Friday, October 26. 2012

Today's schedule is C-D-A-B

9:05 – 10:00        Period 1 (55 min)

10:05 – 10:25      AG

10:30 – 11:25      Period 2 (55 min)

11:25 – 12:05      Lunch

12:10 – 1:10        Period 3 (60 min)

1:15 – 2:15           Period 4 (60 min)

2:15 – 3:15           X block (60 min)

C Block Criminology 12 - Today in Criminology class we're turning the clock back a few days and  I'm going to show you a tv show called White Collar. From USA network:

White Collar is about the unlikely partnership of a con artist and an FBI agent who have been playing cat and mouse for years. Neal Caffery (Matt Boomer), a charming criminal mastermind, is finally caught by his nemesis, FBI Agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay). When Neal escapes from a maximum-security prison to find his long-lost love, Peter nabs him once again. Rather than returning to jail, Neal suggests an alternate plan: He'll provide his criminal expertise to assist the Feds in catching other elusive criminals in exchange for his eventual freedom. Initially wary, Peter quickly finds that Neal provides insight and intuition that can't be found on the right side of the law.

The episode I’d like you to show is called Hard Sell from season 1, which deals with stock manipulation and churning the value of stock in a boiler room (metaphor). From tv.com...

The scam is a "pump and dump", in which a group of "junior Gordon Gekkos" is selling bad stock. The guy in charge buys a large amount of dollar stocks, and has his men inflate the price by selling it over the phone. When the price peaks, guy in charge dumps the stock and leaves the buyers holding worthless shares. The average person loses $30,000, and some victims have lost their homes. The boiler room is mobile, moving to a new location after each stock dump

This episode deals with the white collar crime unit that we previously covered in Criminology and I’d like you to have a discussion about this:

Agent Burke describes the boiler room salesmen as "junior Gordon Gekkos". Gordon Gekko was the mega-successful, totally ruthless stock trader played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street. Minor trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) tries to break into the big time by following Gekko's merciless killer-instinct methods. Along the way Fox discovers that Gekko-style success can cost dearly. One of the most famous quotes from the movie is when Gekko says “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

So we’ve looked at psychopaths in Criminology and we watched “The Corporation” which compared modern business to psychopaths…Gordon Gekko is the embodiment of the psychopath in the 1980’s corporate world while the boiler room characters in White Collar are a 2000’s version of the same thing. So… does Avery Phillips (the “man behind the curtain”) exhibit psychopathic traits and if he’s successful what does that say about business (corporate) crime?

D Block Social Studies 11 - Today with Ms. Curry...you'll have the whole block to work on your "famous Canadian from the 1920s" business cards.

A Block Law 12 - Today with Ms. Curry...we'll be hanging out in the computer lab so that we can get some work done on the perfect crime assignments. Feel free to bring any sort of art supplies that you may need.

B Block Geography 12 -  Today we're looking at water. The USGS diagram below shows the distribution of water on the planet and explains the amount of water available for "human use". You'll note that there is precious little water available for 6.7 billion people. Then consider that the flora and fauna of the biosphere require water as well and you can see the importance of water to all forms of life on the planet.

Today we'll look at the properties of water in its three phases and then you'll need to sketch a diagram of the hydrologic cycle (page 253 in Geosystems). Next you'll need to define: condensation, evaporation, transpiration, precipitation, sublimation, percolation, aquifer, zone of aeration, and zone of saturation. Lastly you'll need to complete questions 2 & 5 from page 210, 1 from page 278, and 14, 16, & 18 from page 280 all in your Geosystems text. To help look at the United States Geological Survey Water Cycle website and ther University of Kentucky Geology Department flash animation site.