Before enrolling in writing for engineering, I already had several skills at my disposal. My writing was considered to be blunt, but it was also considered to be crude. What skills I lacked was often said to be organization, clarity, and repetition. Quotations and citations were not a problem I had to deal with often, as I had learnt different citation styles in my research class in my freshman year of high school. I had learnt that excessive quoting would hurt whatever text I was writing, and that the best form of quoting was a quote that was integrated into my sentences, allowing me to both quote and paraphrase at the same time, but a text containing mostly paraphrasing demonstrated that the person writing it understood the context of their source. My teachers considered my writing to be blunt and direct but they also thought my writing was often disorganized, repetitive, and a bit confusing at times. My teachers had issues understanding my writing or not being annoyed at the frequent repetition more times than they understood my writing or were not annoyed by its repetitive wording.
During my time being enrolled in my writing for engineering class, I learnt several skills. I learnt to better organize my writing when writing for a more academic and formal setting, such as the technical description, lab report, and technical proposal. In all three of these projects, not only did the writing have to be able to be understood by everyone in the class, it had to be written in a formal manner. The writing was usually written in an active tone, as a passive tone was often too indirect and would result in potential and unintended confusion. As such, most sentences were written in an active voice. I learnt how to better organize my writing in these projects. The guidelines given in the articles provided a better idea of what I should have included in each section. It allowed me better to provide more writing in each section that was more clear and despite and avoided repetition. Before I would keep second guessing myself on how much information should be provided, and would end up providing much more information than I needed to provide. It caused my writing to become full of unnecessary information that could be considered fluff and made my writing much less organized and more confusing to understand.
It allowed me to formulate and articulate a stance in my writing by setting guidelines that I would follow in order to avoid writing unnecessary pieces of information. In the past, I did not have such guidelines to allow me to avoid writing information that the reader may deem as unnecessary and irritating. I focused my priorities on the quantity instead of the quality. I was focusing on writing as many words or pages as possible based on what my teacher asked for each assignment. Instead of focusing on information that is meant to take up large amounts of space on the paper, I was focusing on information that was relevant to the topic at hand and important to mention to the reader.
Writing the lab report, technical description, and engineering proposal would not have been possible without the internet. The internet gave me access to information that I would not have known had I not searched it up online for these projects. I had no issues citing websites and videos, but I was not familiar with citing images as I had not cited any sort of images before in any of my previous essays or projects. I was only used to citing websites, articles, videos, books, and papers that I found in the CUNY library system. I was unfamiliar with the process of citing images. I was not sure not if I used a footnote, a bibliography or just a link to the website where the image was taken from.
Strategies that I developed for ensuring that my writing was able to be understood was to ask multiple people who knew nothing of the subject to read my writing. If there was no one to read my document, then I would personally read the document and attempt to simplify as many sentences as possible and read through the document as if I did not understand what my document was about. I would check to see if jargon was used, and if jargon was used I would attempt to make that sentence more easy to understand to the viewer by replacing the jargon with more understandable nouns. If there were a large amount of information involved, I would be very specific with the information like with my lab report.
Especially more important was the process of collaborating and working together with others, specifically the engineering proposal project. It was required that the group members contact each other, for our case virtually, and agree on who would complete which sections. It also required that each member would inspect the other sections and would have to discuss if that section was completed to a satisfactory degree. It required both being able to create descriptive writing and be able to understand the writing of the other group members, despite the different writing styles and techniques of my group members. My group members’ linguistic differences might have caused issues with understanding, but these linguistic differences sometimes helped me express certain messages in unique ways that someone would not hear about in English.
Engineering Proposal
Conclusion Platform screen doors should be installed to prevent people from falling or jumping into the tracks. Platform screen doors are the only solutions to people that are pushed into the tracks or jump into the tracks. Most stations have little to prevent passengers from falling onto the tracks. What prevents people from falling onto the tracks is their awareness of their surroundings. However, it is also a large obstacle. The only barrier to this proposal would be the large cost of installing these platform screen doors . It costs a prodigious bill for all stations to install the platform screen doors, claiming “that potential billion-dollar costs and engineering challenges” (Martinez, 2022) would make the implementation and installation of platform screen doors unrealistic and unmanageable. Although, these proposals should at least be partially implemented for experimentation instead of being installed all at the same time in every station, if the logistics and costs are believed to be beyond the capabilities of the MTA. These costs for these proposals will only increase with time and as the subway system becomes more obsolete and older. It is best to spend the costs that will seem miniscule now and implement these proposals in order to improve the safety of the stations. It is important that these proposals be implemented and maintained sufficiently. An example that can be used as a model is the implementation of improvements in Shenzhen City.
Figure 4 The Change in Shenzhen City, China over 40 years China is building screen doors for each of its stations. “The 1.5 m-tall metal and glass doors are the first barriers for China’s oldest subway line, which started operations in1971. Builders reinforced the platform before installing the doors. By the end of 2017,the remaining 22 stations on the line will all have screen doors” (Xinhua, 2016).The MTA and all New Yorkers have reasons to push the implementation of platform screen doors in an attempt to make the subway safer, especially with a larger surge of crime in recent years. “After years of saying engineering obstacles and enormous costs made the doors a non-starter in the subway system, the MTA backtracked in February, following Go’s death at Times Square-42nd Street in January” (Martinez & Pedraza, 2022). Go was a victim who was pushed and then fell onto the tracks. Setting up the screen doors will prevent future incidents such as this from occurring. Incidents such as Go’s death demonstrate a clear need for implementing these four proposals, especially platform screen doors.
References
Bromwich, J. E., O’brien, R. D., Marcius, C. R., & Shanahan, E.(2022, April 13). The shooting suspect left troubling videosonline. The New York Times. Retrieved November 15, 2022, fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/nyregion/frank-james-brooklyn-shooting.html?smid=url-shareBromwich, J. E., Rashbaum, W. K., Marcius, C. R., Ley, A., Kully, S.A., Hinderaker, A., Goldstein, J., & Fitzsimmons, E. G. (2022,April). 23 injured in subway shooting – The New York Times.Retrieved November 15, 2022, fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/12/nyregion/brooklyn-subway-shootingCGTN. (2018, December 14). 40 years of opening up: Shenzhen’stransformation seen in 10,000 photos. Retrieved November 15,2022, fromhttps://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414d306b6a4d31457a6333566d54/share_p.htmlGhoshal, D., Lahlou, K., Iyengar, R., & Nwoye, I. (n.d.). Less money,more problems. The Story of MTA. Retrieved November 15, 2022,from http://www.columbia.edu/~kyl2120/mtaproject/Gingras, B., Prokupecz, S., Shallwani, P., Moshtaghian, A., Ly, L.,Sgueglia, K., Levenson, E., & Morales, M. (2022, April 14).Suspect in Brooklyn subway train shooting called in the tip thatled to his arrest, sources say. CNN. Retrieved November 15,2022, fromhttps://www.cnn.com/2022/04/13/us/brooklyn-subway-shooting-wednesday/index.htmlKlein, M. (2022, January 29). MTA data shows how many times peoplekilled by trains. New York Post. Retrieved November 17, 2022,fromhttps://nypost.com/2022/01/29/new-mta-data-reveals-the-number-of-train-deaths/Kriegstein, Brittany, et al. “Watch Your Back: Despite Big Decreasein Riders during COVID Pandemic, NYC Seeing Terrifying String ofStraphangers Shoved onto Subway Tracks.” New York Daily News,Daily News, 15 Feb. 2021,https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-mta-subway-shoves-mental-health-trend-20210215-rrjrggdvsjhppnbra5j2mdk5km-story.html.Martinez, J. (2022, January 19). Used around the world, platformdoors keep getting scratched off MTA to-do list. The City.
Retrieved November 15, 2022, fromhttps://www.thecity.nyc/2022/1/18/22890469/used-around-the-world-platform-doors-keep-getting-scratched-off-mta-to-do-listMartinez, J., & Pedraza, C. (2022, July 15). MTA opens door toplatform barriers in three subway stations. The City. RetrievedNovember 15, 2022, fromhttps://www.thecity.nyc/2022/7/15/23219309/mta-open-to-platform-door-barrier-in-3-subway-stationsFeinman, Mark S. (2000). “History of the Independent Subway”.nycsubway.org. Retrieved November 21, 2022.Martinez, Jose, and Candace Pedraza. “MTA Opens Door to PlatformBarriers in Three Subway Stations.” The City, The City, 15 July2022,https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/7/15/23219309/mta-open-to-platform-door-barrier-in-3-subway-stations.Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “Division of the Budget.”Metropolitan Transportation Authority | Agency Appropriations |FY 2023 Executive Budget,https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy23/ex/agencies/appropdata/MetropolitanTransportationAuthority.html.Meyer, David, et al. “Killings in NYC Subway System Skyrocket toHighest Level in 25 Years – Even as Ridership Plummeted.” NewYork Post, New York Post, 12 Oct. 2022,https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/nyc-subway-murders-jump-to-highest-levels-in-25-years-data/.Mikael Priks, The Effects of Surveillance Cameras on Crime: Evidencefrom the Stockholm Subway, The Economic Journal, Volume 125,Issue 588, November 2015, Pages F289–F305,https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12327Nessen, S. (2022, September 20). MTA to install 2 surveillancecameras on every subway car. Gothamist. Retrieved November 15,2022, fromhttps://gothamist.com/news/mta-to-install-2-surveillance-cameras-on-every-subway-carXinhua. (2016, July 19). China’s oldest metro line gets platformscreen doors. China’s oldest metro line gets platform screendoors – China.org.cn. Retrieved November 15, 2022, fromhttp://www.china.org.cn/business/2016-07/19/content_38911823.htm
Lab Report
Converting Cotton Balls into Edible Cotton Candy
Abstract: Cotton and Cotton Candy both contain glucose, an important structural molecule, so it should be possible to convert cotton to cotton candy by isolating the glucose in the cotton balls. The cotton balls are dissolved, cleaned, dehydrated, frozen, heated to isolate the glucose, then converted to cotton candy through machinery. The cotton did not successfully change into cotton the first time, but it did the second time, when the sugar was crystalized further than the first attempt. Introduction: Cotton candy and cotton are mostly made of the same molecules, as they are both cotton, but the difference is that the cotton contains cellulose, a polysaccharide molecule that is inedible, on account of being the primary material in the cell walls of producers. The glucose in the cotton balls are stuck in the cellulose, and in order for the cotton balls to be converted to edible cotton, the glucose must be extracted from the cellulose. Since cotton candy and regular cotton both contain glucose, then theoretically, it should be possible to convert cotton into cotton candy. As such, in the experiment, the cotton will be dissolved, filtered, and crystalized to create sugar that will be placed into the machine to make cotton candy. Materials and Methods Materials:
77 grams of cotton balls
230 grams of Sulfuric acid
70 grams of ice
456 milliliters of boiling water
245 grams of Calcium Carbonate
125 milliliters of water
Filter
Glucose test
Mixed ion exchange resin
Food dehydrator
Hot plate
Ice water bath
Hot water bath
Procedure: Pour 230 grams of 98% concentrated Sulfuric acid onto 70 grams of ice, use ice to prevent the acid from splashing, to dilute the acid into 75% concentrated Sulfuric acid. Wait 30 minutes for the Sulfuric acid to cool to room temperature. Add the cotton balls to the Sulfuric acid to dissolve the cotton Place the container with the Sulfuric acid and cotton balls into a hot water bath of 50 Degrees Celsius. Place 125 milliliters of water into 245 grams of Calcium Carbonate to create an aqueous solution to place into the Sulfuric acid to neutralize it
Place the Calcium Carbonate solution into the Sulfuric acid slowly to prevent it from bubbling out of the container. After using a pH test to test the acidity, place the newly neutral solution into a filter Collect the liquid that passes through the filter and use a glucose test to determine if there is glucose in the liquid Use a mixed ion exchange resin purify the liquid Place the resin in a tube and pour the liquid through Place the liquid through a food dehydrator to remove water from the liquid Place the liquid into a the resin tube with charcoal included this time Place the liquid into the freezer to assist with crystallizing Boil the newly crystalized sugar if it still has water in it and allow it to caramelize Place the sugar into the cotton candy machine to create cotton candy Results: The first attempt did not result in Cotton candy. On the second try, the sugar was allowed to crystalize and caramelize further by increasing the temperature on the hot plate. This resulted in cotton candy which was described as a used and dirty piece of cotton candy. Discussion: The hypothesis was correct as the cotton was successfully transformed into cotton candy. The cotton and cotton candy were predicted to have mostly the same molecules, as in the experiment, the glucose was isolated from the cotton balls and used to produce
cotton candy. However, the attempt may have failed the first time, and when pieces of pure glucose were tried, because the machine may not have been designed for glucose but may have been designed for another sugar that had a higher melting point than glucose. Caramelizing it may have increased the melting point of the sugar used and allowed the sugar to better function with the cotton candy machine. Increasing the amount of cotton involved would definitely increase the amount of cotton candy, but unless the amount increased is massive, the increase will not be significant, as the process is inefficient. Conclusion: Cotton candy and cotton share the same molecule, which in this case is glucose. The glucose will need to be isolated to create cotton candy. After the glucose was isolated, it needed to be crystallized and caramelized to become cotton candy. Cotton has proved that it can become cotton candy. The experiment indicates that an object can be chemically converted to another object that shares the same chemical as it. Resources: TheRedNile. “Turning Cotton Balls into Cotton Candy.” YouTube. YouTube, September 3, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHuFizITMdA.
Technical Description
Technical Description
Writing for Engineering
City College of New York
Khang Phan
October 19, 2022
Table of Contents
Definition and Function 3
Overview 4
Components and Explanations 5
Conclusion 9
References
Definition and Function
The computer is a common tool and machinery for many people on the planet today. Computers have a long history. The first generation of computers were expensive to produce, were initially bulky machines that required large amounts of space, and were particularly slow.
The second generation of computers were involved with transistors, which were compact and required less energy, allowing the second generation of computers to operate at a faster rate than first generation computers. Magnetic cores served as the data storage, and magnetic disks and tapes served as sources for secondary storage of data.
The third generation of computers replaced transistors with integrated circuits, which consisted of multiple transistors and increased the capabilities of the third generation of computers. They were considered more reliable and efficient than the second generation of computers and used remote processing, time sharing, and operating systems involving multiple programming languages.
The fourth generation of computers used Very Large Scale Integrated circuits which were chips with millions of transistors. The use of these chips allowed the fourth generation of computers to increase in efficiency and become more powerful. They shared the features of remote processing, time sharing, and operating systems involving multiple programming languages with the last generation of computers, with the exception that the programming languages for the operating system were C and C++.
The current and fifth generation of computers use Ultra Large Scale Integration technology instead of Very Large Scale Integrated technology of the last generation. Microprocessor chips, which involve millions of electronic components, are used heavily in the current generation of computers. Significant features of fifth generation computers are hardware capable of parallel processing and artificial intelligence.
Computers have become much more affordable and practical since the 1950s, especially after the dawn of the information and digital age and the fifth generation of computers, many households have access to a computer. The computers that many households have access to are used for various tasks. These tasks include accessing the internet, storing and transmitting data, and generally improving productivity and efficiency for tasks: such as producing and creating documents and presentations, marketing, and assisting transactions.
Overview
The modern computer has many appearances. Appearances differ based on the type of computer, as well as the creator and model of the computer. There are two types of computers: a mobile laptop and a immobile desktop. Compared to the desktop, the laptop is relatively smaller and portable to the desktop. The appearance of the laptop is a rectangular shape that can be opened up by lifting the top half upwards to open the laptop. The top half will be the screen, and the lower half is the keyboard and the components of the computer. Desktop computers are larger and have the screen, the monitor, that is connected by wires to the computer case, where all the components are located. Despite the difference in appearance, laptops and desktop computers consist of the same components.
Components
Computers have many components as part of their hardware that allow them to function, located in the computer case, if the computer is a desktop computer, but if the computer is a laptop, the computer hardware will be located on the underside of the lower half. Important hardware required for computers to function are the: Central Processing Unit (CPU), Random Access Memory (RAM), Graphics Card, Sound Card, Hard Disk Drive, Solid State Drive, and Power Supply Unit.
The Central Processing Unit is a small square with metallic connectors on its lower side. The role of the CPU is to process and store data, as well as provide instructions to the other Hardware when a task needs to be executed.
https://pngimg.com/uploads/cpu/cpu_PNG26.png
Random Access Memory provides quick access to temporary short term memory to perform tasks, as using the data from the Hard Drive for the same tasks would be inefficient. The data that is stored on RAM is lost when the computer is shut off, and RAM reverts to its original state.
https://www.fcnaustin.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Ram-1024×978.png
The Graphics Card determines the video memory and display quality of the computer.
https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/MSI-GeForce-GTX-970-Gaming-4-GB-Side-1.png
The Sound Card converts digital audio to analog audio and analog audio to digital audio.
The Hard Disk Drive servers as the main storage of the computer. Data such as the operating system and all other files are contained and held in the Hard Drive. The Solid State Drive is an alternative to the Hard Disk Drive because both store data, but the difference is the Solid State Drive stores data through flash memory, rather than a physical writing process.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6a/db/65/6adb65fd6c54ebcb4ed64dac4e0014f8.png
The Power Supply Unit provides the entire computer with the electricity needed to function. It converts electricity to direct current in order to provide each component with the necessary amounts of energy
The motherboard is an electrical circuit with a non conductive base with printed thin layers of Copper or Aluminum Foil called traces. The Motherboard could be considered the most important type of computer hardware, since most of the aforementioned hardware, with the exception of the Power Supply Unit, is located on the Motherboard of the computer or connected to the Motherboard. The motherboard serves as the central hub or container of the computer case in which most of the required hardware is connected to, allowing the other types of hardware to interact with each other.
The Central Processing Unit is soldered onto the Central Processing Unit socket which contains spaces for fans, on account of the large amounts of heat produced. The chipset is included in the Motherboard and manages the data transmission between the processor, memory and other related types of hardware. Buses in the Motherboard transfer data between different types of hardware in the computer. Ports provide an interface for the user with devices such as a mouse, keyboard, or printer. The Random Access Memory is located in the Dual InLine Memory Module or the DIMM DDR2 Memory Slots. The Graphic Cards of the computer are located in the Peripheral Card Slots, PCI Slots and PCI Express slots.
Explanation
The Central Processing Unit sends signals to the Power Supply Unit when a person presses the power button to turn on the computer. When the button is pressed, the Power Supply Unit converts Alternating current to Direct current to power the components with the proper energy supply. The computer begins the process of booting and loading the operating system and its associated files and data, once it has the necessary amount of energy to supply its components, and the computer has verified its components are functioning properly.
Random Access Memory is the main hardware used for most tasks because its short term memory can be used to store data on tasks that need to be used quickly, such as loading programs or websites while someone is surfing the internet. When the computer is shut down the data collected on the hardware is overwritten, and the hardware returns to its original state.
Conclusion
Computers are pieces of machinery that consist of multiple components. These components function together to form the computer. The signals from the Central Processing Unit allow the hardware to function, and the data from hardware, especially the Random Access Memory allows the computer to perform the tasks that people use computers for. Knowledge of the components and the process in which the components function allows for easier repair of a personal computer, since it is the owner directly repairing or modifying it.
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