Tag Archives: blogs

Blogging Theme for Week 14

As a theme for this week, I would suggest “Policy proposals for limiting carbon emissions”.   We discussed some of these in class on Friday, but in a quite abstract, mathematical way – how they could work in an “ideal world”.   But how about in the real world? What ideas are being tried, how might they work in practice, how successful are they?

Here are some possible readings and references on this issue

Remember that, as always, the theme above is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

 

Blogging Theme for Week 13

For this week, as a theme, I’d suggest “the spread of epidemics in a social network”.   “Epidemic” of course sounds like a disease, but also the spread of new ideas (recycling?) or technologies (solar panels, maybe?) can be thought of as a kind of epidemic.

Here is a link to a TED talk about this sort of idea.  To identify the network nodes which were most likely to be highly connected (and therefore contribute most to the spread across the network) the researchers used a simple trick: have people nominate their friends.  This works because, as we briefly discussed in class, the average person’s average friend is likely to be better connected than the average person.

Remember that, as always, the theme above is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

 

Blogging theme for week 12

It has been good to talk to some of you in office hours about ideas for your blog posts.  I encourage you all to make use of the support provided in office hours to make your blog contributions the best that they can be.

For this week my suggested theme is  “The Anthropocene”.  This term showed up in Chris Uhl’s talk last week.  It has been suggested to describe an epoch (a period of geological time) in which the geologic history of the whole Earth becomes dominated by human influence.

You could blog about the process which leads to such an “official” designation, the evidence for a new geologic era, and how present human-influenced characteristics of the natural world (e.g. rate of species extinction) compare to previous epochs.

Remember that, as always, the theme is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

 

“Spreadsheets of Power”

Here is a rather different take on economic modeling (including the kind that went into the Stern Review, presumably).

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/april/1427806800/richard-denniss/spreadsheets-power

This article is about the use of mathematics (in the form of economic modeling) to distract and obfuscate – to shut down debate.  My hope in offering this course is that mathematics can also empower.

Probably a blog post or two in here somewhere!

 

Blogging theme week 11

This week marks the beginning of the third and final blogging period.  The instructional team has not yet reviewed and fixed the grades for blogging period 2, but simply based on the number of posts it is clear that many of you will need to take advantage of the way the scoring system works to raise your blogging grades in this final period. We had a good discussion about blogging in class last Wednesday and the handout from that session is available here if you missed it.

For this week my suggested theme is “Probability in the Media”.   Find a media item (a news article, a YouTube clip, a web page, whatever) that uses probability in relation to an environmental theme, and analyze the ideas using the concepts that we have discussed in class (conditional probability, payoffs, expectations and so on).

Remember that, as always, the theme is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

 

Blogging for week 10

I’m disappointed to see that there are no new posts on the blog this week.  I guess the most likely explanation is that most of the students are waiting until the third and final blogging period to try to raise your grade on the blogging component of the course.  The good news is that the blogging grade is the best score that you achieve in each of the three periods, so that there is still everything to aim for even if things have not gone well with your blogging so far.  On the flip side, the blog contributions make up 35 percent of your overall grade, meaning that quality blogging is vital if you want to succeed in this course.

This Wednesday in class we will run a workshop on blogging.  We’ll review the grading rubric, discuss a sample post, and look at ways to improve it.  Please also remember that you are welcome to discuss your blog posts in office hours at any time.  You may also revise any of your posts for blogging period 2 up until the deadline of Friday midnight; the final version is the one we will use for grading purposes.

As you know, you are free to write on any relevant subject in the blog.  I’ve listed past “theme” posts below.  For a new theme this week, I suggest that you might look at environmental justice.   If this phrase is not familiar, you can Google it, or ask yourself the following question: what one factor about a US community would you think best predicts whether or not it will be the site of a toxic waste dump?   The answer given in this 1987 report was a shocking one.  See also the twenty-year update given in 2007.

From the point of view of this course, the mathematical content of such a post could focus on the probabilistic or statistical techniques needed to show a correlation between the location of toxics facilities and the social/demographic profile of the neighborhood.  You can also ask what is the evidence for causation here (as opposed to correlation), and how relevant causation is to the justice question that these reports raise.

Here are the links to past weeks’ blogging themes.

Events schedule week 10

Here is the schedule for the tenth week of class.

  • Monday 3/23,  2:30 – 3:20, Class Unit  3.3 (115 Osmond)
  • Monday 3/23,  4:00-5:00, Kaley Weinstein’s office hour and tech support (101 McAllister)
  • Tuesday 3/24 3:30-4:30, Sara Jamshidi’s office hours, 419 McAllister
  • Wednesday 3/25 2:30 – 3:20, Class – Case Study –  Blogging with Mathematics (instructional team)
  • Thursday 3/26, 10:30 – 12:00, John Roe’s office hours, 204 McAllister
  • Friday 3/27, 2:30 – 3:20, Class Unit 3.4 (115 Osmond)
  • Friday 3/27, second blogging period ends.

Readings for  classes are available at

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hcybveug0txcrdh/AAANwF70aqdBlqlD5

Blogging for Week 9

I’m going to keep the proposed theme for week 8 (alternative energy sources) open for another week.  That’s partly because not many people have posted yet, and partly because you haven’t had the opportunity to hear Andrew Gutberlet whose case study presentation had to be postponed because of the weather.  You will get to hear him this Wednesday (March 18th), and I think his talk will suggest several ideas related to this theme.

Remember that the themes are only suggestions.  You can post about any topic that is relevant and interesting.  Read here for details about the Alternative Energy Sources theme.

I expect that the next case study session I conduct (Wednesday March 25th) will be specifically about blogging. Stay tuned for more information about that.  The second blogging assessment period ends on March 27th and the third and final period will begin at that time.

 

Blogging Theme Week 8

The second blogging period ends on March 27th, that is in four weeks time. As you are thinking about your posts for this period, I’d encourage you to read my post summarizing the results of grading for period 1.  To improve your posts, I’d encourage you contact me, Sara or Kaley and make an appointment to talk in office hours or at another time.  We will be happy to provide advice and suggestions, including specific feedback on your current posts if you ask.

A brief general reminder about blogging requirements: you may post on anything related to the course (the “theme” for the week is only a suggestion), and your postings will be graded according to the rubric that appears in the syllabus,  The rubric involves five grading elements: frequency of posting, mathematical content, thematic content, organization and presentation, references and connections.  Blogging is your only “homework” for this course and a high standard will be expected.

The suggested blogging theme for this week is Alternative Energy Sources. I suggest that you take one possible source of non-fossil-fuel based energy and discuss it from the perspectives of economics (cost), feasibility (how near are we to commercial-level application), energy return on energy invested, plant lifetime, distribution mechanisms, long-term sustainability and so on.  Among the sources you could discuss might be

  • Onshore wind energy
  • Offshore wind energy
  • Solar photovoltaic
  • Solar thermal
  • Geothermal
  • Hydro-electric
  • Nuclear fission
  • Nuclear fusion
  • Space-based photovoltaic
  • Wave energy
  • Tidal energy
  • Biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel)
  • Wood

And you could talk about these from a global perspective, from a national perspective, or specifically with reference to Penn State (Andrew Gutberlet’s presentation will provide a lot of useful information here.)

A good general reference for calculations about renewable energy is http://www.withouthotair.com/   Another is Do the Math.

Remember, you are also welcome to post on any of the earlier themes (or on any other relevant topic).

Blogging Theme Week 7

The second blogging period ends on March 27th, that is in five weeks time. As you are thinking about your posts for this period, I’d encourage you to read my post summarizing the results of grading for period 1.  To improve your posts, I’d encourage you contact me, Sara or Kaley and make an appointment to talk in office hours or at another time.  We will be happy to provide advice and suggestions, including specific feedback on your current posts if you ask.

A brief general reminder about blogging requirements: you may post on anything related to the course (the “theme” for the week is only a suggestion), and your postings will be graded according to the rubric that appears in the syllabus,  The rubric involves five grading elements: frequency of posting, mathematical content, thematic content, organization and presentation, references and connections.  Blogging is your only “homework” for this course and a high standard will be expected.

The suggested blogging theme for this week is Limits to Growth.  This is in conjunction with the presentation that I will give on Monday.   Any mathematical scenario which tries to discuss how a population or an ecosystem approaches growth boundaries is okay here.  This includes the book The Limits to Growth itself, of course, and all the discussion and argument that it gave rise too; but you are not limited to that one book.  You could also post about “limits to growth” in the context of Jevons’ discussion of coal (mentioned earlier), urban planning, Penn State student numbers, fisheries management, animal populations, oil or water resources, or any other context.  Or, remember, you are also welcome to post on any of the earlier themes (or on any other topic).