was attractive and has perfect lecturing skills, and thus I did not miss any of the lectures. Moreover, I thought I had understood every concept clearly and could easily state relevant examples or illustration for the concept. However, when I received my first Writing Assignment result, I was stunned by the mark. The tutor’s comment was simple: “I could not understand your logic flow. Though I know you can express them well verbally, your writing does not show it.” This is because I like to write down whatever idea that pops up in my mind, thus I always make it a whole mass in my essay. So by writing a draft or a outline, this can be avoided.
Second difficulty: Expression.
Apart from what has been stated in the introductory paragraph, another problem with my expression is that I tend to use informal English. This is due to lack of ability to distinguish the difference between formal and informal English. In another word, while I write down something which I think is formal, it is not indeed. This could be improved by reading more formal articles and journals to make myself emerged in formal use of English instead of just newspapers and daily conversations, which mainly consist of informal English. While for the mother tongue influence, improvement has been seen from my handouts I believe, though there is definitely space for further improvement. Lastly, speaking Singlish all the time is apparently not a good idea, and with understanding of this point, I has been trying to speak standard English instead of Singlish in my daily life. However, habits are hard to change. I have to not only check out for obvious spelling errors while writing my work, but also correct myself from bad habits of speaking Singlish during my daily life.

Common Grammar Mistakes of Mine

Common Grammar Mistakes of Mine


Misuse of “the”, “a”, “an” and zero article

This kind of mistakes regarding articles usage is common in my essays. The reason for it to be so common is obvious: bad influence from localized oral English. The articles should be correctly used in the way introduced in the grammar notes, which are summarized here:
common noun or noun phrase:
A: Countable
1:Singular: - specific: the
- non-specific a/an, based on pronunciation of the first alphabet.
2: Plural: - specific: the
- general: zero article.
B: Uncountable
1: specific: the
2: generic zero article
I personally think that it is a good practice for us, the EG1471 students to use Microsoft Word or any other software with grammar checking system.
Examples:
The group has discussed about the disadvantage of the hybrid cars.
In the other hand, X opposed that hybrid car is a expensive, inconvenient and unmodified car.
We always forget about non-teaching staffs’ contribution to the campus.
They should be corrected as:
The group has discussed about the disadvantage of hybrid cars.
In the other hand, X opposed that hybrid car is an expensive, inconvenient and unmodified car.
We always forget about the non-teaching staffs’ contribution to the campus.

Transition

Transitions are extremely useful in linking the ideas; it helps the flow of the whole essay, enhancing the entity of the essay. For example, good usage of transitions help the reader to understand the writer better and also, feel more involved. Correct use of transitions allows the reader to predict the content or points after certain transitions. For example, “and” indicates parallel points, “however” may indicate a transverse point. Common mistakes of mine are:
1: Though…but...
This mistake is mainly due to strong mother tongue influence.
2: some mistakes come along with broken sentences, or incomplete clauses.



Subject verb agreement

This type of errors is very common to see.
Singular subject should be followed by a verb that has “s” or “es” after it and plural subject should be followed by the standard form in present tense.
Some special cases, for example, when using “either” “neither”, use the verb form following the nearest subject.
This is not due to imperfection of knowledge of this grammatical error but casual writing style. Thus this kind of errors is common in casually done essays but few in formal essays. Errors are common to be seen in long structured sentences, whereby several subjects may appear in the text. And careless mistakes are easy to be made in subject verb agreement.
Basically this error is easy to avoid using Word to check.

Examples:
Only a group of students want to attend the talk, because the topic was so familiar to most of them.
Either the students or the tutor have to be present.

Corrections:
Only a group of students wants to attend the talk, because the topic was so familiar to most of them.
Either the students or the tutor has to be present.

A Brief Summary of Group 3 Roundtable discussion

This entry is to summarize Group 3's discussion on the topic regarding collaborative or inter-disciplinary research.

The discussion was on "Should institutions or governments regulate the use of this or other technologies". And being the focus of the discussion, Computational Brain Modeling was explained briefly at the beginning of the discussion, whereby this is technology which uses MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to sketch the brain patterns of human beings. This technology is extremely helpful in the studies of human behaviors and reasoning.

However, this technology has enabled us to access and explore the most important and secret part of human beings, the brain. There will definitely be ethical and scientific issues arising from this area of research. Thus the roundtable discussion focused largely on the positive factors, as well as the adverse effects.

Firstly, there are remarkable positive aspects of the computational brain modeling technology. It helps develop working memories, which is something like a computer RAM in our human brains to improve memory; and also, through the computational modeling, brain structure will be so obvious to see and thus, we can trace the reactions of the brain structure against different stimulations, and in this way, we can understand human behaviors better. Moreover, it will produce great contribution towards medical purposes, for example, the cure of autism and Alzheimer's Disease. It may even change our daily life as scientists may be able to predict if the baby has talents in some areas or weaknesses in others. And according to this scientific prediction, parents can prepare better education for the baby: to let it become the second Beethoven or another Albert Einstein.

However, all these benefits come along with remarkable negative impacts also. And first of all, ethical issues are expectedly argued. Do we have the right to peep at a baby's potential and thus make a sentence to his life to be a success or failure? Do we have the right to trace anyone's behavior by connecting numerous cables on his skull? Or basically do we really should understand the last unknown part of human beings? Specific examples were provided during the discussion to tackle the questions. However, one could not simply weigh the importance between the positive factors and the negative impacts.

After about 20 minutes discussion on the pros and cons, the group finally made a politically correct conclusion that, the use of this or other technologies should be strictly regulated, and deep consideration should be made before adoption of the computational brain modeling technology into our daily life.

The doomed Hydropower

Being very concern about the climate change, our group chose the last topic for our roundtable discussion. And after discussion, we came out with a conclusion that R&D in new powers, or in modification of the thermal power generation method, which is currently widely adopted, are a possible way to mitigate climate change.

Being too optimistic on the promising hydropower generation, I did a research on disadvantages of the hydropower generation method. After a brief online research, I would like to summarize two relevant articles concerning the pros and cons of hydropower.

The first sentence in Duncan Graham-Rowe’s “Hydroelectric power's dirty secret revealed” shocked me: “Contrary to popular belief, hydroelectric power can seriously damage the climate.” Even Eric Dunchemin, a consultant for the IPCC, agrees with this point of view. According to Philip Fearnside from Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus, Hydropower dams produce even more methane and carbon dioxide than normal thermal power stations. And examples are given to support this idea, the greenhouse effects tripled after a dam was built in Para, Brazil. The reason for this unexpected result was due to the flooding of green plants at the stage to form the reservoir, the green plants died and thus the capacity of this region’s ability to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen through photosynthesis process is decreased, leading to the higher greenhouse effects. Furthermore, the dead bodies of the green plants decayed underwater with absence of oxygen to form huge amount of methane trapped underwater. Thus once the methane is released, the greenhouse effects will be further worsened. And to make things even worse, methane's effect on global warming is 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide's.

Being apparently disappointed and disheartened after reading this pessimistic article, I would like to summarize another article from an energy analysis website. This article, “Micro Hydro Power - Pros and Cons” discussed the advantages and disadvantages of micro hydro powers, which is to use water flow energy from streams instead of big rivers like the Yangtze River where china’s Three Gorge’s Hydropower Station lies on. And this method definitely solved the problem outlined in the previous article. And to build a small-scale hydro-power system can cost from $1,000 - $20,000 only, and maintenance fee will also be relatively low. Developing countries can adopt this technology faster and easier as it requires less capital to put in compared to large projects, say a nuclear power station. However nothing is perfect. Micro hydropower has remarkably numerous of disadvantages as well. The most visible one is it can only be built based on small scales, thus it does not fulfill the large energy demand in most industrialized countries. As the same time, though the micro hydropower plants are built at smaller scale, the impact on diverting the streams is still the same, and it is not negligible. And unlike big rivers for example, the Mississippi’s, streams might dry up during dry seasons.

After this brief online research, hydropower, being the well-commented new way to acquire energy, has numerous disadvantages of itself, and these disadvantages cannot be easily solved because they are all from its way of functionality to convert hydropower into electricity.

However, hydropower is not to be denied as a possible new way to generate electricity. Compared to thermal power generation, it is still much more environmentally friendly. Scientists should not feel doomed because hydropower is not a very suitable way to solve our current crisis, instead, more R&D should be done to find better ways to generate electricity, for example, wind power or solar power maybe?




Vocab List: (is it because the articles are too easy…? I actually saw unknown vocab…)
Drawdown: The Drawdown is the measure of the decline from a historical peak in some variable.
Agenda: a temporally organized plan for matters to be attended to


Duncan Graham-Rowe(2005), Hydroelectric power's dirty secret revealed, retrieved on 2nd March 2009, from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046.
Micro Hydro Power - Pros and Cons, (2006), retrieved on 2nd March 2009, from http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/micro-hydro-power-pros-and-cons.

The echoes of the 30th Jan Lecture

On the evening of 30th Jan, a talk was given by three professors regarding the hot issue “Global Warming”. Each of them addressed on one aspect of the issue, with the first lecturer Mr. Palmer shared the methodology of “the capture and storage of carbon dioxide”; the second lecturer Mr. Benjamin talked about the importance and mechanism of different problem-solving algorisms; and at the end, Mr. Bala shared his analysis on how are we, the very ordinary people, able to do, to contribute towards alleviation to the rapidly worsening Global Warming.

Mr. Palmer, with very strong accent, started the lecture. His sparkling and creative idea of “trapping” the most contributing Greenhouse gases, Carbon dioxide, is believed to be a very effective and feasible way to alleviate the Global Warming. Furthermore the methodology of trapping and storing the gas has been sufficiently developed to be adopted into industrial use. Although this method is costly, most of the audiences, the EG1471 students, were very convinced that this method will help a lot in slowing down Global Warming to a large extent.

However, after the second lecturer, Mr. Benjamin introduced the algorism of Social Science Systems Approach; the idea of Mr. Palmer’s turned unpractical, and is not likely to be adopted by current policy makers. Mr. Benjamin used one detailed example of Renewable Power to illustrate the practical use of the approach: academically applicable idea might as well fail due to bad social science complements, say Market Failure or Information Failure. As a conclusion to his lecture, the Science and Technology Study methods provide a useful lens to evaluate new technology. Hence, theoretically applicable methodology might still fail. For instance, under the current background of global economic recession, Mr. Palmer’s idea is not likely to be well-received by the major world powers like the US.

Lastly, Mr. Bala did a summary on recent climate change, with facts given by IPCC, the potential consequences and possible effect of a warmer earth, trying to warn the audiences the importance and threat of Global Warming. Although his presentation was down systematically and passionately, the content was very similar but more condensed to Al Gore’s famous “A Inconvenient Truth”, making it a bit tedious and boring at the end of the whole lecture.
In conclusion, the two-hour lecture was beneficial to the audiences as engineering students. The introduction of different problem-solving approaches given by Mr. Benjamin was impressive though the sequence of the three presentations were not structured nicely. Instead, I felt Mr. Bala should have started the lecture as introduction to Global Warming and followed Mr. Palmer, to share his idea of Trapping and Storing carbon dioxide; and lastly, shared by Mr. Benjamin’s analysis on different scientific approaches.

An Inconvenient Truth

The fluctuating temperature, the melting and re-freezing of icecaps are the very normal phenomena we see on planet earth, always. However these normal phenomena are gradually going wild: temperature going out of expected range and icecaps melted without re-freezing. From something to anything, nature is trying to warn us this inconvenient truth, Earth is becoming hotter.

Al Gore stated many facts to his audience patiently and passionately, trying to persuade them that Earth is becoming unexpectedly hotter than before, and the final destination is foreseeable if we let this trend move on. Carbon dioxide, the so-called “Green House Gas” commits the arch criminal of the climate change. It didn’t exceed certain range though the concentration fluctuated throughout years, so does the temperature. However, current records are showing the trend of mother earth’s surface temperature is getting out of control nowadays. Although reduction of usage of fuels can significantly reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, and as well reduce the level of global warning, politics does not agree with this, simply because politicians’ reluctance of slowing down the native economic progress. From this point of view, the truth AL Gore trying to reflect is really “inconvenient” to our dear politicians.

Besides the exponentially raising carbon dioxide’s concentration in the atmosphere, people have seen too many real cases reflecting nature’s rage: floods, typhoons, droughts. They destroyed, killed, leaving the living in desperation and abomination against the nature. However what indeed caused the unusually high frequency of various disasters? The answer is inconvenient for us to confess to confess ourselves guilty. Under the worldwide appeal to boost economy in the past a few decades, anyone of the earth’s population have to confess our sin to the mother earth for using electricity and fuels.

Hence, all the excuses appear to be so valid that we should not start from ourselves to cut down carbon dioxide emission, at least within the context of the past few years – whereby everyone was charmed by the incredible cash inflow. However I still want to bring the case back to our global economic condition now: recession. Oil price went down to 40 dollars per barrel from the historical high reached in last July of 147 dollars, government expenditures are being cut down for unknown reasons, I feel maybe here is the right time us to consider Climate as a more important issue compare to money. As well for Al Gore, maybe it is also a right time to come out again for his faithful passion to save the mother earth. And then go for Presidential Election again?

Analyse Systematically Like an Engineer

After reading Prof. Ramakrishna's “Expanding World of Engineers”, one question popped up in my mind, that is, how does the engineer training really help to systematically analyze difficult situations?

Firstly, I personally agree with the statement that the engineer training is systematic itself compared to other tertiary students. Being a Year One student in NUS, I have been allocated fundamental modules as a Mechanical Engineering Student, inclusive of basic mathematics and basic physics modules, even a programming module which teaches the methodology of problem solving with aid of computer programs. These modules function as foundation for any ME student, though none of them heavily talks about machine or engineering. However, one may realize that the knowledge is essential in the later courses. This is characteristic of engineer’s training guarantees that one must prepare the necessary knowledge before start solving any problem.

Secondly, Engineer’s training encourages and cultivates a mind-set, which is neither sentimental nor statistical, but logical. A typical tertiary engineer course does require the students to have at least one economics-related module and some Arts modules, which implies that an engineer should look at the big picture instead of living in his own world doing research. Thus when engineers suggest solution to problems, they do not only provide solution, but instead, the overall best outcome for the parties involved.

Thirdly, an engineer is trained to possess the ability to think holistically. Taking Mechanical Engineering as instance, students are trained to consider each part of a given machine separately, while ultimately, these parts are to build one operational device as a whole, failure of any part will lead to entire failure of the system. Thus the engineer’s training must cultivate a holistic and systematic way of processing problems and subsequently provide all-rounded solutions to it.

In conclusion, the current Tertiary ME course I am taking now is a good example of systematic education provided to us, with resourceful basic knowledge and holistic way to handle problems, an engineer should be able and habitual to apply holistic and systematic approach in designing solutions.