The Prospects of Hydropower

Water. It’s everywhere; from the oceans that cover almost 70% of the world, to the countless lakes scattered throughout the country, to the puddles in the street after this morning’s rain. There are billions of gallons of water on the plant and unlike other resources, such asnatural gas and oil, water is not hidden thousands of feet underground. It is easily found and accessible to billions, and is even recycled millions of times per day.This is exactly why many scientists are pushing for further exploration of water. Not to find more of it though, but to find how viable an option it is as a major sustainable energy source.

For a few decades now, scientists have been experimenting with the concept of renewable energy. There have been tremendous advances made throughout this time period, but there is still a lot of work to do. While many people agree that we need to make more improvements within the field, many people are also debating whether or not renewable energy will ever be cost efficient. As of right now, there are little renewable energy programs that are reasonably priced against the standard fossil fuels. With more research, I believe that hydropower can become the most efficient and reliable source of energy.

Hydro-power is an oft overlooked source of energy, and many people do not realize the amount of energy we receive from hydro-power already. There are upwards of 45,000 dams in the world and most if not all of these dams contribute significant amounts of energy to their surrounding areas. These dams only contribute a small amount of the world’s total technically feasible hydro-power potential, which is estimated to be around 14,000 Terrawatthours/year, of which about 8,000 TWh/year is considered “economically feasible” (H.J. Wagner and J. Mathur).  As a whole, these dams contribute about 19% of the world’s electricity, which is surprising to some, and most dams have paid themselves off through the amount of energy they have generated (H.J. Wagner and J. Mathur).

Generating electricity via water is actually a very simple process. Hydro-power can be done essentially anywhere that water moves from one point to another, lower, point. For dams, the water is moved from the side with the water source on it, to the artificially lower side. As the water moves from one side to the other, it passes through generators which are turned and produce electricity. This is similar to how water wheels generate power, shifting water from one ledge to the next one. This happens while the wheel itself moves in the opposite direction to move each “lower point” into the same higher position. It is estimated that

Where the dams have had disappointing results has been in their impact on the environment. When designing and building dams, engineers did not take into account the effect they would have on their surrounding ecosystems. Dams cause huge disruptions into the natural landscape and ecosystems of rivers. Their disruptions are likened to the disruption caused by logging projects on forests. The two are very similar, often times entire portions of forests are demolished to make room for the dams.

Where the dams have had disappointing results has been in their impact on the environment. When designing and building dams, engineers did not take into account the effect they would have on their surrounding ecosystems. Dams cause huge disruptions into the natural landscape and ecosystems of rivers. Their disruptions are likened to the disruption caused by logging projects on forests. The two are very similar, often times entire portions of forests are demolished to make room for the dams.

 

In order to make any innovation in the hydro-power field, researchers must decide if they will be able to reduce its environmental impact. Dams are the most practical means of generating hydro-power, but it is not the only way. As mentioned, water wheels generate power in the same means as dams, and they as an aggregate, they have less of an environmental impact. After researching this topic, I believe that hydro-power can be developed in mass this way, but it will not be nearly as efficient as dams have been. In order to maximize the energy generated with water, we will need to make the tough decision whether we will lose these large chunks of forestland, in order to generate millions of kilowatt hours worth of energy for years to come.

Works Cited

1. H.J. Wagner and J. Mathur, Introduction to Hydro Energy Systems, Green Energy and Technology, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20709-9_8, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.

First photo courtesy of Michael Stone

Second photo courtesy of Nick Neely

Your Brain On Violent Video Games

In the most recent version of the Grand Theft Auto video game series players have the capability to kill police using a menagerie of weapons, pay for the services of prostitutes, as well as ingest large quantities of drugs and alcohol. Although the graphic nature of this game may seem like an exception, a multitude of games available on the market today feature game-play that condones explicit violence. As all forms of media, especially video games, are becoming more violent, graphic, and more realistic, concerns are growing about the potential side effects of repeated exposure to violent media. One possible consequence of chronic exposure to violence in the media is increased desensitization to violence and violent images. Scientists have speculated that this desensitization to violence may lead to an increase in aggression, but it was not until a recent study that this connection was actually made to be legitimate. In an experiment conducted by university researchers, evidence was found demonstrating a link between acute desensitization due to violent media exposure and increased aggression.

The directors of the experiment began by selecting sixty-four undergraduates out of a pool of two thousand, based on what types of games the students played and how often during the week they played them. Next participants were randomly assigned to play either a violent or non-violent video game. The violent games included Call of Duty, Hitman and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The non violent games included Jak and Daxter, MVP Baseball 2004, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. After playing their games participants were then shown a series of neutral or violent images and were told by experimenters to think about their reactions to the images. This stage of the experiment was used primarily to determine whether individual participants experienced some desensitization to violent images after exposure to violent video games.

Following the picture viewing, participants completed what they believed to be a competitive reaction time task. Participants were told that they and an “opponent” would have to press a button as fast as possible on each of twenty-five trials, and that whoever was slower would receive a blast of white noise through headphones. However, there really were no opponents opposite of the participants; all actions were controlled by a computer. Prior to each trial the participants set the noise level of their “opponent”, varying from 60DB to 105 DB. Participants could also determine how long their “opponents” could suffer by determining the duration of the noise blast from 0s to 2.5s. Essentially participants were given a pseudo-weapon by which they could inflict damage onto their “opponent”. This gave the experimenters a reliable and valid measure for aggression. In order to receive reliable data from the participants, the noise level and duration that the participants experienced was made constant.

As the scientists had predicted those individuals who played a violent video game showed higher levels of aggression than those who played a non-violent game. The effect was the same regardless of previous exposure to violent video games. However, when reviewing the desensitizing affects that occurred throughout the experiment, those individuals who had little exposure to violent video games experienced greater desensitization than those who had greater exposure to violent games. The experimenters could not come to an official conclusion as to why this occurred but they established a few hypotheses.

Prior to this experiment many scientists have suggested that desensitization to violence overtime or in the short-term can lead to changes in aggression. However, this study is the first to provide experimental evidence of this connection between desensitization due to violent media exposure and increases in aggression.

Works Cited:

Engelhardt, Christopher R; Bartholow Bruce; Kerr, Geoffery; Bushman, Brad. “This is your Brain on Violent Video Games.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology Vol. 47 Issue 5: pages1033-1036.

Energy. It is the string that binds us all together. Whoever we may be, wherever we may live, and however old we are, we all use and depend upon it every day. And as a general rule, we all want more. So when it starts to hurt our environment, we rationalize it. Oh, its only a hurting it a little bit, or its only me doing it, so that will be alright. Or even more disturbing, we look for any fake, unscientific reason that we can find to convince ourselves that it isn’t real. Because if its all a lie of the liberal media, than I don’t have to pay attention to my energy usage, and I don’t have to pay for development of alternative energies. Anyways, there are many solutions proposed, some far out, and some not. The paper “Loss analysis of emitter-wrap-through silicon solar cells by means of experiment and three-dimensional device modeling” explores some of the solar energy aspect of the solution and researches on whether a cheaper model of the classic photovoltaic cell could become efficient enough on its energy conversion to replace the more common, more expensive version.

    The world’s climate is changing. That is fact. The icecaps are melting, the polar bears are dying, and soon all of the people will follow. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point. Fossil fuels are bad for us. They’re basically like cheating at life. Let me explain. They are easy, cheap, and highly condensed energies, but they ruin the environment, and there isn’t really many more of them (the cheap, easy to access ones at least). So you are basically cheating your future for the present. This has stop if we are to continue living on this wonderful earth. Unfortunately there are things standing in the way of our ‘green’ takeover. While most of these are corporations or special interests, we will be talking only about the technological gaps that need to first be made. One of the biggest of which, is to lower the cost of ‘green’ energy solutions without lowering the quality of them.

In short, we need to make them more economically sound. They need to be able to compete on the free market with other fossil fuel products, and with coal produced electricity. This needs to happen to get the people behind a ‘green’ economy. And one of the major stumbling blocks in this sense is that of coal power. For how much power it produces, coal power is extremely cheap and easy to produce. And this is a problem because to become green, solar power must be able to compete with that, which it just can’t right now. Most of this is due to the high cost of materials to produce solar panels. A new way to make solar panels, dubbed EWT panels dramatically reduces the cost of making the solar panels, but unfortunately also decreases the energy conversion efficiency by a significant amount.

    The classic photovoltaic cells average around 25% efficiency, while the EWT (emitter-wrap-through) cells are averaging around 18%. Researchers are saying that this is due to the historically low ‘FF’ values of the EWT cells. Most agree that the low FF levels can blame this is on the relatively high resistance in the rear end of the cell as compared to the classic cell’s.  This article attacks that assumption to see if it holds water, and if not, to see what may be causing the EWT cells to be performing under expected efficiency values as predicted by the common device theory.

    By means of many 3D device simulation the researchers in the article showed “that the VIRE effect causes the front emitter of an EWT solar cell to operate systematically at higher bias conditions than the external voltage probed at the rear emitter. As the difference of the bias of front and rear emitter diminishes with increasing external voltage, the VIRE effect reduces the
FF of EWT cells.” This results in a less efficient photovoltaic cell, but according to the researchers, they have found a way to at least partially correct this. They say that their “simulations predict that EWT design with a nonpassivated rear emitter and a homogeneous emitter diffusion leads to an efficiency improvement of about 1% absolute as compared to the common FJ design.” So basically, decreasing the resistivity of the base metal by a significant amount can result in the increase of efficiency by 1%, which may seem small, but would save many people quite a bit of money.

    In conclusion, EWT cells show much potential due to their relatively low cost of production as long as the producers find other creative ways to raise their efficiency, because, as significant as 1% is, it is just simply not enough to compete with coal.

Works Cited

Ulzhöfer, Christian, Pietro P. Altermatt, Nils-Peter Harder, and Rolf Brendel. "Loss Analysis of Emitter-wrap-through Silicon Solar Cells by Means of Experiment and Three-dimensional Device Modeling." Journal of Applied Physics 107.10 (2010): 1-12. Web. 23 Sept. 2011. <http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=101&sid=f907b4bd-d6e2-4366-b166-7369d22f13a6%40sessionmgr110&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=aph&AN=51060806>.

Rattling Your Brain

Picture By: Liz Henry

I remember when I was 13 years old and I joined this new soccer team. Everything was great until I found out that every girl had to wear headgear during every game and practice. This headgear was so ugly and uncomfortable to wear, it drove me so crazy that I would pretend that I left it at home so I wouldn’t have to wear it. They required us to wear it to prevent us from concussions. At that time, I would have rather experienced a concussion than be seen wearing this hideous headgear that felt like a helmet. But at that age, I never fully understood how serious a concussion was. A blow to the head causing your brain to move rapidly inside your skull doesn’t sound like something that should be taken lightly. But should girls like me have to wear headgear to protect us? The Journal of Athletic Training searches to discover differences of symptoms between high school male and female athletes.
The objective of this study was to find differences in symptoms between male and female concussed high school athletes. The female athlete population has grown tremendously throughout the years, thus causing scientists and doctors wanting to study differences in male and female injuries and their symptoms. They wanted to compare symptoms, length of the symptoms, and time it took to rejoin their sport after experiencing a concussion.
To test this, they collected data from both 2005-2006 and 2006-2007. They had a year 1 and a year 2 to look at. The injury and exposure data was collected from High-School Sports Related Injury Surveillance System, RIO. RIO is an online data base that tracks and records injuries in high school students. Male sports that were studied were football, basketball, baseball, soccer and wrestling. Female sports were soccer, volleyball, softball, and basketball. In year 1 they had 425 Athletic Trainers involved, in year 2 they had 316. Each year, the Athletic Trainers were to log on to RIO and record injury and athlete-exposure data. The differences between these terms are that Athlete-exposure was defined as one athlete participating in one sport. Where as an injury was described into three parts, it had to have occurred during a high-school practice or competition, it required the assistance of an Athletic Trainer or physician, and it required restriction of play for at least one day. In year 1 they were only asked to record primary symptoms, but in year 2 they changed it, and asked to record every single symptom. Due to the purpose of the study, only concussion occurrences were collected. They took into account weight, height, what time it occurred, practice or game, new or old injuries, and safety equipment worn.
In year one, 391 concussions were recorded, 283 males and 108 females. In year two there were 421 concussions, 327 males and 94 females. During year 1, symptoms were primarily headaches. When they looked at symptoms in regards to sex, males reported more amnesia and confusion than did females. During year 2 headaches were again, the most common symptom. Males recorded more amnesia and confusion than females, however females recorded more drowsiness and sensitivity to noise than males. In regards to symptom resolution, they found that it took 3 or more days for both females and males to recover. But they could not distinguish a difference between them. Out of all the athletes, 64% could return to play after 9 days. However, for females it averaged 3-6 days after concussion to return. Males took an average of 7-9 days. These results were not significant enough to discern any differences between males and females.
In conclusion, they found that differences in symptoms are not very pronounced. In regards to symptom resolution and recovery time, both males and females had similar results. The largest difference was shown in different types of symptoms after the injury. Males had more cognitive symptoms and females recorded more neurobehavioral and somatic symptoms. Concussions are one of the most difficult injuries to assess due to the fact that no biological sign can signal a physician or Athletic Trainer that you have one. Doctors and Athletic Trainers have to go off of symptoms and information that is given to them from the athlete. This is why it is so important that symptoms and results are studied because concussions are a serious issue and cannot be overlooked.

Susan A. Saliba, et al. "Sex Differences in Concussion Symptoms of High School Athletes." Journal of Athletic Training 46.1 (2011): 76-84. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 26 Sept. 2011.

A Modern Study in Neuroscience

When a person remembers something, there is a certain biological process that happens inside their brain involving a communication across neurons that allows them to recall details about a past event. Memories come in all shapes and sizes. For instance, one might have a very vivid and detailed memory about an event that happened five years ago while remembering very little about an event that happened five weeks ago. Memories can be tied to particular songs as when that song plays a certain memory is recalled automatically. Researchers at the University of North Carolina recently performed a study to figure out exactly why some memories are easier to recall in detail than others. In this post, I will summarize how the researchers working at UNC performed an experiment in which they claim that memories are formed within different levels of specificity in the brain and can be enhanced by musical ques.

The way that researchers can study the formation and recall of memory has been recently performed using function magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. This machine will scan the brain and show the parts of the brain that have the most electrical activity. Researchers utilized this by scanning the brains of subjects while asking them to recall certain events.This way they could observe the amount of electrical activity in the brain of a subject recalling memory. And in this case, the electrical activity is a direct correlate to the function of recalling memory. It was by this method that it was found that there are three different levels within the brain that use electrical activity which corresponds to levels of specificity of a memory. This is to say that the area of the brain that deals with highly specific memories will show high electrical activity when the subject is recalling a specific memory.

This particular study deals with primarily the recall of autobiographical memory. This is memory that is about oneself. For example, “I remember getting a dog for my 12th birthday”. In previous studies, it has been concluded that memory forms in three varying levels of specificity within in the brain. The third level being the most vivid type where one actually feels like they are re-experiencing the memory and the first level being more generalized memories of oneself such as “I lived in Chicago when I was 6”. The goal of this study performed by UNC was to determine how music effects the neural regions while recalling autobiographical memory.

The hypothesis of this study was towards the idea that by playing popular songs to participants, they would describe more vivid memories than participants who were asked to recall a certain event without music. This would provide the conclusion that music inspires a different neurological process than simply trying to remember an event. The study was to be performed using sixteen healthy adults between the age of 16 and 23. Each participant would then have their brain scan while listening to a popular song from the current decade. 30 songs were played and while each was playing, the subject was asked to describe in as much detail as possible what memory that the song made them think of. Also the subject was asked to rate the memory on a scale 1-4, 1 being low level of vividness and 4 being feeling as if they were reliving the memory. As they were describing the memory, the fMRI would record the electrical activity in the different regions of their brain that deal with recalling memory. There was also a control group, which is the group in an experiment that is designed to set a baseline to compare. In this case the control group was a group of subjects that were asked to simply recall a certain event such as what they did on their birthday last year. The idea was that the electrical activity of the brain while recalling with musical cues could be compared to the activity while recalling without.

The results of this study proved to be a success for the researchers. First evidence of music effecting memory recall was found in that it took participants on average about 5 seconds to recall a memory when listening to music whereas the participants without music took on average about 12 seconds to recall a memory. It was also found that the participants with musical ques on average rated their memory to be 3.2 on the vividness scale as described before whereas the average rating for participants without music was 2.3. (Giovanello, Ford, and Addis 2971-3150) This alone clearly is evidence that music effects the brains ability to recall specific memories.

Furthermore, the results of the fMRI showed different images of electrical activity between the experimental and control group (with music and without). Subjects in the experimental group showed much more electrical activity in the region of the brain that deals with level 1 memories which are the most vivid types. They also showed a fare amount of activity in the level 2 and 3 regions of the brain. Whereas subjects in the control group showed less activity in the level one region of the brain and more so in the level 2 region which deals with does not provide the really vivid details that makes you feel as if you are re-living the experience.

This study took advantage of music’s ability to cue different memory levels of auto-biographical memory specificity,and examined how patterns of neural activity differed across these different memory levels. Using musical cues also allowed participants to retrieve a wide range of memories that had not been retrieved many times previously. It was concluded that the evidence in this study serves as further support for the use of music as a retrieval cue in autobiographical memory tasks. (Giovanello, Ford, and Addis 2971-3150) It also further supports the previous claim that there are three core regions of the brain that deal with memory recall, all of which deal with different levels of specificity. So the main conclusion that this study provides is that musical cues allowed participants in to retrieve all three levels of autobiographical memory naturally, without explicit instruction. Additionally, the memories retrieved were often highly emotional (both negative and positive) while the memories retrieved in the control group were not. These findings support the use of musical cues in future studies of autobiographical memory, and may be applied to those in populations such as depressed individuals and older adults, who may experience difficulty retrieving specific memories.



Works Cited:

* Giovanello, Kelly, Jackelyn Ford, and Donna Addis. "Differential neural activity during search of specific and general autobiographical memories elicited by musical cues." Neuropsychologia. 49.11 (2011): 2971-3150. Web. 21 Sep. 2011.

* Photo credit : http://www.radpod.org/2007/09/01/polymicrogyria/

Why We Cite

Citing is important in the academic world so that credit is given to the rightful owners of intellectual property. If an author publishes work and can express a new, novel idea, this idea is deemed to be rightfully his. For the integrity and betterment of academia, it is important that these rightful owners can feel safe publishing their ideas knowing that they will be credited for them. It helps to promote new and innovative ideas, because intellectual property rights are respected and enforced, which helps people build off of one-another's ideas instead of taking them.


We will be citing the sources we use for the remainder of our blog posts in order to establish our legitimacy as authors and to give credit to the authors who we are referencing to. We will be citing the sources we use in MLA format. This link will give you an idea of the structure of MLA formatting: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/. We chose MLA over other forms of citation, as it is a universally accepted format and one we are all familiar with.

Defense of the Future

With the 10 year anniversary of September 11th passing recently, a large debate has sparked in the scientific realm. Many scientists have begun to debate the effectiveness and necessity of our biodefense efforts. Some critics, such as the author of “Biodefense since 9/11”, argue that we have spent an enormous amount of money and we have little, if anything, to show for it. Other scientists, like the author of “Understanding Bush’s Biodefense Budget” have argued that it is too early into our biodefense program to make any substantial evaluations. With our nation’s defense and money at stake, though, we must decide whether we give our biodefense program more time to develop or if we should cut our losses and explore other options.

As aforementioned, the author of the editorial entitled “Biodefence Since 9/11” argues that the government’s spending on biodefense have been squandered thus far. With over $50 billion in expenditures there is some substance to his claim. In the past 10 years, we have only been able to produce a few million vaccines for a handful of drugs, much less than the three hundred million we would need for every person in the United States. He also suggests that the government has run the program very inefficiently since it has begun the program. The author essentially argues the biodefense measures are a good idea in theory, but the execution of these programs has not been done well. The author’s opinion certainly seems to be the popular one. 

After searching rather extensively, I finally found an article that argued for increased spending. The author of “Understanding Bush’s Biodefense Budget” argues that the measures since 2001 have been more productive than people give it credit for. At a briefing on Capitol Hill, several doctors that spoke agreed that the budget was originally adequate, but may actually be too small now. One doctor argued that the biodefense funding is inadequate because they are having to spend money to test and evaluate the drugs they have developed. In 2001, the Research and Development, Testing, and Evaluation fund, RDT&E, was used solely for Research and Development since there were no antibiotics to test. With ten years passing though, drugs have begun to make it to the testing and development phase, which means money has to be moved from Research and Development to testing and evaluation, creating a vicious cycle of unbalanced funding.

At the heart of the argument is whether the biodefense programs have been run as efficiently as possible since 9/11. Those who are against the increased spending, point to the $60 billion dollar price tag that biodefense has cost us in the past ten years and how that plays into our countries ever-increasing budget deficit. However, having just read several articles on pharmaceutical drug pipelines, I understand how expensive and time-consuming it is to develop pharmaceutical drugs. I found that it usually costs over half a billion dollars to develop a single drug, and it often takes around ten years to get the product through all the testing phases required by the FDA. It is hard to quantify how efficient the program has been with few drugs to show as real results. It would also seem that when a drug does not make it through the testing phase that it is a failure, but it is much better for our country for ineffective drugs to be sent back to development phase. When we need our biodefense drugs, we would like to be sure that they will work.

With the recent debt debacle, there is a lot of support against any type of government spending that has little obvious benefits There are supposed to be upwards of a trillion dollars worth of cuts in the next ten years, so people will be looking everywhere to find cuts. With this in mind, biodefense measures are unfortunate targets, and can seem somewhat defenseless. The current biodefense programs are just becoming old enough to start producing biodefense antibodies, and it would be unfortunate to cut the programs now. In a little more than a year, we will have our next presidential election, so the debate over biodefense will surely be a hot topic for our country to discuss.

Carbon tax and the debate thereof.

Carbon tax. Does it work?

If you haven’t been living under a rock the past decade and a half, then I’m sure you’ve heard all about global warming and the various ways people are trying to solve that particular problem. One of the many ways recently implemented in Australia is a new “carbon tax” on carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Nature’s article says that a price of 25 US dollars on each tonne of carbon will be levied on Australia’s largest carbon emitters, but there are some (represented by the indymedia article) who oppose this method of counteracting global warming.

According to Nature’s article “Sunday Best” this, while not enough to completely counter Australia’s carbon footprint, is an excellent and revolutionary step in the right direction for countering global warming, saying “The policy breaks new ground, moves in the correct direction and comes at a welcome time, given how climate change has plummeted down the international political agenda over the past year or so.” The article then goes on to say that while some may say it is quite insignificant, “a drop in the ocean”, that it is an important first step for a country that has yet to place any significant limit on carbon emissions. This all sounds great, but as with all things even remotely connected to a political view, there is an exact opposite opinion on the same source material.

The one that I found was from an independent media source based in Australia aptly named indymedia. Their article, selflessly named “Carbon Taxes will not work, do not work, global warming will continue, economic systems are failing us - we must have research and development as a % of GDP and PEOPLE before PROFITS.”, goes on to reiterate exactly what the title of the article says, although in less of a scientific manner, and more of a ‘Its right because I said its right” manner”, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Here is where I would normally say what the article claimed, but really, the title says it all. They claim that carbon taxes are useless, global warming will continue, we need rapid and drastic rearrangement of our economic systems, we need more R&D into cleaner energies, and we need to stop being greedy bastards (liberal interpretation). Now as far as thesis statements, the author of “Sunday Best” basically says that the carbon tax is not only an inherently good thing, but is also a step in the right direction for a country that has long needed to update its policy on carbon emissions. The thesis of the other article is, once again, explained by the unnecessarily long title.

As far as the relative strength of their arguments as they pertain specifically to the new carbon tax in Australia, I believe that the Nature article has the more valid argument. While Nature even says itself that “The package, of course, does not come close to cutting emissions by the amount required to head off the worst of global warming” , it does go on to say that it is the first step that may lead to other, more drastic and more needed environmental legislation. The indymedia article just says that Carbon taxes are bad because the prices get passed on the general public and do not help the environment at all. While the first part of that claim may be entirely true, I think it is foolishness to say that charging companies for their carbon emissions will have no effect on them. At the very least they are going to be self-conscious about it. The pure magnitude of the carbon tax is in itself more than enough to insure that not ALL of the tax will be able to be passed down to the consumer because then nobody in their right mind would buy from them. While the Nature article just takes it for common sense that carbon taxes are inherently good, I find even that half-assed try at an argument superior to the one on the Indymedia site just due to the fact that it makes more sense. (Remember this is only describing the part of the argument pertaining to the new Carbon tax, I actually agree with the rest of the indymedia article). In conclusion, I believe that, while both bring up excellent and valid points, the “Sunday Best” article has the more logical argument behind it, and therefore the one my preference goes to.