What the Frack?

So, after all the news about plans on fracking in the UK, and the arguments for and again, I figured surely the best way to get one's head round what is going on, and what position should one stand in on fracking, what I can provide from my readings on fracking on exactly what it is, and its pros and cons! 


Currently, during 2013, the government was solidly behind development of the fossil fuel shale gas industry and was offering to give shale gas companies favorable tax treatment for the unconventional energy source. Also they stated they would turn 100% of business tax proceeds over to local councils instead of the usual 50% which has been seen as controversial in some parts of the media
How its done:

• It is a way of getting at "hidden" reserves of natural gas, petroleum -- even water.

• Far, deep underground, around 7,000 feet/2,133 meters below the surface, rocks like shale can hold gases, water or oil in their pores. Hydraulic fracking moves that resource from the pores of the rocks to production wells 

• It's done by creating horizontal "veins" off a vertical well, and then pumping that horizontal well full of water (plus sand and some chemical additives) at an extremely high pressure. This causes fissures in the rock that branch off, releasing gas, oil or water into the cracks created. The gases and oils are forced into the horizontal wells and then flow up to storage tanks with the water that comes back up.

• So a deep well is drilled (imagine the depths as six Empire State Buildings down underground - that is crazy!) When the well reaches the right depth, it takes a right or left turn and this is referred to as the kick off point and becomes horizontal.

•  Steel casing fits in the wellbore (the hole drilled). The steel is intended to protect groundwater and the surrounding area from any potential leakage during hydraulic fracturing. Down at the horizontal section of the well, the steel is perforated through with a tool that can penetrate the steel and cement of the well to create small holes for water or tiny particles to escape through. Water is then pumped in at an extremely high pressure.
• When the solution reaches the perforated points, the liquid is too much for the rock to absorb, and the rock cracks. It takes three to 10 days for fracturing to be complete. Additives and sand found in the water mixture hold open these fissures, allowing the gas (or whatever resource) to escape and be brought up to the surface in the water that's pumped back up, and separated.

Pros: 

• Provides people with loads of accessible resources that are normally trapped in the pores of rock.

• Natural gas is more environmentally friendly than oil or coal as it burns more cleanly

• Creates jobs and revenue

• Energy can become cheaper

• Can create trade with other countries

• Our shale deposits may not even be frackable

Cons:

• At the moment, the UK only has the 'potential' - it will take 5 years, and drilling of 20 to 40 fracking wells just to find out if the UK has a viable shale gas industry

• It'll be quite the eyesore - drilling and the trucks, pumps, transports and storage containers -- are all still going to be present at the site, along with the necessary related infrastructure.

• Pipelines can cause damage to crops on farmlands and equipment can tear up roads

• the chemicals used can leak into the water supply and/or leaching soil and groundwater (devastating on animals and plants) Shockingly, in the US, fracking well operators are not obliged to report annual releases of toxic chemicals from their wells

• Increase of pollution

• More than 650 products containing chemicals with potential cancer-causing properties have been used in fracking

• Millions of gallons of water is wasted, and water depletion in areas can occur

• And let's face it, to live near a fracking well would be a terrible experience, and one that people do not deserve to have to live by. Drilling can disrupt lives, including heightened noise levels aided by the transportation of materials, construction of facilities and drilling process itself; deterioration of air quality with the rise of diesel fumes; and implications of potentially destroying communities' access to clean water, including additional costs and efforts to transport and store water sourced from elsewhere. Communicates may then want to move, the homes near fracking areas would decrease in value, and we may end up having communities and home areas destroyed by the fracking practices.

• Ministers are currently now also planning to reform the trespass laws to make it easier for fracking to take place without homeowner's consent. 

• Possible risk of earthquakes occurring? (I question mark this as this is only correlated, and not proven in the UK) 

I tried to make this post as unbiased as possible, and looking through it, I may not have succeeded. But what can I say. This just might be representative of the fact that less than one in four people support fracking in Britain and support is continuing to decline. If only how we felt could be representative in the government's actions. Hopefully, this has been enlightening to anyone who didn't know a lot about fracking. 
Thanks for reading! 

The Workings of the Brain

Hello, readers! Today, when browsing the good old science section of the Guardian, I came across an interesting article about the discovery part of brain area that helps spot bad decisions. Oh, cool. So I read further, and naturally, went to share it with everyone else! It is the size of a Brussels sprout, and made up of a ball of neural tissue that seems to be crucial for our flexible thought that allows us to consider switching to another more promising course of action. It is named the lateral frontal lobe, and is perhaps an area known only exclusively to human brains when the area could not be found in any comparable region in monkeys. Now I know maybe not everyone cares at all that much about the recent discoveries about what goes on in our skull everyday, but this is so interesting! The brain is what makes us us! And so, lovely readers, here is my post on what the heck the brain is.

Okay, so we have the brain and a bunch of words some of us may not be familiar with. So I'll do my best to deliver a simple explanation of the parts of the brain and their function, and hopefully some of you guys may come away from this post, enlightened on the knowledge of the workings of the brain in what you thought was just spending time surfing the web...

• It is a complex organ that allows us to think, feel, hear, taste, and smell by controlling our body through producing electrical signals, with chemical reactions, that allow parts of the body to communicate
• The average brain weighs 3 pounds
• It consists of grey matter (40%) and white matter (60%) and is composed of three main parts: the cerebrum, cerebellum, and the brain stem (medulla)
• The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system (CNS). The brain is connected to the spinal cord, which in turn carries nerve 'messages' (technically a transmission of motor or sensory signals) to the body. This is known as the peripheral nervous system.
• The brain and spinal cord are covered by a tough, translucent membrane, called the dura mater. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a clear, watery liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, and is also found throughout the ventricle (brain cavities and tunnels). CSF cushions the brain and spinal cord from jolts. The cranium surrounds and protects the brain. The spinal cord is surrounded by vertebrae (hollow spinal bones). Also, some muscles serve to pad and support the spine.   

So, in following the parts of the diagram:

• Thalamus:  a large, dual lobed mass of grey matter buried under the cerebral cortex. It is involved in sensory perception and regulation of motor functions. Its functions involve motor control, receiving auditory, somatosensory and visual sensory signals, relay sensory signals to the cerebral cortex and controls sleep and awake states.
• Pineal gland: A small, cone-shaped organ in the brain of most vertebrates that secretes the hormone melatonin.
• Superior and inferior colliculus: Out of the two, the superior one is a layered, visual structure. Its upper layer gets visual signals from the retina, while the lower layers get multiple signals from various other parts of the brain. This colliculus is not restricted to a visual role alone, and performs another important function of providing orientation to the eyes and head. One of the key projections of the colliculus is to spinal cord region. This helps the head to respond to different sensory stimuli  
• Cerebellum: the part of the brain at the back of the skull in vertebrates, which coordinates and regulates muscular activity.
• Spinal cord: the cylindrical bundle of nerve fibres and associated tissue which is enclosed in the spine and connects nearly all parts of the body to the brain, with which it forms the central nervous system.
• Medulla: The lowermost portion of the brainstem in humans and other mammals. It is important in the reflex control of involuntary processes, including respiration, heartbeat, and blood pressure.
• Mid brain: a small central part of the brainstem, developing from the middle of the primitive or embryonic brain.
• Pituitary: the major endocrine gland, a pea-sized body attached to the base of the brain that is important in controlling growth and development and the functioning of the other endocrine glands.
• Corpos callosom: a broad band of nerve fibers joining the two hemispheres of the brain. 
• Cingulate gyrus: coordinates sensory input with emotions, emotional responses to pain, and regulates aggressive behavior
• Hypothalamus: coordinates both the autonomic nervous system and the activity of the pituitary, controlling body temperature, thirst, hunger, and other homeostatic systems, and involved in sleep and emotional activity.
• Fornix: the arched band of white matter located beneath the corpus callosum of the brain.  

The Ukraine Protests

So, there I was, catching up on news, and I've come across a few articles on the recent Ukraine protests, but really haven't a clue how it started or why it is happening! So, this leads me to the blog today, to teach myself and any of you readers who are in the same boat as me, about the Ukraine protests and the how, and how why of it!




The protests began in late November 2013 after the president dismissed a trade deal with the European Union, reversing a decision to sign the deal, and instead set a course for closer ties with Russia, signing a $15 billion bailout deal with Russia. The initial demands by protesters were centered with closer ties with Europe. After numerous clashes with police and refusing to back down, protesters expanded their demands beyond amnesty for demonstrators - after anti-demonstrators have paralyzed the capitol for weeks now, they've stated that despite key concessions already made by President Viktor Yanukovych they want more: a complete change in their system. The EU's top foreign policy was stating saying she was 'shocked' by the deadly violence int he capital and across the country in the recent week.
The protesters are now demanding a change in the constitution to give more powers to parliament over the president and a full change in the regime. 
Lawmakers have given in to the demand that they repeal the anti-protest laws that sparked an escalation of street protests last week that resulted in five protester deaths. The prime minister, Mykola Azarov and his Cabinet have resigned, but the president has not. 
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian parliament voted to given amnesty to protesters if they vacate the occupied government buildings. Protesters at the moment hold on city hall and an agricultural ministry in Kiev, a number of governor's offices in the western regions of the country and several non-governmental buildings in central Kiev.
The Ukranian parliment passed a law providing amnesty to protesters detained during the the unrest, 232 votes to 11 with the backing of Mr Yanukovych, while opposition parties abstained from voting in anger that the condition of the bill whereby it will only apply if protesters abandon the government buildings. Protesters on the streets of the capital also rejected the move. 

Ukraine key dates:

21 Nov 2013: President announces it will not sign a deal aimed at strengthening ties with the EU

30 Nov: Riot police detain dozens of anti-government protesters in a violent crackdown in Kiev

17 Dec: Russia agrees to buy $15bn of Ukrainian government bonds and slash the price of gas it sells to the country

16 Jan 2014: Parliament passes law restricting the right to protest

22 Jan: Two protesters die from bullet wounds during clashes with police in Kiev; protests spread across many cities

25 Jan: President Yanukovych offers senior jobs to the opposition, including that of prime minister, but these are rejected

28 Jan: Parliament votes to annul protest law and President Yanukovych accepts resignation of PM and cabinet

29 Jan: Parliament passes amnesty law for detained protesters, under the condition occupied buildings are vacated

President Viktor Yanukovych:

• widely criticized for massive corruption and cronyism. More than half of the ministers appointed by Yanukovych were either born in the Donbas region or made some crucial part of their careers there. Over 46% of the budget subventions for social and economic development was allotted to the Donbas region's Donetsk Oblastand Luhansk Oblast administrations
• The Ukranian Week claimed in March 2013 that Yanukovych had failed to meet his 2010 election promises
• On the 16th January 2014, he signed the Bondarenko-Oliynyk laws, also known as Anti-Protest Laws. Demonstrators occupied provincial administration buildings in at least 10 regions. Verkhovna Rada lawmakers repealed nine of the 12 restrictive laws that had been passed on January 16 by a show of hands, without debate. The laws imposed limits on free speech and assembly in the country

'It is a new and somewhat embarrassing experience for me to appear as lecturer before students of the New World. I assume that I owe this honor to the association of my name with the theme of psychoanalysis, and consequently it is of psychoanalysis that I shall aim to speak.'

The post's title are the words of Sigmund Freud at the beginning of his first lecture. Being an English student, I made an unfortunate mistake of picking a Literature and Psychoanalysis module for my second year and in the recent weeks of research for my Freud essay, I am filled with Freud knowledge that people are tiring of listening to me. I kid about it being a mistake, I do enjoy learning about Freud, someone I only really knew by name beforehand...sort of. And so to kick start what will be a blog filled with knowledge about a completely range of topics, I'll start with an accessible introduction to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis! 




Original name: 

• Sigismund Freud (bit of a mouthful...no wonder it was changed. No offence to anyone out there called Sigismund...in fact, I'd like to meet someone called Sigismund. I change my mind, its awesome and my future son will thank me for such a name)
• Born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor in the Czech Republic). His father was a merchant. The family moved to Leipzig and then settled in Vienna, where Freud was educated. Freud's family were Jewish but he was himself non-practicing.
• In 1873, Freud began to study medicine at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. He collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of traumatic experiences under hypnosis. 
• In 1885, Freud went to Paris as a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot. On his return to Vienna the following year, Freud set up in private practice, specializing in nervous and brain disorders. The same year he married Martha Bernays, with whom he had six children.
• Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses (the id) are in constant conflict for supremacy with the defenses against them (the ego). In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences. The dreams analyzed were his own and this was discovered in his letters to Fliess 
• In 1902, Freud was appointed Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna, a post he held until 1938. Although the medical establishment disagreed with many of his theories, a group of pupils and followers began to gather around Freud. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded with Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud's, as the president. Jung later broke with Freud over the theory of infantile sexuality and developed his own theories.
• After World War One, Freud spent less time in clinical observation and concentrated on the application of his theories to history, art, literature and anthropology. For example, his studies included the works of Leonardo DaVinci, and a dream he wrote in a footnote, playwright Goethe's dream, and Shakespeare, especially Hamlet in his development of the Oedipal Complex. In 1923, he published 'The Ego and the Id', which suggested a new structural model of the mind, divided into the 'id, the 'ego' and the 'superego'.
• In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud's books. In 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud left Vienna for London with his wife and daughter Anna.
• Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, and underwent more than 30 operations. He died of cancer on 23 September 1939.

Brief overview of some of his widely known theories 

• Trauma: the treatment of hysteria was the beginning for Freud's work on psychoanalysis. Freud trained as a neurophysiologist and worked on the physical structure of the brain and the central nervous system. In 1885 he traveled to Paris and studied with the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot’s main object of study at the time Freud worked with him was physical trauma and its often delayed after-effects, which he conceived of as a form of hysteria caused by the psychological shock of the trauma (railway and workplace accidents were the prototypical instances) as opposed to hysteria conceived of as an hereditary and constitutional condition. Freud developed the idea of a primal scene in which something traumatic, yes, perhaps sexual, occurred in one's childhood, and the memory is repressed. After puberty, another traumatic moment occurs which triggers the the hysterical symptoms in response to the raising of repressed memories. So, in conclusion, the event that caused the hysteria occurs long before the hysteria in childhood and the dividing line is puberty. The problem happens after puberty where you have become sexualised and realise that what occurred in childhood was sexual. In childhood, you do not realise sexuality. It is the distance of time between the traumatic scenes that cause the development of hysteria and not due to heredity as Charcot proposed.

• The unconscious/conscious system: 1900 with the Publication of Dreams is when Freud says that we are all divided in a conscious and an unconscious. Most of what you are made up of is your unconscious. You have no or little access to it. It is constructed by traumatic scenes of their childhood. The conscious is small slither of what you’re thinking in your mental faculties and is about what you are currently attending to. Therefore, as I am writing all of this down, my conscious is made up of what I'm thinking and writing. The pre-conscious is when one can easily access memories and bring them to mind, which is what I'm doing when I remember what was said in a class or a lecture about Freud. And the unconscious is made up of repressed memories; things we can't remember. 

•  The Interpretation of Dreams: Freud argues that all dreams come from wish fulfillment. They can be dreams of convenience such as being thirsty, and so drinking in a dream, which is common in children's dreams, and so are easy to interpret. The ego is relaxed in the dream, and consequently, can allow for feelings and wishes that were repressed when the dreamer was awake, to come out into the dream. Unsatisfied days's events in the pre-conscious can lurk in the dream and while dreaming, the conscious wish is realized with a parallel to an unconscious wish. Freud argues that even anxiety or traumatic dreams are wish fulfillment dreams as it is the fulfilling the wish of the ego with ideas of fear and punishment. The dreams use something called the days residues which are points of transference used by consciousness. The dream cannot be spelled out that simply to be understood as such things called displacement, condensation which distort the dream and it ends up seeming nonsensical.Freud uses the decoding method to analyse dreams. He breaks the dream up, treats it as a set of signs,signifying sequence/chain, analyzing separate components, on each separate signifying element, ‘as if each fragment of rock requires a separate assessment’
• Infantile sexuality: this theory definitely turned a few heads! Broadly speaking, yes, this is to do with the child being in love with their mother. Used in the Little Hans case, Freud argues that this idea of sexuality is divorced from its close connection with genitals to concentrate rather on the purpose of achieving pleasure. It is only secondary to serve as the means to reproductive function which is something that the mother provides for the child in their years of infancy. 

•      The Ego, the Id, and the Superego: the ego, to start with, is a socially constructed driving force of repression and, formed through a modification of the body, it takes the impact of things coming from the outside world and consequently represents reason and common sense. The id is, in comparison, the source of passions that need to be controlled by the ego. The superego is formed by the identification with the adult, in particular, the parent site of the drive, labelled the id and is the embodiment of norms and injunctions, being internalized by identification with the parent/adult figure
• The Oedipus complex: you know, it really can be summed up quite easily as the child (male) is in love with his mother, and wishes to kill his father, and marry his mother. Freud uses the tale of Oedipus and Hamlet as part of his findings of where we can see the Oedipal complex. However, Oedipus the character does not know he has married his mother and killed his father, so there is no desire for it shown in the narrative. Hamlet, on the other hand, one can see has a certain kind of obsession with his mother's sex life but the desire to kill his uncle is out of revenge, not to take his place as the mother's husband - in fact, making this even more problematic is that his uncle is not even his father!

I hope this is an easy and accessible way of getting acquainted with Freud if you haven't done so already! He is an interesting character, I'll say that, from what I can recall, he is quite the narcissist, fancies himself as a Hamlet and tries to really punch up his work as works of science - despite the incredibly small sample sizes he uses, not to mention simply using himself as a patient - but that doesn't stop him from making sweeping generalizations! However, I do not wish to belittle Freud as some of his work is incredibly fascinating and I urge you to read on some of it (or a Wikipedia summary entry on it). Oh, and fun fact, he was in love with eldest daughter, Anna! And smoked a hell of a lot of cigars! Hope you enjoyed reading it!   

Wait - where did blogging come from?

Hello!

First of all, I'd like to say welcome to my blog, and talk about what it is all about. I've been considering creating a blog for a long time now, and no particular idea came to mind, until one day, where I realized exactly what I've been wanting to do in my spare time. You see, ever since coming to university, limited to studying only one subject, English Literature, I felt as though I were missing out on the broad learning of other subjects and had gaps in my knowledge on the wider spectrum of things! I'm sure I am not the only one out there, and so this brings me to why I've made this blog - and that is, really, to just take time out of my day, and do a little research on a subject, that'll mainly be on something relevant that has occurred today, and present it to my lovely readers! Of course, many may already know about topics I'm going to bring up, and I'm not suggesting that people don't know certain things; this blog is really just a way of taking on things that are occurring in the world, and reflecting on it, and bringing up a history or argument or discussion of a certain topic that some may not fully know. I, myself, will be learning among you guys! And so, when you are flicking through blogs, and hopefully come across mine and take some time to read any of posts, you can come away from your desk, thinking, ah, I've learnt something new today! 

So, I figured at the start of this blog, I should surely talk today about exactly what is blogging and how did it start? We all know that blogging is a way for one to muse on a certain topic or subject online, which of course technically went back before internet days in diaries and writings. Today, it is considered a web page, serving as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual or company. In other words, its an online diary of sorts! 

Timeline of the Development of the Blog

1983 - 1993

Usenet was the primary serial medium included in the original definition of the Internet, featuring the moderated newsgroup which allowed all posting in a newsgroup to be under the control of an individual or small group. Most such newsgroups were simply moderated discussion forum

early 1990s: Tim Berners-Lee coined the term word wide web and defined the first standards for HTML and URLs, the specifications included "USENET newsgroups for serial publishing and discussions."

1994

Swarthmore College student Justin Hall started an online diary called Justin's Links from the Underground. The site, which first started as a guide to the web, soon became an account of Hall's life, and earned him the surely coveted title of pioneer blogger. Three years later, Jorn Barger would coin the term "weblog," and its short form, "blog," was later coined by Peter Merholz

1997 

SlashDot launched, a blog for tech 'nerds'

1998

Open Diary launched, growing to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers' blog entries

1999 

Brad Fitzpatrick, well known blogger, started LiveJournal

Pitas.com created by Andrew Smales, followed by DiaryLand that focused on a personal diary community 

Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan launched blogger.com in August 1999, which was                 purchased by Google in February 2003

Thanks for reading!