Thirty years ago this week, residents around the Three Mile Island nuclear power generating facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania awoke to an ongoing accident in the second generating station at the plant. Over the next several hours and days people would be barraged with confusing information about what WAS happening at the plant, what HAD happened at the plant, and if there was any danger to residents in the area. The governor ultimately did order pregnant women and pre-school children evacuated from the area and more than 140,000 people left. During the following days, radioactively contaminated Noble Gases were released from the generator, but very little of the highly dangerous Iodine 131. Several different epidemiological studies have been done of area populations over the years, with the latest results published in 2003. This most recent study confirms that only a tiny possible uptick in cancer risk appears to be evident in the exposed population, although the researchers felt that the population should continue to be followed.
Dickinson College, located in Carlisle, PA , had to decide during the crisis whether or not to cancel classes as a result of being located in the potential evacuation zone. Today Dickinson maintains an excellent web site about the events at Three Mile Island. The site includes a virtual museum which offers an excellent timeline and sense of events. PBS's The American Experience did an episode on the events entitled Meltdown at Three Mile Island (available in the library). As with most of their episodes, an accompanying web site offers lots of useful and interesting information about events. The Washington Post assembled this interesting collection of information on the twentieth anniversary of events. Finally, this essay by Gary Weimberg in Jump Cut does a good job of looking at the profound impact that the coincidental release of the film The China Syndrome about a nuclear reactor accident (available in the library) 12 days prior to the events in Pennsylvania had on how people perceived not only the event itself, but nuclear power in general.
When people think about nuclear reactor disasters, if Three Mile Island doesn't come to mind first, it's only because Chernobyl does. The explosion and fire at the number 4 reactor at Chernobyl that resulted in a radioactive cloud of contaminants spreading over areas of Europe and leaving whole sections of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (link to map to experience long-term closure as "exclusion" zones). In an unusual turn of events, Chernobyl is becoming something of an extreme tourist attraction. You can view the starkly beautiful photos many visitors have taken on the web. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. The other fascinating fact about Chernobyl is the complex situation that has developed regarding wildlife in the exclusion zone. Many large and rare animals have made surprising and abundant reappearances in the absence of human intervention, and in fact a herd of the radically endangered Przewalski's horses were reintroduced into the zone as a result of this observation. But before people get too excited, more recent evidence suggests that smaller, surface-dwelling creatures, such as insects and spiders, and the numbers of animals total within the zone are actually lower than their partial abundance would lead people to believe, while the number of deformities is higher, indicating they have been negatively impacted by radiation.
So what does all this mean for the future of nuclear power? Well, despite safety concerns, the fact that nuclear power does not generate any carbon means that it remains part of the overall picture of future power plans. The Union of Concerned Scientists makes this assumption in its analysis of the nuclear power industry and appropriate nuclear power regulation. To get a sense of nuclear power worldwide, view The Virtual Nuclear Tourist, which addresses many concerns about nuclear energy and is written by a nuclear engineer. For a more detailed and complex analysis of the future and potential of nuclear power, review this MIT analysis, The Future of Nuclear Power.
And finally, what about the holy grail of nuclear energy, the fusion reactor? It may be closer than the skeptics think. A practical plant is under construction in France, while a prototype has been at work in the UK for some time.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Bee a Good Speller
The library blog extends its congratulations to Michael Spors, the son of DACC's Director of Instructional Media, Jon Spors, who just earned a place at the National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC. You can see the news story in the library's America's Newspaper's database here. (If you are off campus, you'll need to provide your DACC user ID and password to access the story.) You can access the original story in the Lafayette Journal & Courier online, but you'll have to pay for the privilege, and you still may not get to see the accompanying photo. But spelling bees aren't simply for kids. Did you know there was a National Adult Spelling Bee? This year the event will be held May 3, 2009.
Spelling, Vocab and Study Aids
So how do people prepare spelling bees? All different ways, but Scripps, the national news organization that sponsors the spelling bee coordinates with Merriam-Webster to provide a prep website called Spell It! On this site users can study words according to language of origin (one of the questions spellers are permitted to ask). The lists include tips about how words originating from particular languages tend to be spelled. The site also includes lists of eponyms, or words based upon people's names. Many of these, like "shrapnel," may surprise you. Another important group is the list of words you need to know. These include those words that are frequently misspelled, commonly confused with other words, and homonyms that are misused. Homonyms are words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like "meat" and "mete".
Looking for some help with spelling but lists aren't quite what you had in mind? Purdue's famous Online Writing Lab (OWL) has a section dedicated to Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling that can help you cope with trouble spots in all three of these famous bugaboo areas. Here is another page that details spelling rules designed for readers struggling with dyslexia. But one of the best ways to develop not only your spelling but your vocabulary in general is to work on developing your understanding of the root words underlying the English language. Vocabulary.com helps users do that by developing their root word knowledge through puzzles and activities that reinforce the learning process. And it's all free! The site also provides lists of words focused on specific subject and theme areas, lists based off of works of literature, and even vocational terminology. Do you find flashcards a useful tool for learning vocabulary or some other form of information? Then take a look at FlashcardExchange, an extensive online library of flashcards in numerous subject areas compiled by users from 1st grade through college. The service lets you create unlimited text cards and use them online for free as often as you'd like. If you want to download them or add images or audio to your flashcards, you will need to spring for a one-time membership fee.
Y U Shld B a Bad Splr
Not a great speller? Maybe even a really bad one? Take heart, the inability to spell is not a reflection on your intelligence, more an indicator of how your brain is wired. In fact, MRIs reveal your brain may have done some amazing rewiring on your behalf, as the infamously poor-spelling Steve Hendrix of the Washington Post found out. But you don't have to be a crackerjack speller to take an interest in the subject. In fact, over the years there have been multiple movements to simplify English spelling. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, Teddy Roosevelt and Melville Dewey (creator of the Dewey Decimal system of library organization used in most public libraries and here at DACC) all advocated simplifying the spelling of the English language. If you can't spell, these folks might argue, it's not you, it's the language. Having more than 1,100 possible letter combinations to form only 44 sounds, as English does, might be viewed as a bit of overkill.
Some see the rise of text messaging and email as exerting a degree of pressure in this direction on the language. And more than one teacher has expressed fears that these practices are destroying students' language skills, fears that linguist David Crystal identified as appearing first in Great Britain where texting has been a social practice for a longer period of time. But this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor reports that new research suggests otherwise. Texting may actually increase certain linguistic skills. Not quite sure what all the fuss is about? Check out this text to plain english translator.
And finally, many of you have probably seen the Spell Checker poem that has circulated around the internet for several years in varying forms (one version can be seen here). Here is the story behind the poem, as well as its original, subtler form.
Spelling, Vocab and Study Aids
So how do people prepare spelling bees? All different ways, but Scripps, the national news organization that sponsors the spelling bee coordinates with Merriam-Webster to provide a prep website called Spell It! On this site users can study words according to language of origin (one of the questions spellers are permitted to ask). The lists include tips about how words originating from particular languages tend to be spelled. The site also includes lists of eponyms, or words based upon people's names. Many of these, like "shrapnel," may surprise you. Another important group is the list of words you need to know. These include those words that are frequently misspelled, commonly confused with other words, and homonyms that are misused. Homonyms are words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like "meat" and "mete".
Looking for some help with spelling but lists aren't quite what you had in mind? Purdue's famous Online Writing Lab (OWL) has a section dedicated to Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling that can help you cope with trouble spots in all three of these famous bugaboo areas. Here is another page that details spelling rules designed for readers struggling with dyslexia. But one of the best ways to develop not only your spelling but your vocabulary in general is to work on developing your understanding of the root words underlying the English language. Vocabulary.com helps users do that by developing their root word knowledge through puzzles and activities that reinforce the learning process. And it's all free! The site also provides lists of words focused on specific subject and theme areas, lists based off of works of literature, and even vocational terminology. Do you find flashcards a useful tool for learning vocabulary or some other form of information? Then take a look at FlashcardExchange, an extensive online library of flashcards in numerous subject areas compiled by users from 1st grade through college. The service lets you create unlimited text cards and use them online for free as often as you'd like. If you want to download them or add images or audio to your flashcards, you will need to spring for a one-time membership fee.
Y U Shld B a Bad Splr
Not a great speller? Maybe even a really bad one? Take heart, the inability to spell is not a reflection on your intelligence, more an indicator of how your brain is wired. In fact, MRIs reveal your brain may have done some amazing rewiring on your behalf, as the infamously poor-spelling Steve Hendrix of the Washington Post found out. But you don't have to be a crackerjack speller to take an interest in the subject. In fact, over the years there have been multiple movements to simplify English spelling. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, Teddy Roosevelt and Melville Dewey (creator of the Dewey Decimal system of library organization used in most public libraries and here at DACC) all advocated simplifying the spelling of the English language. If you can't spell, these folks might argue, it's not you, it's the language. Having more than 1,100 possible letter combinations to form only 44 sounds, as English does, might be viewed as a bit of overkill.
Some see the rise of text messaging and email as exerting a degree of pressure in this direction on the language. And more than one teacher has expressed fears that these practices are destroying students' language skills, fears that linguist David Crystal identified as appearing first in Great Britain where texting has been a social practice for a longer period of time. But this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor reports that new research suggests otherwise. Texting may actually increase certain linguistic skills. Not quite sure what all the fuss is about? Check out this text to plain english translator.
And finally, many of you have probably seen the Spell Checker poem that has circulated around the internet for several years in varying forms (one version can be seen here). Here is the story behind the poem, as well as its original, subtler form.
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