Posted: March 12th, 2023

homework help

Instructions on writing discussion post

How to write a good initial discussion post:

1. The purpose of writing a discussion post is to reflect on what you have learned from the assigned material. How does it support what you already thought? How does it challenge conventional wisdom? Where it conflicts with your understanding of the world, does it convince you? Where it agrees, what further understandings does it imply?

2. Your initial discussion post must include at least 300 words of your own material. Repeating the question, titles, quotations, paraphrases and other additions are not counted as your own material. Any discussion that does not meet the 300 word minimum will receive a grade of 0.

3. Refer to at least two of the assigned resources. You need to give some thought to what’s presented in the assigned material. For example, you might write: The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy explains Locke’s understanding of the relationship between simple and complex ideas this way: “Once the mind has a store of simple ideas, it can combine them into complex ideas of a variety of kinds” (

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/)

. Don’t make the class guess at the reference. We have to be able to find it. So it needs to be relevant and specific. People get busy and time is sometimes short, so it may be tempting at times to excerpt something from readings you haven’t considered carefully and stick it in your post to meet this requirement. Try not to do this. See point 5 on why. There is no need to use an MLA style citation to the end of a post. We need to read the quotation, and we need to know what in the material helped you arrive at the conclusions you arrived at and where we can find it. That means you need to include an author and a page number if it’s a printed resource, or a title reference for audio and video resources. Points will be deducted if the location of the reference isn’t obvious. To earn full points for your discussion, you need to refer to more than one of the assigned resources in the module if more are available. The resources work together.

4. Any discussion that includes sufficiently poor grammar or spelling to suggest that the posting was not proof-read and spell checked will receive a grade of 0.

5. The best way to meet the requirement to reference the readings is to quote them directly. But please do not quote lengthy sections of the readings. I am looking for your ideas concerning the readings and classes. See point 3. for a good example. Quotations are not considered part of the 300 word minimum.

6. Remember that you are reflecting on the material presented in the module and taking an informed position on the topic. It doesn’t help to simply repeat facts from the module. What do they mean? Use your existing opinion wisely. The distinction between research and opinion is an artificial distinction we don’t want to make in this class. Criticism is useful but only if it’s thoughtful and reasonable. If, at the end of every unit, you think exactly the same way you did when you started the unit, something has gone wrong.

8. You will need to post your own initial post before you can read the responses from others. It makes for a much more diverse conversation. After you have posted your initial post, I hope you will consider other ideas as well and comment on them. There is no grade-sensitive requirement to comment on other posts but, needless to say, your ideas on others’ thinking is the best way for all of us to learn. And feel free to respond to my comments on your post.

Energy.html

So what fueled the Industrial Revolution? Greed? Political upheaval? Good old fashioned capitalism? We could even be clever and say that it was innovation that fueled the Industrial Revolution. But one thing it could not have done without is fuel. Most say it was coal and it probably was. England, after all, was an island made of coal. But everywhere people recognized that there were no free lunches. They would have to come up with some other way of doing more work to produce more results besides adding more horses and more people. What no one realized was how much the lunch would actually cost.

 
It’s important to recognize that, for the overwhelming bulk of human history, energy was generated by people and animals. If you wanted to pick up a rock, you bent over and picked it up. True, enormous changes happened as a result of innovations like the horse drawn plow when it came to doing more work. But production always topped out and the point where the farmer and horse had done as much as they could together.  Engines were fueled by natural power. What you might call artificial energy, mostly produced by burning fossil fuels, is a very very recent innovation.

It seemed relatively easy to find, relatively cheap and it seemed inexhaustible. But once we got a taste of what this kind of energy could get for us, everyone began to see that the only way to get more was to become more efficient. But, just as, centuries earlier, machines were limited by the amount of energy a man or a horse could generate, the efficiency of machinery during the industrial revolution was limited by our understanding of what energy was and how it could be manipulated.

Watt and Boulton’s Steam Engine

Cosmetics containing radium before we found a better way to use it.

 
We could spend a lot of time on the steam engine and, frankly, it deserves it. But the processes used to make this, and other, machines more efficient is what gave rise to, not just better efficiency, but better science. This is the topic of the video “Can We Have Unlimited Power? A History of Energy.” You can watch it at
http://ctcproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=19667&xtid=43343

It takes you from coal power to nuclear power. Particularily interesting is the chicken and egg nature of innovation. Electricity, for example, was discovered long before anyone knew what to do with it. After all, it’s not like there was an electric razor waiting around for someplace to plug it in. And imagine what people did with radio activity.

Many people are still convinced that we can continue to grow by increasing efficiency, even if we have finally come to realize that fossil fuels are not inexhaustible. But there is a growing belief that, if Industrialization is to continue to grow, it has to be based on a revolution just as significant as the first Industrial Revolution. They call it the Third Industrial Revolution.

Industrialization is energy dependent. So the growth of industry is linked directly to the history of energy which is a function of infrastructure. We’ve seen what happens when that fails. This video gives a good background on how energy sources have been found and exploited. 

http://ctcproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=19667&xtid=43343

Can We Have Unlimited Power – Watch Free Online (documentarymania.com)

There is also a video to watch that explores the implications of technology as it relates to the labor movement, and other political movements, all of which are alive today and impacting our day to day lives more than ever. You can watch the video here: 

https://mediaspace.minnstate.edu/media/Industrialization+Modernism+and+1886/1_r3pajfa

Modernism, Industrialization and 1886 – YouTube

Discussions

The Industrial Revolution depended on two critical components that went beyond innovations themselves, although, clearly, inventions were significant. But the two that has given us the most benefits, and the most costs, are energy and labor. What roles did they play and how are they related?

Most people agree, Postman and Burke among them, that there are costs associated with implementing technology. But child labor, unsafe working conditions, poverty and slavery are all costs we have demonstrated a willingness to pay, or, rather, to make others pay. Energy, itself, is associated with costs and the implications of these choices last a long long time. Many inequities we see today in America are rooted in the 300-year-old economics of slavery in America, for example. What is the relationship among labor, energy and technology?

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