Post 7

We used to do a project on Agatha Christie and her works. The project was in the form of a report. During that report, we introduced the class system of England at the time she lives.
And we are asked to show the reasons why we want to talk about the class system. The following article is my response to this question:


Talking about England at that time, one thing that I could not avoid mentioning was the class system. We think it is important to give the readers a basic impression about the class system because agatha Christie and her works were greatly influenced by the class system. There were altogether three classes and Christie was born in the leisured class. Her family had been enjoying a relaxed life as they did not have to work for a living. Her father’s death changed all this. The great change left great impact on Christie. Many characters in her works are from the leisured class and many stories were set among the leisured class. Though her books were mainly set among the leisured class, the other two classes were also mentioned frequently. In murder on the orient express, Christie even put people from all the classes in the train. We can see that the class system is an important part of her books.

Another purpose for talking about the class system is to help readers understand people’s behaviors in Christie’s books. Servants, middle class, rich people are always seen in her stories and they were from different classes. So some knowledge of the class system can make readers more clear about the relationships between classes and they get to know why the characters in her books behave that way.

In this part, we also talk about the shift from different classes because we think it is necessary to show the evolution of the class system. The industrial revolution was a landmark. Before that, people’s social status were determined by their birth while after the industrial revolution, shift between classes were possible. To give an example of how the shift happened, we use the case the tape-measure murder in which a working class person became a middle class. This is a typical example though the shift happened in an illegal way.

Post 6

My first most common grammar mistake is the use of prepositions. Preposition shows the relationship between two things, either real objects or conceptual ones, such as the subject and the object in a sentence. Using the wrong word may cause the readers to misunderstand the meaning of the sentence. I have a very typical example:

Many boys like to play basketball to draw the attention to the girls that they like.

This sentence uses the wrong preposition and as a result, the readers will get confused. The correct sentence should be like this:

Many boys like to play basketball to draw the attention of the girls that they like.

In the sentence, we are actually showing possession between attention and girls. Since “attention” belongs to “girls”, we should use “of” to indicate the right relationship between them, rather than “to”.

Another common mistake that I usually make is the use of articles. There are three articles: the, a and an. I always miss out the articles, or use the wrong one. One example is like this:

The professor shows the second research on black holes.

If we use “the”, we are indicating that this research has been mentioned before and it is the second research. However, if we use “a’, the meaning is totally different. “A” indicates that it is the first time that this research is mentioned and it is the second one. Readers will be misguided if I mix up those two cases.

The third mistake happens when I use clauses. This is one example:

Please go to the football field which they are playing.

When the readers first see this sentence, they might be surprised because if we rephrase the sentence, it would be “They are playing the football field and please go there.” How come people can play a football field? The correct sentence would be:

Please go to the football field where they are playing.
Please go to the football field on which they are playing.

I think the best way to avoid such problems is to read more and hope I will overcome them in the future.

Post 5

During the round table discussion, there are four kinds of technologies that were discussed. The first one is biofuel technology. The group first gives a brief introduction of biofuel technology. Biofuel technology is currently a very hot area where many research has been done. Unavoidably, many controversies will be brought up by it, such as the use of land in Singapore. Actually we can make use of the roofs of the HDB flats as the “land” to grow biofuel crops. There is rich sunshine and rain there, so the flats may works very well.

The second group focuses on green chemistry. It is a new concept coming from the principle of sustainable development. It emphasizes on the environmental friendliness during manufacturing process. The greatest difficulty it is facing is resources, such as fund, people and technology. The green chemistry techniques are likely to require higher cost; therefore an intense competition exists between the traditional techniques and green chemistry techniques. As a result, its popularization would be a problem.

The third group discussed a new technology which will plant some chips into human body and convenience would be created through this method. We will not need to worry about losing our identity card and bank cards. Payment would also be much easier then. However, there is a serious disadvantage of this technology which might prevent it from being adopted. Planting chips into human body means that our every single action will be supervised by the government, which would be a great challenge for our privacy. I believe most citizens would not agree with adopting this technology at the cost of their privacy.

The last discussion is on carbon storage, which is another hot area in mitigating climate change. The group briefly showed us the mechanism of carbon storage. Inevitably, problems also exist. One problem is find container for carbon. Currently scientists plan to use the ocean as the container. But what if the ocean is saturated? We will be facing a difficult problem with finding another good container as the ocean. All these issues remain to be seen.

Global Warming Is a Social Problem

The main concern of the lecture is global warming. All of the three lectures have been concentrating on global warming, but from different point of views. The first speaker, Prof Palmer talked about the mechanism of how do greenhouse gases heat the earth, and then he moved on to talk about technologies of carbon capture and the influence of politics on technologies. The second speaker, Prof Sovacool, mainly focus on how to estimate technologies. He used two examples in order to show that political and economic factors must be taken into consideration when we estimate a technology, which is exactly the objective of STS. The last speaker, Dr Bala, talked about the evidence of global warming and the challenges of solving global warming. He also provides us some measures in response to global warming and climate change.
Among the three speakers, the second one, Prof Sovacool, stood in a rather different point of view from the other two in the discussion of global warming and climate change. I have never considered about the impacts of politics and economy in estimating a certain technology, or especially technologies on solving global warming. I have heard of many technologies before, in response to global warming, some of which sound really effective. However, I have never paid enough attention to the current situation of our fight against global warming. In fact, most of the technologies are not practical. They require a large amount of funds in order to apply it, which would cause more pressure on our economy, compared to global warming itself. China is a very good example. China has great potential in developing wind-based energy source. However, according to China’s national conditions, adopting wind-based energy source widely is unrealistic because that would cost much many and take a long time. Currently, China should focus on reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency, which is the most realistic and suitable option for China.

China's Policies in Response to Global Warming

The documentary The Inconvenient Truth provides us a very detailed description of the challenge that all the whole human beings are faced with --- global warming. The average temperature of the earth has risen dramatically during the last decades of years, which has never happened in the history of human beings. If this trend continues in the future, it will cause an irretrievable disaster. Being aware of the importance of this problem, many countries have formulated their respective plans in response to the problem.

The core issue of global warming is the dramatic increase of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The reason of this dramatic increase is high energy consumption which causes large amount of greenhouse gases to be emitted into the atmosphere. China, as one of the most rapidly developing countries, also has the highest energy consumption. Thus, China’s policies in response to global warming would be of vital importance to the world’s effort to reduce global warming. As one important measure to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, China has increased the tax of coals. Coal is the supporting energy of China; therefore this measure can effectively reduce coal consumption in China. As a result, a large proportion of carbon dioxide emission would be cut off, which is a significant contribution to reducing global warming.

However, increasing coal tax cannot eliminate the root of overemission of carbon dioxide. The determining policy is to invest in R&D to search for new techniques to increase the efficiency of energy sources, as well as to reduce total energy consumption, rather than purely reducing coal consumption. Although this policy requires large amount of fund and large number of highly educated people, once we find out a new technique to reduce energy consumption or increase efficiency of energy sources, this technique would be adopted widely by industries worldwide, the effect would be revealed immediately in several years. Global warming would be reduced significantly.

Engineers--------Dominating Force of The Future

Professor Seeram Ramakrishna’s article has illustrated us the tremendous developments of engineering by describing in details the rising importance of engineers with specific emphasize on Singapore’s condition. It is true that engineers are becoming more and more important nowadays. Our life is surrounded by the products of engineering. The concept of engineering has broadened to a rather large scale, rather than only building. Almost everything in our life can be related to engineering. Electronic devices, which is designed and manufactured by electrical engineers has played an irreplaceable role in our daily life. In a nutshell, engineers will be the dominating force of the world in the future 50 years or even more.

There are 195 countries in the world. However, only a small proportion is developed countries. Vast majority of the world’s population are still living in developing countries. Especially people living in Africa, they are facing great difficulty with lacking of the most basic stuff to sustain life. Thus, manufacturing industry becomes very important in those places, which is closely related to engineering. In addition, construction of infrastructures, such as power supplies and water supplies, is extremely urgent. Without those infrastructures, people’s living condition could never be improved. This is also closely related to engineering.

Let us stand in another point of view and consider why engineers would be the dominating force of the future. If we move our focus to the scientific world and consider the current situation of science, would find that we have developed a relatively complete science system and many scientific researches has turn into the research of technology, rather than science itself. All these technologies would turn into application in the future. The job of transforming technology into application is done exactly by engineers. This process requires great amount of dedicated engineers. Engineers would be in great need in the future and they will be the dominating force of the future.