Friday, March 12, 2010

An Idea for Our Report

Hey everyone,

As the heating team met today after class, the idea came up to include a quote from the heating plant supervisor Jim Franklin. I bring this up to the whole class because I was wondering if for consistency, we would all like to include at least one quote in our respective sections. It could make our writing more personal as it did when Kolbert added her characters. Ours would be on a smaller scale, but I think it's something we should consider and decide on.

Also, maybe we would like to discuss consistency with photos as well. Would everyone be willing to commit to providing at least one photo for their section? We could use it at the beginning of each section with the heading, perhaps.

Finally, I have a separate question regarding the electricity team. This might be over your heads, but I hear every now and then that a lot of electronics take energy when they're plugged in even if they're turned off. I personally use a power bar for most of my electronics, and I turn it off every night. I'm curious to know if that makes any difference in my carbon footprint, and if so, could we promote the use of power bars for the campus especially with the student body living in the dorms?

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Letter: Global warming evidence exists

When you have a minute or two, read Dr. Crispin Pierce's letter to the Spectator.  I've included a link to the on-line edition (which I hope will work-it's an awfully long URL).

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Survey to be Opened on Later Date

Hello again, my fellow CNTers-

The Transportation Team (along with Dr. H and Robyn) met this morning for a bit of review work. While editing the survey, we came to the conclusion that with our potential participants already being swamped with surveys and midterms, our difficulty preparing multiple incentives, and the delay in finalizing our "year," we would be better off moving the survey to a later date.

The survey will now be sent out after spring break.

This means that we have a longer time to do test-runs of our survey for clarity and content, and a few more weeks to find incentives. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or incentive-connections, please contact me or another member of the Transportation Team right away and we will take care of it.

In addition, we have decided to use the 2009-2010 fiscal year for our data collection.

While this includes estimations, "Choice 3: July 1, 2009 - June 31, 2010" was by far the most popular choice of our classmates, as shown on our Timeline blog comments. This means that each of the teams using University-recorded data will need to view the data for May and June of previous years in order to estimate the carbon output for May and June 2010 (based on trend). The Transportation Team will be using the June and July 2009 transportation data as June and July 2010 in order to keep our data as accurate as possible. Though the estimations will result in a small drop of data-integrity and reliability, the vast majority of the class believed this to be our best option for the sake of relevance and clarity.

Until Friday,
Andi

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Transportation Survey, Rough Draft 4

Hello, CNTers -

The external reviewer has replied and given us many constructive suggestions. I went through the survey and made the changes that I thought were appropriate and have emailed the Transportation Team with the edited version of our survey.
(In case you wanted an update on how it's going!)

Also, the Transportation Team is working hard on finding incentives for the survey. If you know of any ideas or have any great connections, please contact me at: krunnfae@uwec.edu so that we can finalize our prizes.

I will see you all on Friday,
Andi