VV064 Week 9
Adapted from: Ahnert, K., Abel, M., Kollosche, M., Jørgen Jørgensen, P., and Kofod, C. “Soft Capacitors for Wave Energy Harvesting.”
Journal of Materials Chemistry, 21, 13392-14497. 2011.
Crane, H. D., Kinderman, E. M., & Malhotra, A Cubic Mile of Oil. New York: Oxford UP. R. (2010). 264-5.
Swales and Feak. Academic Writing for Graduate Students. 3rd ed. Michigan. 2013
Polishing Presentations
Look at the five version of a sentence below. Practice saying these sentences by
emphasizing the words in bold. How is the meaning of each sentence changed?
Please present your paper next week.
Please present your paper next week.
Please present your paper next week.
Please present your paper next week.
Please present your paper next week.
Look at the following text and then highlight the words you would emphasize in your
speech. In addition, try to insert slash (/) into the text to indicate a pause.
First of all, thank you very much for coming here today. My name’s Esther Kritz and I am currently
doing research into psycholinguistics at Manchester University. I’d like to show you what I think are
some incredible results that I got while ...
David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
Listen to the presentation and then do the following:
1) What was the presentation’s goal? Did it succeed in putting its ideas across?
2) What was the presenter’s style? Was it formal or informal? Serious or humorous? What were
some features of his language use?
3) Look at the following phrases and try to identify when they appeared in the presentation and
their function.
a. This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram, and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting
of billion-dollar amounts in the press.
b. Let’s take a look. This is Mountains Out of Molehills, a timeline of global media panic. (Laughter)
So, I’ll label this for you in a second. But the height here, I want to point out, is the intensity of
certain fears as reported in the media. Let me point them out.
c. But what I love – and I’m a journalist – and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a
data detective. And there’s a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only
see when you visualize it. Let me highlight it for you.
VV064 Week 9
Adapted from: Ahnert, K., Abel, M., Kollosche, M., Jørgen Jørgensen, P., and Kofod, C. “Soft Capacitors for Wave Energy Harvesting.”
Journal of Materials Chemistry, 21, 13392-14497. 2011.
Crane, H. D., Kinderman, E. M., & Malhotra, A Cubic Mile of Oil. New York: Oxford UP. R. (2010). 264-5.
Swales and Feak. Academic Writing for Graduate Students. 3rd ed. Michigan. 2013
d. Can you guess what this data set is? What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks
before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday, and then flattens out over the summer? I’ll take
answers.
e. So there’s a titanic amount of data out there now, unprecedented. But if you ask the right kind of
question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge.
f. Let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer: Who has the biggest military budget?
It’s got to be America, right? Massive. 609 billion in 2008 – 607, rather. So massive, in fact, that it can
contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,
gobble.
g. So, absolute figures, like the military budget, in a connected world, don’t give you the whole
picture. They’re not as true as they could be.
h. We scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed, the biomedical database, and we compiled them and
graded them all. And it was incredibly frustrating for me because I had a book of 250 visualizations to
do for my book, and I spent a month doing this, and I only filled two pages. But what it points to is
that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. It’s a way of squeezing an
enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space.
i. So, just to wrap up, I wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and
providing elegant solutions, and information design is about solving information problems.
What do you think could be used in a poster? Look at the following:
- Short quotations from people
- Aims and objectives
- Outcomes
- Brief background of the project
- The title of the project
- A flowchart of the development of the project
- A visual
- People involved in the project and sponsors who helped the project financially
- Work with a partner or in a group
- Select a subject from those on the next page
VV064 Week 9
Adapted from: Ahnert, K., Abel, M., Kollosche, M., Jørgen Jørgensen, P., and Kofod, C. “Soft Capacitors for Wave Energy Harvesting.”
Journal of Materials Chemistry, 21, 13392-14497. 2011.
Crane, H. D., Kinderman, E. M., & Malhotra, A Cubic Mile of Oil. New York: Oxford UP. R. (2010). 264-5.
Swales and Feak. Academic Writing for Graduate Students. 3rd ed. Michigan. 2013
- Use the following stages in the appropriate order. Make sure to spread the work evenly in
your group:
o The production of the poster itself
o The collation or gathering of material from different sources
o Putting the different parts of the poster together
o Selecting a title
o Planning the design and layout
o Doing the research (if possible)
In your group, practice describing the poster as a whole, and talking through particular parts of the
poster. Ask each other questions about specific information.
Put your poster up in the room and give your presentation. Ask questions about other groups’
posters.
Presentation texts
Text 1
The world currently consumes energy equal to 3 CMO (cubic miles of oil) each year. It uses 1.0 CMO
from oil, 0.8 CMO from coal, 0.6 CMO from natural gas, and approximately 0.2 CMO each from
hydro-electric power, nuclear, and wood. Although its population is only 1/20th of the world
population, the United States uses about one-fifth of the world’s energy. There will soon be
substantial increases in global energy demand: more than three billion people are poised to sharply
increase their standard of living, and in India and China there are already large groups of people
whose wealth equals that of the average citizen of richer countries such as Sweden and Switzerland.
Business as usual for the world – which includes a steady improvement in energy efficiency – would
place the annual global demand for energy in 2050 at around 9 CMO. Even if we were to follow a
more modest growth scenario, the annual global energy demand could still increase to 6 CMO by
then. We therefore predict a need for additional energy sources capable of delivering a minimum of
an additional 3 CMO annually. Fifty years from now, the 1 CMO a year we now obtain from oil will
also have to be replaced, adding another CMO to the demand for alternative sources. And if we wish
to reduce the role of coal and natural gas, then the alternative sources will need to provide a total of
between 4 and 5 CMO by 2050.
Text 2
The problem of adequately supplying the world with clean, renewable energy is among the most
urgent today. It is crucial to evaluate alternatives to conventional techniques. One possibility is
energy harvesting from ocean waves, which has been proposed as a means of offsetting a large
VV064 Week 9
Adapted from: Ahnert, K., Abel, M., Kollosche, M., Jørgen Jørgensen, P., and Kofod, C. “Soft Capacitors for Wave Energy Harvesting.”
Journal of Materials Chemistry, 21, 13392-14497. 2011.
Crane, H. D., Kinderman, E. M., & Malhotra, A Cubic Mile of Oil. New York: Oxford UP. R. (2010). 264-5.
Swales and Feak. Academic Writing for Graduate Students. 3rd ed. Michigan. 2013
portion of the world's electrical energy demands. However, the practical implementation of wave
energy harvesting has met with obstacles, and the development of new methods is necessary.
Oceanic waves have large amplitude fluctuations that cause devices to fail due to excessive wear or
during storms. A strategy to overcome these catastrophic events could be to base the harvesting
mechanisms on soft materials. Soft, stretchable rubber capacitors are possible candidates for energy
harvesting that have already been tested in a realistic ocean setting. They were originally introduced
as actuators, capable of high actuation strains of more than 100% and stresses of more than 1 MPa.
With a soft capacitor, mechanical energy can be used to pump charges from a low electrical potential
U to a higher one, such that the electrical energy difference can be harvested. This is made possible
by the large changes of capacitance under mechanical deformation. Although the method is simple
and proven, it is still not clear to what extent the approach is practically useful, which is the concern
of this paper. Of the many electro-active polymers, it appears that soft capacitors could have the
highest energy densities.
Text 3
Ghana is located on West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea just north of the Equator. Unlike many poor West
African countries, this country of 24 million has a growing economy that is expanding over 10%
annually. Ghana has also emerged as an important center for e-waste recycling and disposal, an
industry that contributes more than US$200 million into the economy. E-waste consists of electronic
devices typically from Europe and North America that have been discarded, but still have some value.
E-waste provides opportunities for employment, poverty alleviation, recycling business
developments, and may even bridge the digital divide by contributing to the country’s growing
demand for information technology. However, this industry also poses environmental and health
risks that cannot be ignored.
The largest e-waste recycling and disposal center is located in the capital city of Accra and is adjacent
to the Agbogbloshie Food Market. At this site recyclers disassemble electronics to retrieve valuable
metals (for example, gold) or burn items covered with plastic (for example, computer wires) to
recover metals such as copper and aluminum. These processes expose workers and others living near
the e-waste site to toxic materials including plastics, lead, aluminum, and silica that are known to
cause cancers and central nervous system damage among other health problems.
One way to address e-waste dangers is to install modern recycling technology that can greatly reduce
exposures to toxins. One drawback to this approach, however, centers around who should be
responsible for the cost of installing such systems. Perhaps a better solution is for the manufacturers
of electronics to reduce the amount of toxic materials used to make their products. Thus, rather than
placing all of the responsibility for safe handling of e-waste on the recyclers, the manufacturers
should examine their own practices to determine ways to lower the risks associated with e-waste.