Is Peak Oil theory correct?

As has been previously mentioned, "peak oil" is just a theory. There people who believe it to be false. Read this New York Times opinion piece by Michael Lynch and answer the following question:

• What are the main arguments that Lynch uses to discredit proponents of peak oil?

Then read this article by Nate Hagens over at The Oil Drum which rebuts the Lynch article.

• According to Hagens, how is Lynch mistaken? What proof does Hagens offer that peak oil is real?
• Who do you think is more convincing? Explain.
  

FPS Practice Problem - Body Enhancement

The following passage was devised by the Future Problem Solvers organisation for competitors to practice upon in 2008.

My daughter will receive her first programmable tttoo today The baby, Daylin Ndjeka Anziani, born at 12.45am on April 15, 2039 received her genetic tattoos at birth. Using her own DNA, genetic cell manipulation marked her forhead, brow and jaw. As a teenager, a work tattoo will be applied to her cheek revealing her aptitude and talents. Her generation marks the new face of the human race, required for all citizens of the Continental Coalition born after 2029.

The indigo petroglyphs marking her forhead reveal her family rank and position. As in earlier times, her tattoos tell the world "I am Durinazzi". Her birth status is clearly noted on her jaw and pictographs on the left and right side share her family background. She hardly even squirmed as the tattoos were applied. In fact, I think she liked the procedure. From birth, her identification is secure and ancestry forever noted.

Now that she is six months old, I ready her for the appoinntment at Durinazzi City Hospital. I am nervous about the programmable tattoos Tattoo-medics are not required by law, but I am convinced this is the right choice for my daughter. After the overwhelming success of RFID (radio frequency identification) with animals and the medical breakthrough in Smart Tattoos with diabetes and health maintenance, I know that programmable tattoos are the next step for safety and protection.

Her paediatrician, geneticist and nano-bio-technicians assure me that the procedure is painless with few complications. Tattoo-medics use polyethylene-glycol beads coated with fluorescent molecules in a programmable implant that is injected jyst under the skin. The beads are larger than ink modules, so they float in the fluid between the cells and cannot be absorbed. The digital ink is visible through a translucent layer of skin. The beads have the ability to rearrange themselves into preset words, numbers, and animations that can display bio-sensing readouts monitoring pulse, body temperature, and signals frm the nervous and circulatory systems.

Tattooed warnings inform parents of the need for medical intervention due to infection or illness. For typical childhood diseases, dispensing devices embedded in the Tattoo-medic follow the fuel-injected principle to deliver vaccinations wheen required and medicine if the molecules sense a fever or presence of harmful vireses or bacteria. The positive benefits of Tattoo-medics, constant health monitoring designed with her individual DNA far outweigh any possible negatives.

Technological innovations with the programmable tattoos will continue to advance. Soon I will have to decide if I want to be able to know where she is and monitor her movements through tattoos with pico-speakers allowing me to speak to her through a tattoo. Eventually, using Wi-Fi mapping, she will be able to choose amazing tattoos that can record, recall, and redisplay on command stored emotional memories that she can extract and watch. Networked with WPAs (Wireless Personal Area Networks), these implants will create a broadband connection between humans and machines, taking the idea of a personal computer to a whole new level.

Programmable tattoos provde safe monitoring for health and identification. These "identity cards" help every parent rest a little easier. The Continental Coalition and world medical associations have come together to support and regulat these procedures. However, some countries in each of the continents resist the innovations citing loss of civil liberties and unknown, long term negative effects. These countries are refused membership in the Continental Coalition unless they comply.

The Continental Coalition, working in the best interests of all humankind, requests that you use the FPS model to generate challenges the Coalition faces, select an underlying problem, and produce solution ides for the use of these tattoos.

Political Problem Solving

Many of the problems that Australia faces today are complex and multifaceted. They may have technological and engineering aspects to their solutions, but in almost all cases these solutions require political will and the intervention of government in some form or other (eg: through legislation, through public funding, through coordination of government agencies, etc).

Your task is to identify a problem (or multiple connected problems) and devise a political solution to this problem. You need to establish a political party and outline it's policy measures that will tackle the problem you identify.

The process of dealing with this political issue has six steps:

1. Identify problems faced by Australian society and become familiar with an outline (general characteristics) of these problems. From these identify between 1 and 3 problems that you believe to be the most serious threat to Australian society in the coming decades.
2. Identify the underlying problem. Here you are identifying the causes of the problem in section 1. You should also explain what you want to do and why you want it to be done.
3. Brainstorm alternative solutions. This will require further investigation into the problem. In step 2 you offered a solution based on very little research and understanding. Now you need to look into the problem more deeply and identify a wide variety of solutions. Remember, your problem is complex and may require several steps and/or several components working in concert to solve. You will need 16 alternative solutions.
   
4. Now that you have investigated a range of solutions, you must determine which are the most effective. But first, determine the criteria for evaluating alternative solutions.
5. From your list of solutions, select 8 solutions that you think have the most potential. Scale these solutions on a scale from 1 (poorest) to 8 (best).
6. Start a political party and develop a policy response to the problem(s) you identified in steps 1 & 2. Your political party must have a name, a demographic of voters that it is seeking to appeal to (primarily), and a set of policies aimed at solving these political problems. Some consideration must also be given to marketing these policies to the electorate in order to persuade them to vote for your party.

{stay tuned for more}
...

Contour Landform Models

Your Task

In pairs you are to construct a three dimensional model of a particular region of the Earth which includes at least 3 labelled, landform features using materials such as glue, paper mache and paint. Most of the preparation for this model will need to be done at home. Only the final glueing together and painting of the model is to be completed at school.

Step 1: You will need to find a contour (topographical) map of an area that you are investigating.

Step 2: Now draw a diagram on an A3 piece of paper, showing the land form features that you have identified, in the form of a contour drawing. Check your drawing with your teacher and make any alterations if necessary. Then take a photocopy of the drawing.

Step 3: Now cut out along the contour lines to make templates for the cardboard. Start your first cut with the highest contours.

Step 4: Depending on the thickness of your cardboard, it will be necessary to cut out 2-3 pieces of the same size to provide the elevation needed on the model.

NOTE: You will need to cut out TWO large pieces of cardboard to form the base of the model. Glue the two pieces together with grains at 90 degrees. This will prevent buckling when constructing and painting the model.

Step 5: Now with PVA glue stick the pieces of cardboard together starting from the lowest contour and work up to the highest.

NOTE: The design must be the same as your contour drawing.

Step 6: Using plain flour and water make a glue and stick strips of newspaper over the cardboard model, be sure to work out the air bubbles and work the paper mache into the grooves.

Final Step: {stay tuned for more!!!}

Using Web 2.0 applications in the classroom: #2 Social Bookmarking to organize and share resources

What is social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
(definition of social bookmarking by Wikipedia)

To get a better idea about what social bookmarking is and how it is advantageous, watch this short video from the Common Craft Show.



Getting started with social bookmarking using Diigo


Diigo is a social bookmarking service established in 2006. It's late arrival on the web compared to other social bookmarking services like Delicious (2003) means it has a smaller user base, but has learnt from the inadequacies of earlier services and thereby provides other features which other social bookmarking services do not - including special educator accounts that allow teachers to set up class groups. To get a good overview of what Diigo offers, get me to give you a demo, or just watch this promo video.



The advantages of using Diigo in the classroom are:

1. Bookmarks are stored online and can be accessed from any computer.
2. Teachers can share links with students (no more writing long URLs on the board) and students can share links with each other.
3. Bookmarks are categorised and searchable for simple retrieval later on.
4. Important parts of pages can be highlighted to make located specific information easily retrievable later.
5. Sticky notes can be attached to highlighted sections of pages. This means that with the web and Diigo, a complete replacement for manual (handwritten) note-taking in research is available. Indeed, once a student is familiar with Diigo, the process of note-taking in research becomes much more efficient.
6. Educator accounts are available (upon application) which allows a teacher to have a "teacher's console". This allows a teacher to set up class group. The class group can easily share links and message each other in forums. The teacher can see and monitor all students' bookmarks.
7. If students are submitting work online in the form of blogs, teachers can use the highlighting and sticky notes to offer comments to students about their work.
8. Diigo has "webslides" which allows users to assemble links in a list and then play them back as slides (eg: like MS PowerPoint).

For a more extended demonstration of how to use the highlighting and note-taking feature of Diigo check out this video by a teacher.

Using Web 2.0 applications in the classroom: #1 Introduction

What is Web 2.0?

"Web 2.0" is a catchphrase coined by web gurus at O'Reilly's to describe the revolution in web technologies that arose around the mid-00s. Essentially it is about the arrival of the read/write web - websites that weren't just about disseminating media to the user (eg: portals), but actively required the user to participate in the process of creating the information on those sites (eg: blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking). This has coincided with greater intergration of audio and video media with the web. Therefore a site like YouTube is not just about videos, but is actually a Web 2.0 site in which the users upload and share video with one another.

Here is some further information that will provide an audio-visual introduction to what Web 2.0 is and it's significance.



Social Networking in Plain English (by Lee LeFever, Common Craft Show)


Social Media in Plain English (by Lee LeFever, Common Craft Show)


The Machine is Us/ing Us. (Michael Wesch, Kansas State University)



How is Web 2.0 relevant to education?

For a whole lot of reasons. Here are some:

1. Nearly all students are already using Web 2.0 applications and are frequently more knowledgeable than their teachers. Kids intuitively understand and accept that the Web is an integral part of their lives and can see how it is useful to them. They cannot understand why teachers and the education system in general don't get this point. (Read this article and this article for reports on student usage of the Web.)
2. The workforce of 10 years from now - which we are supposed to be preparing students for - will be even more reliant upon web technologies than today. To deprive students of the information literacy associated with our intellectual disciplines is to inherently disable students. Students may be using the Web, but this does not mean they are using it well or are capable of identifying reliable sources, etc.
3. By not utilizing the resources and services available on the Web we are depriving our classes of some very rich resources and teaching tools - nearly all of which are available for no cost.
4. As we enter the Information Age teaching will move away from being about locating and reproducing scarce information resources to dealing with an overabundance of information resources and identifying the most reliable and useful of these. For this we will be required to teach information literacy skills, including search strategies, identifying reliable sources, producing outputs (eg: essays, slide presentations, graphics, films) utilizing web applications and colloborative online networks.

The necessity of developing information literacy (identification of reliable information, processes, organizing, storing, retrieving and synthesizing in an online environment) brings us to the point where we need to get started. One of the best places to get started is with the next post which introduces social bookmarking in the classroom. Go to

Using Web 2.0 applications in the classroom: #2 Social Bookmarking to organize and share resources

How has Australia's colonial past influenced Australian society and culture?

• Investigation: Select an event* in Australian history between 1788 and 1901. Investigate this event and report on how it has influenced Australian society since 1901.

(* You may choose a specific event, or a year in Australian history, or a development that occurred in a particular place over a few years. eg: Victorian goldrush)

As part of this task you will be required to submit an annotated bibliography via diigo (utilizing the common tag "9SS_1" - you may use other tags in addition to this) or a printed copyof an annotated bibliography. You need to have a two pages of notes prior to writing up your answer in class in week 10.

To complete this task with high marks you will need to:

• choose a major event (from the period 1788 to 1901) that has influenced subsequent Australian history and society, and conduct research into this topic.
• demonstrate that you have a detailed and in-depth knowledge of at this event.
• develop an argument explaining how this event influenced australian culture or society (eg: government, economy) during the 20th Century.
  
• provide plenty of accurate, relevant factual evidence to support your argument and historical examples.
  
• be able to discuss the political, social, economic and/or cultural effects of this event upon subsequent Australian history, including into the 20th century. You need to consider both short-term and long-term effects.
• write up your answer in essay format, including an introduction (stating your argument about how a major event influenced the course of Australian history) and a conclusion (summarising your arguments main point).

Remember you need to write a well-researched article, supported by evidence that persuades the reader that a major event in Australia's past has influenced later developments (whether n the fields of economics, politics, culture or society). You argument needs be consistent and reference relevant source material.