Trivia - A Google a Day XXXII

What group of antibiotics does penicillin and amoxicillin belong to?
Beta-Lactams

Of the two U.S. states that are not divided into counties, which one is first alphabetically?
Alaska

Where did Churchill deliver the speech in which he used the term "Iron Curtain" for the first time?
Westminster College

Which former NBA player has appeared on the small screen with Larry David and on the silver screen with Bugs Bunny?
Muggsy Bogues

For what team did the founder of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association play at the time of his retirement?
Kansas City Royals

The mother of the first infant to be recreated in wax by Madame Tussauds was nominated for a 2008 Golden Globe for what movie?
A Mighty Heart
The infant’s name is Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt daughter of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

What volcano is responsible for the formation of the tuff cone that was named by British sailors who mistook the embedded calcite crystals for diamonds?
Ko’olau

After performing for a few months as "Composition of Sound", from what source did the band then take its new name?
French Fashion Magazine

What does Dr. Van Helsing protect Mina with that scars her forehead before the final hunt for Dracula ensues in Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula"?
Communion Wafer

An actress published a collection of her photos entitled "In Mexico". In what movie did this actress play the sister of a character named Lenny Magrath?
Crimes Of The Heart

Trivia - A Google a Day XXXI

In addition to being one of very few mortals to be depicted as part of a pharaoh's statue, who is considered to have been the world's first physician?
Imhotep

Who wanted to block the U.S. publication of Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel in 1971?
Her Mother

How long was the IDF corporal held before his release was secured in October 2011? (In Years)
Five Years

What reply does the large computer give as the answer to everything in the universe in Douglas Adams' 1979 novel?
42

If you travel north on N. Jefferson Davis Highway in Northern Virginia and turn left on Memorial Drive, in what cemetery would you be?
Arlington National Cemetery

Who was the then-spouse of the writer of Clark Gable's last film?
Marilyn Monroe

What did an American business magnate and film producer design for his leading lady in the film "The Outlaw" that she then refused to wear?
Bra

During the 2010-2011 NBA season, for what team did 1997's "Mr. Basketball of Michigan" play?
Memphis Grizzlies

In alphabetical order, what are the two largest islands off the coast of the country that flies a Naval Jack featuring the coats of arms of the four major Maritime Republics?
Sardinia & Sicily

In the novel that won the Booker Prize in 2002, Pi is the protagonist. What is Pi's full name?
Piscine Molitor Patel

Paper - Sustainability Beta Test 2012

Sustainability Beta Test

Chris Luk

Abstract
<in progress>

Introduction

Y2K, missing days in Mayan calendars, the Large Hadron Collider causing black holes, these are just a few of the recent end of the world crises the media has publicized. Its been a recent trend in our culture, to be concerned with the end of the world and so far, we have passed over such events with little trouble. However, our world is still threatened, though in a less dramatic fashion.

Issues and Concerns

The crisis we face is one of energy, of production, of sustainability. Sustainability is defined as resistance to degradation, and the ability to endure and in this case, we are concerned with the continuation of our civilization. If the world follows the model of development that the United States has done, the world will simply collapse. We have already passed the point where our consumption exceeds our production of resources so the resources we have now will only diminish. In the article The Bottleneck Wilson states, “For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more Earths”(Wilson 84).  Although the amount of resources and rate of consumption is in question, all studies agree that we will use up the Earth’s resources sometime in the near future, and that change is necessary. Vaclav Smil, a professor at Penn State, helps to drive home the point of the urgency of the situation by noting  that the United States currently uses up about 27% of the world’s current energy production. How much more of a problem would this be if China, a country with more than 4 times the population of the US consumes the same amount?

These are the issues our generation faces, changes have to happen and soon, with engineers leading the charge. Engineers as a profession, are responsible for increasing the quality of life enjoyed by the rest of the population, however this also makes them responsible for the drastic increases in energy consumption. Even though they strive for efficiency, many times this does not line up with the keeping consumption lower than our production of resources. William Stanley Jevons famously stated, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth”(Jevons)(Smil). As efficiency increases, we often find ways to consume even more resources.

Smil p.711

Viewpoint of the Engineer

So now that we are aware of the causes and problems, we must address the matter of responsibilities and roles. The profession to address is that of the engineer. Engineering as a discipline, is responsible for shaping the material construction and production of our entire society, and because of that it is the field of study that consumes more raw materials and resources than any other discipline. However, we can't simply ask that engineers to stop or lower consumption. As Alastair S. Gunn noted, the duties of an engineer are many and complicated. The public expect both reliability and progress out of engineers. Every engineering project is supposed to be 100% functional, failure is not considered acceptable. In addition, we assume that some radical new product will come to increase our quality of life with more and more rapid turnover. The new generation is far less patient than previous ones when it comes to satisfying wants. Communication, shopping, and luxuries are available on the spot. Take for example the cellphone. We can make long distance calls now, anytime anywhere, but it wasn't so long ago that the majority of citizens needed to go home to their main phone line, and even have delayed calls where it took a significant amount of time to transfer the signal from one end of the globe to another. This has forced engineers to focus their work and concerns towards functionality, profitability, and time to market rather than the potential ethical and global impacts their work could have.

Neglecting to realize the difficulties and addressing the problems in the workplace for engineers can end in disaster. Tragedies such as the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger where lives were lost by simple calculation errors, remind us of the impact and responsibilities of an engineer. The public expects engineers to speak up whenever they are capable of spotting an error, but at the same time doesn’t realize the cost of such decisions. Although it may seem like a simple thing to speak up about an error or a problem, in the workplace where speaking against a superior can cost you your job, from a personal perspective the question may not be so clear. Recognizing that such an event can occur requires that engineers act with a sense of integrity, wholeness in personality and talent that must be part of the curricula for engineers, as well as built into the structure of the workplace to allow for flexibility of thought. By integrity we mean that the education and personality of the engineer must be high enough to both recognize when mistakes occur, and be willing to put their livelihood on the line to do what is correct from a moral or ethical perspective.

Restructuring our Perspective

So we want to figure out how to allow engineers to bring up the question of sustainability. In a capitalist economy, where the market decides what succeeds and what fails, the initial investment towards a sustainable future is a daunting one. Almost all current technologies in renewable energy sources, or low consumption construction techniques require a large initial investment that returns in value far in the future. For example, building an array of solar panels, or a wind farm has a far later return on investment than a coal power plant. This means that in an immediate sense, there isn’t a short term economic drive to move towards sustainability. So even if an engineer can recognize the errors of ignoring sustainability and production of products, he can’t act on that knowledge. However, like the engineers who worked on the Challenger we can’t simply ignore the necessity of reducing our consumption. The world is at stake here, and the only ones who can start the process to fix this problem is the profession that creates the material products and services provided to the world.

Thus we need to provide both economical and ethical motivation for sustainability. First we must concern ourselves with survival as a species. This is actually a harder task than it sounds. Notice that sustainability is an issue that displaced both spatially and temporally from our daily lives. For example, if you're old enough that you will die before the resources run out, why does it concern you? Why are we concerned about the species as a whole over our own current well being? To make this challenge even more difficult, we have to realize that sustainability is not an item of value we can pass down. If you gain wealth, you can pass down your material possessions to your progeny. If you are knowledgeable, you can prepare your children for the world to come. Sustainability is not something you can directly hand over to your own children, rather its something a generation hands off to the next generation and we must prioritize that by realizing the global interconnection between people in the world.


Globalization and Restructuring

Thanks to the internet and communication technology, we’re already well on our way to realizing that thinking globally as a species is only a matter of time. In the meantime, we must  take a page out of the development process for computer applications and run a beta test for sustainability. Engineers must look to restructure existing architectures, to make things not only more efficient, but consume less resources as a whole, instead of focusing on creating brand new products. In particular, electricity generation must move off the dependency on non-sustainable fossil fuels, and all stages of production from the construction of workspaces, through production, to the usage of product must consume less energy, not just be more efficient than it is now. We have to reverse the impact and allow for our production and consumption of resources to stabilize.

To enact this change engineers must be ethically driven simply through a solidity of character, in integrity, to care about their fellow humans and prioritize communal thinking. In the future this must be incorporated into the education of engineers, but for now it is the responsibility of this generation to realize the urgency, and aim to restructure current methodologies with sustainable energy techniques and standards in mind. In order for this to happen people in industry must more solidly attach themselves to their companies and think more about making the company succeed and grow in the long term as opposed to personal benefit as restructuring rarely results in immediate monetary benefits. Management must follow suit from the engineer’s lead and reward long term thinking and goals over short term ones by promoting loyalty towards the company. 

General Education and Rational Thought

<in progress>

Conclusion

To do so we must expand upon the role of education. First information must be spread about the urgency of the situation. Secondly, we have to bring greater standardization to the field of sustainable energy. Standardization is what drives both efficient and quick changes in a field. For example, lets take one of the fastest changing fields in industry, computer science. In computer science, even though there are many different higher level programming languages, the way in which they operate is relatively similar. You tell the computer a set of instructions, and it translates it to machine code and executes. The way that you structure your instructions, though syntactically different, often uses the same formats, such as the heavy emphasis on recursion methods. This applies on to sustainable energy because right now, the way in which it is taught at a university varies, and the way in which calculations are done in the filed varies greatly because its a new field. This makes it difficult for professions to talk about sustainability in the same way, since they all learned different things and work with different tools.

Thirdly, educators must work more closely with private industry so that a future in a company can be secured. If students are excited for and have a job security in a particular company, the motivation to benefit the company in a long term way is already there. Increased job security means more discussion can occur about policy and company goals without fear of reprisal. Having a more comfortable working environment, with a unified goals allows policy changes and organizational restructuring to happen which allows for a sustainable energy initiatives to succeed in the company. If these goals can be achieved we would have an appropriate economic and social structure to allow for change, and the ethical incentive through globalization and upbringing to care for the propagation of our species to give us a sustainable future.

Bibliography

Smil, V. 2010. Science, Energy, Ethics, and Civilization.

Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness, R.Y. Chiao et al. eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 709-729.

Gunn, Alastair S. "Integrity and the Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers."

Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. 125-33. Print.

Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question. [S.l.]: Macmillan, 1906. Print.
Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print.

Trivia - A Google a Day XXX

Every year, a trophy is awarded to the top defense player in the NHL. The trophy is named for the former owner of what NHL team?
Detroit Red Wings

The trophy is called the James Norris Memorial Trophy

What ocean, known for some of the roughest storms in the world, was misnamed by the explorer whose good sailing fortune led him to find it "a beautiful, peaceful ocean"?
Pacific Ocean

Where were the Olympics held when the Olympic flame was first introduced into the modern games?
Amsterdam

What U.S. state has more poisonous snakes than any other?
Texas

What does the WHO project say will be the greatest worldwide killer by 2030?
Tobacco

Who is the World Health Organization, which sponsors many different projects.

What profession did Samuel Clemens's hold that inspired his pseudonym?
Riverboat Pilot

How many minutes of the nearly two-hour-long "Silence of the Lambs" is Anthony Hopkins on-screen in the role of Hannibal Lecter, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor?
16 minutes

What country is home to the mountain range that shares its name with the common name for Elettaria cardamomum, a spice in the ginger family?
Cambodia

Apple Blythe Alison's godfather makes music for a living. Of what band is he a member?
Coldplay

The band member’s name is Chris Martin

What former VH1 VJ who became a daytime talk show host was taken on as the editorial director of an iconic magazine in 2000, which she renamed after herself and then featured herself on all subsequent covers until it ceased publication two years later?
Rosie O'Donnell

Trivia - A Google a Day XXIX

Because of its representation of American capitalism, what popular board game was once banned in Russia and China, and remains banned in Cuba and North Korea as of 2012?
Monopoly

Which legendary goal scorer played for three World Cup-winning teams and published his autobiography in 1977 called "My Life and the Beautiful Game"?
Pele

Which Major-winning golfer sang backing vocals on a chart-topping album from 2007 called "Rock n Roll Jesus"?
John Daly

What river connects the City That Care Forgot with the capital of its state?
Mississippi River

The country that in 2010 had the world's highest GDP per capita and the fastest growing economy in the world borders only one nation. With what country does it share a border?
Qatar

What is the protagonist's real name in Fitzgerald's 1920's novel narrated by Nick Carraway?
James Gatz

What was the street address of the business where the first ever credit card charge was made?
33 W. 33rd Street

If you completed two Ironman Triathlons, what interstellar lake would you only be 9.4 miles shy of covering the distance of its entire length?
Ontario Lacus

What crater has the same diameter as a trip from the renowned copper producing town in Uttar Pradesh state of India to Delhi?
Ptolemaeus

What is the name given to the part of the city that includes the I.M. Pei-designed museum located just east of the stadium where the Browns play?
North Coast Harbor

Trivia - A Google a Day XXVIII

Following the 2010-2011 season, what state was home to two of the top five NCAA basketball teams to make the most NCAA tournament appearances?
Kentucky

When Omar Bradley appeared on the cover of Time magazine on December 4, 1944, how many stars are visible on his helmet?
3

Who was the first male in the open era to win three or more Grand Slam singles titles in a single calendar year?
Rod Laver

What was the major work of the woman that was married to the author of "To a Skylark"?
Frankenstein

On what album cover did the Beatles wear their Most Excellent Order of the British Empire medals that they received from the Queen?
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

On what sea does the country with the world's only camel-backed bagpipe military band sit?
Arabian Sea

While performing as the One Percent in Jacksonville in 1970, the band introduced itself under a new name, inspired by a gym teacher with whom the band members had had run-ins. How did they later change the spelling?
Lynyrd Skynyrd

What two U.S. presidents died within a few hours of each other on the 50th anniversary of the document that declares that all Americans have "unalienable rights"?
John Adams & Thomas Jefferson

How many rooms are there in the safe house the prince has built to escape the pestilence in Poe's work about the plague?
7

Though this country shares four large lakes along its border with a neighboring nation to the south, none of these is the country's largest. What is the largest lake entirely in this country?
Great Bear Lake

Computer Science - Parity bits error checking

Parity is a technique used in error checking when sending bits. It can detect any odd number of errors. Here we can take the example of sending ASCII characters. Lets say we want to send some data, like the character A, showed as the following

0|1000001

The reason why there is a divider on the first bit is because that bit is used to determine the parity of the sent message. Let us use the example of even parity. Similar to the way it is used in mathematics, parity refers to a form of symmetry, in this case parity maintains the number of even or odd 1s in a given row. If we want to maintain even parity we must keep the above at 0. Lets say we want to send C represented by

1000011

Which means the parity bit should become to maintain even parity

1|1000011

Now we can expand this to increase the amount of errors this can handle. We can check the columns as well as the rows. For example, lets try sending ABC

0|1000001

0|1000010

1|1000011

We then ensure that the columns retain even parity in the number of 1's so

0|1000001

0|1000010

1|1000011

1 1000000

Now we can be safe against 1, 2, and 3 bit errors, but not 4 bit errors. For example if in the B and C codes 4 adjacent 0's turned to 1 we wouldn't be able to tell like so.

0|1000001

0|1011010

1|1011011

1 1000000

However this is the limitation of parity error checking, but as you can see its a simple block error checking mechanism which is why it was one of the first methods implemented. For ease, we have used even error checking but in practice where this is used, odd parity error checking is used.