ResearchBuzz

There’s a new database available online that shows the power plants of the world and how much carbon dioxide they’re putting into the atmosphere. About 25% of the dioxide is coming from the US, but the power company releasing the most CO2 overall is in China.

CARMA (CaRbon Monitoring for Action), is available at http://www.carma.org. The site includes information on over 50,000 power plants and over 4,000 power companies. A map on the front page shows the most polluting power plants in the world. You can also do a search — by zip code, state, county, or other geographical specs.

I started with my usual 90210, and got the power supplier for that part of California — Southern California Edison Company. When I went to the page for that company I got a table of power emissions as of 2000, as of now, and predictions for the future. (There’s a glossary available if you don’t understand all the terms on the table.) I think I hit a bad table, though — I find it very hard to believe that this company went from generating 26,179 tons of CO2 in 2000 to 1,172,342 tons now (especially since the projected increase is so low.)

Below that there’s a map of the power plants. The map has icons that show the plant’s output as well as the intensity (amount of CO2 released per megawatt hour.) The list shows details for power plants as well. Mountainview Power, okay… a planned Mira Loma substation, okay … wait a minute… Monterey Hills Elementary School??

Yes, Monterey Hills Elementary School, generating 227 MWh of energy for you in 2000. With no CO2 output, so I guess this is a wind or solar output? Unfortunately while power plant pages provide details like congressional reps for that area and address (for US plants), the actual fuel source for that plant is not available. (The site has a reason for this and also explains how you can do some assumption of fuel source based on icon color.) The site has the capacity to accept comments for power plant pages, but I didn’t see any.

In an interesting use of similarity matching, you can view power plants around the world which have an output profile similar to the one you’re using — which is how I went from California to Africa.

In addition to the searching, you can also browse power companies, check out the API (very nice! Looking forward to the mashups), or read the blog.

Miss Tom Servo? Ready to get your ‘bot on? Check out RobotEvents ( http://www.robotevents.com/ ), a database for robot technology and educational events in a variety of categories.

You can see some of those categories right from the front page, with links for competitions, workshops and camps, and conferences. There’s also an overall calendars link. I looked at the conferences link and found only one, the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo taking place next week in California. The link on the event listing lead right to the event’s Web site.

How about competitions, then? Searching for all Botball competition found almost two dozen results all over the United States. These events also linked directly to event Web pages.

In addition to a calendar of events, there’s a gallery of bot and event images. There’s a forum, but it appears to be almost completely empty, and a place for blogs, but those look like they’re in the coming-soon stage. The event listing is the attraction here.

If you’re a teacher and you’re looking for resources to teach engineering to pre-high school kids, you might want to check out TeachEngineering, a new library that, according to its home page, “provides teacher-tested, standards-based engineering content for K-12 teachers to use in science and math classrooms.” It’s available at http://www.teachengineering.org/.

There are two ways to go through the material first. First you can browse the material by standard (there are some state educational standards and what I assume to be federal standards.) From there you can also narrow down your search by grade level, topic, and standard number.

If you’re not a teacher you might want to search instead, which allows for either a simple keyword search or an advanced search that additionally allows you to filter by grade level, time required, and even by group size and cost per group member. (You can also browse all the lessons at http://www.teachengineering.org/browse_lessons.php — currently there are 163. There are 327 activities listed at http://www.teachengineering.org/browse_activities.php. )

I did a keyword search for rocket and got two lists of results: 5 results for lessons and 9 results for activities.

Lessons had a summary at the top of the page that included grade level, engineering connection, and overview. A more extensive description/plan included educational standards, points for a classroom discussion, background and resources for teachers, vocabulary, and lesson closure. There are also references. Activities were similar but since they are, you know, ACTIVITIES, they also include a materials list, safety issues, troubleshooting tips, and photographs of both materials and activities. Both lessons and activities had a place for reviews but none of the lessons/activities I looked at had reviews yet.

To save and organize the lesson plans in which you’re interested, you may register for a MyTE account. It’s free and requires some personal information (name, city, state, occupation.) You do not have to have a MyTE account to use the site however. Lots of great, well-documented stuff here, which I can see as useful for teachers or homeschoolers. I’m now officially jealous that I did not get to make Alka-Seltzer rockets in science class.