Engineering Disaster

ENGG 123 ASSIGNMENT #3 DISASTERS AND REFERENCING


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Introduction

Assignment #3 requires students to produce a brief formal paper that deals with an engineering disaster. The minimum length of the paper is five-double spaced pages and the maximum length is seven double-spaced pages, not including your references page. An effective paper will pose and answer a number of the questions listed below. (You do not need to answer all of these questions)

·         How is it an engineering disaster? 

·         Which particular aspects of the disaster are the result of a poor engineering choice or practice?

·         How is it relevant to the study and practice of engineering?

·         Who was at fault? What caused the accident?

·         What future precautions are recommended?

·         Were any new laws, practices, or regulations implemented as a result of the disaster? 

·         What was the overall impact on engineering practice?

·         Did the accident change engineering practice (either in general or in a particular field)? e.g. The Challenger disaster led to significant policy changes at NASA and ultimately to Whistle blower legislation.

To produce an acceptable paper students will employ a brief literature review to help answer research questions about an engineering disaster. And, you must complete the following four key tasks:

1.       Select a disaster to assess which is not on the “Banned Topics” list.

2.       Locate a minimum of three useful sources from the academic and/or professional literature;

3.       Compose a paper that conforms to the formatting guidelines presented in this document; and,

4.       Employ the American Psychological Association (APA) citation and referencing system presented on the Purdue Owl Writing Lab website https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/02/

Task #1 Select an engineering disaster

You are required to select a real engineering disaster from history. You must put some thought into choosing a disaster that has engineering-related causes. In other words the disaster’s causes should be related to faulty engineering, a design flaw for example. This means that disasters related to things such as ethical lapses or corrupt practices are not suitable for your paper.

Banned Topics List

The list of disasters that you cannot write about is posted on our UR Courses home page under the heading Topic 4 Assignments.

Task #2 Locate a minimum of three sources

At least three of the sources you employ in your literature review must be from the academic and/or professional literature. Acceptable sources include the following:

* peer reviewed academic journal articles;

* peer reviewed academic books;

* official publications of professional engineering associations;

*official government or judicial reports on the disaster; and,

*certain evidentiary documents such as company reports, and sometimes eyewitness reports.

Complete definitions and descriptions of these sources will be provided in the lectures.

How to locate sources

Our University of Regina Library provides instruction and assistance in locating academic sources. The university has a number of search engines available and can provide students with free access to many academic journals and e-books. In addition, basic online searches (e.g., Google searches) can help you locate journal articles on many topics e.g., “peer reviewed articles Three Mile Island,” would lead you to a series of academic journal articles on this topic.

Source location will be discussed in greater detail in class.

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Task #3 Formatting Guidelines

The items presented below describe the format and style you are to employ for this paper.

Do not provide a title page for this paper.

Place the name and number of the assignment, your name and the date of submission, and the title of your paper at the top of the first page of the paper.

Do not provide a Table of Contents for this paper.

Be concise, do not make the mistake of using a narrative (literary story) style.

Do not write in the first person (e.g., use I or me).

If you employ tables, or figures in the paper follow the guidelines presented in writing tips #6 available on the course homepage. You do not require lists of tables and figures for a paper that is this short.

You must use the APA citation/referencing system in this paper.

Introduction

Your introduction should not be much more than 1 ½ pages in length. It should include the following items described below in the introductory section of your paper.

Purpose: i.e., your research questions

Begin with a statement of purpose that identifies the name and date of the disasters and poses your principal research question(s). Once you have read about the disaster you should feel comfortable about the sorts of questions you can effectively answer. It is often useful to select one main question along with two or three subsidiary questions. A suitable question for many papers might be: What were the flaws in engineering design that led to this disaster?

Conceptual clarification

Your research questions should be followed by a section on concept clarification. What do you mean by “disaster?” What is an engineering disaster? You should also define any technical terms that feature prominently in the paper and may not be understood by your audience.

Methodological statement

You must include a statement indicating the methodology you employed to answer your research question. In the case of this paper the methodology will be a brief assessment of the literature or a literature review. If your paper focus on a few sources, they should be cited in your methodological statement.

Analysis section

The analysis section should be the longest part of your paper.

Background statement

You can begin your analysis section with a very brief overview of the basic, undisputed facts that describe the disaster. You might describe the structures involved, the date they were completed, when they failed, how many people were killed or injured if any and perhaps the economic and other social costs of the disaster. For a paper that is this short your background statement should be no more than two paragraphs in length.

Argument points

The bulk of the analysis section involves your effort to present points which help to answer your research question. Each of the points you make should be supported by evidence provided by one of your sources and be supported by a citation and reference for the citation. You should logically explain how the point you make helps answer your question(s). There should be one or more points made for each of your questions.

Disputes and alternatives

If you run across disputed evidence or examples of alternative explanations for your questions, you should indicate as much in the text of your paper. Some writers add a discussion section at the end of their analysis to summarize their findings, assess alternative arguments and tie up loose ends. Most writers leave the discussion tasks to their conclusion.

Conclusion

In your conclusion, you make direct reference to your original research questions. You can simply summarize them, but can repeat them word for word if necessary. You should indicate whether the analysis answered your questions and briefly summarize the key points of the analysis if necessary.

You should honestly indicate whether a research question was effectively answered. If you failed to answer a question you should try to explain why. You should indicate what might be done in a future research effort to answer the question – more research, more data, more time?

At the very end of your conclusion you can include an optional “affective” statement. An affective statement is where you can briefly state what the outcome of your research says about the need to prevent similar disasters, or what the impact of studying this disaster is for you personally. The effective statement is the one portion of the paper where the use of the first person (I, me) is permitted.

References

Your paper ends with a references section which employs the APA format. You must have a reference for each of the sources cited in the text. If a source is cited more than once you still need only one reference for all the citations related to that source. The most common error students make is the failure to list the references alphabetically according to the author(s) of the article, book, etc. The items in the reference list are not numbered and they are not listed according to the order in which their corresponding citations appear in the paper.

Task #4 use APA

As was already noted in these instructions you are required to employ the APA in-text citation and referencing system as presented in the Purdue Owl writing lab. We will also be discussing citations and references in our lectures.

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