Women in Science, Math, and Engineering
The statistics can be somewhat startling, while women receive 56% of BA degrees in the United States, they receive only 37% of the Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (SME) bachelor degrees (Chang, 1). As scary as the statistics on women are, they only point to an even bigger problem among all SME majors. According to one study, there is a 40% decline in the number of undergraduate science majors between the first and senior year of college (Didon, 336). Another study found that about 50% of the students who enter college in SME majors will change their major in two years (Change, 1). In a study of Hispanic American women who declared physical science or mathematics majors, 50% drop out within the first grading period (Ortiz, 1). The lack of SME majors has often been blamed on America’s high schools or even elementary schools, with university professors claiming students are not encouraged to consider science careers or are unprepared by their high school teachers. The statistics tell another story, no matter which specific numbers you consider, 50% in two years or 40% in their college careers, students are getting turned off from SME careers while in college, not high school. And the problem isn’t just with women; men are fleeing the sciences as well.
This decline in SME majors couldn’t be coming at a worse time. Studies show the U.S. will need 1.9 millions science workers over the next ten years (Chang, 1). All SME fields, especially physics, saw a rise in prestige, funding, demand, and research areas during the middle of the twentieth century. The space race was a major boost to the sciences as America saw the importance of a scientific education and scientific research. Ma...
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Acid rain has been proven to have damage forests, fresh waters and soils, killing insect and aquatic life-forms. It also causes damage to buildings and impacts on human health. Many people do not know what acid rain actually is. Acid rain is any form of precipitation that is unusually acidic, low pH levels, higher than normal amounts of sulfuric and nitric acid, occurs naturally and from man made sources. Forms when gases react in the atmosphere with water, oxygen, and other chemicals (what is acid rain?). The only water that will not have some amount of acidity is pure water. Pure water has a pH of 7 which is neutral; regular, unpolluted rain water has a pH of around 5.6. The acidity in rain water comes from the presence of Carbon Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxide, and Sulfur Dioxide. CO2 reacts with water to form carbonic acid. Nitrogen and water react during lightning storms, forming Nitric Oxide. NO is then oxidized to form N02. The NO2 reacts with water to form nitric acid. Due to this, the pH is lowered to be slightly acidic (Acid Rain). Acid rain can occur naturally in the environment, but the problem occurs when human interaction is the cause of the acidic levels.
Rain occurs nature as part of the water cycle, but sometimes rain can do more harm than good. Acid rain can causes damage to plants, animals, and even structures. Acid rain occurs naturally without human interference, but since humans started to make objects that contribute to the creation of acid rain, it happens more frequently than if humans would not be involved. People not only raised the amount of acid rain that falls, they can also be the ones to bring the amount back down to reasonable levels.
To identify truly dangerous plants in Emmet county Northern Michigan, the list of poisonous plants in the ACHS Herb 101 textbook were compared to plants in Emmet county using the Field Manual of Michigan Flora. From the emerging list, eliminations were made based on established medicinal or traditional use, and toxic, allergenic or photo-sensitizing abilities. Finally, by taking into consideration the highest probability of mis-identification or improper preparation; the list of poisonous flora growing in Northern Michigan was narrowed to a legitimate five. From those five, three extremely dangerous plants were chosen: Anticlea elegans (Death Camas), Conium maculatum (Poison Hemlock), and Daphne mezereum (Mezereon).
As Adam Rogers explains in his Wired Magazine article “Getting There,” driverless transportation is not a novel concept. Instead, its idealistic implications have been omnipresent in the minds of inventors and traffic engineers for more than seventy years (Rogers 76). But it is only now, with the gradual augmentation of technology and changes predicted by Moore’s Law that we have gained the ability to create such vehicles. The Trends E-Magazine article titled “Driverless Cars: Coming to Your Streets Sooner Than You Think,” further examines the factors contributing to the rise and foreseeable overhaul of the highways by autonomous cars, attributing their growth to three central factors. First, as technology becomes increasingly intertwined with
UNH President's Commission on the Status of Women. (1994). Report on the Status of Women Profile of Women Students at the University of NH.
It was once envisioned that by the 2000’s people would be flying to work and living on different planets. The future held runways instead of garages and the 52nd state was to be Mars. Unfortunately, today people still drive themselves to work in cars not a flying apparatus, and the only thing living on another planet is the Mars rover Curiosity. But the part about people driving themselves might soon be a relic of the past. In 1939 Norman Bel Gaddes in a partnership with General motors showed off the first prototype for an autonomous vehicle (Are Self-Driving Cars Safe? , 2012). Unfortunately his idea was too early to ever truly come to fruition, but it is that idea that could lead to one of the greatest revisions of the automobile since the seatbelt. Semi or fully-autonomous vehicles are currently being developed by some of the greatest thinkers in the world. Google has been experimenting with and using them for several years in contained situations as have many auto manufacturers. Mr. Gaddes would be amazed by the leaps this technology has made in just this decade. While concerns with the legislation, liability and market acceptance could stall this technology, fully and semi-autonomous vehicles are the future for a quicker, safer and more efficient means of transport.
Do you ever think about what the next piece of technology will be that will take the world by storm? Self-driving cars are gradually becoming more and more relevant. People like them because they allow for a better commute. They like them because people are able to spend more time with their families. Driverless cars will also make it so that people who are disabled can still get around on their own.Driverless cars are going to be the next big thing.
Women’s education has been seen as a way for all the focus on all the attention and opportunity on the students that attend the college. It is seen as a way to eliminate the need to compete with their male peers, with no one to compete with these colleges argue that women have the ability to hold all of the leadership positions on campus which provide them with a valuable experience to apply their future cultures and post-graduate lives. The environment provides women with stronger role models they aren't typically p...
All those countless hours are put to waste if more people are dying from crashes than terrorist attacks. Currently, the death ratio of terrorist attacks to car accidents is 19,000 to 1. Driverless cars will save more lives NSA by preventing 1.2 million deaths annually. For years, the main goal for car manufacturers has been safety. Driverless cars will be able to make transportation much safer. Google was the first company to begin developing driverless cars and they are very close to having them available. The testing of driverless cars has been going on for 7 years and Google’s fleet of driverless cars has driven over one million miles without any accidents caused by the car. This is a major advance in the prevention of accidents. Right now there are 1.3 million deaths worldwide from accidents a year, and an additional 20-50 million injuries a year. Of these accidents, 1.2 million are caused by human error; that's 90%! That means that if everyone had a driverless car, the number of deaths from driving would be less than 100 thousand per
Companies like Google, Tesla and Nissan, among others, have announced over the past few years that their companies are trying to develop self-driving or autonomous cars [Ref. 1 and 2]. Self-driving cars can provide many benefits to the average consumer. Studies have shown that because computers can react and process information many times faster than a human being, crashes on streets and roads can be decreased with quick and consistent evasion maneuvers by the autonomous car. They can also help maximize fuel economy by calculating the most direct and fastest routes. When the driving of an autonomous car demonstrates that the computer can safely and reliably transport the passengers to their destination, this frees up the passengers to do other things that they would not normally be able to do if they were driving the car manually. For this reason, self-driving cars can help maximize productivity of their passengers.
With the rise of ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft, autonomous vehicles have a real shot at becoming a leading mode of transportation. Technology is becoming a bigger part of each of our lives everyday, along with the unfortunate increase of laziness, this shows that the greater population would most likely benefit from a hands-free mode of transportation. Some think that this new technology will lower driving jobs and hurt the economy, but with all technology, someone has to fix it when it glitches. This new technology is going to open up job opportunities across many fields such as mechanical and computer engineering. Also, the economy will be thankful for the booming business that these autonomous vehicles are going to bring. Along with the great economic effects, autonomous vehicles will also prove to have a smaller impact on the environment and therefore we will have less air pollution. Air pollution is a serious problem in America, being the worst in cities with high amounts of traffic. Fuel being pumped into the air will be a thing of the past when autonomous vehicles take over, and the economy will like it to. Although, economic effects seems to be the least of worries as scientists are struggling to solve ethical
Seymour, Elaine, and Hewitt, Nancy. Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences. Westview Press: Boulder, CO: 1997.
In some respect, we can say all problems begin to resemble nails when the only tool we have is a hammer, which is typically seen in natural sciences – depending predominantly on rationalism (a tool defined as an intrinsic common sense to the knower) to solve scientific problems and generate theories. Isaac Newton discovered the Laws of Gravity through empirical and deductive reasoning when he observed an apple falling, where he rationalized thus: “The apple is accelerated, since its velocity changes from zero as it moves toward the ground. Thus there must be a force that acts on the apple to cause this acceleration.” He then extrapolated this line of reasoni...