Effective Communication

  At the start of the semester, my goals were to improve my writing and to overcome my fear of speaking in front of people. Under Professor Blackstone’s guidance, I have seen improvement in my writing especially for my formal writing and technical report. I learnt that words like “I” and “we” should not appear when writing a report and that a report should be written purely in a third person point of view instead. I also learnt to paraphrase sentences and how to use APA citation to cite the sources where I got the information I needed for my report to avoid plagiarism. Nevertheless, I feel that my language still has much to improve as I am still making mistakes and language is the most important part of a piece of writing. To improve my language, I need to cultivate a habit of reading regularly since improvement in language is made over a period of time and not overnight. Although I have made some progress through the 13 weeks of lesson, I feel that I am quite a distance away f...

In the article “How Flying Robots Might Prevent Deforestation,” Peck (2012) mentioned the purpose, features and effectiveness of quadrotors, and mainly focused on them being “sentinels of crucial environmental protection”. These “miniature flying robots” were programmed to inspect the surroundings of the rainforest independently, providing advanced feedback for unlicensed activities and diminishing the desire of those people who considered carrying out unlawful acts such as "cutting down trees and drug trafficking". According to Peck, Vijay Kumar, the developer of the Quadrotors, highlighted the robots’ ability to efficiently function together as a team without a need for any communication. Furthermore, quadrotors were equipped with “little rotor blades'' for easy gliding action, and the programmed commands on the “onboard processor” would call for an immediate response to any difference in their surroundings. According to Peck, Mario Campos, a professor of computer s...