2 Your own mathematics It is crucial to remember that you are a learner of mathematics as well as a teacher. In this unit you will be asked to undertake some mathematical tasks. The aim of these tasks is not to improve your mathematics, but to give you experience of doing mathematics for yourself—experience that you can reflect upon subsequently. The reflection is used to develop your awareness of the ways that learners deal with mathematical tasks, and how learners' mathematical thinking is influenced by the way
1.6.1 Introduction The process of keeping up-to-date in your chosen subject area is useful for your studies and afterwards, for your own personal satisfaction, or perhaps in your career as part of your continuing professional development. There are a great many tools available that make it quite easy to keep yourself up to date. You can set them up so that the information comes to you, rather than you having to go out on the web looking for it. Over the next few pages, you will be experimenting with some
1.5.1 Why is it important to be organised? 87% of items that are filed into a filing cabinet are never looked at again. STANFORD UNIVERSITY
The world is producing nearly two exabytes of new and unique information every year – an exabyte is a new term that had to be coined for a billion gigabytes. All the words ever spoken by human beings comes to five exabytes. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (BERKELEY)
More new information has been produc
1.4.3 R is for Relevance Relevance is an important factor to consider when you are evaluating information. It isn’t so much a property of the information itself but of the relationship it has with your question or your ‘information need’. For example, if you are writing an essay about the Consumer Price Index a book or website about how the Ancient Egyptians drew circles would not be relevant. So there are a number of ways in which a piece of information may not be relevant to your query:
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1.1.2 Key resources When you need to find information in Arts or History, how confident are you that you know the best places to search (e.g. search engines, subject gateways, online databases etc.) to find the information you need? 5 – Very confident 4 – Confident 3 – Fairly confident 2 – Not very confident 1 – Not confident at all How familiar are you with journal articl
3.2 Governance – filling the hole where government used to be Sustainable development emerged as a prominent environmental policy discourse at a time of deep introspection in policy communities. In the 1970s and early 1980s it was widely felt that something was badly wrong with the political process. Commentators from both left and right argued that nation states were losing the authority to govern and the capacity to act effectively. Expressions such as ‘ungovernability’, ‘legitimation crisis’ and ‘crisis of the welfare state’ were coined t
6.1 ‘I’, ‘we’ or ‘they’? We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. (Al Gore, 2007) There are some things that we can do as individuals: making this an energy-efficient house and making smart transport choices. Then there a 4.3 Technical and behavioural actions The numbers generated by the carbon calculator use a computer model based on some of the best information available. However, as I mentioned earlier, the results are not exact because calculators typically require you to enter broad categories of information about yourself and your household. And there are always uncertainties about some of the data on which the calculator is based. Nevertheless, the calculator allows you to explore the important actions needed to lighten your carbon load and 2.2.1 Long-term rhythms in the climate The instrumental record referred to above is based on direct temperature measurements (using thermometers), and extends back only 150 years or so. Temperatures further back in time are reconstructed from a variety of proxy data. These include historical documents, together with natural archives of climate-sensitive phenomena, such as the growth or retreat of glaciers, tree rings, corals, sediments and ice cores (see Author(s): Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. Box 1: ‘O sweet spontaneous’. Copyright 1923. Trustees for the E E Cummings Trust. Box 5: Maugh, T H (2008) ‘The MIT Meteorologist’s theory 2.1 Dealing with change in what matters: ethics, policy and action Much of what has been covered so far in this unit deals with the individual human capacity to frame nature as a means for enabling environmental responsibility. But what are the implications of this for actually doing something about policy design and action to improve matters? Framing the natural world is an inevitable human endeavour that we all carry out, whether consciously or subconsciously, as part of our interaction with human and non-human nature. For example, each of the tools listed Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material within this unit. Box 4: Four Scenarios for 2050, Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 22nd
Report, Energy– The Changing Climate, June 2000. Crown copyright material is reproduced under class licence number C01W0000065 with the p 2.3.1 Public participation and perspectives on sustainability When it comes to issues around the environment, ‘experts’ – whether ecologists, economists or other types of social scientist – are clearly not infallible. Environmental crises have led to a questioning of traditional expert support as a guarantor of environmental planning. This has had two consequences. Firstly, there have been some interesting and useful explorations amongst environmentalists in seeking guarantors through the domain of spiritualism. In particular, traditional worldv Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following: Reading: Stephen Talbott 7.3 Running the models forward What happens when the models are run forward? It depends upon the models used and the scenarios they are asked to run. It seems almost certain, however, that there will be increases in the global mean surface temperature, to the order of +1.5 to +4.5 °C (– possibly more, according to some models and scenarios. These changes are predicted to be associated with increases in sea level, changes to weather conditions (e.g. more regular and violent winter storms in the UK) and changes to t 3 Recorded temperatures Analyses of over 400 proxy climate series (from trees, corals, ice cores and historical records) show that the 1990s was the warmest decade of the millennium and the 20th century the warmest century. The warmest year of the millennium was 1998, and the coldest was probably 1601. (Climatic Research Unit, 2003) Throughout historical times, fluctuations in the Earth's mean temperature have been recorded. During the seventeenth century, the Thames periodically froze over during winter and m Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to use material: All other materials included in this unit are d 5.3 Global warming Media attention has been such that it would be hard to have missed the fact that global warming is considered to be a ‘bad thing’. Why should this be so? What is so wrong with being a bit warmer? Anyway, is global warming really occurring and, if it is, what are the causal factors responsible for it? Let us deal with this last question first. As we sit on a beach in summer, or in a sunny window seat in winter, we are aware of the Earth being warmed by the Sun. In fact the Earth is w 4.4 Genetic diversity and mass extinctions It is for this reason that there are now international agreements on the need to work together to retain genetic diversity in all species and, more generally, biological diversity (species and habitat diversity). From a 3.2 Food webs The Eucalyptus provides food for other species too, so a more realistic way of expressing the complicated interrelationships of plants and animals, is in a food web as shown in Figure 2 for the common oak.
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