2.5 Review The title of this unit could have been Juggling with complexity: searching for system. This title seemed to capture something essential about the unit. Juggling is a rich metaphor and will be used explicitly in Part 3. But it also carries the idea of a skill that needs to be practised and that might seem incredibly awkward to begin with. You may find this idea helpful as you review your work in Part 1. Juggling is also a skill that, once practised, becomes second nature. This too may b
4.10 What has been learnt from the history of the telephone? Here are some points about invention and innovation that seem to have emerged from considering the case of the telephone. Invention is an ongoing process not a one-off event. It's not always possible to identify one individual as the inventor of a new technological product – even in well-known cases. Boldness and determination, allied with sufficient resources and a good support team – especially good patent lawyers â€
4.3 Who invented the telephone? The popular image of Bell inventing the telephone, while it has some truth, is by no means the whole story. The two most significant players in the invention of a practical working telephone were Bell and Elisha Gray. Gray was the co-owner and chief scientist of a company that manufactured telegraphic equipment. Bell's patent description had sound transmission as a minor purpose. But Gray's caveat declared that the main purpose of his device was ‘to transmit the tones of the human voi
Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: explain invention, design, innovation and diffusion as ongoing processes with a range of factors affecting success at each stage; explain how particular products you use have a history of invention and improvement, and appreciate the role that you and your family, as consumers, have played in this history; define key concepts such as invention, design, innovation, diffusion, product champion, entrep
1.1.3 Features of diagrams As there is variety in the types of diagrams we can see and use we need to think more broadly about what diagrams are trying to represent. One distinction which follows on from the discussion above is:
Analogue representations: these diagrams look similar to the object or objects they portray. At their simplest they are photographs of real objects and at their most complicated they are colourful, fully labelled drawings of the inner workings o
3.5.3 Protozoa
Protozoa
are microscopic single cell animals. They utilise solid substances and bacteria as a food source. They can only function aerobically, and in a stream which contains little organic degradable matter they can become a predominant microbial type. They play an important part in sewage treatment where they remove free-swimming bacteria and help to produce a clear effluent. In an aquatic environment, there are three main types of protozoa:
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2.1 Introduction The hydrological cycle, the continuous cycling of water between land, open water surfaces and the sea, either directly or indirectly, is an extremely complex process which has been known for a long time (Figure 1). The identifiable mechanisms of the cycle are complicated not only by the characteristics of air-water-land interfaces across which the cycle operates, but also by climatic factors which vary in both time and space. The various operations and mechanisms within the cycle are illustra
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: know something about how hieroglyphs were used to represent numbers and the nature of the problems that have survived; understand that Egyptian calculation was fundamentally additive. Operations such as doubling and halving being used for multiplication and division; appreciate the advanced understanding of mathematics in Ancient Egypt in relation to the manipulation of fractions; consid
Introduction For many centuries, ancient Egypt was seen as the source of wisdom and knowledge, about mathematics as well as other things. There was a long classical Greek tradition to this effect, and in later centuries the indecipherability of the hieroglyphs did nothing to dispel this belief. But since the early nineteenth century, when the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone by Young and Champollion enabled rapid progress to be made in translating extant Egyptian texts, the picture has changed to reveal a
Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. Courtesy of Lanterna at Flickr All other materials included in this unit are derived from conten
Unit image
1.6 The social context of Babylonian mathematical activity The extant mathematical tablets from the Old Babylonian period fall broadly into two categories, table texts and problem texts. You have seen examples of both of these. The weighing-the-stone problem with which we started is from a problem text, while all the others—the table of squares, the reciprocal table and Plimpton 322—are table texts, tablets consisting solely of tables of numbers. Several hundred table texts have been found, and many types of calculations appear to h
1.5.3 Errors in Plimpton 322 The presence of errors on the tablet is of further benefit to the historian, in that trying to discover how they could have arisen provides strong clues about how the computations were done. So, for instance, the last entry in column C is half what it ‘should’ be. The scribe wrote 53, where 1,46 is what is needed to preserve the pattern of the rest. This tells us that some stage in the computation must have involved a doubling or halving, which on this occasion the scribe overlooke
3 The pronunciation of Latin Contrary to what many people think, we do know how classical Latin (the Latin spoken in the first century BC and the first century AD) was pronounced. One of the main clues is provided by the spelling of Latin names in Greek: thus, since Latin Valeria, for instance, was spelled
in Greek, we can tell that Latin
2 Conclusion We have now looked specifically at two considerable monuments created at about the same time to commemorate the First World War. You have been using your eyes, and looking closely to respond to visual clues. We hope you found that, in doing so, you developed your understanding of them as memorials and also as ‘made objects’; and that in the process of asking questions about them you have reached some kind of explanation as to why they are as they are. 1.2 The Sandham Memorial Chapel So let us turn first of all to the visual arts, and see how one artist, Stanley Spencer, created a memorial to those who died in the First World War. Spencer was profoundly affected by his experience of the war, and decorated the walls of a chapel especially designed to display his work. First of all, it will help to have a few biographical details. This is not because you could not understand his painting without knowing about him: you could certainly pick up a lot of information about 1.1 Introduction War memorials are artefacts which commemorate loss – of individuals, armies or battalions – in war and have particular symbolic meaning and form. We could define texts as ‘things that people have made or produce Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have: an understanding of ‘texts’ that is not restricted to the written word; an understanding of war memorials as text; a basic ability to interpret a visual text. References 5 Function of a memorial We could, of course, extend this notion of appropriateness into other forms of civic building. If I had asked you to consider your local town hall, shopping centre or supermarket, we could have asked many of the same questions about function and appropriateness. We expect a shopping centre to be organised so that shopping and spending money are easy. If it is not well organised, we might go elsewhere. We expect civic offices to be accessible and central to the area they serve; and we are anno 4 Form of memorial I now want you to think about the form of ‘your’ war memorial. I don't think you will have had any difficulty in knowing what to look for when I asked you whether you had a memorial near to you, and where it was. You may have had to think about the question, and search for the memorial, but you knew what you were looking for.
Exercise 1
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