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Andrew Damaso

Writing for College Section 2

Mr. Smith

17 January 2018

Section 1: Fixing Your Life: How Engineers Can Solve The World’s Problems

At times, engineers are underappreciated. Most people don’t understand what engineers

are doing to make the world a better place. People forget that engineers are the people who make

it possible for you to travel around the world in a plane or help you to get home or to work faster

with your car. Engineers build and design all of our technology that we use today.

An engineer is a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public

works. Engineers all around the world make it possible for everyone to live in a world full of

technology. Engineers build our homes and cities, and they make our phones, computers,

televisions, etc. The role of an engineer is to protect the environment and the people within it.

During the engineering design process, the responsibilities of the engineer may include defining

problems, conducting and narrowing research, analyzing criteria, finding and analyzing

solutions, and making decisions. Much of an engineer's time is spent on researching, locating,

applying, and transferring information. I am interested in the role of engineers because in the

future I’d like to become an engineer myself. This job would be perfect for me because I love to

help the environment and I just want to build, design, create new things that the world hasn’t

seen before; I want to be creative.

The essential question is “How can engineers save the world.” Engineers don’t just build

things, but they can help to save the world. For example, they can build solar-powered cars or

anything solar panel to conserve energy and so that we don’t waste electricity. My first point to
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prove is “What are engineers doing to help the environment?” The second is “How can earth-

scale engineering save the planet?” The third point to prove is “How can engineering solve the

world’s problems?”

Section 2: How Can Engineering Improve the Medical Field

Solving the problems of the world is a very hard and challenging thing to do. There are so

many problems in the world that we just can’t solve. Some of the major problems include

solving world hunger, waste disposal, pollution, rapid global warming, and diseases such as

AIDs. Surely enough, you can’t stop pollution just by cleaning the beaches that you live close to.

Everyone in the world has to clean up the trash that’s left on the beaches to help stop pollution.

Microsoft has developed a new machine that will change the medical field for the better.

What is Microsoft? Microsoft is an American multinational technology company that

manufactures, develops, supports, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, personal

computers, and services. The machine that they’ve developed can predict whether or not a

patient will be readmitted back into the hospital within 30 days. For example, the article, “The

Next Scientific revolution,” stated that it “can predict with impressive accuracy whether a patient

with congestive heart failure who is released from the hospital will be readmitted within 30

days.” This isn’t based on programming a computer to run through the questions a given

diagnostician would ask or on an overall estimate of how many patients return. But it rather

comes from something called machine learning.

Machine Learning is a field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give

computer systems the ability to "learn" with data, without being explicitly programmed. The

name machine learning was founded in 1959 by Arthur Samuel. “Machine Learning is a process

by which computer scientists direct a program to pore through a huge database in this instance,
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hundreds of thousands of data points involving hundreds of evidential variables of some 300,000

patients. The machine is able to “learn” the profiles of those patients most likely to be readmitted

by analyzing the differences between cases for which it knows the outcome.” With this program,

doctors can now plug in the names of their patients and test if they will be bouncing back to the

hospital.

Machine learning is a very useful tool now that it’s the era of technology. Machine

learning could be used to advance cybersecurity, a more efficient healthcare network, and a wide

scale use of autonomous vehicles. What is cybersecurity? It is the state of being protected against

unauthorized or criminal use of electronic data. “cybersecurity is the practice of ensuring the

integrity, confidentiality, and availability (ICA) of information. It represents the ability to defend

against and recover from accidents like hard drive failures or power outages, and from attacks by

adversaries”(Porup).

With cybersecurity comes cyber threats. The threat varies from attacks on confidentiality,

integrity, and availability. “Stealing, or rather copying, a target's personal information is how

many cyber attacks begin, including garden-variety criminal attacks like credit card fraud,

identity theft, or stealing bitcoin wallets”(Porup).

With Machine learning comes ChatBots. A ChatBot is an artificial intelligence(AI)

program that is used by patients to identify potential symptoms of a diagnosis. The ChatBot uses

speech recognition to identify patterns in the symptoms of the patient in order to find a potential

diagnosis. It can also be used to prevents diseases or recommend appropriate courses of action.

Babylon Health, a health service provider that allows users to virtually communicate with

doctors and health care professionals via video and text messages through its mobile application.

Their headquarters is in London, United Kingdom and Ali Parsa founded the company in 2013.
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With speech recognition the app will compare symptoms of the patient against a database of

diseases. After that, it will give the patient a course of action based on a combination of the

patient history, patient circumstances, and reported symptoms. The app is also designed to

integrate data from wearable devices to check the users vitals such as cholesterol level and heart

rate.

Another way that engineers could improve the medical field is through pathology.

Pathology is the science of the causes and effects of diseases, especially the part of medicine that

deals with the laboratory analysis of bodily fluids. Some fluids include urine and blood, as well

as tissues. Machine vision and other machine learning technologies can enhance the efforts

traditionally left to pathologists with microscopes. The way pathologists diagnose diseases,

which involves manual observation of images under a microscope, has remained relatively

unchanged for over a century. In an effort to improve speed and accuracy of diagnoses, a team of

researchers have used deep learning to train an algorithm capable of integrating multiple speech

recognition and image recognition to diagnose tumors. The researchers began with hundreds of

images with labeled regions showing cancerous and noncancerous cells. The labeled regions

were then extracted resulting in millions of examples that served as the basis for the model that

would train the algorithm.

Facial recognition software is being combined with machine learning to help clinicians

diagnose rare diseases. Patient photos are analyzed using facial analysis and deep learning to

detect phenotypes that correlate with rare genetic diseases.The platform is currently available

only to trained clinicians to prevent false positives and supports over 7,500 disorders. However,

it is unclear how many total users are accessing this software and what impact the application has

had on these patient populations.

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Section 3: What Can Engineers Do To Stop Pollution

In our world today, there are many different ways on how we can clean up the pollution

in the air and in our waters. The clean up solutions vary from both natural and man made. For

example, a carpet cleaner or vacuum is meant to suck up crumbs and dust off your floors. There

are many natural ways to clean the air including hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, plants, and mucus.

Hurricanes are violent tropical storms of rain, lightning, thunder and high winds. Tornadoes are

violent, funnel-shaped windstorms that are very destructive. Raindrops, snowflakes and other

precipitation events remove air pollution through the natural water cycle, but this can lead to

water and land pollution. Plants mainly include spider plants. The mucus inside our noses traps

the dirt and germs from the air before they reach our lungs. If the air is really dirty it cannot stop

all the pollution, so some of it may reach and damage our lungs. For example, the effects of

smoking.

There are also many different industrial ways of cleaning the air. Such as Bag houses,

Cyclones, Electrostatic precipitators, and wet scrubbers. The Bag house is a pollutant recovery

method that works very much like a giant vacuum cleaner. Heavy dirt particles fall out and are

removed, and smaller particles are trapped by filters (bags) made of cloth, paper or similar

materials. Particles are shaken or blown from the filters into a collection hopper.

The Cyclone is a pollutant recovery method in which dust-laden gas is whirled very

rapidly inside a cylinder-shaped collector. Flying dust particles (as well as all matter) like to

travel in straight lines unless an external force acts upon them. Because of this, pollutant

particles with inertia in a cyclone tend to leave the circular path of the cyclone, collect on the

wall, and then slide down the wall into a collection chamber.
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The electrostatic precipitator is a pollutant recovery method in which a static charge

makes dirt particles stick to electrified plates (much the same way that static electricity in

clothing attracts small bits of dust and lint). The dirt is knocked loose, collected and removed.

The wet scrubber can handle high temperature gas streams and it reduces gaseous

pollutants as well as dust. It is a pollutant recovery method that traps solid particles and gases as

they pass through a fine water mist inside the scrubber. Sometimes the mist is injected with

limestone powder to help extract the dirt particles.

Section 4: How Engineers Can solve Global Warming

Reflecting sunlight, also known as solar radiation management, and it focuses on

techniques that decrease the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface to cool the planet.

These ideas all aim to increase reflectivity through methods such as large mirrors in space or

injecting reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere. We know that aerosol injection works

because volcanoes mimic the same process. Explosive eruptions from volcanos emit enough

sulfur dioxide (which then forms reflective sulfate aerosols) to have a measurable effect on

global temperature. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines produced enough

aerosol to cool the global temperature by roughly 0.5°C (~1°F) in the year following the

eruption.

In the month of September in 2016, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

reached 400 parts per million. Monthly values will very likely not fall below this level for the

rest of our lifetimes, and beyond. The process of getting rid of the Carbon Dioxide(CO2) is

commonly referred to as carbon capture and storage (CCS). There are 15 large-scale CCS

projects worldwide that capture about 28 million tons of CO2 per year, or 0.08% of global fossil
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fuel emissions. Many of those projects use the captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, a

process that pumps CO2 through semi-depleted oil wells to produce more oil.

Direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere is harder than at a stationary source because

the background concentration is much lower. It’s easier to have a constant source of CO2 from

something like a coal-fired power plant. Despite this challenge, there are companies aiming to

make air capture possible through the chemical extraction of CO2 gas from the air. The pure

CO2 can then be used for industrial applications or permanently stored. However, at present

these technologies are expensive and need to be scaled up in order to put a sizable dent into the

carbon emissions.

Section 5: Conclusion

All in all, I believe that engineering and technology can impact the world greatly. By

improving the medical field with new and cutting edge technology we can treat diseases with

ease and prevent people from dying due to the lack of treatments. Engineering can also rid the

world of pollution through the process of inventing new products that will purify the air and our

waters. And lastly, engineering can solve global warming through reflective mirrors in the sky

and by capturing CO2 gases to prevent the earth from burning.

Works Cited

Agrawal, Aj. “5 Innovative Uses for Machine Learning.” Entrepreneur, 19 Jan. 2018,
www.entrepreneur.com/article/307633.

"Engineering the Earth to Fight Climate Change." Science in the News, 28 Oct. 2016,
sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/engineering-earth-fight-climate-change/.

Hey, Tony. "The Next Scientific Revolution." Harvard Business Review, vol. 88, no. 11, Nov.
2010, pp. 56-63. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=bth&AN=54604474&site=ehost-live.
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"How Earth-Scale Engineering Can Save the Planet." Popular Science, www.popsci.com/
environment/article/2005-06/how-earth-scale-engineering-can-save-planet.

"Machine Learning for Medical Diagnostics - 4 Current Applications -." TechEmergence, 11 Jan.
2018, www.techemergence.com/machine-learning-medical-diagnostics-4-current-
applications/.

"Pollution Solutions - Lesson." Www.teachengineering.org, 8 Feb. 2018,

www.teachengineering.org/lessons/view/cub_air_lesson10.

Porup, J.M. “What Is Cyber Security? How to Build a Cyber Security Strategy.” CSO Online,
CSO, 27 Dec. 2017, www.csoonline.com/article/3242690/data-protection/what-is-cyber-
security-how-to-build-a-cyber-security-strategy.html.

TEDxTalks. “How Engineers Will Save the World | Anthony Fasano |

TEDxBergenCommunityCollege.” YouTube,YouTube, 30 Mar. 2016,

“why Environmental Engineering is Vital for Our Future.” EvnvironmentalScience.org,

www.environmentalscience.org/environmental-engineering.