Second week presents: second post

About a  fortnight ago we began our work on our project. Since the last blog post, a lot has been going on! Right after, two members of the group, Carl and Jakob headed for London for a school related trip and Hjalmar stayed in Sweden working on the project description. The group was plenary again on Monday, three days ago, and we’ve been working hard since. So far, we’ve covered the initial phase of lectures at VRG given by many talented persons, teachers as well as volunteers from companies and organisations. We are very grateful for the opportunities they’ve given us, making our start considerably easier and we’d like to thank them all!

The lectures we’ve been attending were called: Att Söka Info på Webben, Upphovsrätt Etik, Ung Företagsamhet, Naturvetenskapliga metoder, Vetenskap och sanning, Tech Transfer, Statistiska sammanställningar, Experimental design and analysis.

Here are some of our thoughts about them and what we learned:

The lectures gave us a lot of knowledge. Experimental Design and Analysis was about how to write a scientific essay and gave a lot of insight on how to compile statistics and how to use it, what data is good and actually possible to use, how to use it and differences between mode, mean and median. For instance, median is better than mode if the data contains extreme values, which will make the results worse since they might not be relevant to the research. Sometimes mean is better, and sometimes mode value is better.

The Copyright Ethics course was very rewarding because most images / texts are protected by copyright. Copyright means that a image or text that belongs to someone else may not be used by other people. For example, a person might writ a text and then upload it on wikipedia.org, the author now owns the text and others may not download or copy it.

Of course the author can authorize others to use the text but they have to link or quote back to what the author wrote.

A good website to keep in mind when trying to figure out if a certain text/picture is protected på Copywrite permission is http://www.CreativeCommons.se.

With the Creative Commons’ tools, authors, scientists, artists and teacher can easily select which freedoms their works will have.

Here, the creator of a work will determine the copyright terms, from “All Rights reserved” to “Some rights reserved.

That’s all for now. We’re making the final push before summer break, wish us luck!

The Team

First post: hope floats

It was a keen and enamoured group of individuals who had assembled yesterday midmorning in the F-sal, all of whom were very excited and eager to get to work on their projects.

And then there was me. In the midst of the commotion following the introductory lecture I found myself wondering if anybody else realised the massive, massive work we all have in front of us. All the more reason to get started.

This blog will cover the work process of me and my group’s 100-point project during “the project period” which is between week 21 in 2010 and week 13 in 2011.

The project:

to build a hovercraft prototype, investigate the environmental friendly option, in means of transportation, by using hovercraft instead of trucks, boats and aeroplanes. If the prototype is deemed successful the model may be applied in larger scale. The target audience is the transportation business, as well as.. all mankind. Just by trying we are helping the development of environmental friendly world of tomorrow. Like Thomas Edison once said:

“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

The rest of the group consists of Jakob Matto and Hjalmar Heimbürger and in case anyone haven’t noticed yet, we’ve decided to do our work in English.  So what have we been doing?

Today we began our first step: research! The trial-and-error method of working is just too time consuming and we also want our project to have meaning and hopefully the final product will be rewarding. Therefore research is paramount and needs to have been thoroughly done before any of the fun can begin.

We’re starting from scratch and are trying to decide why hovercrafts are superior to other means of transportation. What better place to do that than the Vasa museum right here in Stockholm? Ships can be fragile, risky and slow. In some places there’s also the risk of pirates. It was an educating day and we learnt a lot about the pros and cons of transporting goods by ships.

That’s about it for this post but you never know that tomorrow will offer.

Until next time,

Carl