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Electricity

9/24/2013

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A man made satellite radios information from outer space...A teacher, many miles away, instructs a class by television...An elevator whisks passengers to the top of the Empire State Building....An underwater cable sends messages from one continent to another...A city becomes ablaze with man-made light as darkness falls...A mother sets a dial on her electric oven and bakes a cake.

All these and many others are examples of electricity at work, for today we live in a world of electrical marvels. All around us are gadgets and appliances that work by electricity. All we do is flick a switch, and there it is-power to serve us. Electricity warms us in winter and cools us in summer. Electricity cooks our food and washes our clothes. Electricity provides light to chase away the gloom of night. Electricity gives us movies and television to entertain in leisure hours. Electricity turns the giant wheels of factories and mills. There is almost no end to what this obedient and faithful servant can do for man.

One can imagine what would happen if suddenly all electric power were to go off. This actually happens. Most of the things we do day in and day out come to a stop. And life was very much like that in the days of the late 19th century, the days before electricity. Light was provided by candles and oil lamps. Transportation was slow, for it depended upon horses to move carriages or coaches, and the wind to move ships. Letters crossed the oceans in sailing ships and moved overland no faster than a horse could run. News was days, weeks and sometimes months old when it arrived. Food was cooled with ice and cooked with fires of coal or wood. Cloth was woven by hand; were made by hand and washed by hand. Radio, television, movies were unheard of.

And then came electricity; its beginnings were very simple, but in time it grew like a snowball that rolls down a hill and grows larger and larger. First a discovery was made. Then certain facts were noted, and finally an idea was formed. With the first discovery serving as inspiration, another discovery was made. As man learned more and more about the strange and wonderful force called electricity, new developments came more rapidly. The more men understood, the more they advanced and the more ways they learned about how to put electricity to work. Electricity is one of those wonderful gifts of nature that has been with us for a long, long while, in fact ever since the beginning of time. 

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Conceptions of Development

9/24/2013

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Although, the fact that motion and development are universal is indisputable, there are two approaches to an understanding of the world process, two conceptions of development: metaphysical and dialectical. The dialectical conception of development is the richest one. It answers the fundamental questions of the world outlook: on the source of motion and development, their nature, mechanism, form and direction.

The metaphysical conception misunderstands the source of motion and development, sees development as a simple increase or decrease in that which already exists, makes absolute the element of stability, and fails to understand the contradictory nature of motion and development and so on. The antithesis was shown between the dialectical and metaphysical conceptions. Two elementary thoughts of development (evolution) are: development as increase and decrease, and as repetition, and also development as unity of opposites. In the very first conception of self-movement, motion, its driving force, its motive, its source, remains in shade (or it can be presumed that this source comes from external-God). In the second conception the chief attention is directed precisely to knowledge of the source of self-movement. The first conception is lifeless, pale and dry. The second is living.

The metaphysical conception of development expounded by present-day bourgeois philosophy has a definite class purpose, seeking to emasculate the revolutionary content of dialectics, to present development in such a way as to discard or distort the idea of social progress, to show that the exploitive society is eternal and that class struggle is useless, and to disprove the doctrine of mankind’s inevitable transition to socialism and communism.

Materialist dialectics is essentially revolutionary. It teaches people to see all processes and phenomena of the surrounding world in motion and development. In its most profound and ample reflection of the actual processes going on in nature and the society, it is a powerful instrument for their scientific cognition and revolutionary transformation.

Any science or knowledge is not only the result of past cognition, but also an instrument for discovering new truths and attaining a fuller and deeper reflection of reality. This means that any human knowledge, if used for acquiring new knowledge, is a method for acquiring it. One could say in this sense that any general or particular theory is also a corresponding general or particular method of cognition and activity. The opposite is equally true; any method has a theoretical aspect and is of theoretical importance.

 

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How to Find Oil

9/15/2013

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Noah was the first successful oilman from Biblical record. Throughout history, people have used petroleum that came from the ground for building of boat, warfare as a material in Greek fire, which is an ancient form of napalm used by the Byzantine navy, also used as a laxative. The petroleum geology research group has collated nearly 200 places where petroleum is seeping out through soil and rock outcrops. Although, the seeps may be a result of modern pollution, but this may be unlikely too. Many were framed prior to the creation of the internal combustion engine. Moreover, the composition of natural petroleum differs from that of refined oil. The oily iridescence produced by iron salts on stagnant pools in peat bogs should not be confused with the iridescence produced by petroleum. The former breaks into jagged rafts when you prod it, while the genuine article flows in smooth curves.

Most petroleum comes originally from sedimentary rocks- source rocks in the language of the oil business-containing plenty of organic matter usually formed in lakes or shallow seas. If these rocks were heated up to the right temperature when they were buried, the organic molecules reacted to make oil and gas. Oil reservoirs form when the hydrocarbons move away from the source rocks and accumulate in a permeable area of rock, often sandstone. In places, the petroleum oozes from the ground; elsewhere, it fills fissures and pores within the rock as what is called an impregnation.

The seepages are principally within sedimentary strata-the old Red Sandstone-but they also fill veins and fissures in metamorphic rocks. In the 19th century the local blacksmith used to quarry these veins of pitch to fire his forge. The seepage and impregnation comes principally from layers of shale rich in organic matter, within the old Red Sandstone itself. These shales were mud in lakes some 400 million years ago; the oil of at least one sea field probably came from the same source.

Elsewhere there are reports of petroleum in strange places, including impermeable igneous and metamorphic rocks that the conventional petroleum prospector would regard as barren. The hydrocarbons are far away from conventional source beds from which they could have migrated. For example, there are lumps of ozocerite, plastic, waxy paraffin oil, on the shores; bitumen impregnates granites. A few kilometers away, there was seepage of petroleum from fractured schist sufficiently abundant and pure for a local farmer to run his tractor on it. Suspecting that the farmer had found his fuel from some recent spill or a leaking tank somewhere, Customs and Excise officers tried to trace it. But even their best efforts could not find a suitable, taxable source.

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Motion as the Mode of Existence of Matter

9/15/2013

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Knowledge of the universal forms of the existence of matter is of great importance for a scientific understanding of the world, and motion is one of these major forms.  There is nothing in the world but matter in motion. All objects –atoms, molecules, living organisms, the surface of the earth, planets, stars, galaxies and so on-are in a state constant motion and change. So motion is universal. There is no matter without motion.

But the universality of motion and change in the world does not rule out elements of rest. In the course of any motion and change, the moving, changing object also has some stability, retaining some of its properties over a certain period of time. So motion is inseparable from rest and stability. But rest has a temporary, relative nature.

A sleeping man is in a state of rest, but the rest is only relative, for without changing his position with regard to the objects in the room and to the house itself, the man is moving together with the 

Earth, and various complex physiological changes, circulation of the blood, breathing and other processes are going on within him. So rest and stability are relative, while motion is absolute. While being in a state of rest in one respect, any object is in a state of constant change and motion in other aspects. The idea that motion is universal and is inseparable from matter was expressed by many philosophers. But pre-Marxian materialists gave motion a narrow and limited interpretation. The essence of motion was reduced to a change of location in space. Motion was seen from outside, from the standpoint of a change in the location of objects, rather than a change of the objects themselves. In fact, the motion of matter includes not only mechanical movement of objects, but all the changes that happen to them.

Among the diverse forms of matter in motion, the important ones are: the mechanical form of the motion of matter (changes in the location of bodies in space in relation to one another), diverse physical forms of motion (heat, sound, electromagnetic, intra-atomic, intra-nuclear, etc.), the chemical form of motion (formation and break-up of molecules constituting diverse substances), the biological form of motion (organic life in all in its diverse manifestations, the changes taking place in living organisms) and the social form of motion (development of the human society).

All forms of the motion of matter are strictly interconnected and interdependent. Some forms of motion are prerequisites for the emergence of other forms.


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The Genes that Protect Against Malaria

9/10/2013

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Scientists have discovered two genes that seem to protect people against severe malaria. Both are members of complex family of HLA genes on chromosome 6, which are involved in the body’s immune response to infection. The findings are exciting because hey offer clues to the body’s defense mechanism against the Plasmodium parasites that cause the disease. Also, they provide part of the answer to a riddle that has long puzzled geneticists: why have we evolved with so many different forms of HLA genes?

The HLA or human leucocyte antigen, genes are the most variable in the genome- that is, there are more alleles, of alternative forms, of them than any other group. Each one codes for an antigen on the surface of cells, and no two people’s antigens are the same.

The HLA antigens enable cells of the immune system to recognize foreign proteins invading the body. T cells will recognize such proteins only when they are bound to HLA antigens. Class I HLA genes govern the killer T cells and Class II genes govern the helper T cells, making them organize other cells of the immune system to produce specific antibodies.

In theory, scientists argue, different HLA genes must protect people against different infectious diseases so natural selection has resulted in the large variety of genes. However, strong evidence for this theory has been hard to find. But the picture has changed. This is the first piece of data that strongly supports the theory of why the genes are polymorphic.

The researchers analyzed the HLA signatures of 1800 children where a quarter of all child deaths are from malaria. They classified the children into four groups: those with severe malaria that had affected the brain; those with severe malaria causing anemia; those with mild malaria –that is, symptoms but no physiological damage; the healthy children who acted as controls. The control children were matched with the cases for age and district.

The team took blood samples from each individual and studies the sequence of DNA encoding their HLA genes, using gene probes and the polymerase chain reaction. In the Class II genes, they found that a particular unit of several linked alleles which is usually inherited together was much rarer in the group with severe malarial anaemia than in the healthy controls. This unit of alleles, know as a haplotype, was also rarer, but less markedly so in the group with cerebral malaria.

For the Class I genes, children with severe malaria- both cerebral and anaemic - were much less likely than controls to have a particular allele of the HLA-B series which is much commoner. The researchers calculate that the alleles offer between 40 and 50 per cent protection against severe malaria. 

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Dialectics as Doctrine

9/10/2013

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The concept of dialectics is used in the philosophy to mean the theory and method of cognition and transformation of reality. Materialist dialectics and philosophical materialism are the two interpenetrating aspects of the integral philosophical doctrine. Philosophical materialism deals with general questions of world outlook, with the nature of the surrounding world. Materialist dialectics answers the question of what is happening to the world, of whether it originated or exists eternally, whether it is immutable or keeps changing and developing.

Dialectics has been defined as the science of connections and also as the science of the universal laws of all motion and development. The principle of universal connection is considered in close unity with the principle of motion and development, for connection in the material world means interconnection and interaction is motion and development. The whole of nature accessible to people forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies and by bodies it is understood here all material existences. These bodies are interconnected and react on one another. Thus, it is this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. That is why when dialectics is defined as the science of universal connections, the laws of motion and development. At the same time, in defining dialectics as the science of the universal laws of all motion, it is also implied universal connections, for there are no connections without interaction or motion, just as there is no motion without connections or interaction.

The dialectics materialism starts from the material unity of the world and the objectivity of all forms of motion and development of matter. Its materialist nature is most pronounced in the doctrine of objective and subjective dialectics. As a result, objective dialectics is motion and development in the material world itself as in an integral, interconnected whole. Subjective dialectics or dialectical thinking is the motion and development of thoughts, concepts etc which reflect objective dialectics in the human consciousness. Being a reflection of objective dialectics, subjective dialectics in its content coincides with the former. Both are governed by the same universal laws.

The subject of dialectics as a science is the universal objective principles of existence and the laws of development of the material world. Objective dialectics constitutes the content of subjective dialectics. That is why its basic laws and categories are simultaneously laws and categories both of being and cognition.

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What if the computer makes a mistake?

9/10/2013

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There are many sources of potential errors: wrong inputs, programming mistakes, undetected bugs in the compilers and hardware errors such as the random changing of bits in the computer’s memory. If anything, we can be almost certain that some error did occur. It should be clear why it is impossible to verify the correctness of this proof. We could perhaps check all the computer programs there are also the compilers and operating systems to reckon with, but how are we to guarantee the absence of built-in hardware errors or random errors during a run? As for trying to simulate the workings of the supercomputer by hand, the enormity of the task staggers the imagination: the actual search took more 2000 hours of computer time-at a rate of hundreds of millions of operations per second. 

We may establish the validity of the result-if not the absence of errors-indirectly, for example, by an independent verification, using different programs and machines. Another such test is the test of time. It is a simple but fundamental logical principle that from a false premise we can prove anything. If the four-color theorem is false but believing it true we use it to prove other theorems, one of these may contradict some well-established fact. Should no such contradiction ever happen, this would add weight to the computer result. 

Surely the use of computers in proofs introduces an element of uncertainty new to mathematicians but not to experimental scientists. This seems a small price to pay for the use of such a marvelous tool. A central issue is the question of the length of proofs. The shortest proofs of some mathematical propositions are much too long for any human being to check in full. Admittedly, we do not know whether there are any important or interesting theorems in this category.

A computer assisted proof would be like the picture of a peak on some distant planet transmitted by a space probe. Our observer may reject this electronic image as unreliable, second-hand evidence. Real mathematicians are in a similar predicament when confronted with a proof by computer. They may postpone accepting the result until someone comes up with a shorter proof, a proof they could check themselves. But they realize that such a proof may be impossible. And so, if they reject the indirect evidence, they risk being cut off from a mathematical truth accessible only by nontraditional means.

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Are the consumers being misled?

9/10/2013

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The world Chocolate foundation insists that there are only around 5 – 6 million cocoa farmers in the World. However, truly the numbers of people who are dependent upon the production of cocoa for survival are not less than 40-50 million.   By the purchase of fair trade chocolate, a consumer contributes significantly by helping the poor farmer to earn enough to support his family and educate his children for a brighter future. TransFair USA has the rights to certify products in the United States of America. In the rest of the world, Fair Trade International does the work. The certification process of fair trade is certainly expensive and has its own issues, but that does not dilute the fact that it is a step in the right direction.

All people have a different relationship with chocolate. The feeling and the favourites have a lot of element of subjectivity in it. The chocolate lovers have a reason to not just defend their own preference but also to convert others into liking the brown thing. It is a step towards increasing one’s passion towards the environment, eradication if poverty, equality for all, green living, sustainability in agriculture   and more. In some or the other way, they all are attached to the cocoa tree. If all this is not enough links to cocoa, the changes in the climatic conditions are also impacting cocoa production,

The mushrooming ethical chocolate industry has persuaded many of the big names in the industry climb the bandwagon. The famous and trendsetting Dairy Milk chocolate by Cadbury was made fair trade certified in the year 2009. Competition further pestered Nestle to follow suit and Maltesers from Mars’ to move forward and gain the same certification. They all now carry their own fair trade logo. It does the task of serving as a reassuring label for the consumers. It imposes the fact that all the poor third world farmers involved in the production of cocoa beans have earned a good deal on their output. However, what shows may not be the true story completely. With all the logos in place, it is possible that all the above mentioned chocolates may not have any cocoa beans whatsoever. It so happens because the manufacturers have the liberty to mix up their fair trade beans with the other ones from the nontrade sources and still has the rights to label their product as fair trade certified.

With no guarantee to take care of your contribution by consuming fair trade certified products, can this be termed as “misleading the consumers” 

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Attending online English learning classes

9/6/2013

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Language is a subjective thing and it demands a proper and thorough learning and understanding. English being the most accepted language among the myriad available languages in India gives you an international platform. This growing demand for English eventually led to the mushrooming of English Speaking classes and session, especially in non-English speaking nations.

Analyzing the importance of English, varied modes are available through which one can gain expertise in it. Some of the prominent ways to learn this popular language include: classroom teaching, study materials, and online classes. Out of these, learning it online is a most innovative way as you can learn it sitting at your place at your convenience and in your way.

Understanding the language
To start up with a language you first need to make up your mind as it will require patience, dedication, and regularity. With these factors in mind, you can carve out a swift way to learn the language.

You need to focus on the grammar, punctuation, voice, narration, diction, pronunciation of words and once you gain control over these; you are almost done with the primary phase of English learning. This task becomes easier, if you are learning English online.

Study material
Institutes offering English learning classes provide you with study materials, with which you can practice and master the language. Generally, the provided study material includes books and notes, but nowadays, there are many institutes that give you compact disc, digital files to ease the learning process. These study materials contain learning modules, interactions, and references. The content of these study materials is according to the adequate syllabus.

Discussion
Unlike a real-time classroom session, the online English learning classes are pretty much different, where you need to have a computer system with a proper and fast internet connection. There are proper lesson plans, which you can discuss with fellow virtual students and a teacher, during the classroom session. Just in case, any confusion occurs into your mind, never feel shy to discuss with other members of the community. You can create a separate chat thread and invite other members, ask them if they have doubts on a common subject. Keep the window of communication wide open and you will be able to learn at a much faster pace.

The other most adequate way suggested by the experts of this language is to learn it by reading newspapers, magazines, journals aloud, and watching television news. These online classes, at times, offer various categorized classroom sessions of English language, such as Basic English, Advanced English, Written English, Vocal English, Corporate English, etc.
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