WSUV - Research Blog

Week Five Assignment Part One: 1.       Has anti-smoking advertising by the tobacco industry lead to decreased smoking among youth? "decreased smoking" "tobacco industry" anti-smoking youth Anti-smoking AND (advertising OR “Tobacco industry”) 2.       How much more can a college graduate expect to earn over someone with a high school diploma? "high school" college graduate* earning* diploma  (“high school” OR college)  AND graduate* AND earning*     Part Two: Key word - Solar energy Subject Term - renewable energy sources Key word - Photovoltaics Subject Term - photovoltaic power systems Part Three : Reflection- What part of this lesson did you find useful? How do you intend to use these skills for future searches?  I think the most useful portion of this was to recognize that a lot of research can be done by simple putting together a l...

Week Four Assignment 1. Electronic Reference: The reference I used was titled “National Energy Policy in the United States” located in The Oxford Companion to Global Change , edited by David Cuff and Andrew Goudie. This was found using the Oxford Reference Collection. Although indirectly related, the new information I learned was that the United States specifically takes up 25% of the global total for greenhouse gas emissions, largely caused by fossil fuel resources. This just shows that renewable resources are highly needed in today’s world—especially in the United States. Some subtopics that relate to the search would be renewable energy standards versus how the relate to local economies and politics, possible national energy plans (since there is no current one), and how funding affects efficiency of solar cells.  More possible research questions that arose while reading this were “besides finances, why does efficiency of PV materials rise when national funding i...

Part One: Background Information from a Web Search 1. What is your research topic? This should be a general area of interest at this point. It should NOT be a research question yet . I would focus on Solar Energy, given that I am currently taking a renewable energy course. 2. Select an unfamiliar Search Engine or Metasearch Engine from this list (that was also linked in the lesson)  and run a search for your topic. DO NOT use Google or Wikipedia for this part of the assignment! a. Tell me which search engine or metasearch engine you used. For this assignment, I used DuckDuckGo b. What new ideas or information did you find about the topic? I found out that the sun is compared to a fusion reactor--or even that fusion reactors are just little copies of the sun. The amount of energy that the sun provides in one minute is enough to power the entire world's energy needs for an entire year. c. What are some subtopics you read abou...