Brief reports on China may be completed via a powerpoint presentation or by locating and explaining the background to a brief video clip.
This week my classes have seen samples of downtown Shanghai and Hong Kong, They have seen street food being prepared and sampled in Szechwan province and neighboring Hanoi. They have even seen rats being prepared for dining in restaurants in Guangzhou.
They have samples Chinese opera and 2 movies on Chinese history. And the have taken lessons in Mandarin Chinese.
Presentation -
Notes so that you can tell the class where and what topic you are presenting. Title or url of a clip of approx 3 mins.
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Mon, May 13: China reports via video
Robert "Weiwei" Trudeau: adding a Chinese name in imitation of thew Chinese taking Western names
"At my workplace, which is 90 percent mainland Chinese, just about everyone I interacted with had an English name, usually selected or received in school. The names ran the gamut, from the standard (Jackie, Ivy) to the unusual (Sniper, King Kong), but what really struck me was how commonly people used them when addressing one another, even when the rest of the conversation was in Chinese," says Huan Hsu at slate.com.
Therefore I want my students to honor the Chinese by researching and choosing a Chinese name.
I've chosen "Weiwei" because I know much about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Ai Weiwei (born 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism, says Wikipedia.[1][2]
Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.[3] As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called "tofu-skin schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.[4]
In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing airport on 3 April, he was held for over two months without any official charges being filed; officials alluded to their allegations of "economic crimes" (tax evasion). In October 2011 ArtReview magazine named Ai number one in their annual Power 100 list. The decision was criticised by the Chinese authorities.
By next class have your Chinese name and notes on the person from whom you have adopted the name.
Sunday, May 05, 2013
Your future: trends in petrochemicals and in clean energy
Jonathan Fahey, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected.
By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae — or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn't shine or the wind didn't blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers.
Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age.
But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning.
Oil companies big and small have used technology to find a bounty of oil and natural gas so large that worries about running out have melted away. New imaging technologies let drillers find oil and gas trapped miles underground and undersea. Oil rigs "walk" from one drill site to the next. And engineers in Houston use remote-controlled equipment to drill for gas in Pennsylvania.
The result is an abundance that has put the United States on track to become the world's largest producer of oil and gas in a few years. As domestic production has soared, oil imports have fallen to a 17-year low, the U.S. government reported Thursday.
The gushers aren't limited to Texas, North Dakota and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Overseas, enormous reserves have been found in East and West Africa, Australia, South America and the Mediterranean.
"Suddenly, out of nowhere, the world seems to be awash in hydrocarbons," says Michael Greenstone, an environmental economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The consequences are enormous. A looming energy crisis has turned into a boom. These additional fossil fuels are intensifying the threat to the earth's climate. And for renewable energy sources, the sunny forecast of last decade has turned overcast.
This is the story of how technological advances drove a revolution no one in the energy industry expected. One that is just beginning.
___
EXPLORING ENERGY FRONTIERS
The new century brought deep concerns the world's oil reserves were increasingly concentrated in the Middle East — and beginning to run out. Energy prices rose to record highs. Climate scientists showed that reliance on fossil fuels was causing troubling changes to the environment.
"The general belief was that the end of the oil era was at hand," says Daniel Yergin, an energy historian and author of "The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World."
As a result, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and governments were pouring money into new companies developing alternative forms of energy that promised to supply the world's needs without polluting.
Even oil and gas companies got in the game. BP had adopted the slogan "beyond petroleum" in 2000 and threw millions into its solar division. Shell partnered with another company to fire up a plant to convert agricultural waste into ethanol.
So strong was the lure of alternative energy that veterans of the oil patch began fleeing for startups.
In 23 years at Shell, David Aldous helped develop projections that showed a booming world population and rising energy demand. He also saw how hard it was for big oil companies to find enough oil every year to replace all they sold. He left Shell to join Range Fuels, a company that promised to turn wood chips into ethanol, in 2008.
"I felt we needed faster innovation," he says.
___
THE RACE FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY
But while the national focus was on alternatives, the oil and gas industry was innovating too. New technology allowed drillers to do two crucial things: find more places where oil and gas is hidden and bring it to the surface economically.
Large oil companies such as Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP turned up huge discoveries offshore in ultra-deep water with the help of better sensors and faster computers that allowed them to see once-hidden oil deposits.
Onshore, small drillers learned how to pull oil and gas out of previously inaccessible underground rock formations.
For most of the oil age, drillers have looked for large underground pools of oil and gas that were easy to tap. These pools had grown over millions of years as oil and gas oozed out of what is known as source rock. Source rock is a wide, thin layer of sedimentary rock — like frosting in the middle of a layer cake — that is interspersed with oil and gas.
An engineer named George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, spent years searching for a way to free natural gas from this source rock. He finally succeeded when he figured how to drill horizontally, into and then along a layer of source rock. That allowed him to access the gas throughout a layer of source rock with a single well. Then he used a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" to create tiny cracks in the rock that would allow natural gas to flow into and up the well.
The United States, which was facing a gas shortage five years ago, now has such enormous supplies it is looking to export the fuel in large volumes for the first time.
The common wisdom in the industry was that the process Mitchell had invented for natural gas wouldn't work for oil. Oil molecules are bigger and stickier than gas molecules, so petroleum engineers believed it would be impossible to get them to flow from source rock, even if the rock were cracked by fracking. But Mark Papa, the CEO of a small oil and gas company called EOG Resources, didn't accept that.
"The numbers were too intriguing, the prize was so big," he remembered.
He thought there could be as much as a billion barrels of oil within reach in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere — if only he could squeeze it out.
In 2003, he had a "eureka!" moment while poring over pictures of rock. Sections of a 40-foot-long column of source rock had been run through a CT scanner, the same type used to peer into the human body.
He saw something in the source rock sections the rest of the industry didn't know was there: a network of passageways big enough for oil molecules to pass through. Papa believed the passageways could act like rural roads for the oil to travel through. Fracking could then create superhighways for the oil to gather and feed into a pipe and up to the surface.
EOG began drilling test wells, and in 2005, Papa got some results from one in North Dakota that made him realize oil could flow fast enough to pay off.
"It was kind of like holy cow," he says. "My first thought was we need to replicate this, make sure it's not a freak result."
It wasn't. EOG snapped up land in a similar formation in South Texas known as the Eagle Ford Shale for $400 an acre when his competition thought it would never produce much oil. That land now goes for $30,000 per acre.
Papa thought the Eagle Ford might hold 500,000 barrels of oil. The Department of Energy now predicts it holds 3.4 billion. Some even expect 10 billion, which would make it the biggest oil field in U.S. history.
___
SMART DRILLS, RIGS THAT CAN WALK
But even after drillers figured out how to find oil and gas deep offshore and in onshore source rock, they still needed to develop technology that would make it economical.
At the tip of every oil or gas drill is a rotating mouth of sharp teeth that chews through rock. In the past, these drill bits could only dig straight down. Now they are agile enough to find and follow narrow horizontal seams of rock.
The drilling-services company Baker Hughes has designed a bit that can change directions underground, without having to be drawn back up to the surface, reducing drilling time by as much as 40 percent.
Behind the drill bit, attached to a long line of steel known as the "drill string," is an array of sensors. The sensors bombard rock with subatomic particles and measure the gamma radiation that bounces back. They assess how easily electricity flows through the rock and underground fluids. They analyze the magnetism of the rock and how it vibrates — both up and down and side to side — while drilling.
"To the layman, it looks like dumb iron, but you'd be shocked about what's inside," says Art Soucy, president of global products and services at Baker Hughes.
All this information is sent to engineers via fiber-optic cables. They run the information through supercomputers as powerful as 30,000 laptops to create a picture of the earth thousands of feet below the surface.
The people analyzing this data — and even directing the drill bits — are often sitting hundreds of miles away. Shell's Pennsylvania drilling operations are directed from a center in Houston, where experienced drillers monitor the progress at several sites across the country from a single room.
And when the drilling is done, the rig itself can "walk" a hundred feet or so to another location and start drilling again. In the past, rigs had to be taken down and reassembled, which could take days. New rigs are built on sliding "shoes" that allow hydraulic lifts to shuffle the rig forward in short steps.
"It has made possible things that were unthinkable 10 years ago," says Claudi Santiago, managing director at First Reserve Corp., a private-equity firm that invests in energy companies.
Now, drillers are finding oil faster than the world is using it. At the end of 2001, the industry had enough "proved oil reserves" to satisfy world demand for 45 years, according to BP's annual statistical review, a closely watched study. By the end of 2011 that had grown to 51 years — even though a decade's worth of oil had been used and daily demand had grown 14 percent. And "proved reserves" refers to oil that can be economically tapped using today's technology. Tomorrow's methods could yield even more.
This is good news for a global economy that remains dependent on fossil fuels, but it's terrifying to climate scientists.
"If we're willing to go down this road of squeezing whatever petroleum we can out of the earth, we can easily get carbon dioxide levels up to unfathomable levels and put in motion what would be dramatic or catastrophic changes in our climate system," says Michael E. Mann, a geophysicist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
___
RENEWABLES PROGRESS, BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH
Renewable technologies have had their successes. The average cost of a solar power system has fallen by 31 percent in the last two years. Solar now generates six times more electricity in the U.S. than it did a decade ago, and wind produces 14 times more. Most major automakers offer some type of electric vehicle.
And this success has come despite the fact that renewable energy's major benefit — that it doesn't pollute — is given little or no value in the marketplace because most governments haven't adopted taxes or penalties for fossil fuel pollution.
But the outlook for wind, batteries and biofuels is as dim as it's been in a decade. Global greenhouse gas agreements have fizzled. Dazzling discoveries have been made in laboratories, and some of these may yet develop into transformative products, but alternative energy technologies haven't become cheaper or more useful than fossil fuels.
Solar, wind and geothermal sources together accounted for 4.8 percent of U.S. power generation last year. Ten percent of U.S. gasoline demand was satisfied with corn ethanol, but ethanol and other fuels made from non-food sources have yet to hit the market.
"In many cases, renewables aren't ready for primetime yet," says George Biltz, vice president for energy and climate change at Dow Chemical, which continues to work on a host of renewable technologies.
Likewise, electric cars have not enjoyed the success many expected. The battery alone in an electric car costs as much as a new gasoline-powered car, and electric vehicles are not selling nearly as fast as once projected. General Motors expected to sell 60,000 Chevy Volts globally last year, but sold just half that many. Sales of Nissan's all-electric Leaf grew 22 percent around the world last year to 26,000, short of Nissan's projected 50 percent growth.
The cost of wind and solar power has declined, but the price of electricity made with newly cheap fossil fuels has fallen too, making it harder for wind and solar to compete.
"Renewables are now under scrutiny. They haven't made the kinds of quantum leaps we have seen in the oil and gas industry," says First Reserve Corp.'s Santiago, who now shuns investments in alternatives.
David Aldous, the former Shell executive, learned that lesson while trying to turn wood chips into ethanol at Range Fuels. The system that fed the chips into a gasification chamber didn't work well, and the project failed.
"Things don't always scale from the petri dish to the demo plant and then to the commercial plant. It's just part of building up a new industry," Aldous says.
Range went out of business in 2011, and it was hardly alone. Dozens of biofuel, battery and solar companies failed even though federal and state governments supported alternatives with loans and grants, and mandated their use. Others are limping along.
Pacific Ethanol, which traded near $300 per share in 2006, now trades for 28 cents. Amyris, an advanced biofuels company, traded near $34 a share as recently as last year, but now trades at $2.74. The battery maker A123 was forced to file for bankruptcy protection last year, three years after going public. An index of clean energy companies that was first traded in March 2005 is down 69 percent since then. A similar index of traditional energy companies is up 75 percent over the same period.
___
THE NEXT 10 YEARS
This dark period for alternative energy could last for years. With government debt soaring and no more worries about running out of oil, many renewable subsidies are being scaled back.
"The world is completely different now," MIT's Greenstone says.
But there are still hundreds of companies, including fossil fuel giants, working on new renewable-energy projects. ExxonMobil is investing in Synthetic Genomics, a company started by the geneticist J. Craig Venter to try to create strains of algae that will produce fuels. BP and Shell continue to work on ways to turn plant waste into fuels.
California, meanwhile, set the nation's most ambitious renewable energy goals and is on track to meet them. One-fifth of the power delivered by the state's three biggest utilities now comes from renewables, not including large hydroelectric dams. By 2020, that portion will rise to one-third.
President Barack Obama in March proposed using $2 billion in federal oil and gas royalties to invest in clean energy technology research. Obama is also expected to promote renewables through pollution regulations, if not with new laws.
And for all the world's newfound oil, prices are still high because developing nations are consuming more.
"It's not time to write the epitaph yet," Aldous says. Eventually the global economy will fully recover, he says, and demand for energy of all kinds will increase.
"New sources of energy are going to be in vogue again," he says.
Experts didn't see the oil and gas boom coming five years ago. It's certainly possible the world will change direction again in the next five years.
But EOG's Papa says oil and gas companies will just invest in even more sophisticated technology. He estimates that current techniques pull only 6 percent of the oil trapped in source rock to the surface. Learning to double that would yield yet another enormous trove of hydrocarbons.
"Now we go into the next phase of technology," he says. "How are we going to get the rest of it out of the ground?"
____
Thursday, May 02, 2013
Tsunami / Earthquake and Nuclear Power Plant Meltdown Quiz
1. Fukushima is located on the Japanese island of a) Kyushu b) Honshu c) Hokkaido
d) Shikoku.
2. The nuclear meltdown occurred in a )1986 b) 2011 c) 2013.
3. The fuel rods in a nuclear reactor are made of a) steam b) heavy water c) coolant
d) uranium.
4. Electricity-producing nuclear plants begin by producing a) steam b) heavy water c) coolant
d) uranium.
5. Power reactors work by splitting __ in a chain reaction. a) fuel rods b) atoms c) coolant
d) uranium.
6. Fukushima's seawall was about 20' tall; the tsunami's height was about a) 49' b) 99'
c) 149'.
7. The meltdown could've been avoided by preventing flooding of the basement of the turbine buildings, location of the emergency diesel __ . a) generators b) reactors c) cafeteria
d) thermal producers.
8. The key failure in the Fukushima disaster: a) mechanical factors b) human factors.
9. Basically, the Fukushima meltdown was unavoidable. T / F
10. Japan has numerous renewable energy alternatives, including wind turbine, hydroelectric, solar energy and __ power, seen in the numerous volcanic mountains of the nation.
a) nuclear b) steam c) tidal d) geothermal
Background on the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.[5][6]
It is the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, says Wikipedia.
The plant comprises six separate boiling water reactors originally designed by General Electric (GE) and maintained by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
Immediately after the earthquake reactors 1–3 shut down automatically and emergency generators came online to power electronics and coolant systems. However, the tsunami following the earthquake quickly flooded the low-lying rooms in which the emergency generators were housed. The flooded generators failed, cutting power to the critical pumps that must continuously circulate coolant water through a nuclear reactor for several days in order to keep it from melting down after being shut down. As the pumps stopped, the reactors overheated.
Power reactors work by splitting atoms, typically uranium, in a chain reaction. The reactor continues to generate heat after the chain reaction is stopped because of the radioactive decay of unstable isotopes, fission products, created by this process. This decay of unstable isotopes, and the decay heat that results, cannot be stopped. Nuclear fuel rods that have reached cold shutdown temperatures typically require another several years of water cooling in a spent fuel pool before decay heat production reduces to the point that they can be safely transferred to dry storage casks.
The earthquake was followed by a 43–49 ft height tsunami arriving approximately 50 minutes later which topped the plant's19 ft seawall,[73][74][75] flooding the basement of the Turbine Buildings and disabling the emergency diesel generators[76][77] located there[72].
Government agencies and TEPCO were thoroughly unprepared for the "cascading nuclear disaster".[91] The tsunami that "began the nuclear disaster could and should have been anticipated and that ambiguity about the roles of public and private institutions in such a crisis was a factor in the poor response at Fukushima".[91] In March 2012, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said that the government shared the blame for the Fukushima disaster, saying that officials had been blinded by a false belief in the country's "technological infallibility", and were taken in by a "safety myth". Noda said "Everybody must share the pain of responsibility".[92]
According to Naoto Kan, Japan's former prime minister, the country was totally unprepared for the Fukushima disaster, and the crippled Fukushima plant should not have been built so close to the ocean on a tsunami-prone coast.[93] Kan has acknowledged flaws in authorities' handling of the crisis, including poor communication and coordination between nuclear regulators, utility officials and the government.
Japan’s "rigid bureaucratic structures, reluctance to send bad news upwards, need to save face, weak development of policy alternatives, eagerness to preserve nuclear power’s public acceptance, and politically fragile government, along with TEPCO’s very hierarchical management culture, also contributed to the way the accident unfolded. Moreover, the information Japanese people receive about nuclear energy and its alternatives has long been tightly controlled by both TEPCO and the government".[95]
There has been a significant re-evaluation of existing nuclear power programs in many countries. One poll found that what had been growing acceptance of nuclear power in the United States was eroded sharply following the 2011 Japanese nuclear accidents, with 43% approving and 50% disapproving of building new plants.[183] Events at Fukushima "cast doubt on the idea that even an advanced economy can master nuclear safety".[184] Increased anti-nuclear sentiment has been evident in India, Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States.
Japan could have chosen to exploit the country's extensive renewable energy base. Japan has a total of "324 GW of achievable potential in the form of onshore and offshore wind turbines (222 GW), geothermal power plants (70 GW), additional hydroelectric capacity (26.5 GW), solar energy (4.8 GW) and agricultural residue (1.1 GW)."
Louisiana has two nuclear power plants on the Miss R that have been at work for decades. One is in St Charles parish below New Orleans; it is called the Waterford Steam Electric Station. One is near St Francisville, above Baton Rouge. It is the River Bend Nuclear Generating Station.
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Semester exam study guide in world geography: 50 multiple choice questions and a comparison essay
The semester exam will have 2 parts:
- a brief, detailed comparison essay
and 50 multiple-choice, open notes questions.
- 10 on the Fuller Center's Veterans Build project.
- 10 on Vietnam - especially the US, Vietnam conflict.
- 10 on Japan.
- 10 on India.
- 10 on the Coates Bluff Nature Trail.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Fuller Housing essay and BP Oil Disaster notes
Fuller Veterans Houses essays complete.
Now, make an 11-question public awareness quiz about the most important facts in the BP Oil Disaster quiz. All multiple-choice. Jazzy title.
Make the quiz easy and the answers easy. The idea is to educate.
Monday, April 29, 2013
In-class reading and question-writing project on the BP Oil Spill
A 10-page version of an overview of the BP Oil Spill is being read in class this week.
It is edited from What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill
The 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill was even worse than BP wanted us to know.
by Mark Hertsgaard | April 22, 2013. Newsweek Magazine online, The Daily Beast.
Along with reading, students are expected to
- take notes.
- be able to discuss the issues raised.
- know the basic facts of the disaster.
In groups, students will write 11 multiple choice questions designed to raise public awareness of the calamity. In other words, easy and basic questions with easy answers. Colorful title.
Answers quietly added to bottom of the page. Names of students in the group.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Presentations this week in Asian studies, moving from Japan to Korea and China
Plan to make another Asian presentation
- six images of Korea
- map
- documentation
- factoids
- colorful title
Topic areas
- North Korea profile
- N. Korean Communist dictatorship
- N. Korea threats to world stability
- Korean history
- Korean sports, cooking, technology, manufacturing, art, etc.
12 pts.
Presentations on Wed, Th, Fri.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Social studies in action: students observe, question and write about the Fuller Center for Housing, Veterans Build
Fuller Center for Housing, Veterans Build; Caddo Magnet HS students. Gail Saetta of One Small House, liaison to contributor Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters., a photo by trudeau on Flickr.
Students observing the Fuller Center volunteer house construction project adjacent to Olive St were introduced to social change in action.
Martha St, a neglected street in the Stoner Hill neighborhood, is the site of the building of 4 houses - dedicated to impoverished veterans.
The Fuller Center house plan is designed to be affordable to people of limited means. Yet it is not a give-away program.
- All house applicants must participate in 350 hours of non-paid work called "sweat equity" prior to qualification.
- Residents take on mortgage payments of about $400 per month.
- By building new houses instead of patching old ones the Fuller Center intends to raise the standards and spirits of discouraged neighborhoods.
Fuller Center is a national organization created by the late Millard Fuller (1935 - 2009), an attorney, missionary and philanthropist from Alabama. Honored by Presidents Carter, Clinton and Bush, he developed Habitat for Humanity Intl. In 2005 he founded the Fuller Center for Housing.
Volunteers from NY, California and Ohio have converged on Shreveport to work.
Gail Saetta of One Small House, an organization that ordinarily builds dwellings in Mexico and Haiti, described her outreach to Roger Waters, contributor and famed as a musician in the band Pink Floyd.
Famed musician John Mayer spent a day painting a Fuller house on Martha St. On June 1 CBS news star Diane Sawyer is scheduled to broadcast from the Martha St site.
As visits to the site continue, students are encouraged to watch their steps - boards and nails are everywhere - and ask as many questions as possible.
A descriptive essay, "Social studies in action," will be written in class.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Monday, April 22, 2013
Magnet geography / Japan
Bluefin Tuna $$$
- spicy raw tuna (key to killing bacteria is quick freezing)
Nori
- seaweed dried and cooked for the international market; used in suchi.
Wasabi
- Japanese horeradish; powerful spice.
Gari
- pickled ginger, thinly spiced; to cleanse palate and is germicidal.
Koi, or carp
- aquaculture; protein from a fish that Americans would not find tasty.
Bento
- boxed lunch.
Zen Buddhism
- emphasis on meditation and riddles.
Shinto
- traditional religion.
- "hai, "yes." Iie, "no."
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Boston and Tokyo
1. Place Boston on a sketch map of Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York and Massachusetts.
2. List 3 ways in which the Boston Marathon is notable.
3. The length of a race called a marathon, in approximate miles: a) 9 b) 18 c) 26.
4. Pyongyang and Seoul: briefly identify.
5. Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku are Japan's principal __ .
6. Sketch the location of the holy mountain, Mt Fuji, on a fresh map of Nihon.
7. A city with a metro population of about 4.5 million: __ .
8. City with a metro population of ome 35.6 million: __ .
9. The latitude of Tokyo is about __ degrees __, which is closer to a) Shreveport than NYC b) NYC than Shreveport.
10. What makes you guess that there must be a Tokyo Marathon?
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Wheelchair competitors, blind runners among 20,000 participants in Boston Marathon
Begun in 1897, inspired by the success of the first modern-day marathon competition in the 1896 Summer Olympics,[1] the Boston Marathon is the world's oldest annual marathon, says Wikipedia. It ranks as one of the world's best-known road racing events.
Annual attendance: 500,000
Runners: 20,00
Though starting with 18 participants in 1897, the Centennial Boston Marathon in 1996 established a record as the world's largest marathon with 38,708 entrants, 36,748 starters, and 35,868 finishers.
26 miles, 385 yards length conforms to Olympic standard.[6] Marathons celebrate a messenger's dash from Marathon, Greece, to Athens to announce an unlikely Greek victory.
Women were not allowed to enter the Boston Marathon officially until 1972. In the 60's many women ran the course in defiance of the rules.
The Boston Marathon has a proud tradition of extending the challenge of the marathon to people with disabilities. In 1975, the Boston Marathon became the first major marathon to include a wheelchair division competition.
It also hosts a blind/visually impaired division and a mobility impaired program. In 2013, 40 blind runners participated.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Presentation on Japan next week, Ap 24-25
Have fun choosing and making a lighthearted presentation on Japanese culture. 15 pts.
Powerpoint or other format if OK'd by your teacher.
- Fun title.
- Photos on each visual page (aka slide).
- Map.
- Documentation at end.
- Total of 6 pages / slides.
- Factoids, or bulleted notes.
Typical topics -
- Hayao Miyazaki
- Animated movies.
- Manga.
- Zen Buddhism
- Mt Fuji
- J-pop group.
- Tokyo, or one section of the city, such as the Ginza.
- Tokyo's Harajuku area, center of youth fashion.
- Sega, Nintendo and Japanese game companies.
- Auto manufacturers such as Honda, Mazda, Toyota, Mitsubishi.
- Music-related companies, such as Sony, Panasonic, Yamaha and Korg.
- Motorcycle companies such as Kawasaki, Suzuki, Honda.
- Geishas.
- Samurai.
- Swords.
- Ships; the junk.
- Noodles; soba.
- Sushi and sashimi.
- Tempura; also, Benihana of Tokyo.
- Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji.
- Historic art and architecture.
- Modern art.
- Robots.
- Karesansui and other gardens.
- Kimono and traditional clothing.
- Judo and martial arts.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Vietnam veteran interview due Wed or Thurs, Ap 17, 18
Using the adults around you to find a veteran of an Asian war to interview is the heart of the Vietnam Vet Interview project.
Most students cannot do it alone. be smart in thinking of resource people that will connect you to a veteran.
The emphasis in this project is use of the Primary Source.
See the earlier post on this assignment.
5 images. Map. Title.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Essay on the US in Vietnam in the 1960's
Essay on the US in Vietnam in the 1960's must be written around these notes . . .
11 pts. In class.
- names (presidents, etc)
- events (battles, treaties, etc)
- dates (years)
- weapons (high and low tech)
- acc to teacher Robert Trudeau, acc to Wikipedia, etc.
- colorful title and opening
Friday, April 12, 2013
Danh's Garden, Pho Kim, Lemongrass: a taste of Vietnam in Shreveport
Banh mi sandwiches, bowls of Pho, Vietnamese iced coffee, Thai curry, Chinese bubble tea: there are many tastes to be enjoyed locally. For bonus points, I might add.
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