Thursday, June 22. 2023

Today's schedule is DCBA

D Block Physical Geography - Quiz day today...it's your Weather, Climate and Climate Change quiz. You have all block in the Learning Commons to do it but I suspect it will only take 30 minutes at most. You have the rest of the block to work on your Chroma Key Weather Forecast video project. Check the blog for sites to help. When you are filming the forecast, the green screen is ready for you in the classroom (#115)…please remember, for the green screen, don't wear green.

C Block Human Geography - Today more help for the SimCity Buildit project...For your project I will be grading you using the following core competencies and skills:

1. Discuss what goes into planning and maintaining a city using geographic inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze data and ideas; and communicate findings and decisions
2. Draw conclusions about the variation and distribution of geographic phenomena over time and space through identifying basic city services and features (such as emergency services, transportation, and education), along with areas of zoning and the services that comprise city infrastructure (commercial, residential, and industrial)
3. Evaluate how particular geographic actions or events influence human practices or outcomes through describing the consequences of decisions regarding various city functions (taxes, budget, services, etc.)
4. Assess the significance of places by identifying the physical and/or human features that characterize them through explaining the importance of city location, placement of city features, and proportions in zoning
5. Identify and assess how human and environmental factors and events influence each other in order to identify and build features that best represent successful city design.

Remember I need your presentation by Friday so use your time wisely. So to that end here's some things to help:

• "Why Are Urban Areas Expanding"? 

According to the peripheral model, an urban area consists of an inner city surrounded by large suburban residential and business areas tied together by a beltway or ring road. Around the beltway are nodes of consumer and business services called edge cities. The edge cities originated as suburban residences for people who worked in the central cities and then shopping malls were built near the residents. Because Census Metropolitan Areas in Canada are composed of many independent suburbs (edge cities) and central cities as well as counties, local governments are fragmented and less able to deal with regional problems. In British Columbia, Metro Vancouver (formerly the Greater Vancouver Regional District) is a partnership of 21 municipalities (Vancouver, New Wesminister, Surrey, Richmond, Maple Ridge, Burnaby, Coquitlam, etc.…) and is a political body and corporate entity operating under provincial legislation as a ‘regional district’ and ‘greater boards’ that deliver regional services, policy and political leadership on behalf of 23 members. North American cities once followed a density gradient where density decreased consistently with increasing distance from the city center. Suburbanization has flattened the density gradient as more and more people have moved out of the city center and suburbs have become uniformly dense. The U.S. and Canadian suburbs are characterized by sprawl, which is a progressive spread of development over the landscape. The U.S. and Canadian suburbs sprawl across the landscape because of a desire for single-family housing surrounded by private land. European cities restrict the availability of land for new development to preserve the greenbelts, which are rings of open green space surrounding cities.

Zoning ordinances in the early decades of the twentieth century encouraged spatial segregation. They prevented the mixing of land uses within the same district. Single-family houses, apartments, industry, and commerce were kept apart because the location of one activity near another was considered unhealthy and inefficient. Legal devices, such as requiring each house to sit on a large lot and the prohibition of apartments, prevent low-income families from living in many suburbs. The suburbs created segregated land uses, with residential areas separate from retail and manufacturing activities, with the consequence of requiring automobile ownership for all trips. Retailing has been increasingly concentrated in planned suburban shopping malls. Suburbanization is made possible by high levels of automobile ownership and now requires most U.S. and Canadian residents to drive daily to work and other trips. Population growth has led to traffic congestion and inefficient use of land for roads and parking. An average city allocates about one-fourth of its land to roads and parking lots. 

Try to understand urban areas, census metropolitan areas, annexation, sub-urbanization, sprawl, smart growth and transportation into and out of city cores. From the Conversation Boomburbs: The rapid rise of Toronto’s northern suburbs

B Block Criminology - Remember your last question, which is due tomorrow:

Regardless of your opinion of Casey Anthony is it possible for her to escape the negative label of "Tot Mom" and will she ever be able to avoid the horrible mother image presented by CNN and Nancy Grace? Use examples from the Casey Anthony trial to explain your ideas. How does the concept of Schadenfreude apply to the Casey Anthony trial? How would low self-esteem make someone more likely to seek out schadenfreude-filled crime media? Is Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, Instagram, Snapchat) good or bad for criminal trials and the news/media coverage of them? Use examples from the Casey Anthony trial and from either Monica Lewinsky's story or those in the 15 Minutes of Shame video (Matt Colvin or Emmanuel Cafferty) to explain your ideas.

If there's time then we'll look at Colton Harris-Moore, the "Barefoot Bandit", who was raised on Camano Island just north of Everett Washington in the Puget Sound. 

Harris-Moore was sentenced in December 2011 to seven years in state prison for dozens of crimes, including burglary and identity theft, stemming from his two-year run from the law in stolen boats, cars and airplanes. A self-taught pilot, he was finally apprehended in a hail of bullets in the Bahamas in 2010, after he crash-landed a plane stolen from an Indiana airport. He had a fan club and many many articles have been written on him including Time, and Outside Magazine...Twice (by Bob Friel) He also has agreed to sell his life story to 20th Century Fox movie studio for $1.3 million...every society creates its own heroes and villains and has the option to frame them in a way that says something about it. So what does the "outlaw folk-hero" status that Colt Harris-Moore has gained say about who we hold up as heroes or villains in our modern crime-media saturated society? In an article by Paul Ibbetson he states:

Juan McCartney and Mike Melia of the Associated Press say that Harris-Moore has built his reputation as a 21st-century folk hero. Of course thieves don’t “build” as they have no time for such labors. They are too busy stealing what others have built. Even with the factual terminology in place, one cannot say that Harris-Moore even managed steal a reputation as a 21st-century folk hero. No, to be factual it must be said that this young man’s celebrity status was a gift from the media, paid for by modern society.

I want you to think about celebrity/fame (or infamy) and how the television and social media channels contributed to "the barefoot Bandit" mythos. From Crime and the media in America

In the 1960s a term was popularized to describe our society’s fascination with violence and crime as a public spectacle called “wound culture.” It is this odd pull towards the abject that has been at the heart of American media. As the future of media looks to integrate social media and news information more and more, there are serious questions to consider. Will algorithms designed to feed us content we “like” lead to even more consumption of crime news? How will that skew our perception of crime in America? Will an illusion of a crime infested America affect our politics?

And from ShoutoutUK  How the media controls our perceptions of crime

Despite the fact that most crime is fairly routine, trivial and non-dramatic, TV programmes such as Crimewatch often pick up on the more serious and violent offences like sexual assault, murder or armed robbery – with reconstructions giving quite a frightening insight into the crime. This focus on the dramatic side of crime is a routine feature on TV programmes or film as well as news reports, and gives a false and misleading impression of the real extent of such crimes.

You could read an interesting scholarly article Consuming Television Crime Drama: A Uses
and Gratifications Approach

There is also a really good Canadian on line piece titled Understanding how the media reports crime

So, please make sure you think about about celebrity, fame, and how they fit into the social order and structure theories when you're looking at Colton Harris Moore.

A Block Legal Studies - I have the library/learning commons booked for you to continue your work on the major civil law project that is due this Friday; that means tomorrow, right?! I'll remind you that you have the option of completing a video commercial for your law firm much like

Or real life ones...like this

  

 11 Best Lawyer Commercials (as of 2023)