APS301 Fall 2016

Sample Study Questions for Part 1

These questions will not be used for the purpose of quizzes or exams.

Week 1: Organizational Lectures and Course Structure

1. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of a discipline-based approach to scientific
knowing.
2. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of a discipline-based approach to technical
doing.
3. Discuss the validity or non-validity of the following comparison:
a. Undergraduate engineering education as a way of learning to steer
technology into the future is like learning to drive an automobile by primarily
concentrating on the gauges on the dashboard and only looking out the
windows when crashes or screams are heard.
4. Describe the role the hidden curriculum plays in undergraduate engineering
education.
5. Explain the differences between the cognitive style referred to as numeracy and the
one referred to as literacy. Explain the kinds of difficulties a person who is strong in
numeracy may have when learning the social sciences or humanities. Also explain the
kinds of difficulties someone strong in literacy may encounter when studying the
physical sciences or engineering.
6. The knowledge bases employed by the industrially advanced nations to evolve their
ways of life are based on high levels of specialization. This leads to three significant
limitations, the first of which is the inability of decision makers to understand the
consequences of their decisions that fall beyond their domains of competence.
Explain this limitation and its consequences.
7. The knowledge bases employed by the industrially advanced nations to evolve their
ways of life are based on high levels of specialization. This leads to three significant
limitations, one of which is the trapping of decision-makers in a triple abstraction.
Explain this limitation and its consequences.
8. The knowledge bases employed by the industrially advanced nations to evolve their
ways of life are based on high levels of specialization. This leads to three significant
limitations, one of which makes it very difficult to come up with genuine solutions to
many issues which require approaches other than the improvement of performance
and efficiency. Explain this limitation and its consequences.

9. Explain the four pre-judgments which we all bring to the study of technology and its
influence on human life, society and the biosphere pre-judgments that stem from
having grown up in an industrially advanced society.
10. Explain how preventive approaches can help us overcome the three limitations of the
knowledge bases that contemporary societies use to evolve their ways of life, and the
pre-judgments regarding technology held by most decision-makers.

Week 2: The Biology-based, Technology-based and Culture-based Connectedness of

Human Life and Society
1. Explain what is meant by the biology-based connectedness of human life and society.
Can it be affected by biotechnology and nanotechnology? If so, how?
2. Explain what is meant by the technology-based connectedness of a society.
3. Explain what is meant by the culture-based connectedness of human life and society.
Briefly explain how it can be modified by technology.
4. Using the concept of the cultural cycle, explain why the interaction between
technology and the host society is a reciprocal one.
5. Explain the differences between the way materials flow through the network of flows
of matter associated with the way of life of a society, and the way they flow within
the biosphere. What is the significance of these differences?
6. What are the primary differences between the network of flows of energy associated
with the way of life of a society, and the network of flows of energy within the
biosphere? Explain the significance of these differences.
7. Explain how the flows across the society-biosphere boundary can be classified in
terms of their availability for human use.
8. Using the concept of an Eltonian pyramid, explain how energy flows through the
ecosystem.
9. Explain the effects on the daily lives of people whose culture-based connectedness
can no longer be elaborated due to diseases such as short-term memory loss or
Alzheimers.
10. Explain how the low efficiency of photosynthesis (about 2%) is essential to ensure
the enormous diversity of plant and animal life.
11. Explain the differences between a primary fuel and an energy carrier.

12. Explain why a zero-emission vehicle is an impossibility.

Week 3: Industrialization as People Changing Technology

1. Explain why the relationship between a technology and the society that creates and
evolves it is a reciprocal one.
2. Explain the differences between people changing technology and technology
changing people, and how the two are connected by the cultural cycle.
3. Explain why the technical division of labour reorganizes human work in the image of
the machine.
4. Why does the technical division of labour separate the technology-based
connectedness from the culture-based connectedness of human life and society?
Explain how it strengthens the former at the expense of the latter.
5. Explain the effect of industrialization on the technology-based connectedness of a
society.
6. Explain how the technology-based connectedness of a society constrains the process
of industrialization as it advances.
7. Explain the principal economic adjustments industrializing societies had to make in
order to accommodate the massive changes in their technology-based connectedness.
8. Explain the principal social adjustments industrializing societies had to make in order
to accommodate the massive changes in their technology-based connectedness.
9. Explain the principal political adjustments industrializing societies had to make in
order to accommodate the massive changes in their technology-based connectedness.
10. Explain the principal legal adjustments industrializing societies had to make in order
to accommodate the massive changes in their technology-based connectedness.
11. Using what you have learned in the course, explain why you agree or disagree with
the following statement:
The Market, by which industrializing societies organized their technologies and
economies, always remains under the guidance of the cultures of these societies.
12. Using what you have learned in the course, explain why you agree or disagree with
the following statement:
The Market organizes human life and society much more effectively than a
traditional culture does.

13. Explain what is meant by Market externalities, using examples to illustrate five
different kinds. Also explain what is meant by Market forces.
14. Many developing nations wish to adopt modern science and technology for economic
development while retaining their own unique cultural identities. Based on what you
have learned regarding people changing technology (Chapter 1 of Living in the
Labyrinth of Technology), assess their chances of success.
15. During the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites wanted to adopt the technologies that
were beneficial to human life and society and reject the technologies that were
harmful. Had they not been brutally suppressed by the authorities, assess whether or
not they might have succeeded in this endeavour.
16. Explain why the process of industrialization exhibits the characteristics of a chainreaction-like process.
17. Explain why the process of industrialization is an all or nothing affair as far as the
technology-based connectedness of human life and society is concerned.
18. Using what you have learned in the course, explain why you agree or disagree with
the following statement:
Contemporary industrially advanced nations are increasingly at risk of a chainreaction process of industrialization in a reverse direction.
19. Using what you have learned in the course, explain why you agree or disagree with
the following statement:
Because human activities are connected by networks of flows of matter and
energy, industrialization provides a society with more powerful means to pursue
its values and aspirations.
20. Explain the process of commoditization of the biosphere and of human life. Why is
this commoditization required by the Market?