FINISHED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes! I just finished!!!!!!!!!! Except now my printer's not working...Will this never end??!!!

2 days to go... a bit less actually

Got the criteria sheet of Bonny last night. It includes a diagram in the method. Is that nescessary? It doesn't really apply to my experiment, does it? What would I draw, a stick figure sitting in front of a rectangle (meant to be a computer)? I went to ask Ms Zhang after school today when I got back from cross country but she wasn't in the staffroom, so I still don't know.
Also, I've had 2 more results emailed to me, thanks very much, but I'm still waiting on 5. Come on guys, it's due in less than 2 days! I am really appreciative of people who are getting friends of theirs to do my experiment, but I really need the results, now. I can't anaylse the results, write a discussion and conslusion (more than 1/2 the project) until I have the results!

Aaaaaaarrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just found out from Bonny that there's a criteria sheet I never got!!!!!!!!!!!! Starting to panic!!!!!!!!

Results...so far

This is my awesome table.
Please no one be offended. I checked with Ms Zhang and she said it's alright to use the term "white" in my report.
*In the top corner, where it says Race &, it should say Race & Gender.

I'm hoping that slow and steady will win the race

I finished writing the method yesterday. Haven't started the discussion yet because I haven't tested everyone yet, but I have made an awesome results table. I had planned to be finished the tests by this stage but, although I'd planned when to meet everyone, some people just didn't turn up, which is really not helpful. But never mind, my friend manged to rope in her younger brother along with one of her brother's asian friends, one of her brother's anglo friends and that friend's older sister. I'm still one asian guy short (because people didn't turn up!) but I think, if I can't find someone else, I'll be able to cut back the number of volunteers. I know that in a previous blog I said I already had the minimum (30), but I actually had 32, because I thought I needed equal numbers from all four groups. But one of the reports I found used not equal numbers of males and females within their racial categories so, if it's good enough for the scientists, it's certainly good enough for me. Now I will have 15 from each race instead of 16: 8 girls and 7 guys.

Also my last, rather incoherent blog (which had a couple of embarrassing typos, if any one's read the comments) mentioned that I was researching the different causes of the cross-race effect (which from now on I'll just call CRE or cre), but didn't go into details. Well, the actual reason for the CRE is not known, however scientists do have a couple of theories.
The most widely accepted one is that it's simply caused by lack of contact with the other culture; the observer just isn't used to the other faces and so is unable to recognise them as well. This is the reason I'm focusing on. I'm saying that as 16.9% of Sydney's population is of Asian background, Asian and Anglo teens in Sydney have a considerable amount of contact with each other. Therefore, if this theory is indeed the cause of the cre, there should not be a significant level of own-race bias present amongst this group.

Ummm...the confusion and tiredness are setting in

I just finished the first draft of my introduction, but I'm really not sure if I've done it properly. I ended up referencing the 2009 school report! I think I'm probably the only person who's ever done that in their SRP. It's not as random as it may sound. While I was researching I found some information on the suggested causes of the cross-race effect, which sounded more interecsting than reading heaps of reports on just testing the cross-race effect (which, by the way, were quite hard to come by, as most you had to pay for). So instead I spent a lot of time looking at possible causes and tests of these causes and so now my aim includes seeing if its likely that a particular cause is the possible cause. And so I referenced the school report as well as the 2006 census to see the percentage of Asians in Sydney and at school. I realise that wasn't very clear, but I just had to get the fact that I referenced the report off my chest. I intend to upload a more coherent description of my research and report tomorrow.
Oh, btw, I've tested two more people since this morning.

On my way (and do you like the new background?)

I just changed my blog background, I think it makes a nice happy change to the previous dark spots. Anyway, I started conducting my experiment yesterday. I haven't analysed the results because I'm not really sure how to go about it. I can easily give the percentages of the asian and then anglo-saxon models that the volunteer correctly identified as having been in the previous slideshow, but what about the models that weren't in the previous slideshow but they thought were? But I'm not thinking about that just yet. My current aim is to write my introduction. I've been researching all morning and will be for the rest of the day. Well, better get back to it!

Wish me luck!

Just put the finishing touches on my powerpoints. It took me way longer than it should of to complete them because my USB kept corrupting the pictures and the powerpoints and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was so frustrating. But anyway, Sylvia lent me her USB which so far, works really well. Thankyou Sylvia! I had to redo the powerpoint and go back and re-find some of the pictures, but hey, it's done now.
I've been handing out permission notes over the past through days, I'm going to start conducting the experiment tomorrow and I'm about to go and perform a trial run on my sister. I really hope it works. Wish me luck! (Please)

Progress...finally

I started handing out permission notes yesterday and gave out more today! Yay, it feels like I'm getting somewhere. Also, I checked with Ms Zhang and she says that, as long as I check first to make sure the results aren't too different, I can test people over the internet. This hopefully means I won't have to go to the english centre at Kogarah after all.

*groan* I just spent the last hour of my life looking up pictures of asian models. Does anyone realise how hard it is to find pictures of asian male models where they're looking at the camera (not doing the whole "I want to show you how long my neck is" thing, geez that's annoying), where the picture is big enough so that when you enlarge their face it's not blurry and who aren't famous?! I'm so over this experiment at the moment, and i haven't actually started yet.
Anyway, surprising though it may seem, the purpose of this update is not to rant. I've realised that I can't start my experiment tomorrow because I need to get Lisa to check my models to make sure they are models and not incredibly famous actors or singers. A bit annoying, because some people I only have the chance of showing the slide show to on Sunday before church. Ah well, what can you do?

Making changes

I haven't done anything more with my experiment since my last post because I've been at music camp. My internet is still mucking up so I only have a limited time on it, which I will use to find more asian models. I'm still short on volunteers but a couple of people have suggested to me that I go to the english centre at Kogarah and ask if they have any students who have been born in Asia and have been in Australia for less than 10 years who are willing to participate in a year 10 student's science experiment. I don't want to resort to this, but I don't really have any alternatives. I mentioned in a previous post that I was considering cutting back on the number of volunteers but I've checked with Ms Zhang and I've already got the minimum number.
I plan to start my experiment tomorrow, hopefully, provided that I can finish the slide shows before my internet time is up. I haven't written my permission notes yet; I was only told the other day that we weren't getting a template and had to create our own. I had planned to get Ms Zhang to check it before I started to hand them out, but I really want to start tomorrow. I've seen Steph's notes and so if I use those as my template and then check with Ms Zhang on Monday I'm sure it will be fine.
Oh, I almost forgot something important, I think I have to change my method. Originally I was going to carry out two tests; one 1 hour after the first slide show and the other one week after the first slide show. However this is looking impractical as I need to use people I've never even met and I think trying to met with them twice exactly one week apart would be too much to ask.
Another thing, I've mentioned before that I originally wanted to get all my volunteers together and carry out the experiment in one go, then I said that this wouldn't work so I had to carry out the tests at different times in different locations. Unfortunately it seems like I may have to even conduct some of the tests over msn or something, due to the fact that some of the people are friends/acquaintances of friends that live too far away etc. I don't know if this will still work so I'll have to check with Ms Zhang on Monday.
P.S. I know we're meant to upload photos but at the moment there isn't anything to photograph. I can't put the pictures of the models up because if one of my volunteers sees them before the experiment it will alter the results.

I hate technology

I started collecting pictures of models last week (I would have blogged sooner but our internet's decided to stuff up). The anglo-saxon models were easy to come by, but I'm having a bit more trouble finding the Asian models. For example the first sight I clicked on which had a totally innocent, if rather superficial, title like "top 50 asian models" had some very, well, not innocent pictures. So did the next site. In order to avoid any more confronting and rather gross pictures I changed my search from "asian models" to "seoul fashion week". These models were predictibly (and thankfully) more clothed, the only problem is that, because it's fashion week, the focus of the picture is the clothes and not the models' faces. This has added difficulty to my search because I need to enlarge the faces of the models for the slideshow and when they're that small in the picture they just turn out blurry (which would really muck up the recognition thing).
Yesterday at school Lisa looked through the pictures that I had managed to collect to ensure that none of them were famous (which would also muck up the recognition experiment). It's a good thing she did. She ended up in a fit of hysterics; partly, I think, due to excitment at seeing a picture of her favourite boy band singers and partly through shock at how totally oblivious I am to Asian pop culture.
So now I'm back to square one as far as asian male models go, and not that much better with asian female models. To make matters worse my laptop has decided to not work properly and so some of the pictures that I've found and saved have come out fragmented and unrecognisable(sort of like my climate graph but 10 times worse) and every time I fix the powerpoint backgrounds it refuses to save them. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! I hate techology!

Climate Graph

Hi, i was just reading over my method post and realised I'd forgotten to mention something. When the volunteers are shown the slide show during the study I won't ask them any questions on it. All they have to do is pay attention and try to remember the faces.

Variables

Ideally, I would conduct the studies and tests for all the volunteers on the same day at the same time at the same location (I was thinking a park), in case different surroundings, time of day or weather affected their thinking abilities. Actually, if we're talking about ideally, it would have been good to get a little plain room where I could test them one at a time, sort of like the police interrogation rooms on tv.
Sadly, when I perform this experiment it won't be ideal. I won't be able to control all the variables. Originally I thought I could get everyone together in a park near my house, but as I've had to ask friends of friends, I think it would be rather presumptuous of me to ask them all to come out of their ways for my experiment. Instead I'm going to have to carry out the studies and first tests over at least a week, all in different locations. Hopefully I'll be able to have them all either indoors (assuming that wherever I have to go there is some sort of building) or outdoors (which will be rather impractical if it rains).

more method...

So, that's my method. Now there are just a few more things to work out. First of all, I forgot to mention this in my last post, each slide show will have an equal number of Asian models (equal number of males and females) and Anglo-Saxon models (equal number of males and females).
The other thing I have to work out is how long to leave between the study and test. I'm not sure whether to do them on the same day; either leaving an hour in between or performing them right after each other, or to leave a considerable amount of time in between. One experiment I read about left 3 weeks between study and test, but it seems like that would be more memory testing than just own-race bias. Another option is to perform more than one test e.g. one week after the study, then 3 weeks after the study. I suppose then I would have to change the aim a bit to include not only "to determine whether a person from one race is able to distinguish between faces of their own race more accurately than those of another race" but also something like "and whether these results change after a period of time".
My current plan is to leave one hour between the study and first test and then one week between the study and second test.

Method...in progress

Okay, so last post was about a study I'd found online that's really helpful for my method. This post is me working out my method.
The first stage of my experiment will be the study. I'll arrange pictures of models' faces in a slide show with a timer to regulate how long it remains on each slide. I'll set the timer to 4 seconds. I'll insert a blank slide between each photograph, the slide show will remain on each blank slide for 2 seconds. This slide show will be shown to all my volunteers.
In the test, I will create a different slide show will some of the same pictures from the study and some pictures of different models' faces. This slide show will be shown to all volunteers. They will be asked to give a yes or no answer to the question "Have I shown you this face before?" for each model. While there will be no timer on the slide show, if at 2 minutes they have still not given an answer, there will have to give an answer and the next picture will be displayed.

Research

I found a different study online, this one was actually free to access. In the introduction it says that although several independant studies have confirmed the cross-race effect, other studies have lead to different results. They claim that there are a number of possible reasons for this including the type of stimulus used, the encoding time and the delay between study and test. This lead to a number of questions for me, the most important being that I had thought that the study and test were the same thing. But obviously they're not. So, what's the difference?
Well apparently this sort of experiment is made up of two main stages, not one. I'd intended to just show the pictures of models to my volunteers and ask "have I shown you this face before?" all in one go, but this isn't how it's done. Instead the first stage is the study where faces are shown to the volunteers for a set amount of time (in this study it was 3 seconds with an interstimulus time of 1.5 seconds). During the study the volunteers aren't asked any questions about the faces, just told to remember the faces. The next stage is the actual test. The volunteers are shown faces and asked questions (in this study they were asked if they had been shown the faces before and just had to give a yes/no answer. There was no time limit, the picture remained until they had answered.) This method of performing the experiment, with both a study and test, makes a lot more sense. It's rather exciting, I feel like I'm a considerable way closer to performing my SRP.
The report also confused me with mention of an "encoding time". When I first read this phrase I had no idea what it meant, however I think, it refers to how long each image is shown in the study.
Another question the introduction raised for me was "is there more than one type of possible stimulus?" I'd thought not, you could only show pictures (or maybe computer-generated faces). However after reading their method, I think what they mean is the type/quality of picture instead of completely different types of stimulus. For example they go into a lot a detail about the picture: the background was digitally removed, the colour resolution and pixels of the images remained the same the light in the image was fixed etc.
During the discussion of this report, which was titled "Recognizing faces across continents: The effect of within-race variations on the own-race bias in face recognition" the authors suggested another reason that different studies have found varying results. It is because the definition of race in these cross-race effect experiments is rarely given. For example if the races being studied were termed black and white, it would be assumed that white South Africans would be able to distinguish the faces of white Americans as well as other white South African faces, and that they would find black American faces just as hard to distinguish as black South African faces. But this is not always the case. Their conclusion was that own-race bias (another term for cross-race effect) should be "retired from literature" as race cannot be defined with precision and this can result in false conclusions. Basically, they've said me whole experiment is pointless. Ah well, I still find it interesting.
NB. In case anyone's interested, the website where I found all this is http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=christian=meissner

Good news! I have another two Asian girls since I last updated (bringing my current total up to 4 Asian girls) and maybe, just maybe, a few more Asian guys; a friend said she'd ask around at her youth group and another friend said they'd ask around at school. On the negative side, I think quite a few people have gotten the wrong impression of me and think that I'm crazed and obsessive, understandable really as I have been going up to people and saying "What country were you born in?". Ah, the sacrifices one must make for science.

Umm..., I've come across a few bumps in the road. Basically all the little but vital details that, when I decided to go with the facial recognition experiment, I thought "I'll work it out later". Well, that later has come, but unfortunately the answers to all my problems haven't.
First of all, I need volunteers. I wanted at least 32 between the ages of 14 and 17: 16 anglo-saxons who were born and raised in Australia (8 boys, 8 girls) and 16 Asians who were born in Asia and have been in Australia for less than 10 years (8 boys, 8 girls). It turns out that it's harder than I thought to find 32 people who fit my specifications. I've got enough anglo girls and I think enough guys (I just haven't asked them all yet). I have 2 asian girls and 1, only 1, asian guy. So I've got a few solutions, sort of:
1. Go round to every person in my grade, then perhaps in other grades until I find enough girls, and hopefully some of them will have brothers.
2. Maybe increase my age restrictions if I still don't have enough.
3. Decrease the number of volunteers (but I really don't want to as I think I've got the minimum as it is).
4. If worse comes to worst, don't have the separate genders; either blend them of cut the guys completely.
Now, to the other problems I'm facing.
1. I was going to use pictures of models, but I need more than one picture of each model and how do i get those?
2. I need to work out the questions to ask in my experiment. At the moment I don't have much of an idea.
Solutions:
1. don't know
2. Research. Try and get a copy of that report I've mentioned in previos blogs and see how they carried out their (more advanced, more acurate) experiment.
NOTE: I also have to get the permission notes written.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There's so much to do!
Also, I apologise for the way this blog rambles on. Well, my username isn't jabbering jess for nothing.

This blog goes back to the facial recogntion topic, which at the moment I think is my favourite. I now have a name for it: the cross-race effect. (I didn't make it up, I found the term whilst researching.) But please Ms Zhang, if it's really not going to work, please tell me straight out. I know you said that the global warming experiment would be better, and I really do value your advice, but for some reason I really want to do this experiment and if there's a fair chance that it will work I think I'm prepared to take it, I just don't want to dig myself into a hole.
The facial recognition one would also, I think, be easier to perform. There's no equipment that will be impossible to access or expensive to purchase. At the moment my idea is to only use two different cultures because I wouldn't be able to get large enough groups of 3 or more cultures. The two cultural backgounds I'll use are Asian and Anglo-Saxon. I'm aiming for around 16 people in each group, half boys half girls. All the volunteers will be around my age - say between 14 and 17- because 1) this will remove one of the variables and 2) this is the age group in which I know the most people. I'll use not well-known models (they can't recognise the models) of both cultures as the people they have to distinguish between. This will work well because most models are of the same height and build so one will have to concentrate more on the facial features and because photos of models won't be hard to come by. As yet, I'm not totally sure how to question the volunteers. I might sure them the pictures in a sequence and ask "have I shown you this person before?". One of the experiments that was conducted in Germany (which I posted the other day) showed the volunteers the faces then left a gap of up to 3 weeks before they tested the recognition.
Unfortuanately I haven't been able to find too many examples of how the cross- race effect has been tested. Most sites just mention it in regards to witness-identifiaction. I managed to track down the Meissner and Brigham, 2001 study into the cross-race effect that was mentioned on nearly all of the sites, only to find that I had to buy it before I could read it. Maybe I'll find it a library.
For my experiment, the aim would sound something like "Is a person able to recognise faces from their own culure better than those from another culture?" I think the independant variable is the person and their culture and the dependant variable the effect of culture on recognising faces.

Okay, I've temporarily moved away from the facial recognition idea and am back to global warming. (I apologise to the people reading this blog- it must be really hard to follow.) As shown in the mind map in my second post, one of the aspects of global warming that I thought about studying was the effect global warming and rising sea temperatures will have on coral reefs.

To conduct the experiment I would obtain a sample of a species of coral and place it in a fish tank. Over the fish tank I'd put one of those heat-lamps, maybe similar to those used for pet reptiles. The temperature of the water and lamp would begin at the temperature the coral is used to, then after a certain amount of time (say, 2 days) I'd increase the temperature. The increase would depend on the rate scientists believe that global warming will warm our seas. Every 2 days I'd increase the temperature by the same amount and observe how the coral reacts. Obviously I'd have to do a lot more research into how coral survives so that I could place the right type of water and other things in the fish tank with it to ensure that the coral doesn't die because I've left out a vital nutrient as opposed to because of the temperature increase. If time and availability permit, I would hopefully be able to study at least 2 or 3 corals instead of just 1, removing some of the variables of the experiment.

I think the aim would be something like "Do increases in sea temperature have an effect on coral reefs?" The independant variable would be the increase in temperature while the effect on the coral would be the dependant variable.

There has been quite a lot of research into the changes in coral reefs due to rising temperatures. According to my research, the coral dies due to a process called 'bleaching'. The rise in sea temperature causes coral to release the food producing algae that is its symbiont (I think that's a word, it is according to dictionary.com anyway). Without the algae the reefs turn white as they die. Coral can recover from bleaching, but most do not. Fish species also suffer from the bleaching of coral but I don't think test that in a fish tank for my SRP. For anyone wanting a bit more knowledge of this but not an overwhelming tidal wave of words try http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/warming-coral.html .

This picture is also from that siteand shows what was once a living reef but now resembles rubble.

Hooray!!!!!!! I found something. This is just a brief extract from from a site titled Investigative Interviewing Research Laboratory, url is http://iilab.utep.edu/eid.htm .

Cross-Racial Identification

Faces of one's own race are better remembered when compared with faces of another, less familiar race. This phenomenon, referred to as the "cross-race effect" or "own-race bias," has been demonstrated across a variety of memory tasks (e.g., recognition, identification, forced choice, etc.), in both adults and children, and across a variety of ethnic groups (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.). Our research has focused on explicating the cognitive or social psychological mechanisms that might underlie the phenomenon. More specifically, we have been examining the role of perceptual learning and encoding-based processes that might substantiate superior memory for own-race faces.

This is another extract from what I'm pretty sure is A German University -but as the name is in German I can't be positive. Thankfully they had an English translation underneath.

In research on the perception and recognition of human faces, the
Own-Race Bias has been the subject of numerous studies and is known as
a robust phenomenon (Meissner & Brigham, 2001). It depicts the worse
recognition performance with faces from persons of other ethnic groups
(out-group faces) compared with faces of the own ethnic group (in-group
faces). Despite some smaller gradual differences in the extent of the
Own-Race Bias (Sporer, 1992), this effect occurs with most ethnic
groups (see Meissner & Brigham, 2001), whereas Blacks and Whites are
the ethnic groups whose recognition performance has been tested in most
studies. It was the aim of this dissertation, to test Sporer's (2001)
In-Group/Out-Group Model. This model is based on earlier theoretical
explanations of the Own-Race Bias, and integrates these theories to
build a basic structure for a more complete explanation of this effect.
A central assumption of the model is the emergence of different kinds
of encoding strategies depending on the perception of a person as being
a member of the own ethnic group or another ethnic group, respectively.
The model predicts that once a face is perceived as an in-group face
it will be processed holistically, whereas out-group faces will be
processed feature-based, leading to worse recognition performance with
these faces.
...
Experiment 2 investigated the recognition performance with faces whose
outer features (eg. hair, ears) were deleted, compared with 'normal'
faces. Participants were n = 64 Turks and n = 64 Germans. By the
deletion of outer features, feature-based encoding was supposed to be
more difficult, thus leading to worse recognition performance with
out-group faces compared to in-group faces. Additionally, the interval
between encoding and test varied between immediate and three weeks.
Test stimuli were faces from African-Americans, Caucasian-Americans,
Turks and Germans. A worse recognition performance for faces without
outer features was found, independently of ethnic membership after the
delay of three weeks. When the recognition performance was tested
immediately, a Own Race effect was found for faces without outer
features, indicating feature-based encoding of out-group faces, that
disappears after longer intervals between encoding and recognition.
Experiment 3 investigated the Own-Race Bias by testing two German
groups who were supposed to have different amounts of contact with
other ethnic groups. The groups were n = 32 police officers working at
the international airport in Frankfurt/Main (high contact) and n = 32
students at the University of Giessen (low contact). Test stimuli were
faces from African-Americans, Hispanics, Turks and Germans. Both
groups showed equal recognition performance when analysing overall
performance, however, police officers performed better with black faces
than did students, whereas students showed better performance with
German faces than police officers. In a second experiment
(Delayed-Matching task) with the same participants, the view of the
test face (frontal vs. half-profile) was varied. While performance in
the frontal-view condition was almost perfect for all of the four
ethnic groups, the performance decreased with increasing social
distance from the participants (i.e. performance was worse for the
black faces, followed by the Hispanic, Turkish and German faces) in the
half-profile condition. These results are interpreted as evidence for
an influence of contact on the Own-Race Bias and as evidence for
feature-based encoding of out-group faces.

Hmmmm...facial recognition not looking too promising at the moment. All the sites and studies I've found so far are about the differences between people of different cultures recognising facial expressions, not the actual faces, which is what I'm looking for.

Okay, I've come up with an idea that has nothing at all to do with global warming. I don't know if it will work as an SRP topic but I think it has potential. I want to test facial recognition between people of different cultures. In other words, does someone asian find it harder to distinguish anglo-saxon faces than other asian faces and vice-versa.
I got the idea in history when my teacher, straying from the topic of the Vietnam War, somehow got onto the topic of facial recognition between cultures. According to him studies have actually been conducted to show that, in his words, people from one culture who haven't been exposed to other cultures think that everyone from that foreign culture look the same.
I spoke to Ms Zhang about it, who confirmed that a lot of studies have been carried out into this area of research. However she also said that it might not be feasible on the small scale I would be conducting it on and there are too many variables. So at the moment I really don't know what to do. Ms Zhang thinks that the global warming experiment would be better but the only problem with that is that I don't have an actual experiment in mind. My next step is....research. Lots of it I think, if I'm going to be able to determine whether the facial recognition will work. Wish me luck.

This doesn't relate to the phytoplankton aspect of my research at all, it's more of a mental note as to how to test different ways of removing/absorbing/destroying greenhouse gases. I'd thought I wouldn't be able to do something like this because I wouldn't be able to contain samples of the gases, but one of my friends suggested that I use car exhaust fumes. I still don't know how or what I'd use them for, but I thought it was worth keeping in mind.

I've done some research into ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere but I'm still not sure if the idea will be suitable for my science task.
I found out that in 2007, Virgin launched a competition with a prize of $25 million (!!!!) for the person who can come up with the best way of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (there are catches though, like it has to be tested over a 10 year period before the majority of the prize can be claimed etc.). The competition closed in January this year and the judges received over 900 entries- that's a lot of ideas I can test- but I think they must still be adjudicating them because I can't find out what the winning and other best solutions were. However the website did say that the judges thought that some of the more promising solutions involved machines which use chemical reactions to remove gases. I don't really have a clue what those machines would involve though so I don't think I can base my science project around one. (For anyone that's interested the website is http://www.virgin.com/subsites/virginearth)
On wikipedia I found out some ways of removing methane. Although no processes have been invented with this specific purpose, a number a processes already exist which involve the removal or destruction of the gas. These include combustion- in which methane is destroyed as it passes through eg fire-, chemical decomposition- where some sort of radicals react with methane and it's destroyed, I don't want to research this topic because I think it would both confuse and bore me to tears- and biological decomposition- in which the methane is broken down by bacteria in soil. I think the last option sounds the most promising, both for the environment and for my SRP considering that having more fires (which release greenhouse gases) to get rid of another greenhouse gas seems ridiculous and I don't think I can bring myself to do my SRP on something to do with radicals. But I'll need to do more research into this before I make a decision on doing it for science.
There are two things that have astonished my so far relating to my SRP. They are:
1. the incredibly large amount of research that there is to do for anything and the increasing number of ideas that branch out from that first idea the more research you do which all require huge amounts of research themselves.
2. the number of things I don't know about the world. I'm not saying that I thought I knew everything, far from it, but I thought I had a far better understanding of things than I now realise I do. It's a very humbling experience.
Back to my research. I said in my last blog that getting rid of carbon dioxide wasn't as much of a problem as removing other gases because all we needed to do was stop logging and replant the forests which we ignorantly destroyed. I'm coming to realise it's not quite so simple as I originally anticipated. Don't get me wrong, I knew it wasn't going to be as easy as snapping your fingers; for starters, where do we plant all these trees? So much of the land that was originally forested is now urban settlement or farm land etc.. Also, Earth's population is increasing so more land will have to be cleared to make room for new homes, suburbs, even cities. But that last point is moving more into a humanitarian aspect which I want to avoid for my SRP. Anyway, but I still thought that the carbon dioxide issue was relatively easy to deal with. During my research however I found that many groups are brainstorming ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere-emphasising the point that there's more to it than planting trees. One process that might hold the answer is something called "ocean fertilisation". Never heard of it? Me neither. Apparently phytoplankton, found in oceans, is a major absorber of CO2. At the end of its 60 day life span, phytoplankton sinks in the ocean, taking its absorbed CO2 with it. Some environmentalists believe that increasing the amount of phytoplankton in our oceans is one of the best ways of removing CO2. The way to increase the plankton is to add iron- which is needed for its growth- to the oceans. But it's not as wonderful as it first appears. Research is not conclusive that the CO2 is permanately stored in the deceased phytoplankton/water (at this stage I'm not 100% sure which). Also the process of increasing phytoplankton through iron will be very expensive, and some argue that this money could be better used in other areas of research. Some groups fear that the plankton, once it has increased and spread, will not be able to be controlled, causing other problems in terms of water pollution and ecosystems. Different research shows that to use the phytoplankton to remove only 30% of our CO2, we would need enough to cover an area greater then that of the Southern Ocean.
So, I don't know if ocean fertilisation is a sensible option, but it sounds promising enough and could very well be the basis of my SRP.

I just thought of another possible topic that isn't on my mind map. It relates to the pollution/greenhouse gases heading.
It's all very well to say "we need to stop polluting", and the ways to do so seem logical enough: use less energy and switch to more sustainable and environmentally friendly energy sources. But what about the gases that are already in the atmosphere? I acknowledge that if we suddenly stop releasing greenhouse gases the threat of global warming will be a, well, a lot less threatening. But even so the effects of global warming have already started. Glaciers are already melting at an increased rate, the world is already experiencing more extreme weather and more ferocious storms. Even if we stop heating up the world now, we've already made a difference, so it seems the next step would be reversing the damage we've already done.
Last year, milllions of people from around the world united for one purpose, to highlight the need for reducing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. And nature has provided us with a way of doing so, trees! So if we plant lots and lots of trees instead of cutting them down, the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere will go down as well, right?
But what about the other gases? Gases like carbon monoxide, methane and nitrous oxide? How do we get rid of those? Trees don't absorb those too.
I haven't done any research into this specific topic yet, so for all I know, there could already be a way to get rid of them or, at the other extreme, scientists and environmentalists could have no clue whatsoever and there would be nothing for me to test in my research task. I'm hoping that there are a few theories circulating as to how to deal with these gases which I can compare and test.

Whew! It just took me about 5 minutes to access this page because I'd thought I'd forgotten my password. Turns out I was using the wrong username. Anyway, back to the science task.

I wanted to do an experiment with some form of environmental aspect, I don't know what environmental aspect but, well, it's better than nothing. I've drawn a sort of mind map during my attempt to think of a topic. It's a very simplified (very very simplified) description of global warming, with blue lines branching out listing some possible sollutions to these problems and pink lines suggesting possible research tasks.

HELLO WORLD!!!