Wednesday, September 7, 2016
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Italian, Coding & Thai Food
Hello and welcome to this post! Today, I'll talk about what I'll be up to (educationally) over the summer. Here we go!
My online Italian course through Wellesley College in Massachusetts is one of the things that I'll be doing this summer. I am currently about halfway through and am making progress. I will undoubtedly finish by the end of summer vacation, so no worries there! There are 4 units, each containing 4 lessons followed by tests, a reading followed by a test, and an interview followed by a test. I am on Unit 3: Attività , sport e vacanze (Activities, sports, and holidays). I am going to make a prediction: I will be done with this course by the end of July.
One of the other things I'll be doing is coding in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Using CodePen, I am making a "Pen", or webpage, using HTML and CSS. One can also use JavaScript, but I am not opting to use it as of right now. The one thing that I am trying to learn is how to make a drop-down list/menu. Once I figure that out I can take the owner of Thai Mii Up up on her offer of designing her restaurant webpage in exchange for a week of free lunch. Considering how delicious their food is, that is a great deal!
Thank you for visiting School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!) and I hope to see you again soon! If you want to see the "Pen" that I'm working on, I will put the link here. NOTE: the "Pen" is unfinished.
Friday, June 10, 2016
Physics
Hello and welcome to my blog! Today's topic is physics. More specifically, the physics of falling balls. All of this content is derived from my physics course, How Things Work: An Introduction To Physics through the University of Virginia and taught by Professor Louis Bloomfield. Also, this all holds true only if you ignore effects due to air.
Does a ball's upward motion affect its fall? The simple answer is that there is no large effect due to an upward motion. The ball still has a downward acceleration, so it will still fall downwards. Why does a ball travelling upwards still have a downwards acceleration? Because of gravity. Gravity drags the ball down, and the closer the ball gets to the earth, the faster gravity drags it. Fun fact: A ball thrown directly up is temporarily motionless, or at rest, at the peak of its arc.
Does differing gravity strength affect the fall of a ball? Yes, it does. For example, in zero gravity, a ball dropped from rest will stay at rest, while a ball dropped in motion will stay in motion. In a zero-gravity situation, if I was to throw a ball directly up, it would float up forever, or until it enters a gravity field. Everything in the universe exerts a gravity field, with its weight determining how strong that field is. That is why the earth's gravity is so much stronger than the moon's, or yours!
As an extra bonus, does a ball's horizontal motion effect its fall? Not the fall, no.The only thing horizontal motion effects is the distance that the ball travels. The angle that a ball is kicked/thrown also affects the distance traveled and/or the peak height. If a punter in American football wants to get the ball far, he should kick at a low angle. If he wants to get the ball high, he should kick it at a higher angle.
Thank you for visiting School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!) today, and I hope that you read all my other posts!
Friday, May 27, 2016
Tort Law
Hello, and welcome back to School Stories. I will be your host today, guiding you through parts of the highly complex topic of American Tort Law, one of three major parts of American Common Law. All of this information comes from things I have learned in my Introduction to American Law course through the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
First of all, what is a tort? A tort, in common law, is a civil wrong that causes someone else, called the plaintiff, to suffer unfairly, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tort, called the tortfeasor. Plaintiffs in tort law typically seek monetary reward, or damages. If monetary damages are awarded, the judge in a tort case(tort court?) usually awards enough to put the plaintiff back into the position that (s)he was in before the injury.
One famous case from 1850, the Brown vs. Kendall case, was prominent in the distinction of American tort law. Two dogs, one owned by Mr. Brown and one owned by Mr. Kendall, were fighting. Mr. Brown, worried about the safety of the dogs, started beating them with a stick while Mr. Kendall stood behind him. Mr. Kendall took a step forward to see more clearly, which resulted in Mr. Kendall being accidentally struck in the eye with the stick, damaging it beyond repair.
Mr. Kendall sued Mr. Brown for the damage to his eye. Mr. Kendall thought that Mr. Brown would be found guilty in a heartbeat, since the dominant liability process at the time was something called strict liability, where the tortfeasor had to give the damages no matter what if the plaintiff could prove that the harm was done. Nowadays, the tortfeasor only has to give the plaintiff damages if the tort was intentional or commit through negligence, which is failure to exhibit the caution of a reasonable person of ordinary prudence. That system, called fault-based liability, is the one that the judge decided to use, so Mr. Brown was found not guilty.
Thank you for visiting School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!), and I hope you will choose us again soon!
First of all, what is a tort? A tort, in common law, is a civil wrong that causes someone else, called the plaintiff, to suffer unfairly, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tort, called the tortfeasor. Plaintiffs in tort law typically seek monetary reward, or damages. If monetary damages are awarded, the judge in a tort case(tort court?) usually awards enough to put the plaintiff back into the position that (s)he was in before the injury.
One famous case from 1850, the Brown vs. Kendall case, was prominent in the distinction of American tort law. Two dogs, one owned by Mr. Brown and one owned by Mr. Kendall, were fighting. Mr. Brown, worried about the safety of the dogs, started beating them with a stick while Mr. Kendall stood behind him. Mr. Kendall took a step forward to see more clearly, which resulted in Mr. Kendall being accidentally struck in the eye with the stick, damaging it beyond repair.
Mr. Kendall sued Mr. Brown for the damage to his eye. Mr. Kendall thought that Mr. Brown would be found guilty in a heartbeat, since the dominant liability process at the time was something called strict liability, where the tortfeasor had to give the damages no matter what if the plaintiff could prove that the harm was done. Nowadays, the tortfeasor only has to give the plaintiff damages if the tort was intentional or commit through negligence, which is failure to exhibit the caution of a reasonable person of ordinary prudence. That system, called fault-based liability, is the one that the judge decided to use, so Mr. Brown was found not guilty.
Thank you for visiting School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!), and I hope you will choose us again soon!
Domestication: Artificial or Natural Selection?
Hello and welcome back to my blog! Without further ado, here are the topics of today: Domestication and experimental biology.
Domestication is widely believed to be a result of artificial selection, but is domestication actually a result of it? The professor in my dog cognition course through Duke University thinks it is a result of natural selection instead. Through a theory he calls "Survival of the Friendliest", he believes that as humans began to settle down, "friendliness" in wolves -- or more specifically, aggression towards humans being replaced by interest in them -- started to have benefits, such as free food from the garbage of humans. Eventually, the humans took in these wolves as pets, creating ... dogs!
Now, since this is a theory involving something that happened thousands of years ago, there's no way to test and prove/disprove it, right? Wrong. Enter Dmitri Belyaev's famous silver fox experiment.In 1958,Belyaev asked his assistant Lyudmila Trut to go to Soviet fur farms to gather the tamest silver foxes she could find. A quick note: silver foxes had NOT been domesticated prior to Belyaev and Trut's experiment. The ~30 male foxes and ~100 vixens (female foxes) that Trut gathered formed the base of the experiment that has lasted until this day.
Domestication is widely believed to be a result of artificial selection, but is domestication actually a result of it? The professor in my dog cognition course through Duke University thinks it is a result of natural selection instead. Through a theory he calls "Survival of the Friendliest", he believes that as humans began to settle down, "friendliness" in wolves -- or more specifically, aggression towards humans being replaced by interest in them -- started to have benefits, such as free food from the garbage of humans. Eventually, the humans took in these wolves as pets, creating ... dogs!
Now, since this is a theory involving something that happened thousands of years ago, there's no way to test and prove/disprove it, right? Wrong. Enter Dmitri Belyaev's famous silver fox experiment.In 1958,Belyaev asked his assistant Lyudmila Trut to go to Soviet fur farms to gather the tamest silver foxes she could find. A quick note: silver foxes had NOT been domesticated prior to Belyaev and Trut's experiment. The ~30 male foxes and ~100 vixens (female foxes) that Trut gathered formed the base of the experiment that has lasted until this day.
If Belyaev and Trut allowed the foxes to freely interbreed, there wouldn't be an experiment, would there? So Belyaev and Trut took the friendliest foxes and interbred them, allowing the others to freely interbreed. The freely interbreeding foxes formed the control group of the experiment, while the friendly foxes formed the experimental group. After ~30-35 generations, there were about 100 friendly foxes. As a result of this domestication, however, there were a few unintended results, including: piebald (multishaded) coats, cranium feminization(skull becoming narrower in males), bone gracialization(thinner bones), curled tails, star mutation (a white pattern on the chest), increased litter size(more puppies), floppy ears, whining, and loss of "musky fox smell".
Belyaev and Trut's experiment inspired me to do something similar. I wanted to do something revolutionary with domestication. But what to domesticate... I knew I wanted to do a wild feline of some sort, but what to choose? Panthers, tigers, lions, cheetahs, jaguars, lynxes, ocelots, leopards, caracals, servals, jaguarundis, kodkods, margays, pumas, bobcats, cougars, or oncillas? So many to choose from! I think I might settle for a small cat(any one listed above EXCEPT lion, panther, tiger, leopard, cheetah, and jaguar), but I just don't know yet. Feel free to tell me about your suggestions and reasons for the suggestions in the comments!
Thank you for visiting School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!) today, and I hope to see you again soon!
Thank you for visiting School Stories (Where School Is ALWAYS In Session!) today, and I hope to see you again soon!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)