Internet Resources on the Housing/Finanacial Crisis: II

I've spent a lot of time looking at and trying to understand the Financial Crisis that our country is in right now. A while back, I made a post on (multimedia!) internet resources for understanding the crisis -- in terms that the average person can understand. More recently, I posted about the impact of the Financial Crisis on Women's Health.

Well, I've bumped into a couple of new resources (that are continually updated!) to help with general understanding of the crisis -- how it happened and where we are now.

• from New York Times
• Credit Crisis: The Essentials; updated continuously
• The really helpful stuff is on the left-hand side of the page. At the top of the column, they post the latest headlines and developments about the crisis (and how politicians and companies are reacting), but if you scroll down a little to where it says "Overview," that's where the handy explanations of the crisis begin.
• The middle column of the page is dedicated to Multimedia, and has tons of videos, graphics, and charts.
• from Wikipedia
• Economic Crisis of 2008; updated continuously
• Gives an overview of the economy in 2008, beginning with Causes of the Financial Crisis, then its impact on the major countries of the world (starting with the U.S.) up to the present.
• Global Financial Crisis of 2008; update continuously
• This article is similar to the one above, though it is slightly more advanced, and gives a week-by-week breakdown of the crisis starting when the stock market crashed in September. This article is much more focused and intensive. (It's not as much of a general introduction as the others.)

And I can't stress this enough: If there is ever a word or idea that you don't understand in any article or conversation about the economy, search it in Wikipedia. Smart people who know what they're talking about are updating Wiki-pages on the Financial Crisis all time!

Gravity and Quadratic Equations

Intro
When we finished talking about Gravity last time, the astronauts on Apollo 11 confirmed Galileo's theory that Gravity causes all objects to accelerate at the same rate (regardless of weight or size).

Near the surface of the Earth, the acceleration of an object due to gravity is: 32 ft/s² (9.8 m/s²). You would read that as "Thirty-two feet per second squared" (or "Nine point eight meters per second squared"). But you might be asking: What is a second squared?

[Note: Remember that as you move farther and farther away from the Earth, it has less of a gravitational pull on you. That change is only very slight even when you are as far from the Earth as in an airplane. All the way out near the moon though...that's a different story.]

Another way to write 32 ft/s² is 32 ft/s/s, which you would read "Thirty-two feet per second, per second." We know that feet per second is just a regular old speed. A car driving 50 miles per hour (mph) can also be said to be going 34 ft/s; every second, the car moves forward 34 feet, and every hour, the car drives 50 miles.

Feet per second is how far something moves after one second. So, feet per second, per second is how much faster something moves after one second. An acceleration, then, is the change in speed. If I am holding a bowling ball (over the edge of a cliff) and let it drop toward the Earth -- which has an acceleration due to gravity of 32 ft/s² -- then the ball starts with a speed of 0 ft/s (at the moment I let go of it) and after 1 second of falling, the ball is going 32 ft/s.


So finally, we have reached our Quadratic Equation. The distance equation is:
X_final = X_initial + V_initial*t + (1/2)*A*t²Where X_final is the final location of an object, X_initial is its initial (starting) location, V_initial is the initial (starting) velocity, A is acceleration, and t is time.

Physical Meaning of the Equation
You may remember the old distance equation that you learned in Algebra I: D=R*T (ie Distance equals Rate times Time). In our quadratic equation, the old D is now called X_final; the old R is V_initial. Our new distance equation is the next logical step. It not only looks at something's speed and the amount of time it travels, but also where it starts and whether the speed is changing (by the acceleration).

Going back to our bowling ball example, we determined before that the bowling ball was falling at a rate of 0 ft/s at the moment the ball was released (assuming you don't throw the ball downward), 32 ft/s after 1 second, and then 64 ft/s after two seconds, and so on. Our quadratic equation, however, finds distance; we can use it to find how far the ball has gone after a certain amount of time.


Calculation Time!
When we're using our equation to find the distance fallen (after some period of time), we need to know the values for all the variables besides the one that we're interested in. So when we drop the ball over the cliff, let's say that

• Initial position is Zero (since the ball has not traveled at all yet)
• which means that, for our equation, X_initial = 0
• Initial velocity is also Zero (since we're not throwing the ball either up or down)
• so V_initial = 0
• We know that acceleration due to gravity from the Earth is 32 ft/s²
• which write as A = 32

Plugging these values into our equation, X_final = X_initial + V_initial*t + (1/2)*A*t² becomes X_final = 0 + 0*t + (1/2)*32*t², which we can rewrite as:
X_final = 16*t²This means that we can determine how far the bowling ball has fallen by simply multiplying the time it spends falling, squared, by 16.

Doing some quick calculation:

• After zero seconds, the distance is Zero (the ball has not moved).
• After 1 second, the ball has fallen 16 feet
• X_final = 16*t² = 16*(1 sec)² = 16*1 = 16 feet
• After 2 seconds, the ball has fallen 64 feet
• X_final = 16*t² = 16*(2 sec)² = 16*4 = 64 feet
• And on and on and on... (of course, this all assumes that the ball doesn't hit the ground first)

We can even plot this if we want:


A parablola! [Note: Remember that the physical motion of the ball, though, is in a straight line down.]

Looking at the Math
The parabolic shape of the graph comes as no surprise to us, since we know that X_f = (1/2)*A*t² + V_i*t + X_i falls into the standard form of a quadratic equation
y = A*x² + B*x + CThis difference is that, in the equation for gravity, we use t as our independent variable and X as our dependent variable.

There are so many questions that can be asked at this point. What if we threw our bowling ball straight up first? What if we shot it from a cannon? And what if the cannon were pointed at an angle away from the cliff?



Instead of trying to answer all those questions right now, check out this applet about Projectile Motion (aka Shooting Stuff Out of a Cannon). Try it with different sized objects at several angles. After you've played with it for a while, try to find some patterns. And why does wind-resistance ruin your perfect parabola?!

Khan Academy

My attention was recently directed to a website called the Khan Academy. It's a huge library of YouTube video-lessons on Math and Science, and I've got a feeling that they're going to change the way that I do things on this blog.

Check them out, if there's something Math-related that you're wondering about, this guy probably has a lesson on it.

You Could Do This for a Living!

I just read an article in the New York Times, called YouTube Videos Pull in Real Money. It primarily reports about Michael Buckley who had put clips of himself on YouTube for nearly a year -- mostly just making silly comments about celebrities -- when they offered to make him a Partner.

A Partner is a regular member of YouTube who posts videos like everyone else; the difference is that YouTube gets to put advertisements in his video, and in return Michael Buckley gets paid. A lot. Mr. Buckley makes more than $100,000 per year just from YouTube, and he quit his old job when the videos became more and more profitable.

Stories like this happen all the time. People doing what they love put it on the internet, and a big company offers them money just to keep doing it. (This happens with blogs too! *Nudge*Nudge* to any big companies reading this.)

So, the real question now is: What do you love to do?

Bloxor!

Women's Health and the Economy

You've probably heard a little (or maybe a lot!) about the Financial Crisis that has been happening in the United States over the past few months. The headlines in newspapers for the past two weeks have all been about American car companies trying to get some help from the government ($15 billion in help, that is). Just Thursday was a report that 533,000 jobs were lost in November (that's the biggest number for one month since 1974).

But in all these headlines and numbers, you only hear about companies and executives and politicians who are trying to make decisions. But what about the people? And how is the Financial Crisis impacting women?

In an answer to some of these questions, a new survey was just released from the National Women's Health Resource Center. It has some shocking news to report:

• 45% of women have skipped health care in the past year because the cost was too high.

Just stop to consider the fact that if you have two American women in a room together today, it is likely that one of the two of them decided not to receive some form of health care in the last year (whether it was a prescription or a doctor's visit or whatever) solely because of the price.

But even in the face of rising costs, mothers still have their priorities set:

• While 28% of women report putting off a visit to the doctor when they were sick because the cost was too high, only 4% report putting off a visit for their child for this reason.

[Note: After combing the study's raw data for clarity, I believe that the percentage who put off a child's visit to the doctor is 4% of women overall, not just 4% of mothers.]

Things aren't looking too bright in the immediate future though:

• Among women who have not skipped medical care for themselves or their families in the past year, 55% say that they would be somewhat or very likely to do so if the cost they had to pay out-of-pocket increased significantly.
• And at the same time: 76% of women expect their and their families' health care costs to increase in the next few years.

I paired these two items to highlight the fact that skipping health care could be a reality for 75% of women in America within just a few years. Health care's price has already risen above affordability for 45% of American women and another 30% expect it to happen to them too. This is a financial crisis if I've ever seen one. But the highest, most devastating cost of all isn't monetary: Financial stress is trickling down from adults to children.

From a September, (fantastic!) front-page article in the Wall Street Journal:

At a little under three years of age, Bailey Haag can't understand the turmoil on Wall Street. But last week, the little girl's brow furrowed and her face grew sad as she overheard her mother on the phone, reacting to a ripple effect of the nation's economic problems -- her father's layoff.

Although her mother, Claire Crawford Haag, had hoped to shield Bailey from stress, the child knew from her mother's voice that "it was not a good conversation," Ms. Haag says. Noticing her daughter's face crumple, Ms. Haag began fashioning in her head an explanation a small child could understand.

Amid fallout from the nation's worsening financial picture, many parents are trying to protect their children from worries about layoffs and financial hardship. But children are actually silent carriers of family financial stress, research shows. They're not only keenly aware of it, but it makes them more likely to behave badly or develop emotional problems. To help kids cope, psychologists and researchers say, parents need to communicate in ways they can understand, keep family relationships on track, and give children a role in helping solve family problems.

Children's mental health (and apparently, even their performance at school) is directly impacted by the level of stress in their household. Returning to the Women's Health survey from earlier, I'd like to point out that 43% of women are worrying more about their health (in the last year). This means that despite mother's attempts to shield their children's health from the economic downturn (remember from earlier, only 4% of women have skipped on their child's health care in the past year), a negative impact is still being made.

Job security is lower than ever -- which means that employer-based health insurance can be relied upon less and less -- as women's physical health deteriorates ever more quickly.

• 42% of women report that their health has gotten worse in the last five years -- the majority of whom (53%) blame stress
• In terms of health care, 16% of women say their health has gotten worse because they were unable to pay for needed health care, and others say it has gotten worse because they lost their insurance coverage (10%) or a good doctor (7%)

And apparently women have taken on more stress than men in the last few months, due specifically to the financial crisis. Again, from the Wall Street Journal:


Are those numbers so surprising? Women are still earning 80% of men's pay (that statistic from 2007), while close to 1 out of every 4 children in the US is living with a single mother.

This is what it means to be in the midst of a financial crisis. Banks on Wall Street losing their value at a record pace, car companies struggling to not go bankrupt: these are only pieces of the puzzle. What makes a recession into a crisis is when 3 out of 4 women anticipate skipping health care in the near future (1 out of 2 have already this year), when millions of children watch their parents lose jobs (533,000 jobs in November alone). It may have begun in the financial sector, but when it reached into our homes and took hold of our very lives, that was when it became a crisis.

Gravity

In 1969, when humans first landed on the moon (on the Apollo 11 mission), one of the first things they did was drop a feather and a hammer to test which would hit the ground first. Why do you think they were interested?

• What happens when you drop a hammer and a feather (at the same time, from the same height) here on Earth?
• Is there any difference between performing the experiment on Earth and on the Moon?

Pre-Galileo
Did you hear the name that the astronaut mentioned? It was Galileo Galilei's. (Galileo was a physicist-astronomer who lived in Italy from 1564-1642.) For thousands of years before him, people believed that Gravity was a mysterious force that made things fall toward the Earth -- and they believed that the heavier the object, the faster it would fall. But Galileo changed everything.

Before we look at Galileo's theory, let's consider where the "old" belief about gravity came from. When you drop a hammer and a feather at the same time (here on Earth), the hammer will always land first. And if you try the experiment with all different kinds of things, this is pretty much always going to be the case for a heavy object and a lighter one: The heavier object tends to fall faster. Scientists observed this phenomenon for thousands of years and came to the conclusion that gravity affected heavier objects more than lighter ones.

However, they were not conducting their experiments on the Moon.

Galileo
Galileo (without ever leaving the Earth) did experiments many different objects that fell from many heights and rolled balls with different weights down inclined planes. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate, regardless of their weight.

That means that even here on Earth, a hammer and a feather should land at the same time (like on the Moon). So why don't they? The answer: Air.


You know how when you ride a bike, you feel a breeze on your face (even when there's no wind that day)? The air is standing still, but you are moving, so it ends up feeling like there is wind pushing against the direction you're trying to go. It's the same principle with the hammer and the feather. A light breeze isn't going to push a hammer around, but it'll carry a feather away easily.

In the case of a hammer/feather drop, the breeze is trying to push each object in the opposite direction of the way they are falling (like the "wind" pushes against the direction you are trying to ride your bike). So even though Gravity is trying to accelerate both the hammer and feather at the same rate toward the Earth, the "wind" is blowing them in the other direction. On the Moon though, there's no air, so the hammer and feather can freely accelerate.

Peg Solitaire

I cannot stop playing this game!


A "European" Peg Solitaire board
Peg Solitaire is like one-player checkers: you jump pegs (or -- in the case of our board at Making Waves -- marbles) to take them off the board, with the objective of having a single peg/marble remaining.

Sounds fairly easy right? You'd be surprised. And once you've got the game beaten, you can try all different kinds of starting positions.

(I grew up playing a simplified version of Peg Solitaire at a restaurant called Cracker Barrel where they used to leave the game board out at the tables to play while you wait for your food.)

And for those of you feeling particularly Math-y, there are a couple pages out there detailing strategies and analysis of the board.

The European Union Has Already Developed a Plan to Stop Using Fossil Fuels for Electricity. Where's Ours?

It's called the Supergrid. The idea is a simple one:

Globally, the best renewable resource is solar energy. [...] Every year each square kilometre of hot deserts [in North Africa] receives solar energy equivalent to 1.5 million barrels of oil.
[...]
Solar factories can tap into this using concentrated solar power (CSP) plants [which] use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to create heat which is used to raise steam to drive steam turbines and electricity generators. An area of just 127km x 127km covered with CSP plants would produce as much electricity as Europe is using now.

Two German scientists, Dr Gerhard Knies and Dr Franz Trieb, calculate that just 0.5% of the world’s hot deserts, if covered with CSP plants, could generate as much electricity as the world now uses.

Okay. Pause for a second. The sun is burning millions of miles away from the Earth and just giving us its energy whether we like it or not. Before now, deserts were of use to very few living organisms. Humans have figured for the first time how to take advantage of these vast expanses.

Quick math:

• 1 sq. kilometer of the Sahara Desert receives as much energy (in the form of sunlight) in the course of a year as is contained in 1.5 million barrels of oil
• The Sahara Desert is about 9 million sq. kilometers
• 9,000,000 sq. kilometers X 1,500,000 barrels of oil per sq. kilometer = 13,500,000,000,000 barrels of oil

• Every year, the Sahara Desert receives sun-light energy that's the equivalent of 13.5 trillion barrels of oil
• FYI: That's way more than the 7.3 billion barrels of oil used every year in the US

The Supergrid itself is planned to be a web of High Voltage DC lines that stretch over thousands of miles -- at some points, even underwater. It would interconnect different areas of Europe and North Africa, and the majority of power would be supplied by solar energy from the Sahara, however every different geographic region in the web would contribute its own form of renewable energy (eg coastal countries would contribute energy from wind turbines).

What makes the Supergrid plan attractive is the use of 1) Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants to produce the energy and 2) DC lines to transport the energy.

Concentrated Solar Power
This refers to a way of converting sunlight into electricity by reflecting it off curved mirrors (parabolic mirrors to be precise) toward a liquid to heat it up and eventually boil water (which in turn spins turbines that make an electric current). It is a technology that is in its last stages of development and already produces more energy than other renewable sources.


DC Power Lines
I don't want to go too far into the difference between AC (Alternating Current) and DC (Direct Current) power, though you should know that (more or less) all power lines in the world are AC. (And I'd like to point out that when you plug an AC/DC converter into a wall socket, it takes the AC electricity from the power lines and converts it into DC electricity because for whatever reason your electronic device requires it.)

What's important for the Supergrid is that AC is works well for carrying electricity over distances that are less than a few hundred miles -- and therefore all the power lines in our country were built as AC -- however DC is better when you want to carry electricity over thousands of miles. That means, unfortunately that a whole new set of DC power lines will need to be built across Europe.

The plan has been proposed by a group called E-Parliament. Spain, Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt are already beginning to lay the groundwork, and there has been support from leaders in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has also spoken in support of the plan.

So where's the US's Supergrid?
Right now, there is one CSP plant in the United States -- called the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS), which is in California's Mojave Desert. There used to be another one -- called Solar Two, also in the Mojave -- but it was shut down in 2001. The vast majority of the US's electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels -- including coal, natural gas, and oil -- which produce tons of carbon emissions annually.

But there's still hope! Whenever you hear Obama talking about the need to update our nation's infrastructure, this is one of the things he's talking about. If America ever wants to employ a green system like the Supergrid, we need to build new power lines first. Then, in time, we may build larger and larger CSP plants that could power the whole US. We're on the cusp of a new world of energy.

Student Skills: Test-Taking

[Note: The links in this post go to helpful pages on each topic. Follow them!]

Before the Test
It almost goes without saying, but the first key to test-preparation is GENERAL ORGANIZATION. Time management -- and the development of your REVIEW TOOLS -- over the days and weeks ahead of a test is probably the most effective boost to both your grade and your test-taking confidence. Once you've gotten into a groove with your classes and have a feel for the teacher, you can even begin to ANTICIPATE TEST CONTENT.

Testing Well
When you sit down to a test, you want to be in an optimal state to retrieve information that's been stored away in your head for the past couple weeks. Studying helps, but on test day, it's all about your brain. This means getting your body and mind into a balanced state.

It starts with studying enough to be confident in the material (none of that TESTING ANXIETY) and even arriving early to the test but also doing things to keep your body on an even level: exercising in the days before the test, eating breakfast the day of, deep breathing/relaxing if you even start to feel overwhelmed by the test. If you can do these, then strategic TEST TAKING will be like second nature for you (especially on MATH TESTS).

Having a LUCKY MASCOT when you study and take the test doesn't hurt either.

Cramming
Cramming for a test is pretty much incompatible with a healthy state of mind for test-taking, however it is almost certain that you will have to do it at some point. (That's why I figure it's better to mention it than to pretend that it will never happen.)

If you do hit a time crunch there are a few thing that you can do as EMERGENCY TEST PREP: You have to start by trusting what you already know of the material and identify 3-5 main concepts that have come up in your class. Write them, along with a brief description of each -- then compare that description with your notes and textbook. This will help you to figure which concepts you have a firm grasp of and which you need to work on.

After the test you crammed for, of course, it will be time to work on your TIME MANAGEMENT.

Mid-Terms, Final Exams
The STRATEGY FOR EXAMS is kind of a combination of all of the suggestions above. It's about Time Management (starting about two weeks before the exam), eating healthy and exercising (even though you've got a time crunch since finals are coming up!), Test Preparation, and Testing Strategy.

Don't worry. You'll do fine.