I am working on a project to determine which of several different choices that a U of A student can make is the most sustainable. Because this project has a lot of jargon, I am going to clarify what several words and acronyms related to the project mean.
First, sustainability: the sustainable choice is the one that will preserve the world's ability to carry life the longest. It is not the least expensive, the most comfortably, or generally the easiest. That said, very few will be solely focused on sustainability because it is uncomfortable and difficult. The goal of this project is to find the point at which students are comfortable yet not destroying the environment.
Second, life cycle assessments (LCA) are the tool that scientists use to quantify the sustainability of various options. In an LCA, a scientist examines what negative effects a given thing has on the environment. The format this project will use to display the results of an LCA is the amount of carbon dioxide a given subject produces. This can be in the amount of CO2 used to produce a textbook or the amount of CO2 produced by burning coal to generate electricity to power your laptop.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Week Five
Hello again,
This is a continuation of my last post, detailing exactly what I have been up to in these last weeks. Because
When I left off, I was describing my difficulty in finding information on paper textbooks.
I first checked for Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) about textbooks, but didn't find any. I had decided to wait until I met with the rest of the group to fill in the blanks about how much CO2 is produced by the creation of a paper textbook and how that relates to the amount of CO2 produced by a device that can read eBooks.
The major problem I had this week was in trying to figure out how relate these values of energy used. I tried to find an method of comparing the CO2 produced by the method of using eBooks (including the production, transport, use, and disposal costs of the eReader, the servers holding the eBooks, and so on) and paper textbooks (production, transport, disposal, and number of textbooks required versus one eReader).
Because many of these values vary depending on what classes a student is taking, finding a way to present this information is very difficult. My current plan is to make a spreadsheet that can calculate the CO2 produced and figure out if getting an eReader is worth it, environmentally.
During the meeting, I asked for estimates for many of these values, only to find that there was not a commonly accepted answer.
I asked Professor Blowers how to continue researching and he pointed me to the library. On Monday, I will go to the library to ask the librarians how often textbooks are recycled and so on.
I also was asked to help a coworker of mine pull data from a ridiculously large government database. I will be working on that next week.
In other news, We do not have a meeting next week because of the U of A's Spring Break. I will be able to go the Arizona regional in FRC without worrying about missing a meeting!
This is a continuation of my last post, detailing exactly what I have been up to in these last weeks. Because
When I left off, I was describing my difficulty in finding information on paper textbooks.
I first checked for Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) about textbooks, but didn't find any. I had decided to wait until I met with the rest of the group to fill in the blanks about how much CO2 is produced by the creation of a paper textbook and how that relates to the amount of CO2 produced by a device that can read eBooks.
The major problem I had this week was in trying to figure out how relate these values of energy used. I tried to find an method of comparing the CO2 produced by the method of using eBooks (including the production, transport, use, and disposal costs of the eReader, the servers holding the eBooks, and so on) and paper textbooks (production, transport, disposal, and number of textbooks required versus one eReader).
Because many of these values vary depending on what classes a student is taking, finding a way to present this information is very difficult. My current plan is to make a spreadsheet that can calculate the CO2 produced and figure out if getting an eReader is worth it, environmentally.
During the meeting, I asked for estimates for many of these values, only to find that there was not a commonly accepted answer.
I asked Professor Blowers how to continue researching and he pointed me to the library. On Monday, I will go to the library to ask the librarians how often textbooks are recycled and so on.
I also was asked to help a coworker of mine pull data from a ridiculously large government database. I will be working on that next week.
In other news, We do not have a meeting next week because of the U of A's Spring Break. I will be able to go the Arizona regional in FRC without worrying about missing a meeting!
Friday, March 14, 2014
Week Four
Hello all,
This is a continuation of my last post, detailing exactly what I have been up to in these last weeks.
Where I left off last week, I had found a good, rigorous Life Cycle Assessment of eBook production and presented it at my weekly meeting.
However, later I couldn't find a rigorous LCA of paper textbooks, so I attempted to find statistics that would enable me to carry out my own assessment.
I started with simple statistics, like the amount of CO2 produced during the creation of one textbook. Then I started adding modifiers, like the number of times a textbook can be reused before a new edition comes out all the way through how much the number of students (and thus textbooks) rises every year.
I usually left these blank because I did not know, and could ask the other people working on the project with me "How many people have used you textbooks before you?" and so on. Little did I know that the next meeting would have no answer for me.
Now, on this fourth week I didn't get very much done because I had a robotics competition. I left at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday and got back at 9:30 on Sunday. I missed the meeting, so I didn't get my questions answered.
See you around,
- Henry
This is a continuation of my last post, detailing exactly what I have been up to in these last weeks.
Where I left off last week, I had found a good, rigorous Life Cycle Assessment of eBook production and presented it at my weekly meeting.
However, later I couldn't find a rigorous LCA of paper textbooks, so I attempted to find statistics that would enable me to carry out my own assessment.
I started with simple statistics, like the amount of CO2 produced during the creation of one textbook. Then I started adding modifiers, like the number of times a textbook can be reused before a new edition comes out all the way through how much the number of students (and thus textbooks) rises every year.
I usually left these blank because I did not know, and could ask the other people working on the project with me "How many people have used you textbooks before you?" and so on. Little did I know that the next meeting would have no answer for me.
Now, on this fourth week I didn't get very much done because I had a robotics competition. I left at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday and got back at 9:30 on Sunday. I missed the meeting, so I didn't get my questions answered.
See you around,
- Henry
Week Three
Hello everyone,
So I just got an email from Mr Kittredge reminding me to post here. Because I haven't posted in weeks, I will discuss each week I missed, starting from week three.
I had been having a lot of difficulty finding papers. I was using Web of Science through UA, and was having difficulty finding even a single paper about my topic, specifically comparisons of eBooks and paper textbooks.
I broke the topic down into paper textbooks and eBooks. In both cases, finding papers about a method of accessing a text often lead to papers in than format. I found myself beating my head against the wall (and don't I just love that idiom?) again.
During the course of this head wall beating, I did learn quite a bit about how to use Web of Science. I watched the tutorials, looked around the help section, and played with other topics. However, I did not find a single paper on my topic.
Late in the week, I decided to stop using Web of Science and Google Scholar and did a basic Google search. Lo and behold, I found a PowerPoint on about a life cycle assessment (LCA) of devices that can be used to read eBooks, and it mentioned several other papers. Here, Web of Science became very useful. I found one paper and searched for all the papers that cited it. This solved my problems with the scholarly papers for eBooks.
Then I presented what I had found and what I had learned from the process to Professor Blowers.
- Henry
So I just got an email from Mr Kittredge reminding me to post here. Because I haven't posted in weeks, I will discuss each week I missed, starting from week three.
I had been having a lot of difficulty finding papers. I was using Web of Science through UA, and was having difficulty finding even a single paper about my topic, specifically comparisons of eBooks and paper textbooks.
I broke the topic down into paper textbooks and eBooks. In both cases, finding papers about a method of accessing a text often lead to papers in than format. I found myself beating my head against the wall (and don't I just love that idiom?) again.
During the course of this head wall beating, I did learn quite a bit about how to use Web of Science. I watched the tutorials, looked around the help section, and played with other topics. However, I did not find a single paper on my topic.
Late in the week, I decided to stop using Web of Science and Google Scholar and did a basic Google search. Lo and behold, I found a PowerPoint on about a life cycle assessment (LCA) of devices that can be used to read eBooks, and it mentioned several other papers. Here, Web of Science became very useful. I found one paper and searched for all the papers that cited it. This solved my problems with the scholarly papers for eBooks.
Then I presented what I had found and what I had learned from the process to Professor Blowers.
- Henry
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