Urban sprawl Essay -- essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  This Halloween, Sean Clancy had the most original costume in his southern Pennsylvania neighborhood. The base layer of his costume wasn’t very exciting at all- a flannel shirt, jeans and boots. However, the next layer really made Clancy’s costume memorable. He tucked a street sign into his belt and draped a GAP bag from his left pocket. He hung a Coke can from his thigh and pinned a Sunoco gas rebate banner on his right knee. A KFC sign was just above his left knee, and Clancy’s mask was a US road atlas. Even among all the goblins, ghouls, ghosts, and Lord of the Rings characters, Clancy was the scariest creature of them all. Urban Sprawl.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Since the emergence of prefabricated housing in preplanned neighborhoods in the 1950s, the Pleasantville ethic has brought more than half of the country’s population to the suburbs. Yet while the suburban value system has improved the quality of our lives, it has tarnished the quality of our character. This trend of modernization was recognized by Henry David Thoreau more than a century ago, when he wrote that â€Å"While society has been improving our homes, it has not improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it has not been so quick to create noblemen and kings.† It seems that today’s kings and queens lord over backyard bar-b-q’s, and ride in SUV chariots. But the purpose of this speech isn’t to criticize these kings and queens. What I take issue with is the society that makes them royalty. Herein lies the problem: Our society has come to idealize a destructive vision of the American way of lifeâ₠¬â€one that puts up white picket fences to keep out our neighbors. Rather than valuing what the suburbs used to stand for—community and opportunity—now we first, embrace isolation, and second endorse exclusion.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Clancy’s roadmap Halloween mask may have been clever—but it was probably useless. Roads connecting the suburbs to other locations spring up so fast, maps can’t keep up. Many parts of the country lack public transportation that would integrate our communities rather than isolate them. According to the April 28, 2002 New York Times Magazine, â€Å"In most parts of the country, people now spend more on transportation than on medical care, education, clothing and entertainment- combined.† In Atlanta, the average person wa... ... can’t change the ours in the work week or even our commute we can take the time to make time to spend with our family and friends. Getting beyond isolation is only half the solution. Perhaps most importantly, we need to start considering the well-being of others as integral to our own well being. Being part of a community doesn’t mean just reaping it’s benefits. It means accepting that one of our responsibilities is to consider the well-being of those around us. As individuals, we need to start thinking of ourselves as part of a community, and acting knowing that what we do affects those around us. Our sprawling lifestyle simply means that—like it or not—we’ve enlarged our communities and increased the lives we effect with our actions. Pursue luxury and the American dream, but take ownership of its impacts. For the not-so-huddled masses of suburbia, there’s still something appealing about the white picket fences, the 2.2 kids, golden retrievers and even the distinguished title of soccer mom. Granted, giving up the SUV may disqualify us for membership in the manly fraternity of Those Who Haul Things, but through interconnectedness and diversity, it will make us better neighbors.

Blogs and communication Essay

Corporate blogging is a new method of communication in which employees of different firms and corporations are allowed to express themselves in the current trend in media communications. Several studies suggest that corporate blogs should be limited to only conveying of information beneficial for the company or firm, and thus there is the need to create a strategic management scheme for blogging. As a form of communication, blogs can certainly evolve into a more powerful means of communication. This power entailed in written texts of blogs shall be seen as a tool in encompassing more productive results of the business sector. According to Business Week Online issued in 2006, â€Å"A Weblog (or blog) can be a powerful marketing tool, but it can also expose a business to a legal minefield† as reported by Jacqueline Klosek. â€Å"Blogs can be used to market a company’s products and services, facilitate communications with clients, and even counter negative publicity. † (Klosek, 2006). From the research, many benefits of corporate blogging have been found: it is a tool for search engine marketing, an aide in building the company’s reputation as a thought leader, a good support in crisis management, tool for building relationships with customers, used as a human voice to a company, illustrates transparency, immediate customer service and feedback, acts as differentiator, and tool to find out what others think about you and your company. Presently, corporations are now much more concerned about their reputations. The vigilant companies realize that knowledge is power in cyberspace. They are trolling chat rooms, discussion boards, online news media and Web sites run by their competitors and critics to detect rumblings that could end up making headlines if a reporter or financial analyst discovers them first (Alsop 2004, 21). The existence of cyberspace, wherein the transfer of information is relatively faster than it was ten years ago has just become a threat to the reputations of corporations which are forced to enter cyberspace for more exposure. Corporate blogging is one dependable medium which corporations may pursue in order to protect their reputations and cut of their costs in terms of crises scenarios which could have been avoided. Although, the most of the companies set up corporate blogs for the purpose of promoting their services, building their good image or gaining any other befits. There is however a limitation in blogging, since legal problems may arise in the process. â€Å"Careless statements posted on a company-sanctioned blog can come back to haunt the company through litigation and other avenues† Klosek stresses. Blogs can cause violations on intellectual-property rights since most corporate blogs do not have specific rules that can be followed by the employees. Trade secrets may be revealed accidentally risking the protected status of company information. Disclosure of trade secrets can jeopardize the blogger’s career since this problem may cause his suspension or termination from his position. From many studies and articles written about corporate blogs, the question has been raised on insufficient management. The integrity rules for protection and management of blogs are expected to be established immediately. This research proposal aims to determine that how does corporate blog as a kind of new innovation be widely adopted and used by the both of the individual blogger and various organizations? What are the benefits of the corporate blogs bring to the organizations? How the public perceives corporate blogging as a kind of new innovation? What are the perceived relative advantages of corporate blogging according to the bloggers? Why is it to be welcome and popular as a successful new innovation? Is corporate blogging compatible with the existing values and practices of the bloggers? 1. 2 Overview of the Structure This proposal is structured into several sections. This section provides the audience with the motivations, objectives and a brief introduction to the research proposal. In the following sections, it includes the Literature review concerning blogging phenomenon and the process of this successful innovation, the benefits and limitation will be critically reviewed to provide a background for the research theme. In order to further understand real world practices, a theoretical framework is introduced. In section 3, known as Diffusion of innovation theory will be applied in the analysis part. The DIO theory is also used in combination with literature review to analyze and illuminate primary data, which will be used to answer the research question and the respective supporting the arguments. Section 4 describes the research methodology and various techniques which the author used to collate empirical data. In this section, the case research has been choosing to track and understand the history of the perception and adoption of blogs as a new innovation by the successful corporation in the business industry. An interview will also be carried out in the research process. The interview will help to find out the relationship between the employer and internal blogger, and further testify, discover and summarize the effects and benefits of the corporate blog as a new innovation. Finally, the discussion and the conclusion sections will be given to summarize of the expectation of findings, contributions, limitations of the research and points in which the research could further be improved or developed. 2 Literature review 2. 1 Understanding of blogs A weblog or blog is a form of an online journal. Schiano, Nardi, Gumbrecht, and Swartz (2004) defined blogs as â€Å"frequently updated web pages with a series of archived posts, typically in reverse chronological order†. According to Gordon (2006), blogs use â€Å"straightforward content management tool, allowing web pages and entries to be created and updated easily, without the need to worry about design or architecture issues† (Gordon, 2006). Although blog posts are primarily textual, authors may also include photos or other multimedia content in their posts. The blog is the fourth biggest communication tool after the e-mail, BBS and ICQ. According to Cooke (2005), about 70 million blogs exist and over 75,000 blogs are being created each day. Blogs is indeed increasingly becoming popular. Sprague (2007) traced the growth and evolution of blogs. He also discussed how businesses use blogs to communicate with customers. There are different kinds of blogs present today at cyberspace. The most popular ones are personal blogs, service, and corporate blogs (Geerts and Kim 2005, 12). Personal Blogs provide information about the thoughts, interests and activities of different people whether they are individuals or are blogging by groups or affiliations. Service blogs are often topic oriented and they are context specific and much informative than personal blogs. Some groups use service blogs to introduce new technologies and recent development regarding the corresponding technologies which they present. Finally, the corporate blog which is created and maintained by a business entity, and is used to provide information about the company’s products and services and to interact with clients and customers. (Geers and Kim 2005, 12). Since most scholars who work in the area of life writing have chosen to see blogs as a development of the handwritten diary (Rak 2005, 166) more and more people engage in writing in blogspots or blogsites. There are both threats and advantages which corporate blogging gives to the corporations. At some point, corporate blogging has strengthened the transparency and corporate communications. Since at present, Corporate communication channels include not only printed materials but also information posted on a company’s Web sites and blogs (Argenti 2006, 358). However, some corporations fail to further improve their corporate communications because they limit their corporation’s blogspots only to their employees and their advertisers. It is highly doubtful whether they have fully utilized the capabilities of new two-way communication tools because more corporate home pages have been primarily used as a platform to push mundane advertising messages (Liu et al. , 1997; Salam et. al. 1998; Young and Benamati, 2000). Another point presents the fact that, there might be leaks in confidential corporate information which might be given out through the engagement to blogs of employees. Cases of such has led to the termination of employees active in Web blogs, which gives a corporate disadvantage as it losses some of its quality workforce due to the lack of policies and rules which apply to blogs. A good example would be the Delta Air Lines flight attendant who lost her job after she posted photos of herself in uniform on her blog. Delta stated that those photos, in which she is wearing Delta uniform with the blouse partly unbuttoned, were â€Å"inappropriate and unauthorized use of Delta branding† (USA Today, 2005). Web blogs is a critical accessory in information dissemination, yet at the same time, it might cause some corporate failures, as although the Internet allows companies to present their viewpoints directly to key constituents, control over information dissemination is lost (Ihator 2001). There are several studies that investigate the nature of blogs and bloggers. Schiano et. al. (2004) interviewed 23 bloggers between the ages 19 and 60. The interviews included questions about the participant’s blogs, blogging habits, thoughts on blogging, and use of other communication media such as e-mails, instant messaging, phone, and web pages. They found out that blogging is becoming increasingly popular because it serves as an easy-to-use personal journal in which he can express his thoughts and opinions. Nardi, Schiano and Gumbrecht (2004) describe blogs as a social activity. They interviewed the same population and questions as with their study entitled â€Å"Blogging by the Rest of Us†. After the interviews, the authors continued to read their participants’ blogs and communicate with some of them through email. The participants reported the reasons they started blogging, the reasons they continue blogging, and the changes in their blogging habits as time pass by. A variety or reasons emerge: readers inform bloggers they need the new posts; the friends influence their friend to blog. Due to these responses, Nardi et. al. (2004) conclude that blogs are â€Å"a form of social communication in which blogger and audience are intimately related through the writing, posting and commenting of blogs† . (Nardi, 2004) These studies give us an idea on the perceptions of bloggers about blogs in general. 2. 2 Corporate blogs and applications in the real world Different types of blogs have been posted in the internet ever since the adoption of different corporations in the late 1990’s. Corporate blogs however have different types in which each is branded according to the specific user or blogger. Dearstyne (2005) cites five different types of corporate blogs as: employee blog, group blog, executive blog, promotional blog, and newsletter blog. Employee blogs are blogs which are much like personal blogs and are maintained by a single rank-and-file employee. They vary in their content and are sometimes managed by different hosts which the corporations recognize. Although, often times, corporations gather all the blogs their employees post. Majority of employee blogs are still hosted independently of the Web site, employee blogs are increasingly being hosted independently of the company Web sit, employee blogs are increasingly being hosted on company-owned domains as more and more companies are officially sponsoring employee blogging. (Lee et. al. 2006, 319). Group Blogs are blogs which are written by several people or groups. Employees collaborate and write on a specific topic or different topics pertaining to a certain theme; they are made by those who are experts on the certain topics. Group blogs are sometimes made through the initiatives of employees themselves and self-hosted. Though, many group blogs are driven by strategic plans crafted by management and hosted by companies own Web sites (Lee et. al. 2006, 320). Executive Blogs, coming from the name itself, executive blogs are blogs which are written by various corporations’ executives. Corporations and consumers have been keener on what position blog writers are on as awareness about corporate standing is widespread. People have become more interested in top executives who run companies than in individual companies (Gaines-Ross 2000). Promotional blogs are those which primary purpose is to create a buzz about products and events of corporations. This blog however sparks controversy as most of the blogs which are promotional blogs are often times computer generated and is largely called as fake by some bloggers who remain critical about using blogspots as advertising media. The blogging community severely criticized this strategy as deceptive and bloggers even proposed product boycotts (Gallagher 2003). This case suggests that, marketing in the blogsphere is often times discouraged due to the lack of human voice in the ads which are placed in the blogsphere. Some corporations have moved from the traditional type of blog with a domain, and instead created a newsletter type of blog wherein opinions, thoughts, and positions of different corporate or organizational members are voiced out. They carry different information about the corporation, the people inside the corporation, and the corporation’s products which are widely discussed by members of the organization through the electronic newsletter. Sprague (2007) further explains the influence of blogs to the American society. There is an increasing number of both bloggers and blog readers each day. At present, the blog has already extended its influence to the business society. Blogs are reported to influence what people think, do and buy. By the summer 2005, it is estimated that there are nearly 5,000 corporate blogs. Nowadays, there are a number of companies who have already set up their own corporate blogs. Aside from the influx of bloggers, talking about anything and practically everything under the sun, in some countries wherein political turmoil is prominent and shouting against a regime could practically lose you your head. Blogspheres are considered as sanctuaries wherein anyone could voice off their thoughts. In Iran, the Blogsphere is one of the major mediums wherein the populace could voice out their political positions freely with minimal risk of persecution. Any foreigner who visits Iran is struck by the gap between the image projected by the regime to the outside world and the reality of Iranian society. The blogs quoted here vividly convey the bitter disillusionment many Iranians feel not just towards the hard-line mullahs, but toward the failed reformist project and its erstwhile leader (Berkeley 2006, 73). The safeness and freedom of the blogosphere from any political and other accusations which may arise from its use due to the arbitrariness of the policies governing the blogosphere may be seen as an advantage of corporate personalities in advertising and the diffusion of their advocacy especially in corporate social responsibility.

The Magic Tree House Book Series by Mary Pope Osborne

The Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne has been popular since the first MTH book for young independent readers, Dinosaurs Before Dark, was published in 1992. By August 2012, there were 48 books in the series for independent readers, 6 to 10 or 11 years old, as well as 26 companion research guides (Magic Tree House Fact Tracker nonfiction books) for some of the books in the series. The Adventures of Jack and Annie All of the books in the series center around the time travel adventures of brother and sister Jack and Annie, who live in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania. The two discover a magic tree house in the woods by their house. In books #1 to 28, Jack is 8 years old and Annie is a year younger. Thanks to the book-filled magic tree house whose books have magical properties and whose owner, magical librarian Morgan le Fay provides them with exciting missions, the two have many exciting adventures. Each book focuses on a subject and story designed to pique the interest of young independent readers. The subjects and time periods vary widely, which means that there will most likely be some, or many, of particular interest to your child. The Basics Magic Tree House books #1 to 28 are generally between 65 and 75 pages long and target children 6 to 9. The reading levels are mostly between 2.0 and 2.4. The books are divided into brief chapters, each of which has one or more intriguing illustrations by Sal Murdocca, the illustrator for all of the MTH books. Teachers and parents looking for specific information about a variety of reading level measures for the books, as well as curriculum connections and lessons plans, will find Mary Pope Osbornes Magic Tree House Classroom Adventures Program site a valuable resource. Your children will enjoy the games, activities and fun, all related to books in the series and the subjects they cover, at the Random House Magic Tree House site. While you may want to have your child start with the first book in the series, which introduces Jack and Annie and enables your child to experience time travel via the Magic Tree House for the first time right along with Jack and Annie, its not necessary to read the books in a particular order. A prologue at the beginning of each book provides the necessary background information. However, to provide incentive for kids to keep reading, there is an overarching mission for each four books, but it is still not necessary to read even each of those books in a particular order. To give you an idea of a mission, in books #9 to 12, Jack and Annie have to solve four ancient riddles, one in each of the books, but since each of the books can be read independently, it will be up to young readers (or their teachers) to decide whether or not to read the books in groups of four. The books are available in paperback, library binding, and as audiobooks and eBooks. A full set of books #1 to 28 in the Magic Tree series is also available in paperback. Individual books are also available, as are books in sets of four. Benefits of a Good Series for Young Independent Readers In order for children to learn to be fluent readers, with good comprehension skills, they need to read a lot. When children are relatively new readers, they need to concentrate on decoding each word and comprehending what they are reading without a lot of distractions. It helps if they can find a series they like at a reading level they can comfortably read. Why? Every time they start a new book in the series, they dont have to get used to new main characters, a new story format, a different style of writing or anything else that would distract them from just enjoying the story. Its this enjoyment that will bring them back for more and more stories, which will help them become fluent readers. It also helps a lot to talk about the books with your children. Ask them to tell you about Jack and Annies latest adventure, what it was all about, and what they learned. For kids who prefer nonfiction or who want to know more about the subject of the Magic Tree House book they just read, see if there is a Magic Tree House Fact Tracker nonfiction companion research guide. Book List of Books #1 to 28 in the Magic Tree House Series Note that a CNB (for companion nonfiction book) at the end of each book listing means that there is a Magic Tree House Fact Tracker for that book. Dinosaurs Before Dark, Magic Tree House, Book #1 - CNBThe Knight at Dawn, Magic Tree House, Book Book #2 - CNBMummies in the Morning, Magic Tree House, Book Book #3 - CNBPirates past Noon, Magic Tree House, Book Book #4 - CNBNight of the Ninjas, Magic Tree House, Book #5Afternoon on the Amazon, Magic Tree House, Book #6 - CNBSunset of the Sabertooth, Magic Tree House, Book #7 - CNBMidnight on the Moon, Magic Tree House, Book #8 - CNBDolphins at Daybreak, Magic Tree House, Book #9 - CNBGhost Town at Sundown, Magic Tree House, Book #10Lions at Lunchtime, Magic Tree House, Book #11Polar Bears Past Bedtime, Magic Tree House, Book #12 - CNBVacation Under The Volcano, Magic Tree House, Book #13 - CNBDay of the Dragon King, Magic Tree House, Book #14Viking Ships at Sunrise, Magic Tree House, Book #15Hour of the Olympics, Magic Tree House, Book #16 - CNBTonight on the Titanic, Magic Tree House, Book #17 - CNBBuffalo Before Breakfast, Magic Tree House, Book #18Tigers at Twilight, Magic Tree H ouse, Book #19Dingoes at Dinnertime, Magic Tree House, Book #20Civil War on Sunday, Magic Tree House, Book #21Revolutionary War on Wednesday, Magic Tree House, Book #22 - CNBTwister on Tuesday, Magic Tree House, Book #23 - CNBEarthquake in the Early Morning, Magic Tree House, Book #24Stage Fright on a Summer Night, Magic Tree House, Book #25Good Morning, Gorillas, Magic Tree House, Book #26Thanksgiving on Thursday, Magic Tree House Book #27 - CNBHigh Tide in Hawaii, Magic Tree House, Book #28 - CNB