Technology and Culture: Interplay and Impact

Impact of Scientific and Technical Innovation

• Scientific and technical innovation enhances productivity, increases societal wealth, and raises living standards.
• Diffusion is the process of spreading an innovation to other people and groups.
• An s-curve, also known as a diffusion curve, tracks the increase in revenue or productivity over time.
• During the early stages of product life, an innovation establishes its usefulness and grows slowly, followed by rapid growth in the middle stages, and gradual decline in the later stages.
• Companies must continually seek new innovations to replace older ones, despite product improvements potentially extending an innovation's lifespan.

Resource Management

• Resource management aims to optimize resource usage in a project.
• Resources include money, employees, inventory, production means, and IT.
• Resource leveling balances usage by eliminating inventory shortages and excesses.
• Management should avoid scheduling multiple activities at the same time to reduce conflict and avoid shortages.
• If concurrent activities require more than the available resources or the same resources, rescheduling is necessary and can delay the project if on the critical path.

Stimulating Competitiveness and Creating New Goods and Services

• Technological innovation can introduce new products or more efficient means of production/commodity handling.
• Technological innovation often stimulates the economy by creating additional competition and breaking up monopolies.
• The pursuit of better quality, new market formation, new regulations, the need for replacement parts or services and decreased availability of materials often stimulate economic growth.

Major Scientific and Technological Innovations

• The automobile was granted a patent in 1885 and placed into production the same year by Karl Benz.
• The airplane was developed in 1903 by Wilbur and Orville Wright, using aerodynamics principles.
• The integrated circuit was developed in 1958 by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, revolutionizing electronics by enabling microchips to perform the same functions as vacuum tubes.
• The internet came about with the first TCP/IP protocol, developed in 1983 by Robert E. Kahn and Vince Cerf.

Relationship Between Technology and Society and Culture

• Technology and culture have a synergistic, cyclical, and codependent relationship where each influences the other.
• Funding for technological development comes from private business and enterprise, or government programs.
• New technology influences social attitudes and beliefs, which, in turn, influence technology implementation.
• Key values include achieving higher efficiency and driving social progress through technology.

Conservation and Sustainability

• Conservation reduces energy and material consumption by reducing usage and making more efficient use of existing resources.
• Renewable energy sources, climate-adaptive building techniques, and fuel-efficient vehicles help lower energy consumption.
• Real-time energy metering allows consumers to better understand the impact of their energy usage.
• Sustainability determines the length of time over which an ecological system will endure.
• Technology increases energy efficiency and conserves natural resources, making the human environment more sustainable.

Biotechnology

• Biotechnology is the technological application of biology, using processes and living organisms to create products.
• It spans across medicine (drug production, gene therapy, gene testing), agriculture (enhancing crop yield, improving nutritional attributes), biological engineering (solving life science problems using physics, chemistry, mathematics), and bioremediation/biodegradation (creating organisms for environmental cleanup).
• Cloning includes reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning using stem cells.
• The Human Genome Project seeks to discover all human genes and create a reference sequence.
• Biotechnology often utilizes mathematical biology, which models complex biological processes using various types of math.

Government Regulation and Facilitating Technological Development

• The government funds and regulates technological research, exemplified by the FDA.
• The government chooses research offering the greatest benefit to mankind.
• Interest groups complicate the selection process, and governmental policy is influenced by both the populace-at-large and special interests.
• Technological development is regulated, especially regarding the environment and the protection of ecological systems.
• The government assigns liability to corporations whose products cause harm.

Material Disposals, and Environmental Emission Monitoring and Control

• Materials disposal uses technologies like incinerators (combustion to convert waste into residue and gas), landfills (burying waste), recycling (reprocessing materials), and sustainability methods (composting, anaerobic digestion, energy recovery).
• Continuous emission monitoring systems use gas analyzers to test air samples for emissions like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide etc.
• Federal programs use these systems to ensure compliance with emission standards, such as the acid rain program and EPA standards.

Medical and Agricultural Technology

• Medical technology improves health, prevents sickness, and diagnoses or treats disease.
• It covers diverse products often using mathematical concepts such as medical imaging machines (CAT, ultrasound) using trigonometric functions.
• Agricultural technology enhances agricultural production using machinery, processes, and systems by using a variety of math principles.

Physics

• Bernoulli's principle states that increasing the speed of an inviscid flow decreases its pressure, important for carburetors and pitot tubes.
• Aerodynamics involves thrust, lift, drag, and weight.
• Thrust relates to Newton's Second and Third Laws.
• Lift is generated perpendicular to the oncoming airflow.
• Drag opposes motion.
• Forces must be balanced to achieve flight.

Biology

• Biology includes biological engineering (emulating biological systems), molecular biology (gene therapy), pathology (diagnosing disease), and biotechnology (using living organisms).

SDS

• An SDS (Safety Data Sheet) explains a specific substance's properties and provides a means of cataloging substances according to their effects and risks.
• SDS information has sections such as identification, hazards, composition, first-aid, fire-fighting, accidental release, handling/storage, exposure controls, physical/chemical properties, stability/reactivity, toxicological information, etc
• SDS data sheets are intended for those who work with chemicals in an occupational setting.

Standard Procedures

• Standard procedures when working around materials and equipment related to technology include do not bring pets or nonessential personnel, consult user guides, wear shirt and shoes, tie back long hair, and do not drop the materials/equipment.

Emergency Fire Procedures

• Sound the fire alarm, use a nearby fire extinguisher (CO2 is preferable), carry a fire extinguisher when needed, roll person on the ground if on fire, and immediately leave a building in which the fire alarm has been sounded.

Electrocution

• Never touch an electrocuted person, turn of the power supply, use a non-conducting material to move person if that is not possible, check for breathing/pulse and administer CPR, and seek medical assistance.

OSHA

• Is a federal regulatory agency that enforces workplace safety and health standards.
• OSHA requires guards on moving parts, permissible exposure limits, use of respirators, lockout in order to secure energy sources, air sampling for confined spaces and hazard communication.

Career and Technical Education Course Approval and Re-Approval Process

• CTE programs in all states must emulate the New York CTE program.
• Rigorous academic standards must be maintained.
• All state education reform requirements must be aligned.
• Course approval can be performed online and is due at a respective date for 1st semester courses and 2nd semester courses.

Safety and Health Standards

• The Safety Guide for Career and Technical Education contains instructions for vocational education curricula.
• These practices and requirements include: Proper floor cleanliness, proper shop equipment and material handling.

Career and Technical Education Curriculum Advisory Committee

• The CTE advisory committee recommend a curriculum to best prepare students to pass state assesments.
• The comittee evaluate CTE equivalency courses in core subject areas.

Tech Prep Articulation

• Tech Prep is a high school program that provides students with technical training, applied academics, workplace internship and guidance.
• It provides college credit, so saves time and money.

Membership in Professional Career and Technical Organizations

• These provide networking and professional development opportunities through expos, seminars, and webinars, classroom tools, best practices, partnerships, awards and online courses.

Primary Business Management Functions

• These include planning (creating plans for action), organizing (optimization of resource usage), staffing (recruits and assigns personnel), directing (identify task for plan completion), monitoring (checks progress), and motivating (motivates workers).

Work Schedule

• A work schedule breaks down a project into its most basic work activities.
• The work schedule will include estimates for the resources, cost, and duration of each activity, and arrange them by their dependencies and order of completion.
• A project manager must have a work breakdown structure that also includes an estimate of resource availability.
• A Gantt chart is a bar chart that shows each terminal element, its duration, and other summary information.

Workflow Tracking

• A workflow is an abstraction of work that is performed by a single person or group of people.
• Any workflow must have input, undergoes a change in accordance with rules, produce output and track progress throughout.

Safety Assessments

• A safety assessment is a method of quantifying and understanding the hazards and risks associated with certain products an materials.
• A safety assessment must identify the hazard, perform exposure respons analysis, and exposure quantification.

Explore the interplay between technology and culture, examining funding sources, beliefs, and sustainability. Understand technology's role in conservation and biotechnology's focus. Learn about forces in aircraft flight and reasons for electric car popularity.