4.5 Sustainability of renewable energy sources
Access to safe, clean and sustainable energy supplies is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity during the twenty-first century. This unit will survey the world’s present energy systems and their sustainability problems, together with some of the possible solutions to those problems and how these might emerge in practice.
4.15.1 Ontologies We noted earlier that, in philosophy, an ontology refers fundamentally to ‘being’, or ‘what can be’. In the field of artificial intelligence the term ‘ontology’ has been appropriated to mean a ‘reusable terminological scheme’ or, if you prefer, a ‘conceptualisation’: a scheme for providing a rigorous description of the concepts, attributes and interrelationships deemed relevant to describe a particular aspect of the world. Its precision means that
4.13.2 Example: an ‘intelligent’ email system Let us work through an email example of making a system ‘smarter’. We are all familiar with the standardised fields in an email system: From, To, Subject. The computer needs the To/From information, expressed in a standard format, to direct the message to its addressees and allow them to reply. It has no concept of who the sender and recipient are, or what the Subject field means. We can imagine simple knowledge-level email categories which add status information
4.9.1 Stories for sharing tacit/informal knowledge Once war stories have been told, the stories are artefacts to circulate and preserve. Through them, experience becomes reproducible and reusable. [War stories] preserve and circulate hard-won information within the community. We all recognise that stories are one of the most natural and compelling ways to exchange experienc
4.3.1 Mapping what we know Knowledge maps are often one of the first knowledge management representations to emerge, in an effort to add value over the simple corporate intranet search which returns lists of ‘hits’ that are undifferentiated beyond a ranking in terms of keyword matches. Knowledge maps, like other forms of cartography, should communicate a ‘big picture’ by overlaying meaningful structure on to raw resources. 3.4.1 Integrating memory systems into the flow of work There has been a substantial amount of research interest over the last decade in group/organisational memory systems. For example, software researchers have investigated the possibility of capturing design rationale, the key reasoning that underpins design decisions (Moran and Carroll, 1996). However, time and again projects have failed. A given information codification scheme encourages particular ways of thinking about information and the problem at hand: typically, information must 2.3 Codification and formalisation Much of the knowledge management literature argues the importance of making tacit knowledge explicit, and then codified. For instance, an explicit goal when auditing intellectual capital is to identify human capital as one of the key assets that give an organisation its true value. Some organisations are realising that a large quantity of their ‘assets’ leave the office for home each evening, perhaps never to return, and as a consequence want to capture these in a less vulnerable for 1.2 Pressing questions In the late 1990s, when this unit was first prepared, if you surveyed the field of knowledge management technology you were assailed by technology vendors offering Knowledge Management Solutions. As we write in 2005 , an internet search on ‘knowledge management ICT’ will still return thousands of hits, but the ‘knowledge’ buzzword has faded in potency, the hype bandwagon has trundled on, and vendors now market the same products under business process banners which reflect gr Sneaking Up On Sneakers Engineering in Sports Discovering Friction Images of the Sun How it's Made: Aluminum Foil References 4 Power: the medical gaze and the management of risk Power is an essential feature of the debate about the medicalisation of death, as western societies value knowledge and expertise and allocate authority accordingly. As highly trained professionals, medical and clinical practitioners fall into some of the most highly esteemed positions of authority in society. The philosopher, Foucault highlights the relationship between power and knowledge. He connects them to the extent that: 5.5 ‘A sense of belonging and membership in which sentiment and emotion play an important rol Nationalism is about land or territory and what it means to people. Nationalists make claims to the centrality of certain tracts of land to them, to their people, to their collective history, traditions, cultures and sufferings: When a hundred thousand nationalists march down Sherbrooke Street [in Montreal] chanting ‘Le Quebec aux Quebecois’, they are not just talking about the establishment of a public la 1.2.2 Boundaries of difference One of the things that language does is define and give a name to differences between people – to delineate the boundaries that separate them. In the mental health field, the ‘mad’ are at one end of the social divide that separates the ‘normal’ from the ‘abnormal’. They are ‘the other’, a point made in the article by Perkins (above): ‘To be mad is to be defined as “other”’. This is a recurring theme in the mental health field. Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should be able to understand: the complexity and dilemmas of diverse perspectives in the field of mental health and distress;
the importance of service users'/survivors' experiences and perspectives; how mental health issues affect everyone; the range of risks faced by service users'/survivors' in their everyday lives. Original Copyright © 2004 The Ope The sweatshop on your conscience: How consumers and marketers are more responsible than they’d lik Carbon leakage: EU cap-and-trade rules could do more harm than good
This activity explores why different types of sneakers are used in a variety of common sports. It connects how engineers analyze design needs in sneakers and everyday items. The goal is for students to understand the basics of engineering associated with the design of different types of athletic shoes. Sneakers are one of the most commonly worn shoes in our American culture. They provide comfortable support for our feet as we go about our active lives as students, athletes, educators, and engine
Imagining themselves arriving at the Olympic gold medal soccer game in Beijing, students begin to think about how engineering is involved in sports. After a discussion of kinetic and potential energy, an associated hands-on activity gives students an opportunity to explore energy absorbing materials as they try to protect an egg from being crushed.
With a simple demonstration activity, students are introduced to the concept of friction as a force that impedes motion when two surfaces are in contact. Then, in the Associated Activity (Sliding and Stuttering), they work in teams to use a spring scale to drag an object such as a ceramic coffee cup along a table top or the floor. The spring scale allows them to measure the frictional force that exists between the moving cup and the surface it slides on. By modifying the bottom surface of the cu
Skylab's solar experiments captured images of the sun in incredible detail and revealed unknown aspects of the Sun.
From a large block of aluminum to the foil in your kitchen.
Lower consumer prices and higher profit margins take the spotlight off poor working conditions in cheap labour markets. Changing those practices is as much a responsibility of the marketer and consumer as it is of the supplier. INSEAD professor N.Craig Smith explains how and why responsible consumerism matters.
Despite its good intentions, the next phase of EU emissions trading scheme (to be implemented in 2013) could end up doing more harm than good, both to the global environment and to European industries that must comply with the rules, says David Drake, a PhD candidate in Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD.
