Back next semester....
The Learning Library
Teacher's blog for university students. Resources, tips and general support
Friday, 21 December 2012
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
End of semester...
The semester is about to finish. Here's a summary of what we studied during this course. Hopefully it will help you focus in preparation for Thursday's exam.
- Eurozone crisis
- Nuclear Power debate
- Fossil energy vs. renewable energy
- Arctic oil exploration
- Multicultural differences
- English as a corporate standard... or not
Grammar:
- Do not forget the "s" for he/she when using the simple present.
- I expect to see in your essays a variety of expressions reflecting condition, contrast, opposition, addition as seen in the grammar highlights. Only where needed of course!
- Remember to use these expressions the correct way:
IN my mind (not necessary anyway)
ON the one hand... ON the other hand
- "pour" is often translated as "to" in English, not "for".
To start a new paragraph, the easiest remains:
First / First of all
Secondly / Then
To conclude / To summarise / Finally
- Eurozone crisis
- Nuclear Power debate
- Fossil energy vs. renewable energy
- Arctic oil exploration
- Multicultural differences
- English as a corporate standard... or not
Grammar:
- Do not forget the "s" for he/she when using the simple present.
- I expect to see in your essays a variety of expressions reflecting condition, contrast, opposition, addition as seen in the grammar highlights. Only where needed of course!
- Remember to use these expressions the correct way:
IN my mind (not necessary anyway)
ON the one hand... ON the other hand
- "pour" is often translated as "to" in English, not "for".
To start a new paragraph, the easiest remains:
First / First of all
Secondly / Then
To conclude / To summarise / Finally
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
A new theme to close the semester: multicultural differences in the workplace
Getting a job in a
French company serving only French customers and sourcing only from French
suppliers is no longer realistic today. So chances are you will have to
communicate in English with colleagues, customers and partners from different
cultures and backgrounds.
What does it mean?
What are the hurdles? How do you overcome them? Here’s a selection of articles
from the Harvard Business Review on this topic.
Beforehand, let's have a look at HSBC advertising "the world's local bank"...
What about your own experience?
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
To drill or not to drill...
And more interesting material to prepare for the trial class debate..
A video this time, summarising pretty well the two sides of the story.
So what do you think?
And how would you hold a debate like this: This House would allow Arctic drilling.
A video this time, summarising pretty well the two sides of the story.
So what do you think?
And how would you hold a debate like this: This House would allow Arctic drilling.
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
Text 3b: Oil exploration under Arctic ice could cause 'uncontrollable' natural disaster
BY
MICHAEL MCCARTHY , ENVIRONMENT
EDITOR
TUESDAY 06 SEPTEMBER 2011
Any serious oil spill in the ice of the Arctic, the "new frontier" for oil exploration, is likely to be an uncontrollable environmental disaster despoiling vast areas of the world's most untouched ecosystem, one of the world's leading polar scientists has told The Independent.
Oil from an undersea leak will not only be very hard to deal with in Arctic conditions, it will interact with the surface sea ice and become absorbed in it, and will be transported by it for as much as 1,000 miles across the ocean, according to Peter Wadhams, Professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.
The interaction, discovered in large-scale experiments 30 years ago, means that the Arctic oil rush, which was given a huge boost last week with a $3.2 billion (£1.9bn) investment from Exxon Mobil, is likely to be the riskiest form of oil exploration ever undertaken, said Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.
"If there is serious oil spill under ice in the Arctic it will be very hard, if not impossible to stop it becoming an environmental catastrophe," he said. "It will be very much harder to deal with than a major spill in open water."
The world's oil companies are now turning to the Far North as supplies elsewhere across the globe start to run out or become harder to extract, and both the potential profits from Arctic oil, and the fears about the damage that extracting it may do, are enormous.
The area north of the Arctic Circle is thought to contain as much as 160 billion barrels of oil, more than a quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves. Some of it is under land, as in Alaska's North Slope field, but large amounts of it are known to lie under the seabeds of the Arctic Ocean and Baffin Bay off Greenland, which are ice-covered for all or part of the year, depending on the region.
It is this offshore oil which is now the focus of a new exploration rush, with Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon among the strongest contenders, focusing on the Arctic Ocean itself, while the first wells in the sea off Greenland are already being drilled by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy.
However, many observers are seriously alarmed about the spill risks in the extreme conditions, especially in the wake of BP's calamitous leak at the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico last year, which could not be controlled for three months, released as much as five million barrels of crude, and came close to wrecking the company.
"A spill in the Arctic would essentially make dealing with something like Deepwater Horizon look almost straightforward," said Ben Ayliffe, polar campaigner for Greenpeace.
"There are problems with ice encroachment, the remoteness of the Arctic, darkness, extreme weather, deep water, high seas, freezing conditions and icebergs. Basically it would mean that responding to a Gulf of Mexico-style spill off somewhere like Greenland would be impossible."
Yet Professor Wadhams, who was the first civilian scientist to travel under the Arctic ice in a submarine, in 1971, and who has made five more under-ice trips, is spotlighting an even greater level of concern with his knowledge of how oil and ice interact – with potentially calamitous consequences.
It stems from large-scale experiments he took part in off the coast of Canada in the 1970s, in which substantial quantities of oil were deliberately released into the frozen sea, to see how it behaved. "What we found, and one of the great difficulties, is that spilled oil becomes encapsulated in the ice and is then transported around the Arctic by it," he said.
"The oil is caught underneath the ice, so you can't get at immediately to clean it up or burn it off. You don't know exactly where it is, and then it gets encapsulated in the new ice which grows underneath, so you then have a kind of oil sandwich inside the pack ice.
"And that's being transported around the Arctic and isn't released until spring, when it may be several hundred or even a thousand miles from the source of the spill, so you can have a huge area of the Arctic becoming polluted by oil without initially it being clear where that oil is."
He added: "Once it is released in springtime, it's very toxic, because the encapsulation in the ice preserves the oil from weathering, so that instead of the lighter fraction evaporating and the heavier fraction becoming just tar balls, you have fresh oil being released exactly where the ice is melting, usually round the edge of the pack ice where you've got a lot of migratory birds.
"Not great for the environment. In fact, I think the appropriate word would be 'terrible'."
Professor Wadhams is so concerned that he is helping to organise a high-level scientific workshop on the subject of oil spills in sea ice, in Italy later this month.
While companies such as Cairn Energy stress that they will be drilling exploratory wells only in the summer months, in areas of sea which are ice-free, it is likely that once oil production actually begins, it will be a year-round business and continue through the winter when production facilities are ice-bound. "We would need to produce all year round, in order to make the whole thing worthwhile," a spokesman for Shell said at the weekend.
The oil companies insist that they are aware of the risks and have prepared detailed oil spill response plans, but Professor Wadhams, who has read several of them, said they did not amount to comprehensive plans for dealing with oil in ice.
The expert
* Professor Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, is an oceanographer and glaciologist and one of the world's leading experts on polar ice. He is celebrated for submarine voyages beneath it.
His concern about how sea ice will interact with oil from a spill as the Arctic is opened up for drilling is so great that he has helped to convene an international high-level academic seminar to discuss Oil Spills in Sea Ice – and Future at Italy's Polar Geographical Institute in Fermo, Italy, from 20-23 September.
Wednesday, 7 November 2012
Debating activity
WHAT IS A DEBATE:
This is what they say on idebate.org...
WHAT IS THE DEBATE PROCESS FOR THIS CLASS:
This is what they say on idebate.org...
"I may be wrong and you may be right and, by an effort, we may get nearer the truth." Karl Popper
Debate is a formal contest of argumentation between two teams or individuals. [...] Debate is, above all, a way for those who hold opposing views to discuss controversial issues without descending to insult, emotional appeals or personal bias. A key trademark of debate is that it rarely ends in agreement, but rather allows for a robust analysis of the question at hand. Perhaps this is what French philosopher Joseph Joubert meant when he said: “It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it.”
WHAT IS THE DEBATE PROCESS FOR THIS CLASS:
4 people usually debate on a topic (2 pairs). If there are 5 members in the team, one will act as MODERATOR. One team consists in proposers (people who are arguing to support the motion) and the other is made up of opposers (people arguing against the motion).
STRUCTURE
Introduction and initial attitude of the audience regarding the motion
==================
Proposer 1.1 argument (1 min minimum)
Opposer 2.1 argument (1 min minimum)
Cross fire / cross examination between the 2 speakers
==================
Proposer 1.2 argument (1 min minimum)
Opposer 2.2 argument (1 min minimum)
Cross fire / cross examination between the 2 speakers
==================
Proposer 1.1 summary (1 min minimum)
Opposer 2.1 summary (1 min minimum)
Cross fire / cross examination all 4 speakers
==================
Audience questions (mandatory)
Answers given by proposer 1.2 and opposer 2.2
==================
Vote from the audience
Length of debate: 10 minutes. Max 30 minutes including audience intervention
It accounts for 25% of the continuous assessment.
Skills involved:
Research and analysis
Speaking skills
Speaking skills
Active listening skills (listen and take notes)
HOW TO WRITE THE DEBATE QUESTION OR MOTION
To write a debate question
or MOTION, you will need to pick a topic that you feel that you can defend.
Research the topic to see what others have said about it, and prepare a defense
against any who speak against you, foreseeing any arguments that your opponents
might raise, and dismantling them before they are ever presented as legitimate
evidence.
The majority of debate motions, and
most of those used in large international competitions, take the form of policy motions. A properly worded
motion should be one that identifies or at least hints at a problem with the
world at present (known as the "status quo") and introduces a clear
proposal to solve this problem (known as a "policy").
e.g. This house would legalize drugs.
Status quo: it is currently illegal
Policy: legalization is a solution
THW = This house would...
THBT = This house believes that...
==================================
RESEARCH METHOD FOR THE DEBATE
EXAMPLE OF TOPIC: GLOBAL WARMING
KEYWORD SEARCH:
causes of global warming
CRITICAL THINKING STRATEGY:
Expand: What is global
warming? (look up and paraphrase facts)
Compare/Contrast: How do today‘s climate patterns compare with
past patterns to decide whether or not there really is global warming?
Critique: What actions by
society and/or nature have contributed to global warming?
Predict: What will happen
in the future if nothing is done to reverse global warming?
Persuade: What must the
U. S. and world governments regulate and create incentives for
action to help to reverse global warming?
Evaluate: How effective
have the past actions taken by governments and/or business been in reducing
global warming?
It is not enough to develop 4 ideas for the debate. You also need to prepare for any potential questions from the audience. As such, you will have to collect facts and opinions from different sources in order to be prepared for the debate.
You will hand out or send me your sources to me before the debate (author, website or work title, date, pages if necessary). Debaters may select proper visual aids, either powerpoint, a poster, photos, objects, or videos.
=====================================================================
Advice to prepare for the debate:
For more information and examples of debates:
Friday, 2 November 2012
Text 3: Cold calling: the lure of Arctic oil
As Shell
admits defeat this year, Russell Lynch looks at the risks and rewards for
explorers
TUESDAY 18 SEPTEMBER
2012
Miles beneath the
wilderness of the Arctic Circle lies a potentially huge prize – but the risks
are also huge. In an unforgiving climate where temperatures regularly drop as
low as minus 50C, geologists reckon there are 400 billion barrels of oil and
gas for the taking – enough to meet the world's energy needs for the next 125
years.
Getting it out is the
problem. Royal Dutch Shell became the latest oil major to suffer a serious
setback to its Arctic ambitions this week, as it was forced to postpone
drilling until next year because of failings with its safety equipment.
An environmental
lobby determined to protect the Arctic from invasive exploration also poses a
major complication for Shell and its rivals BP and Gazprom, with safety
concerns already to the fore following BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.
Shell's decision to
postpone drilling off the coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea was met with
unalloyed triumph by Greenpeace, whose activists have been trailing the
company's drill ship Noble Discoverer since it left New Zealand six months ago.
Campaigners – with support from the likes of the actress Penelope Cruz and Sir
Paul McCartney – say Shell's "Arctic misadventure is an expensive and
risky mistake". The group managed to shut down more than 70 Shell petrol
stations in London and Edinburgh in July, at a cost of 24 arrests.
Ironically, it is the
receding ice-cap in recent decades caused by global warming which has opened up
the Arctic for this latest plundering of its natural resources. Arctic
exploration will also be under the political spotlight on Thursday when the
parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee's report on protecting the region
is published.
While Shell still
plans to launch full-scale oil and gas drilling next year when it has corrected
the mechanical faults in its spill containment system and gained the necessary
permits, the latest delay effectively shuts off Shell's attempts to explore in
the Chukchi Sea until next July because the drilling season ends next week. The
delay will add millions to Shell's $4.5bn (£2.8bn) bill in the Arctic so far,
having earlier faced delays when it had to shift its drill ship out of the way
of a 30-mile by 12-mile ice floe.
Shell will continue
to work off the coast of Alaska but will only drill the top parts of wells –
so-called "top holes" extending down about 1300ft – before
temporarily closing the holes and returning to them next year, creating a
"strong foundation for 2013". The bullish statement to investors
stated unambiguously that the exploration programme "remains critically
important to America's energy needs, to the economy and jobs in Alaska, and to
Shell".
But there are plenty
of far less confident signals from the industry when it comes to Arctic
exploration. In July BP shelved a $1.5bn offshore oil project in Alaska due to
cost overruns and technical setbacks. The decision came after an 18-month
review concluded that the Liberty project – an offshore field with about 100
million barrels of recoverable oil – was no longer viable. This was the second
time in ten years that Liberty has been shelved due to cost concerns.
Russian behemoth
Gazprom's Shtokman gas project in the Barents Sea has also fallen victim to cost
overruns and falling gas prices in a slowing European economy. Gazprom – the
major partner in the joint venture with France's Total and Norway's Statoil –
came to the conclusion that "the financing is too high to be able to do it
for the time being". The remote field is estimates to hold gas reserves of
almost 4 trillion cubic metres.
Meanwhile Statoil
itself is holding off from Arctic exploration until 2015 while it waits to see
how Shell copes with the challenges. A spokesman said the firm was taking the
"prudent step" of observing the outcome of Shell's efforts before
finalising its own exploration timetable.
Unofficially, Shell
is playing down the delays. Sources say the company is there for the long haul
because its offshore Alaska wells are not due to produce commercial oil and gas
until 2017. But analysts point out that the vast estimated reserves of oil and
gas under the Arctic – 22 per cent of the world's recoverable oil and gas is
supposed to be down there, according to the US Geological Survey – are just
that: estimates. At the current oil price of $117 a barrel there is an economic
case, but if prices fall steeply, that case could come under pressure.
Seymour Pierce oil
analyst Sam Wahab said: "Compared to the cost of drilling a well in the Falklands
– say around £80m – Arctic exploration is much more expensive. It depends
what's down there but you may need an oil price of $75 a barrel-plus."
With pressure from environmentalists unlikely to ease, it's now up to Shell to
make the numbers stack up and hold its nerve where rivals are losing theirs.
Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/cold-calling-the-lure-of-arctic-oil-8145167.html
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