THE LAST BLOG POST I'LL EVER WRITE FOR THIS CLASS

It took me a little while to understand what you wanted in terms of analyzing space. Looking back at some of my earliest blog posts, I tended to summarize a lot more than I needed to and my analysis sort of got lost in the jumble. I also focused on analyzing the story rather than the actual space.

In my blog pot about Johnny Cash’s “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” video, I summarized every single thing that happened and talked about the significance of each one of those things rather than concisely discussing the elements we talked about in class and going over them with a few strong points form the video. Going into Inquiry 1 I was still unsure about what you wanted in terms of analysis, summary and time spent going over space and meaning. The conference helped a little bit, but having not received a grade on anything from you at that point, I was unsure of what to expect, so I just did what I knew how to do and hoped for the best. The comments you provided on my Inquiry were helpful and provided a good insight into how you graded.

From there, things started to get clearer, ironically this was around the time we read Foucalt which was an ordeal to say the least. The main thing I took away from Foucalt was his concept of mirror spaces, which are perceived but are not actually real in this plane of existence. I was able to apply that concept to a variety of things, like when we talked about the Stubenville rape case and the big data blog post. I said that the Internet acted as a mirror space for real events and in some cases had an enormous impact on the real spaces that we inhabit.

We then had a blog post about Starbucks, which was probably my favorite blog post not only because it talked about the processes in which companies create customer loyalty, but I was also able to apply concepts from a book I had read earlier to it. The book discussed the formation of a habit loop in our daily lives and how each day is made up of many different cycles of this loop, everything from brushing our teeth, to driving places and eating. I’m sure you’re probably tired of hearing about the habit loop from me, but I find it fascinating and it was amazing to me how many different places I could apply it in my own life.

Inquiry 2a suffered from procrastination and lack of motivation, so I had to make up for it in 2b. A lot of the things I talked about in 2b weren’t originally in my prezi including, believe it or not, the habit loop. Inquiry 2 didn’t do a lot for me in terms of introducing me to new information, but it was a great outlet for me to apply the things I had learned so far in the class and in other classes I have had before this one, especially my social psychology class.

Inquiry 3 seemed to pass by quickly since it was a group project and we all kind of worked on it separately aside from a few short meetings so it really felt more like pooled individual efforts rather than a group project. Because of the apparent disconnect in our group, I don’t think our presentation and subsequent paper flowed very well. This is not to say that the information in our presentation was sub par, our information was all rock solid, each individual contribution was interesting and well thought out, the main problem was that there was little or no segway between ideas.

Seemingly interspersed with Inquiry 3 was our box town project; which I thought would have fit better had it been closer to the map reading seeing as they both deal with urban and suburban layout. I remember from both discussions the topic of roads changing depending on the setting they’re in. If they’re in rural countryside, they’re spread out and most of the time they connect two larger cities or towns. Once roads get into a metropolitan area they become straight and divide the city into square blocks so that space can be fully utilized (Boston being the only exception…). In suburban areas, the layout of the roads is less about efficiency and more about things like making sure houses have enough land, and including bends in the roads to discourage speeding.

Despite a bit of a slow start and apathetic ending, this course has engrained a couple things in my head. I’ll always look at the Internet as a mirror space; I’ll never face the door in an elevator again; and I’ll never know how to use a semicolon; because you said you would teach us; but you never did;

Letter Writer's 3 Inquiry

For our Inquiry 3 we used Andrew's project on Great American Ball Park and the four of us all kinda chose different aspects of the park to analyze and redesign. Andrew chose location because he felt it was a very important aspect of the park and since he goes to games often, it influences him directly. Meghan was set on doing fan experience and interaction so we let her run with that. Bannon decided to focus on the size of the diamond and how it related to home runs and fielding plays. I chose to do seating because it was easy and that was one of my main focuses in Inquiry 2. We started with Andrew's powerpoint and just emailed it around as we all worked on it. We had a couple meetings just so we could kind of get a sense of what our entire powerpoint would look like and what direction we were heading in. Without going really in depth into the layout and pricing of all the seats in GABP, I tried to give an overview of everything they had to offer and some of the unique options like the all you can eat seats that they had. Going off of ticketing and seat prices I noticed that the Reds boast using dynamic pricing, which is a good idea and it is actually very useful to both the consumer and the organization. By being able to change ticket prices based on how popular they predict the game to be, the organizations that utilize this system can charge more for games that they know lots of people will come to while charging less for games that won't be as popular. You have to read the fine print on their website to realize everything they're allowed to do, but if you just read what they tell you in bullet points it sounds like you're getting a great deal. If I had gotten time to talk during our presentation I would have talked about how this not only encourages fans to buy tickets, but it encourages them to do so again and again because they know the prices will fluctuate and this way they get the best deal. Form there I was going to talk about how saving money on tickets leads people to generally spend more on food and souvenirs allowing the company to make up the difference in lost ticket sales. I was going to sum up by talking about how the entire process of going to a baseball game is powered by the habit loop. Lots of little decisions that can be made for us lead us to make those snap decisions again and again, and while we think we're acting under our own volition, there is a very powerful subconscious influence that is swaying our decisions.

Trixtopia

We had a kind of slow start to building our city... I think everyone in our group is pretty much done with school and trying, so we made a beach town slash spring break city. As soon as we decided to make a beach town, we basically figured it would be restaurants, shops, and hotels. As we deliberated more on it, we figured we should add a couple things like residential living, and civil services so that the city would at least have a couple inhabitants year round. We ended up having a couple restaurants, bars, hotels, a shopping center, a dolphin sanctuary, two residential buildings and one very large police/fire station and hospital. The entire experience made me realize a couple of things about city planning. First of all, even small towns are divided up within themselves. Much like Goggin Ice Center tries to differentiate experiences and baseball stadiums do too, so do cities. Our town was basically cut in half, one half for the tourists and the other half for the residents. We put clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops by the hotels that vacationers would stay at and we the grocery store and police fire hospital by the residents. It made me realize how people both don't like change in their lives and at the same time need it. That's why people take vacations, they want a break form their normal daily routines. And when they are on vacation, they do not want anything to remind them of their normal life at home and the stresses that come with it. At the same time, when people reside in a place, they don't want to be bothered by tourists, people who exploit the place that they call home. Furthermore, the project made me realize how coveted nature is and how easily exploitable it can become once people start seeing dollar signs. Additionally, when individuals realize that they have the opportunity to create a "unique" "natural" setting, they can do so and make money off of it. that's exactly what we did, we decided to create an inlet in our coastline and then almost immediately after we did that, we put two enormous hotels on either side of it. It wasn't even like we were going to make money off of our decision, we just did it because we figured that's what would happen if this city were real. All in all the project brought to light a lot of things I had never really given serious thought and it made me realize a little bit of what goes into city planning. Granted our town wasn't really a town at all... more of an imagined space that we all wished was real. Had we made our city bigger, I feel like we would have gotten a better idea of all the details that go into the logistics and economics of city planning, but it was still fun.

Ethnographic research

 This is a floor plan of Goggin Ice Center, which is startling because even though I'm fairly familiar with Goggin, I never realized that 11, 10, 9, or 8 existed or how small the walkway around Steve Cady Arena is compared to everything else.

 This is a CGI representation of the main hockey rink from an opera suite. This is also the section of the ice that the student section is located in, facing the scoreboard. Aside from the general admission seat there are also 102 club level seats, 6 opera suites and 4 private boxes.

This is a post game ritual after the handshake where the players circle up and hit their sticks against the ice faster and faster, then point them up in the air, and finally come together and congratulate each other

Steve Cady Arena has 2,800 general admission seats which are divided in half at center ice. one half is for students, the other half is for ticketed entry. The student section faces the scoreboard and is located on the side of the ice where the visiting teams goalie spends 2 out of the 3 periods. This allows students to be closest when goals are scored and allows for 40 minutes of heckling. People tend to line up hours before the game starts so they can get seats on the glass and it's usually the same people every time. Other people filter in closer to game time and some people get there right when the game starts. The Band of Brotherhood takes up one entire section of seats and plays a vital role in crowd behavior. They always play Love and Honor at the beginning of the game as well as the national anthem. They are also responsible for various cheers throughout the game, and if the crowd gets too rowdy, they play a certain  song or cheer to distract the crowd from whatever just happened in the game.

Arcade Fire Knows Where You Live

When I go the Pine Point site, I can't help but think of Foucalt's piece when she talked about places reflected in a mirror and how they aren't really places at all, rather they exist in a separate reality. That's what Pine Point is. Sure, it was a real place and it existed in this reality at some point, but that's not how it is represented today. Now, the only surviving representations of Pine Point exist in its' residents memories, and on that blog site. Maybe that's for the better, after all "recollection will always be the most accurate version of that place and time." as the author says. So perhaps it is better for the former residents of Pine Point that their only interaction with their old town resides in their mind, because if it still existed, they may not look upon as fondly as they do now. Every slide has music and graphics that are on a loop, so maybe the authors sense of nostalgia comes from the idea that one day, Pine Point will become a new town for new people to call their own, and he just doesn't want to see that day come... Or maybe he just had nothing better to do with his life than make an interactive website dedicated to a town that doesn't exist anymore, who am I to say?

As for the wilderness downtown site, that was just kinda weird to see aerial views of my neighborhood spliced with a child running and computer generated trees growing on the picture. I feel the same way about this site as I do about the Pine Point one. It's not a real place, it's a representation of a real place and it exists in another reality. It is not a real place because it is displayed on my computer screen, it is merely a compilation of pixels arranged by a series of code. it lacks all of the things that make it the place it is, the feel, the smell of the air, the ambient sounds of the neighborhood etc. all those things contribute to making my street unique from other streets. Instead, it is represented with a soundtrack placed over the images, and all kinds of additional images and forces are added to this foreign representation of the street I knew as a child.

Sixth Graders in India Have Done More for the World Than I EVER Will

These videos always make me depressed because it just reminds me that some child in Bangladesh had an idea and now he has had a more profound affect on the world than I ever will. Big data is making everyone and everything in the world more connected, which is a good thing because as this video shows, with an rapidly growing population, comes a lot of people who are really bored and want to make a video. So some people put GPS trackers on pizza delivery bicyclists and watched them. Some other people actually had good ideas and were able to do many things from reducing medical costs to putting a small village on the map. Big data is making it easier and easier for people to make a difference without having to start a massive movement. In the age of connectivity, an idea doesn't just have to be an idea anymore, it can quickly turn into something tangible.

Who Knew My Geology Class Would Make Me a Douche Bag About Nature?

After falling asleep several times while reading Lopez's article, I realized that he was just a man yearning for simpler times. Lopez makes the distinction between scholarly knowledge of land and "true" historical knowledge of land many times. He says that the "true" knowledge comes from living on the land and experiencing it first hand; whereas the scholarly knowledge consists of things like which fish live in a certain river and specific flower names which can be learned in books. His tone suggests that the former is somehow more important and better than the latter. It could be argued that to truly understand and appreciate the land one inhabits, you must possess some sort of scholarly knowledge of its' characteristics. For how can one truly appreciate the beauty of a certain Mendocino shoreline unless you understand that the layers upon layers of sediment visible in the bluff adjacent to the ocean were deposited there over millions of years. And that the reason the layers are mismatched at a certain point is because of an earthquake that took place millions of years ago. If you do not know the basic history of a place, you cannot fully appreciate it for what it is. You can appreciate it for its' beauty and picturesque qualities (even thought that's a faux paus in Lopez's mind) but without knowing "scholarly" specifics of the flora and fauna that inhabit a certain region, you are missing out on an enormous piece of historical significance.