Portfolio 5- Predict and minimize potential unethical abuse of your work as a researcher

In the recent years, we have been trying to put the brakes on the act of unethical abuse of somebody else’s work in particular, the research field. The area of ethics could be considered a guide to separate right and wrong, good or evil.  So, how do we as a researcher predict and hence minimize the abuse of our work?

I would predict the immoral use of my work by considering questions such as “Who will be targeted with my new research?”, “Can it be done to them?”,  and “If it can be done, how can it be done in a right way?”. These are paramount questions that I would ask myself so that I have a clear picture of what to expect from the society when my work is being published. Moreover, I would conduct a survey to address the public and legal advisors to determine the acceptability of my research. For example, if I have done researches on brain mapping, which are personal information’s about a person’s mental health, how are these information’s being used and who will exercise it?  In addition, if an employer uses the brain information and discovers that something is not right with the employee. Does this reduce the chance of the employee of seizing the job? Should it be a must for all employees to disclose their personal brain scan since it is a private and confidential information?

In order to minimize the unprincipled abuse of my work, a few items must be noted. Firstly, strict and practical rules and regulations are to be set on what is ready to be used in the marketplace and why not (Marano, 2003). This is to ensure that nobody goes beyond the boundary of misuse of technology for example, using brain scans to grade a person on his/her abilities. Secondly, is that my work must be patented and application could be done through the proper channel for example in Singapore, researchers can patent their findings through PatentArea.com (http://www.patentarea.com/singapore_patent_requirements.html) where all the guidelines are provided.

To conclude, protecting my research from unethical abuses is a rather tough thing to do however; it must be done in order to protect the rights of everyone from all walks of life. Ethical, legal and social implications must be considered from all angles so as minimal problem would arise from my research done.

 

References:

-National Science Foundation (2008 May 30) A computer that can ‘read’ your mind. Retrieved August 6, 2008.

-Marano L. (2003 June 3) Ethics and mapping the brain. Retrieved November 7, 2008 from Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. Web site: http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/brain_mapping_ethics.htm

portfolio 4

What difficulties do you have writing in your engineering classes? You may use your work in MLE 1101 to give examples. How do you resolve the difficulties? How will you continue to improve? Use approximately 300 words. 

Grammar is my main stumbling block from writing good essays in engineering classes. Without a good command of grammar, an essay produced will have so much mistakes it will give a bad impression to the lecturer. During my A-levels, I was not required to write in complete sentences for essays but in point-form because it was allowed. Furthermore, I do not have to note my grammar and vocabulary used. As long as the points and ideas are there, credits will be given and no marks will be penalized for errors relating to English.

Now in university, I have to present my answers in matured sentences and also to consider the grammar. New scientific words are being introduced throughout the whole course, now in particular, in MLE 1101. Having a dictionary and thesaurus by one’s side helps one breeze through all the new and difficult words and their meanings. This will generate a productive learning environment and also increase our vocabulary where we familiarize ourselves with the words used and understand text given completely. I do not know how difficult it is to write exam essays and lab reports, as this is my first year in Chemical Engineering. Nevertheless, essays and reports must be written with good grammar coupled with creative and critical thinking to make the essay clearer. Although grammar is not the essence of the essay, it is important to bring up the point written in a professional method.

  To improve on my grammar and vocabulary, I will read more articles and Internet forums related to the course. As reading is never enough to improve my English, I will try my very best to write every essay in EG 1471 so that I recognize and deal with my mistakes. Without understanding certain scientific words, essays written might go out of topic and hence no points will be awarded and this is not a legitimate excuse of failure.

Writing good essays will help not just in MLE 1101 but also in other modules that requires a strong command of English such as Singapore Studies. In short, language is an essential element throughout our university and working world in order to succeed and when better to improve if not now?

e-Portfolio 3- Summary on Provide Access of Clean Water

A recent U.N reports states that, to overcome the water and sanitation calamity is one of the greatest challenges mankind have to tackle in the early 21st century. (United Nations Development Programme, p. 1) A large percentage of deaths in the world are due to poor access to clean water, which results in poor health quality. Seventy percent of the world, covered with water, makes it adequate for the world's population; nevertheless, it is not always located at regions where it is needed the most. In addition to the severity of this problem, political and economic barrier, waste discharge into clean water sources also affects the availability of clean water. Seawater consists of large percentage of salts, which makes it not usable for agriculture, industrial, ecological processes and the like. One way to tackle this problem is by extracting salt from seawater also known as desalination; reverse osmosis technique uses membrane to separate salt from water, to provide clean water for domestic needs. However, desalination plants are expensive to build and lots of energy is required for it to operate This, is impossible in poor countries where water supply problem are most serious. A more practical technology, which uses less cost and energy, is called nano-osmosis where salts are filtered out by nanotubes (tiny tubes of carbon), effectively and efficiently. Besides that, recycling of wastewater and sewage treatment is being exercised to provide water for non-personal use but to do that, we need effective purification method and rigorous buffer to unsure the safety of recycled water. Other approach involves strategies for reducing water use such as drip technology for agricultural purposes and small-decentralized distillation units for rural and low-income areas where water problems are acute. In addition, new technologies are being studied where contaminant can be extracted from water effortlessly. In future, with the evolution of engineering, clean and cheap water may be available for all without any impediment!

Source:

National Academy of Engineering. Grand Challenges for Engineering.

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9079.aspx

Questions on Adjectives

This is a simple text exercise about adjectives. Just identify the adjectives before looking at the answer in the comment box. Look out for all the objects in this passage. It's a good way to help you locate the objects and the adjectives. Have fun! :)

SUBANG JAYA, Sun - Police are searching for an Indonesian woman to help them in their investigation into the recent spate of petty crimes in the Subang Jaya area. In the first incident, a woman in her early twenties tied up an elderly man living in a big secluded bungalow. The old man, who declined to be identified, said he let in the woman who had come to his bungalow on the pretext of looking for a job. As his busy daughter was looking for a part-time helper, he decided to employ the woman to help his daughter. The woman made off with a gold watch, an expensive digital camera and cash amounting to RM300 after gagging the old man and tying him up in his living room. The old man described the woman as a 'pretty young thing', clad in a tight-fitting cotton blouse and baggy Indian pants. She was around 5' 3" and had long straight hair and a scar on her left cheek. She had small eyes and a sharp pointed nose. A week later, a young woman wearing a black scarf and fitting the above description snatched the leather handbag of an office worker in the same area. She was seen speeding away on a brand new motorcycle. The police have urged the public to contact them if they have any information regarding the woman or her whereabouts.

Reference : McGraw-Hill (Malaysia) Sdn, Bhd. (2003) ADJECTIVES. Have you seen this woman?, page 72

Most common grammar mistake

After trying out the spot-the-grammatical-errors exercise that Mrs. Chan gave us on week 4, I noticed that my most common mistakes made are adjectives. I did not notice this earlier but after this test, only that I realise I have a problem with this section of grammar. So this post will be dedicated to "Adjective: What you should know".

Basically adjective is a word used to modify a noun or pronoun by describing, identifying, or quantifying words. They usually tell us more about people and things. For example, "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The words highlighted are adjective to describe the noun "dog" and "fox". Without the adjectives the sentence will be "The fox jumps over the dog" which sound boring and not descriptive.  An adjective usually precedes the noun or the pronoun which it modifies. An example to show how adjectives are used to identify items, "These cakes that she baked are awesome". Last but not least, to quantify a word, we use numbers such as one, three, eight, ten and so on to quantify things/items, for example, "She has ten children!". These are the fundamentals of adjectives.

Going deeper into this grammar law, we have possessive, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite adjectives where a given occurrence of an adjective can be classified into one of the four kinds stated above.

Firstly, in the possessive adjectives group, we have "my, your, his, her, its, our, their" which are similar to a possessive pronoun (pronoun acting as a marker of possession and who owns the object) to modify a noun or a noun phrase.  In this examples, "I can't finish my dinner because I have no appetite" it is used as an adjective and changes a noun or noun phrase. The possessive adjective "my" changes "dinner" and the noun phrase "my dinner" functions as an object. Another example is, "After the war, he returned to his homeland" where "her" modifies the noun "homeland" and the noun phrase "her homeland" is the object of the preposition. Possessive adjectives can be used when there is a combination of a noun and a noun phrase(to represent the object) in a sentence.

Secondly, is the demonstrative adjectives which includes adjectives such as, "this, these, that, those and what". For instance, "This house needs to be repainted", "That cookie does not belong to you!". In both sentences, the adjective demonstrate objects that are nearby either in space or time

Interrogative adjectives includes adjectives like "which" or "what", when used, modifies a noun or a noun phrase rather than standing on its own. For illustrations purposes, "Which cookie do you prefer?" and "What do you have to offer?"

Lastly is the indefinite adjectives which encompass words such as "many, any, a few, and all". They are used to explain nouns like people, animals, objects and the like. For example, "Mrs Chan regularly reminds us to complete all assignments before the next class begins.

Above are the subunits of adjectives and now we'll go into degrees of adjectives where I think most of us will be familiar with. The degree of comparison are divided into three segments; the positive, the comparative and the superlative. We normally use the comparative and superlative to explain degrees where for the comparative(between two items), we add the suffix -er to the positive adjective and for the superlative(among all the items), we add the suffix -est. We sometimes ned to change it to -ier and -iest when a two-syllable adjective ends with a "y"(happier and happiest) and for the others that do not end with a "y" or when an adjective has more than one syllable, we add the word more before the base adjective rather than a suffix. 

For better understanding, in the positive, comparative and superlative arrangement,

1. Jane is nice.

2. Mary is nicer than Jane.

3. Steve is the nicest of them all.

for the two-syllable adjective that ends with a "y",

1. This is a juicy orange.

2. The Australian orange is juicier.

3. The Valencia orange is the juiciest orange on Earth and therefore, it is used for juice              extraction .

for more than 2 syllable adjective,

1. Cindy is beautiful.

2. Fiona is more beautiful.

3. Miss Japan was the most beautiful among all.

With that, I end my blog for today. Happy reading and understanding adjectives! I know it sounds simple but sometimes we tend to complicate things without knowing and hence, getting wrong answers for Mrs. Chan's exercise! Got to boost up our text editing points up up up before the final exam. Thank you and see you all in class :)

Reference : 

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/adjectives.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectives

http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/adjectve.html

The Good Grammar Book by Swan. M. and Walter. C. page 199.

Engineering Doctors - Personalized Medicine

Engineering is of paramount importance in this era where the promise of personalized medicine and deadly infectious diseases are to be tackled. Drugs and treatment exercised today are normally catered for the mass due to technological constrain and economical reasons. However the response of treatment and effectiveness of the drug differ for every individual. For example, the common drug prescribed by the local pharmacist to treat fever is paracetamol but not every individual’s immune system can work together with this drug to kill the fever-causing bacteria. This is the part where biomedical engineering come in to produce specific treatment and medicine for these individuals. Recent cataloging of the human genetic endowment, and deeper understanding of the body’s complement of protein and their biochemical interactions, offer the opportunity to identify the specific factors that regulate sickness and wellness in any person. (Cited from “Introduction to the Grand Challenges for Engineering” , http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9221.aspx). To realize the promise of personalized medicine, engineers encounter three main challenges which are developing better systems to rapidly assess a patient’s genetic profile, collecting and managing massive amounts of data on individual patients and to create inexpensive and rapid diagnostic devices such as gene chips and sensors able to detect small amounts of chemicals in the blood. (Cited from Engineer better Medicine, http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9221.aspx). Just in 2007, an approximated 8 million people died of cancer due to late detection of the disease and lack of proper treatment. People around the world are dying because they do not have access to the correct medical care for their disease or the cost of treatment is very high. Personalized medicine will enable one to receive accurate drugs so that diseases can be detected earlier, treated accurately and ultimately cured in the shortest possible time. Moreover, it will reduce the cost of having multiple treatments just to cure a disease, as the drug manufactured will suit an individual specifically. In brief, personalized medicine is still in the early period where rigorous Research and Development are to be done to explore deeper into this field. Men will reap numerous benefits with the advance of medicine engineering which makes it “The” Grand Challenges of Engineering.