Ch. 4 Assignments

Chapter 4 Assignments

1. Poor Headlines

Headline: There’s No One in Charge

Problem: No information – could be about anything

Solution: Bay Area Groups Bicker Over Airport Connector: Regional Transit Agency Is Needed to Coordinate Planning

Source: eastbayexpress.com, September 23, 2009

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/there_s_no_one_in_charge/Content?oid=1199047

Headline: Crunch Time

Problem: No information; no verb; makes one think of food, which isn’t relevant

Solution: Hunter’s Point Shipyard Redevelopment Plan Generates Community Objections

Source: sfbg.com, September 23, 2009

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=9185&catid=&volume_id=398&issue_id=450&volume_num=43&issue_num=52

Headline: Haul of Business Golds

Problem: No verb; doesn’t seem to make sense; plural “golds” looks like a typo

Solution: Olympic Games Use Commercialism to Advantage

Source: ft.com/management, September 23, 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f24c1be8-a884-11de-9242-00144feabdc0.html

2. Article with lists added

The Battle Over the Big Ditch (original article)

A fight has broken out among environmentalists over a newly proposed peripheral canal. Backers say it could save the delta and protect our water supply, but critics contend it will do more harm than good.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/the_battle_over_the_big_ditch/Content?oid=1186060

By Robert Gammon

September 2, 2009

When a proposal for a peripheral canal came before voters in 1982, environmentalists universally opposed it. The canal, which would have run around the east side of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, was rightly viewed at the time as a water grab by Southern California developers and Central Valley agribusiness. But since then the delta’s ecosystem has nearly collapsed and its fragile levees have continued to crumble. As a result, the governor and state legislative leaders are once again discussing a peripheral canal plan, and this time it’s creating a schism in the environmental community.

Proponents of the canal, which include the Nature Conservancy, say neither the delta’s severe ecological problems nor the state’s water shortage can be solved without it. “The delta has not worked, and is not working,” said Leo Winternitz, delta project director for the Nature Conservancy. Proponents also point to the work of UC Davis’ Jeffrey Mount, who probably knows more about the delta’s levees than anyone and says that without a peripheral canal, a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault would collapse the levees and inundate the delta with saltwater, thereby destroying the freshwater supply of more than two-thirds of the state’s residents.

However, opponents, including Friends of the River and the California Sport Fishing Protection Alliance, say a canal would rob the delta of essential freshwater at a time when major fisheries, including salmon, are already in serious trouble. They also maintain that if the state builds a giant canal as proposed, Southern California interests and big agribusiness will exert political pressure to divert even more freshwater in the future, thereby ensuring the delta’s destruction. “The problem is that no one wants to talk about the elephant in the room,” said Bill Jennings, executive director of the fishing protection alliance. “California has already over-appropriated its water supply.”

Currently, there are no immediate plans for a peripheral canal. Instead, the legislature has been holding hearings on establishing a statewide commission that would have extensive power over the delta and could authorize a canal. The commission idea is being pushed by state Senator Joe Simitian, a Democrat whose constituents in Santa Clara County depend on the delta for freshwater supplies. Governor Schwarzenegger also supports a canal, along with building new dams.

Understanding the current canal debate requires a bit of background on how the delta “works.” The delta gets its freshwater from some of Northern California’s largest rivers — the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, and the Mokelumne. But the delta was altered substantially in the past century, first by the construction of levees to make way for farms, and then by the creation of the State Water Project, which has been siphoning about 6 million acre feet of water a year and sending it south. Fresh water from the delta is supposed to flow into San Francisco Bay, but instead a substantial portion of it is sucked through pumps in the southern delta near Tracy. This water then slakes the thirst of more than 22 million California residents — including most of the southern Central Valley, Southern California, and much of Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties. Most of Alameda County, including Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda, gets its water directly from the Mokelumne River before it empties into the delta.

But the changes to the delta have caused several major problems. First, the siphoning of freshwater has severely damaged the delta’s health and brought fisheries to the brink of extinction. In addition, millions of fish, particularly the Delta Smelt, are shredded each year in the giant pumps. And finally, the pumps reverse the natural flow of water in the delta, thereby trapping migrating fish and making them more vulnerable to predators. “It’s a black hole — fish get caught there and can’t get out,” Winternitz explained.

Proponents of the canal contend that it will eliminate fish shredding and help plug the black hole. Under a plan floating around the capital, the peripheral canal would take freshwater from the Sacramento River before it reaches the delta and then divert it around the delta to the southern pumps. State-of-art fish screens, in turn, would keep fish out of the canal. In addition, the canal would act as a safe harbor for the state’s freshwater supply in case of a major quake.

Some opponents of the canal, on the other hand, refer it derisively as the “Big Ditch,” because it could be nearly as large as the Panama Canal, running up to 50 miles in length and extending up to 700 feet in width. And with a potential $15 billion price tag, the canal could do more harm than good. Currently, freshwater from the Sacramento flows through the delta on its way to the southern pumps. But a canal would siphon a substantial amount of freshwater before it reaches delta in the first place. The absence of essential freshwater, in turn, could turn the delta much more salty, thereby ruining fish habitat and leaving delta farmers without enough water for their crops.

Some environmental groups say they’ll fight the canal unless there are ironclad guarantees of enough freshwater for the delta. “It needs more freshwater than it has been getting for the past several decades,” said Tina Swanson, executive director of the Bay Institute. “We have exceeded the capacity of the system.” But other groups are less confident that any such guarantees will ever be made. “We could be convinced to support a peripheral canal if we were having discussion about what we need to do about fisheries, but we are not,” said Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has fought several court battles to protect the smelt. “Instead, we’re having this massive infrastructure project jammed down our throats.”

Other environmental groups, meanwhile, likely won’t support a peripheral canal under any circumstances. They argue that the fish shredding problem could be greatly improved right away if the state were to install proper screens in front of the southern pumps. They also advocate shoring up levees to protect against future quakes. And they say that once a canal is built, any guarantees about freshwater flows in the delta will bow to future political pressures from the East Bay, the South Bay, Southern California, and big agribusiness.

From the perspective of Bill Jennings of the fishing protection alliance, the delta’s problems will continue until California stops subsidizing water-intensive crops in the dry southern and western Central Valley. He notes that agribusiness already takes 70 to 80 percent of the state’s developed water, and a significant portion of it is wasted on nonessential, nonnative crops that represent only a fraction of California’s economy. “We can serve our urban water needs, and we can serve most of our agricultural needs, but we can’t continue to subsidize farming in the desert,” he said, adding: “We have to ask ourselves, how much do we sacrifice of this public resource for benefit of a small sector of the economy.”

NEW VERSION:

When a proposal for a peripheral canal came before voters in 1982, environmentalists universally opposed it. The canal, which would have run around the east side of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, was rightly viewed at the time as a water grab by Southern California developers and Central Valley agribusiness. But since then the delta’s ecosystem has nearly collapsed and its fragile levees have continued to crumble. As a result, the governor and state legislative leaders are once again discussing a peripheral canal plan, and this time it’s creating a schism in the environmental community.

Proponents of the canal, which include the Nature Conservancy, say neither the delta’s severe ecological problems nor the state’s water shortage can be solved without it. “The delta has not worked, and is not working,” said Leo Winternitz, delta project director for the Nature Conservancy. Proponents also point to the work of UC Davis’ Jeffrey Mount, who probably knows more about the delta’s levees than anyone and says that without a peripheral canal, a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault would collapse the levees and inundate the delta with saltwater, thereby destroying the freshwater supply of more than two-thirds of the state’s residents.

However, opponents, including Friends of the River and the California Sport Fishing Protection Alliance, say

• a canal would rob the delta of essential freshwater at a time when major fisheries, including salmon, are already in serious trouble
• if the state builds a giant canal as proposed, Southern California interests and big agribusiness will exert political pressure to divert even more freshwater in the future, thereby ensuring the delta’s destruction

“The problem is that no one wants to talk about the elephant in the room,” said Bill Jennings, executive director of the fishing protection alliance. “California has already over-appropriated its water supply.”

Currently, there are no immediate plans for a peripheral canal. Instead, the legislature has been holding hearings on establishing a statewide commission that would have extensive power over the delta and could authorize a canal. The commission idea is being pushed by state Senator Joe Simitian, a Democrat whose constituents in Santa Clara County depend on the delta for freshwater supplies. Governor Schwarzenegger also supports a canal, along with building new dams.

Understanding the current canal debate requires a bit of background on how the delta “works.” The delta gets its freshwater from some of Northern California’s largest rivers — the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, and the Mokelumne. But the delta was altered substantially in the past century, first by the construction of levees to make way for farms, and then by the creation of the State Water Project, which has been siphoning about 6 million acre feet of water a year and sending it south. Fresh water from the delta is supposed to flow into San Francisco Bay, but instead a substantial portion of it is sucked through pumps in the southern delta near Tracy. This water then slakes the thirst of more than 22 million California residents — including most of the southern Central Valley, Southern California, and much of Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties. Most of Alameda County, including Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda, gets its water directly from the Mokelumne River before it empties into the delta.

But the changes to the delta have caused several major problems:

• the siphoning of freshwater has severely damaged the delta’s health and brought fisheries to the brink of extinction.
• millions of fish, particularly the Delta Smelt, are shredded each year in the giant pumps
• the pumps reverse the natural flow of water in the delta, thereby trapping migrating fish and making them more vulnerable to predators

“It’s a black hole — fish get caught there and can’t get out,” Winternitz explained.

Under a plan floating around the capital, the peripheral canal would take freshwater from the Sacramento River before it reaches the delta and then divert it around the delta to the southern pumps. State-of-art fish screens, in turn, would keep fish out of the canal. Proponents of the canal contend that

• it will eliminate fish shredding and help plug the black hole
• the canal would act as a safe harbor for the state’s freshwater supply in case of a major quake

Some opponents of the canal, on the other hand, refer it derisively as the “Big Ditch,” because it could be nearly as large as the Panama Canal, running up to 50 miles in length and extending up to 700 feet in width. And with a potential $15 billion price tag, the canal could do more harm than good. Currently, freshwater from the Sacramento flows through the delta on its way to the southern pumps. But a canal would siphon a substantial amount of freshwater before it reaches delta in the first place. The absence of essential freshwater, in turn, could turn the delta much more salty, thereby ruining fish habitat and leaving delta farmers without enough water for their crops.

Some environmental groups say they’ll fight the canal unless there are ironclad guarantees of enough freshwater for the delta. “It needs more freshwater than it has been getting for the past several decades,” said Tina Swanson, executive director of the Bay Institute. “We have exceeded the capacity of the system.” But other groups are less confident that any such guarantees will ever be made. “We could be convinced to support a peripheral canal if we were having discussion about what we need to do about fisheries, but we are not,” said Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has fought several court battles to protect the smelt. “Instead, we’re having this massive infrastructure project jammed down our throats.”

Other environmental groups, meanwhile, likely won’t support a peripheral canal under any circumstances. They argue that

• the fish shredding problem could be greatly improved right away if the state were to install proper screens in front of the southern pumps
• levees should be shored up to protect against future quakes.
• once a canal is built, any guarantees about freshwater flows in the delta will bow to future political pressures from the East Bay, the South Bay, Southern California, and big agribusiness

From the perspective of Bill Jennings of the fishing protection alliance, the delta’s problems will continue until California stops subsidizing water-intensive crops in the dry southern and western Central Valley. He notes that agribusiness already takes 70 to 80 percent of the state’s developed water, and a significant portion of it is wasted on nonessential, nonnative crops that represent only a fraction of California’s economy. “We can serve our urban water needs, and we can serve most of our agricultural needs, but we can’t continue to subsidize farming in the desert,” he said, adding: “We have to ask ourselves, how much do we sacrifice of this public resource for benefit of a small sector of the economy.”

3. Re-write headline for Ch. 1 writing sample

Old headline: Growing Up in Grandma’s House

New headline: Childhood Memories Reside in My Grandmother’s House

Comments: important word first; attracts attention of appropriate audience; active verb (I considered “inhabit,” but that calls to mind ghosts); simplest description of article

4. Headlines for story fragment (treating “U.S.” as one word)

China Blocks Import of U.S. Meat, Alleging Contamination

China Suspends Meat Imports from U.S.

China Blocks Meat Imports, Alleging Contamination: U.S. Criticism of Tainted Chinese Exports Provokes Retaliation

5. Capstone – I’m done for today – sorry!

Ch. 3: Website critique

Background

alameda.peralta.edu is the website for a small community college in California. It utilizes a content management system purchased about four years ago with the idea that individual faculty and staff members would develop and maintain their own personal and department web pages. This is not unusual for a college website; unusual factors here are that there is no webmaster, primarily to save on costs, and initial plans to establish a district-wide protocol for posting on the site were never implemented.

Site organization and page layouts

The overall conception of the site is clear and organized. All information currently on the home page fits on a 15-inch monitor, with “Quick Links” to important information down the center of the page, events listed in a column on the right side, and links to information that the college wishes to bring to students’ attention in large print at the bottom. It is not always obvious what is and isn’t clickable.

Graphics on the home page include a header across the top of the page, used for branding and bordered by a navigation bar, and two photos of students, which serve to break up the text but don’t add information. Use of graphics in general is limited and often seems to be just to fill space. Some pages are simple and scannable, but most of the academic department sites are text heavy, often including just course listings taken directly from the college catalog.

Much of the College Information page is dated or minimally informative. The campus map is out of date, although this is not obvious from the site unless one goes deeper and compares room numbers. Some other pages have obviously not been touched for more than a year. Committees are listed, but without members’ names or meeting times.

Recommendation: Use more graphics. Choose those that support the message, and focus users on them by linking through them to relevant information.

Recommendation: Regular updates are essential, with addition of missing information.

Navigation

The site is readily accessible from the Peralta Community College District home page. Within the college site, linking down from a higher level page is usually quite easy, but there is generally no obvious way to get back to where you came from, other than the browser’s “Back” arrow in the upper left corner.

Navigation from the bar at the top of the main page is fairly straightforward, except that the navigation bar lacks drop-down lists showing what the reader can find under each topic.

In general, nearly all links are currently functional, although they may link to pages that need to be updated.

Some links are unstable, however, particularly those to the Calendar of Events. When it works, the calendar works well, with information just one click from the home page.

Occasionally, navigating the site requires excess steps. An example is the links to urls on the right side of the Chemistry page, which is otherwise well developed. Student Clubs pages, which might be important to prospective or current students, are buried in the fourth layer of the site, and how one gets there isn’t apparent.

The A-Z Index function is useful if somewhat inconsistent. Some departments have posted all of their courses here, while others have listed nothing more than the main page. Both the Search and Links functions are adequate, and the Directory seems to work, although a only small number of faculty and staff have chosen to make their personal web pages accessible through the Directory.

Recommendation: At a minimum, a “Back” link should be put on each page, as well as a “Home” link.

Recommendation: Many colleges are now centering their main navigation bar around who the visitor is rather than, as is done here, topics defined by the college. If resources become available for redesign, this change should be considered.

Recommendation: Student activities links should be made more prominent.

Consistency

The college’s home page design is consistent with that of the parent district. Layout is relatively consistent because of the limits of the content management system.

Style is very inconsistent. It is most consistent, if not very exciting, when the individual faculty member has not worked on his or her page. Some faculty with the most developed pages have bypassed the content management system and linked to Dreamweaver or WordPress pages, introducing more inconsistency. The content management system imposes consistency in fonts, but either the system or the user causes larger fonts to be crowded vertically, making them sometimes almost unreadable.

Recommendation: The problem of consistency is best dealt with from the outset of development of a website. Consistency requires some central control, which is lacking for this site. The problem might be tackled now by developing a style sheet for production of more interesting pages than most of those that exist now, and applying it to these as a model in the hope that people who are currently attached to their own page designs will be motivated to move toward that style.

Writing Quality, Tone and Voice

The writing is generally literate and informative. The “marketingese” tone often objected to by web users is largely avoided here.

Generally, pages are able to stand alone. However, a number of the academic department pages include no description of the program, but only a list of courses with no context or guidance. For programs that list just one or two courses, with no other information, one has to ask whether achieving the goal of including all courses merits the damage done by having the visitor click on useless pages.

Some programs include useful and visitor-centered information. The Dental Assisting program, for example, uses its main page for paragraphs answering anticipated questions by prospective students, with catalog information and faculty contact information listed on second-level pages.

Recommendation: Develop a template for academic department pages based on user needs and preferences, and ensure that each department includes these basics on its page.

Summary recommendations

There is much work to be done on this site. Initial emphasis should be on regular updating, consistency of style, and more effective use of graphics.

Growing up in grandma’s house

NOTE: Since my first attempt really didn’t work out, I’ve written a second “first” entry, on a different topic.

Every Saturday evening my parents dropped my younger brother and me off at our grandmother’s house. As my parents said goodbye and started the car to take off for their night of dancing, my brother and I rushed up the stairs to our weekly adventure.

Almost as soon as we could walk, we insisted on going it alone up the eight concrete steps from the sidewalk, with a pause and then up another eight wooden steps. We landed on a porch that spread, big as a living room, across the entire front of the house. At that time it held a green-cushioned porch swing, the only one we had ever seen, where we could sit and swing and feel important as we waved to the neighbors who walked by.

My grandmother’s early 1900s, three-story wood frame house was not so unusual in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, but to me the place was magic. My grandmother lived on the first floor. Upstairs was my aunt and uncle’s apartment, except for one room that housed my bachelor great-uncle John. Another flight up was the attic. Never scary as attics are in the movies, my grandmother’s attic was a place to spend an entire day. It was filled with old children’s books, discarded musical instruments and stereoscopes and cameras, and trunks full of fabrics left over from the clothing alterations that my grandmother did for friends in order to support herself economically.

Bridge Night

Saturday was my grandmother’s bridge night. Will and Ferne, a couple who mystified us because Ferne was almost twice as big as her husband, showed up regularly. Sometimes my grandmother’s old friend Nettie was there, very grandmotherly herself in her old-lady glasses and dresses that had been altered to fit numerous times by my grandmother. Uncle John often came downstairs to join the party.

The group took bridge very seriously, and it wasn’t long before they were criticizing their partners for some cue missed or card misplayed. My brother and I didn’t mind the squabbling, because we were focused on the best part of bridge night: the candy. On each corner of the bridge table was a dish filled with hard candy and licorice and caramels, which we were allowed to share. There were also dishes of “party mix,” a concoction of Chex cereals and pretzels and nuts, which wasn’t nearly as good as the candy.

My grandmother, whose other part-time job in her 70s was teaching bridge at the local Y, kept it all under control. On the occasions when the discussion threatened to get out of control, she sent us upstairs to visit our Aunt Kate and Uncle John.

Kate and John

We called them just Kate and John, because old John was Uncle John. They didn’t have any children, but they loved children and were the favorite parents of their nieces and nephews and the neighborhood children. Kate was Irish, and said she believed in leprechauns. John was still a kid at heart, and much of what my brother and I learned as children came from sharing his hobbies. We knew how fast a model train could go around a figure eight before it fell off the track, and we knew the names of the foreign countries that had triangle-shaped postage stamps.

Usually on Saturday nights we would fall asleep before our parents returned, and they would carry their sleeping children out to the car. Once, though, we spent the whole night upstairs with Kate and John. They had a hide-a-bed in the living room, which they would sometimes open out if there was a good movie on TV. Kate’s favorite movie, “Harvey,” was on TV this night, very late. The movie starred Kate’s favorite actor, James Stewart, as Elwood P. Dowd, an eccentric small-town bachelor who is one of few people who can see and talk to the 6’3” white rabbit, Harvey.

Kate made popcorn. The hide-a-bed came out and the four of us—Kate, John, my brother Bill and I—sat side by side munching on popcorn and watching Jimmy Stewart talk to his imaginary friend until after midnight. We felt joyfully wicked: Children our age didn’t stay up till after midnight.

The House is Sold

My grandmother’s house was sold last spring. My grandmother’s generation was long gone; John had died the year before, and Kate hadn’t wanted to stay there alone. I flew up to Portland for a visit to the house before the estate sale, not so much because there were things I wanted as that I wanted to spend one last day in the attic.

While one of the nephews was busy lugging a sterling silver coffee urn down the three flights of stairs, I took out child things: a Chinese checkers game, a copy of the book The Adventures of Pinocchio missing its cover and a few outside pages, and what appeared to be a first edition of Jack London’s 1900 The Son of the Wolf its ownership proclaimed by the signature on the inside cover of the grandfather who had died before I was born. My brother insisted I take along a how-to book titled Cowboy Dances, probably something my mother had read before she met my father, at a dance, of course.

I carried my treasures down the 16 steps from the porch to the sidewalk very slowly. My grandmother’s house held memories of some of the best moments of my childhood, and had sheltered part of my family for nearly a century. Next time I go back to Portland, it will be different.