Carbon Dioxide and Ocean Acidification

One of the results of Anthropogenic Global Warming is the acidification of the oceans which threatens wildlife on this planet. In this work it will be shown what will be the effect of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere, doubling the total amount from 350 ppm to 700 ppm. Principally the effect on carbonate ions CO32-. It is based on textbook chemical principles worked out by numerically solving the resulting non-linear equations by the bisection method. The results are the following: In a pure-water environment the effect is that carbonate ion concentration remains unaltered (i.e., no harm to coral reefs). In a constant-pH environment the carbonate ion concentration grows linearly with CO2 in the atmosphere (i.e., good for coral reefs). When lowering the pH by other means than CO2, the carbonate ion concentration drops linearly (i.e., bad for coral reefs). In some specific cases can raising the CO2 in the atmosphere slightly reduce carbonate ions in the oceans

Education today: 12 + 5 < 4 - lessons of education reforms in Portugal and beyond

Since the adoption of the ‘Lei de Bases…’ of 1984, the quality of education in Portugal is declining, undermined by ‘critical, creative and independent thinking’, implemented by neglecting memorization as a learning tool, as supposedly students should understand things without knowing them. As a consequence, vast majority of students can’t retain any abstract knowledge. They prepare from scratch for their tests and forget everything afterwards. The students never acquire essential primary-school skills such as capacity to do mental calculations, hence the title of this report, comparing contemporary school + university education to pre-1984 primary school of 4 years. The quality of education is further degraded by ‘evaluation’ of teachers at school and university, judged by academic success and degree of satisfaction of their students. With the students objectively incapable to learn, understand or remember, the teachers have a dilemma of either letting such students pass without retained knowledge, skills and competences, or else have their own ‘evaluation’ suffer. As the generations change, students who were ‘passed’ become teachers themselves, still with no retained knowledge and thus no moral authority to fail their own students. Thus, the level of requirements monotonously degrades, with the educational fraud perpetuated in the new generations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Knowledge-based economy

The European Union is resorting to long-term multi-annual political and economical plans. The current set of plans, “Horizons 2020”, also involves restructuring the educational system, as in the Bologna system. The idea behind it is that education should help industry to win the competitive battle with other major economical blocks. The idea is best described by the adage of the European Union of developing a so-called “knowledge-based economy”. It implies that education is a form of investment. We should educate people – the society should spend effort on educating people – in order for society to make profit on it. Contrasting this is the idea of education as a consumption good. In the latter, people study to become knowledgeable, since knowledge makes a person happy. We discuss here the dissident view why an educational system that is for investment-only will at the end not bear fruit and will destroy science, creativity and eventually any form of competitiveness in the economy. It will lead to moral as well as financial bankruptcy.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Perception of Anthropogenic Global Warming Modeled by Game Theory Decision Tables

Society is living in fear of catastrophic climate scenarios, the so called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. It is a multidisciplinary subject; this paper analyzes the psychology behind such thinking which is governing the perception and politics of the subject. It does this in so-called Game Theory decision tables for people's thinking. We come to the conclusion that current opinion in society will shift from 'active believer' to 'passive believer' to 'active non-believer' if evidence against AGW will continue to accumulate

Perils and Pitfalls of Empirical Forecasting

It is common to use past information about the system modeled in probabilistic statistics to make predictions about the future. Especially in the area of climate modeling and forecasting this is done. Here it is argued that doing this in a purely empirical way is full of perils and pitfalls. Without knowledge of the underlying physical laws it will go wrong sooner or later. Specifically, the distribution functions are analyzed, which are normally assumed to be well-behaved gaussian-like not because there is a reason for it, but only because they don’t cause mathematical problems. Real functions (like power laws) will prohibit any statistical analysis and thus prediction model. Furthermore, correlations and extrapolations are considered. The first show that correlations come in many types and not all of them have a direct causation link. The specific case of extreme events is used as an example to highlight the difficulty and the pitfalls of empirical forecasting in general. The conclusion is that empirical forecasting cannot be used for science

An ultra-low-cost RCL-meter

An ultra-low-cost RCL meter, aimed at IoT applications, was developed, and was used to measure electrical components based on standard techniques without the need of additional electronics beyond the AVR® micro-controller hardware itself and high-level routines. The models and pseudo-routines required to measure admittance parameters are described, and a benchmark between the ATmega328P and ATmega32U4 AVR® micro-controllers was performed to validate the resistance and capacitance measurements. Both ATmega328P and ATmega32U4 micro-controllers could measure isolated resistances from 0.5 Ω to 80 MΩ and capacitances from 100 fF to 4.7 mF. Inductance measurements are estimated at between 0.2 mH to 1.5 H. The accuracy and range of the measurements of series and parallel RC networks are demonstrated. The relative accuracy (ar) and relative precision (pr) of the measurements were quantified. For the resistance measurements, typically ar, pr ar pr ar pr ar falls below 5% in some sub-ranges. The combination of the two capacitance modes allows for measurements in the range 100 fF–10 mF (11 orders of magnitude) with ar < 20%. Possible applications include the sensing of impedimetric sensor arrays targeted for wearable and in-body bioelectronics, smart agriculture, and smart cities, while complying with small form factor and low cost.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Science in the times of Covid. An alternative hypothesis

Science consists of testing hypothesis. However, this Scientific Method is used ever more scarcely, and is replaced by general research to help making society a better place. In the current work we analyze how the approach of a solution to the sanitary problem caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been done in a non-scientific way leading to erroneous conclusions. Moreover, we form an alternative hypothesis that has withstood our own attempts at debunking. We conclude that the pandemic is caused by misdiagnosis of other respiratory illnesses and a runaway-testing-scenario.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio