Methods to Motivate

This week I researched all the "tried and true" methods to prevent procrastination. After compiling a list of all of them, I tried to reason behind why this particular method would be helpful. I didn't understand why exercising before doing work would help with efficiency but now I understand that after exercising, a chemical, endorphin, is  released in your body making you feel happy, which could make your task seem less daunting. I also implemented one method in my life which was keeping your work environment clutter free, and it worked. I got my work done much faster when my desk was clean because I only thought about my homework rather than my messy room. My next steps are to integrate more of these methods in my life and once I find which ones work, combining them to come up with the best way to stop procrastination.

Unit 8 Reflection

In unit 8, we covered evolution by looking at the history of our Earth and how we came to be. Evolution is caused by genetic variation in populations, which is caused by reproduction, meiosis, and crossing over. Natural selection favors certain phenotypes and causes individuals with advantages for survival to reproduce. Natural selection can favor one phenotype, which is directional selection. In stabilized selection, nature favors the intermediate phenotype and in disruptive selection, both extremes are favored. Disruptive selection can lead to speciation, which creates a new species. Humans took advantage of this aspect of life to artificially select and breed animals using the same mindset of weeding out the weak from the population. Darwin made a conclusion based on natural selection that as the population evolves, it will start to look more like the organisms with the advantages. This was tested in class when we did the Hunger Games Lab and the Bird Beak Lab. Showcased in the lab and in nature, we can tell if a population evolved based on the allele frequency fluctuations. Allele frequency measures how common an allele is within a population. Evolution is evident in the world and will continue to affect our lives of a span of time. Scientists use evolutionary left-overs and fossils to determine who are ancestors were and to dive into more about Earth's history. As a final wrap-up to our unit, we concluded with a project; a timeline to showcase all of Earth's existence. I wrote a reflection on this project, which you can read here. I really enjoyed this unit because it was a good change from what we have been doing for most of this year. It was interesting to zoom out in perspective and understand the world we live in as a whole. Since I had more interest in the content of this unit, it was easy to be assertive with my learning because I cared more about the topic. In the future I should challenge myself to learn like this for every unit. Here is a picture showcasing the different variations of natural selection: 

Geology Timeline Individual Reflection

In this project, we made a timeline to model the span of earth's history and show when and how some major events occurred on our planet. We used a strip 9.2 meters long to represent the 4.6 billion years of Earth's existence, where every million years was represented by 2 mm. The first event on our timeline, the essential kick starter, is the creation of Earth itself, which lead to the existence of everything we know of today and in life itself. Nothing as we know it would exist if this collision did not happen to form our planet. The increase of oxygen in the atmosphere during the Ordovician Period  is also an important event in Earth's history because  this laid the foundation for processes such as photosynthesis and respiration to occur within organisms. The extinction of the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era was a very significant event in Earth's history as well as it gave way for mammals to dominate. Humans and other mammals were able to exist because the dinosaurs weren't a looming threat for any longer.

The scale of Earth's history includes a lot of empty time periods, in the sense that there was not much life for long periods of time. Being able to see this visually represented really put so much of history into perspective for me. I was surprised that so much of our history is squished into about 1/2 of a foot on our timelines which in comparison to the existence of Earth, is barely anything! The time period in which humans have dominated the earth is so small but we have influenced and changed the world we live in so much in such an insignificant period of time. This made me think about how long we will exist. Will we be like the dinosaurs and our period of domination abruptly brought to an end?

Here is an infographic that is formatted similar to a timeline with the history of our Earth.

Hunger Games Final Analysis

1. In this lab, we split the class into 3 phenotypes that all needed to eat and reproduce to simulate a real world population of organisms trying to survive. 
2. The pinchers were the best at capturing food because they had the easiest mechanism to grab the food, since human fingers are very strong and well trained from doing everyday activities.
3.  In this lab we asked the question "Do populations evolve?". We found that they do, and not always in favor of the "fittest" organism. The population evolved and the evidence of this is that stumpies went from 8 out out of 23 in the population, which is about 1/3 of the population, to 3 out of 23, to completely extinct. This is evidence of various forms of natural selection since the number of offspring fell into different categories based on who survived. This data supported our claim because this process leads to evolution over time. 
4. In this simulation, the beak assignment was not random because it was given to each person and everyone was using the same grabbing technique in their phenotype. But, factors like pocket storage for food, and running speed and aggressiveness were random because different people have unique characteristics and clothes they wore for the lab. 
5. If the food was larger, then people might have gotten more food each because each person could only carry so much food in their hands and clothes. However if the food was less, the competition would be stiffer and people would be more aggressive to "survive". This applies to nature because sometimes there are enough resources and all organisms can live in harmony but when scarcities come up, competition gets much stiffer. 
6. The results would have been different if there wasn't incomplete dominance because stumpies would have shown up instead of knucklers. Actually, there wouldn't be any knucklers or many stumpies in existence because they wouldn't survive. 
7. Natural selection is the main theory behind evolution. Because of competition between organisms, populations change and evolve over time. 
8. Many people mated with others in their own phenotype to ensure survival, which was a good strategy for double dominant or double recessive genotypes. This would affect the gene frequency because it would go higher in the direction of the organisms that mated with each other. This is exactly what happens in nature because each species mates with one another so they ensure having more offspring like themselves.   
9. In evolution, organisms evolve as their genotypes and phenotypes do so. Natural selection also acts on both parts of an organism because as the genotype changes, it usually shows in the phenotype.

How would results vary if we mimicked an ecosystem more accurately? For example, if we placed food in harder to reach places or gave everyone limitations (like with their pockets), how would results change?

Procrastinating on the Project

This week, I did some work on 20 time but mainly I procrastinated. This was clearly a problem so I did a little more work and have made more progress now.  I have decided to use myself as a test subject before asking others to take part in my project. First, I figured out why I procrastinate. This article, http://success.oregonstate.edu/six-reasons-people-procrastinate, explains some triggers in general towards procrastination, and I used this for my initial research but now I'm trying to see which apply to me. In my life, I tend to procrastinate on practicing dance and singing (two of my extra-curricular activities), cleaning my room, and the given obvious, homework. I like to socialize, watch TV, or do other useless tasks instead of doing the important work. My next steps are trying to find out what I feel while I procrastinate and what situations motivate me to keep working. I also want to talk to people who do get all of their work done and see what they think while doing tasks. Hopefully I'll get more done this week!

Bird Beak Lab

Analysis
Recently we conducted a bird beak lab, which tested Darwin's observations and conclusions. We simulated 5 different types of birds' beaks with a spoon, a binder clip, a pair of tweezers, a pair of chopsticks, and a pair of scissors. The goal was for each bird to pick up as many pieces of "food" (rubber bands, macaroni, toothpicks, and paper clips). We saw evidence that individuals with better traits leave more offspring when the tweezers-beaked bird had a total of 15 chicks, the highest among all other birds. A possible explanation for this could be that their beaks were more adept at picking up food. Another of Darwin's conclusions was shown true in our lab: the fact that populations gradually start to look more like the "winners", or individuals with the better traits. The tweezers chicks made up about 21.4% of the population. An explanation for this is that the tweezers chicks collected more food and had more offspring.

Conclusion:
In this lab, we asked the question: if natural selection occurs in a population, how do changes in selective pressures affect the evolution of that species?  We also simulated a farming spraying pesticide incident in this lab, where the "birds" were left with 1/4 of their original pile of food. Theoretically, the birds with the most efficient picking up food skills would succeed with this challenge. We found that the tweezers still produced more chicks. This data support our claim because the tweezer bird was the most efficient.
Even though our data followed our hypothesis correctly the expected results there could be errors. The binder clip required the user to apply a decent amount of pressure in order to operate it and pick up the food. When doing the back to back trials, using the binder clip became tiring. This error might cause its  population to decrease, instead of staying the same or increasing. In the lab as a whole, each bird beak was operated by a different student, and each student would have a different skill level in terms of picking up the food. For example, someone who has been eating with chopsticks their whole life would find the chopstick beak very effective. This might have caused certain populations to be too high or too low. Due to these errors, in future experiments I would recommend students switching "bird beaks" in order to make the lab more objective and maybe finding an alternative for the binder clip, because of the finger pressure that is needed to use it.
This lab was done to demonstrate the concept of natural selection, and how every population will have winners and losers. From this lab I learned how natural selection would works in an ecosystem, and I now understand the concept better. Based on my experience from this lab, I can better understand why certain traits are more dominant in certain populations.