Thursday, October 24. 2019

Today's schedule is DCBA

D & C Blocks Environmental and Social Sciences - Today we are in room 120 to continue our work on palm oil. Remember, you need to look through the Guardian Interactive on Palm Oil and work through a handout (courtesy of Geographypods) that I gave you Monday. We hope to have a conversation with you based on a few of the tasks we asked, such as:

Task 9 – Can Palm Oil be sustainable. Listen to the embedded PodCasts on the site and make notes on whether the experts think that Palm Oil production can be sustainable

Task 17 – Carry out a short investigation into a company that uses Palm Oil irresponsibly. What is being done about it?

Feel free to use The Guardian Palm Oil Debate website for help.

Using Palm Oil as an example, How do we protect peoples livelihoods and the environment?

B Block Human Geography - Today we'll look at the key question, "Why Is Access to Folk and Popular Culture Unequal?" We will really focus on the diffusion of popular culture and look at the mass media of television. The world’s most popular and important electronic media format is television (TV). While the Internet has grown in popularity and importance in recent years, TV remains the foremost electronic media format. Television is a mirror of our world, offering an often-distorted vision of national identity, as well as shaping our perceptions of various groups of people.

In March 2011, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the argument that U.S. television was giving people around the world a distorted view of Americans. "I remember having an Afghan general tell me that the only thing he thought about Americans is that all the men wrestled and the women walked around in bikinis because the only TV he ever saw was Baywatch and World Wide Wrestling," (a side note, at its peak, Baywatch was broadcast in 142 countries and around the world more than 1 billion people have watched the show).

So you'll have some questions about television to work on today and then the Internet and Social Media including "Why do developing nations view television as a new source of cultural imperialism?"

How to stop foreign TV eroding local culture
What is reality TV's influence on culture? 
How have 24-hour sports stations changed society?


A Block Physical Geography - Today we're going to start our new unit on gradation. We've looked at the process of building up the land through tectonics and energy from below. Now we'll focus on breaking down the surface of the Earth and today we cover "geomorphology". We'll look at some slopes on Google Earth and then you will need to work on questions 2, 5, and 6 from page 442 in your Geosystems text. The United States Geological Survey has a good web page on Landslides here and the Atlas of Canada has a good site on Landslides in Canada.