1.3 Designing alternative programmes and curricula Assuming that both the content of mathematics and the processes need to be included in programmes and curricula, the problem becomes one of how a suitable curriculum can be structured. One possibility is to construct a very specific curriculum with clearly defined objectives for both content and processes separately, and possibly with suggested learning activities. However, content and process are two complementary ways of viewing the subject. An alternative is to see the curriculum in
1.3.6 Encyclopedias Encyclopedias can be useful reference texts to use to start your research. There are some available online, such as Wikipedia, which is a freely available collaborative encyclopedia.
1.3.5 Journals Journals and articles written by academics or experts are an excellent source of information. Journals are usually published monthly or quarterly, and contain a selection of articles providing details of recent research. Often they will also contain reviews of relevant books. They are usually published more quickly than books, and so are often more up to date. To access content of journals, most publishers require a subscription. There are, however, some journals which you can freely ac
1.3.2 Search engines and subject gateways Although both search engines and subject gateways will help you find the resources that you need, the types of information that you find will differ. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! search the internet for keywords or phrases, and then show you the results. These results are not mediated by the search engines, and therefore you need to use your own judgement on the reliability of the results. You may, for example, find websites written by experts, alongside websites written by
1.5 ‘Radiative forcing’ as an agent of climate change Since its first major report in 1990, the IPCC has used the concept of ‘radiative forcing’ as a simple measure of the importance of a potential climate change mechanism. The basic idea is straightforward. Any factor that disturbs the radiation balance at the top of the atmosphere has the potential to ‘force’ the global climate to change: it will either warm up or cool down until a balance is restored. The perturbation to the energy balance of the whole Earth-atmosphere system i
1.3.1 The vertical ‘structure’ of the atmosphere The atmosphere is not a simple, uniform slab of absorbing material. On the contrary, it gets progressively ‘thinner’ or less dense with increasing altitude (height above mean sea level); i.e. the total number of molecules in a given volume of air is lower, and so is the pressure. About 80% of the total mass of the atmosphere is within some 10 km of the surface; 99.9% lies below 50 km. The important corollary is that the key greenhouse gas molecules (H2O and CO
Introduction This unit explores different understandings of nature and environment and the significance these may have for developing responsibility. The problems of connecting human and non-human nature are presented here as being a challenge peculiar to the concerns of environmental responsibility. They provide the impetus for exploring the idea of ‘conversation’ as a metaphor for what matters in environmental responsibility. Using a reading by Stephen Talbott as a foundation, the conversation me
References Learning outcomes When you have completed this unit you should have: developed an awareness of different ways in which our use of technology can affect the environment developed your own skills in reading and interpreting texts and diagrams containing some technical descriptions 4.3 Thermally activated processes
Thermally activated processes are those that get going not because of average effects, but because the fraction of particles in the tail of the distribution increases with temperature. This is a basic property of the thermal distribution we have been discussing. For instance, what would take 30 000 years at room temperature may happen in under one second at 1000 K if it depends on how many particles have an energy in excess of 1 eV. The next step in the study of energy distribu 4.5.2 Commercial copolymers The main reason for copolymerizing different monomers is to adjust the physical properties of a given homopolymer to meet a specific demand. SBR elastomer, for example (Table 1), based on 24 wt% styrene monomer shows better mechanical properties and better resistance to degradation than polybutadiene alone. By increasing the s 1.5 Photocapacitors as pixels Perhaps you can also imagine an image-capturing array made up of MOS photocapacitor pixels. It's well within the scope of microelectronics to fabricate such an array of virtually identical, isolated MOS structures that would translate the pattern of light intensity falling on it into a pattern of charge. There's more to it than that, though, because: each capacitor must be simultaneously connected to a power supply that provides the reverse bias References Bridge girders Figures 11 and 12, below, are photographs of the bridge taken from the south and north banks of the firth. The girders of the bridge were supported on a total of 85 piers. The first 14 piers were made from brick and masonry, built up as a solid structure. The rest were fabricated from iron on masonry platforms, and by comparison, appeared rather insubstantial (Author(s): 10 Part 2: 6 Review In Part 2 of this unit, you have undertaken a major piece of work. In encountering the case study you were engaging with a set of events, issues, actors, stakeholders and intentions that was, by any standards, complex. In addition, you brought your own complexity to it, your own stakeholdings and understandings, your own reactions and feelings. You used systems diagrams to structure the complexity you encountered in the case study. That then structured and clarified the situation in way 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 Introduction (Please refer to Reading 4: Learning to act: managing and systems practice, by Andy Lane) This unit teaches some aspects of systems thinking and practice. But what does it mean to be a systems practitioner, and is it different to being a manager? This reading attempts to answer those questions. First, I believe a good systems practitioner will be more competent at handling complex situations, more capable of managing their working and domestic lives, and more able to learn not only how Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material within this book: 3.7 Aftermath In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, it was vital to prevent any further collapses, especially on bridges of similar design. Two other bridges were built to a design similar to that of the Silver Bridge, one upstream at St Mary's, West Virginia and the other in Brazil at Florianopolis. The bridge upstream on the Ohio river, at St Mary's, was the focus of concern, and it was closed to traffic immediately after the disaster. The eye-bar design was actually quite widespread in other bridg 3.6 Failure sequence Following the discovery of the broken eye bar near the top of the northern suspension chain on the Ohio side of the bridge (Figure 36), it was possible to reconstruct the sequence of events during the collapse. When the side chain separated, the entire structure was destabilised, simply b
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