Pda Technical Report 29

[Rashawn Devegowda]

Atechnical report is a formal report designed to convey technical information in a clear and easily accessible format. It is divided into sections which allow different readers to access different levels of information. This guide explains the commonly accepted format for a technical report; explains the purposes of the individual sections; and gives hints on how to go about drafting and refining a report in order to produce an accurate, professional document.

Who is going to read the report? For coursework assignments, the readers might be fellow students and/or faculty markers. In professional contexts, the readers might be managers, clients, project team members. The answer will affect the content and technical level, and is a major consideration in the level of detail required in the introduction.

Begin writing with the main text, not the introduction. Follow your outline in terms of headings and subheadings. Let the ideas flow; do not worry at this stage about style, spelling or word processing. If you get stuck, go back to your outline plan and make more detailed preparatory notes to get the writing flowing again.

During year 1, term 1 you will be learning how to write formal English for technical communication. This includes examples of the most common pitfalls in the use of English and how to avoid them. Use what you learn and the recommended books to guide you. Most importantly, when you read through what you have written, you must ask yourself these questions;

It is often the case that technical information is most concisely and clearly conveyed by means other than words. Imagine how you would describe an electrical circuit layout using words rather than a circuit diagram. Here are some simple guidelines;

The appearance of a report is no less important than its content. An attractive, clearly organised report stands a better chance of being read. Use a standard, 12pt, font, such as Times New Roman, for the main text. Use different font sizes, bold, italic and underline where appropriate but not to excess. Too many changes of type style can look very fussy.

Use heading and sub-headings to break up the text and to guide the reader. They should be based on the logical sequence which you identified at the planning stage but with enough sub-headings to break up the material into manageable chunks. The use of numbering and type size and style can clarify the structure as follows;

Whenever you make use of other people's facts or ideas, you must indicate this in the text with a number which refers to an item in the list of references. Any phrases, sentences or paragraphs which are copied unaltered must be enclosed in quotation marks and referenced by a number. Material which is not reproduced unaltered should not be in quotation marks but must still be referenced. It is not sufficient to list the sources of information at the end of the report; you must indicate the sources of information individually within the report using the reference numbering system.

Information that is not referenced is assumed to be either common knowledge or your own work or ideas; if it is not, then it is assumed to be plagiarised i.e. you have knowingly copied someone else's words, facts or ideas without reference, passing them off as your own. This is a serious offence. If the person copied from is a fellow student, then this offence is known as collusion and is equally serious. Examination boards can, and do, impose penalties for these offences ranging from loss of marks to disqualification from the award of a degree

This warning applies equally to information obtained from the Internet. It is very easy for markers to identify words and images that have been copied directly from web sites. If you do this without acknowledging the source of your information and putting the words in quotation marks then your report will be sent to the Investigating Officer and you may be called before a disciplinary panel.

Your report should now be nearly complete with an introduction, main text in sections, conclusions, properly formatted references and bibliography and any appendices. Now you must add the page numbers, contents and title pages and write the summary.

The summary, with the title, should indicate the scope of the report and give the main results and conclusions. It must be intelligible without the rest of the report. Many people may read, and refer to, a report summary but only a few may read the full report, as often happens in a professional organisation.

This refers to the checking of every aspect of a piece of written work from the content to the layout and is an absolutely necessary part of the writing process. You should acquire the habit of never sending or submitting any piece of written work, from email to course work, without at least one and preferably several processes of proofreading. In addition, it is not possible for you, as the author of a long piece of writing, to proofread accurately yourself; you are too familiar with what you have written and will not spot all the mistakes.

When you have finished your report, and before you staple it, you must check it very carefully yourself. You should then give it to someone else, e.g. one of your fellow students, to read carefully and check for any errors in content, style, structure and layout. You should record the name of this person in your acknowledgements.

A technical report (also scientific report) is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem.[1][2] It might also include recommendations and conclusions of the research. Unlike other scientific literature, such as scientific journals and the proceedings of some academic conferences, technical reports rarely undergo comprehensive independent peer review before publication. They may be considered as grey literature. Where there is a review process, it is often limited to within the originating organization. Similarly, there are no formal publishing procedures for such reports, except where established locally.

Technical reports are today a major source of scientific and technical information. They are prepared for internal or wider distribution by many organizations, most of which lack the extensive editing and printing facilities of commercial publishers.

Technical reports are often prepared for sponsors of research projects. Another case where a technical report may be produced is when more information is produced for an academic paper than is acceptable or feasible to publish in a peer-reviewed publication; examples of this include in-depth experimental details, additional results, or the architecture of a computer model. Researchers may also publish work in early form as a technical report to establish novelty, without having to wait for the often long production schedules of academic journals. Technical reports are considered "non-archival" publications, and so are free to be published elsewhere in peer-reviewed venues with or without modification.

Many organizations collect their technical reports into a formal series. Reports are then assigned an identifier (report number, volume number) and often share a common cover-page layout. Technical reports used to be made available in print, but are now more commonly published electronically (typically in PDF), whether on the Internet or on the originating organization's intranet.

Long-term sea level rise will affect the extent, frequency, and duration of coastal flooding events. High-tide flooding events that occur only a few times a year now may occur once a month, or once a week in the coming decades. These same water level changes may also increase coastal erosion and groundwater levels. Elevated groundwater levels can lead to increased rainfall runoff and compromised underground infrastructure, such as public utilities, septic systems, and structural foundations. Higher water levels also mean deadly and destructive storm surges, wave impacts, and rainwater are unable to drain away from homes and businesses.

Another reason for differences in regional sea level is vertical land motion. Across the U.S., land is sinking or rising at different rates and times, and this affects how high sea level rises in a region. Vertical land motion can be a result of geologic processes (e.g. the movement of tectonic plates); human activity, such as removing groundwater or fossil fuels from underground, which can cause the land to sink; or naturally-occurring sediment compaction and settling over time (e.g., subsidence in the Mississippi River delta).

Global mean sea level, or the average height of the ocean surface, has risen 6 - 8 inches (15 - 20 centimeters) since 1920. In the continental U.S., relative sea level has risen about 10 - 12 inches (25 - 30 centimeters) over the same period. Observational data from tide gauges and satellites also show that sea level rise, both globally and along the continental U.S., is accelerating, with more than a third of that rise having occurred in the past two and a half decades (see NOAA and NASA portals for altimeter-based global rates and NOAA for local tide gauge rates).

In the 2017 sea level rise technical report, scenarios were related to representative concentration pathways. The 2022 report and data employ the underlying methods and output from the Sixth Assessment Report and their dependency on shared socioeconomic pathways, but focus more on how these scenarios relate directly to different amounts of end-of-century surface warming associated with the pathways (see Question 3).

There are two types of uncertainty that are important to consider when thinking about future sea level changes: 1) uncertainty in representing or modeling the physical processes that cause sea level change known as process uncertainty, and 2) uncertainty in how human behavior will drive future emissions and ensuing warming known as emissions uncertainty. The suite of projections in this report captures both process uncertainty and emissions uncertainty.

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