One of our own in the paper

Advanced Geomatics student, Angela Gorczyca, was in today's newspaper. She was part of a study that found that Middlesex County has nearly as many bird species (308) as Yellowstone National Park (318).

Sad day in DC

Washington DC has lost (or at least suffered serious damage to) one of its great old buidings. The Eastern Market suffered from a major fire today. I found a nice old gallery of photos taken at Eastern Market.

FAQ: Changing final grades

Q. I am unhappy with my FINAL grade and would like to see it changed. What can I do?

A. Unfortunately, you may have waited too long for most remedies. Now that the grades are final I will NOT:
* Offer additional extra credit opportunities;
* Change the break point between letter grades;
* Reconsider subjective grades (like a paper or a studio project) unless they were returned so late that you did not have the opportunity to review the paper until after the end of classes; or
* Accept late assignments or offer make-up exams without excused absences (as approved by Martin Hall).
You should understand that these are not fair to the students who worked so hard to come to class on time, take good notes, get their work in on time, complete the extra credit, and take advantage of office hours and test review sessions.

However, there are some appropriate reasons for which I would consider a grade change. If you are requesting that I reconsider your grade, you should suggest which of the following reasons applies:
a) there seems to be a computational error in calculating your grade;
b) there seems to be a reporting error in calculating your grade;
c) you believe there was a scoring error on one of your exams;
d) you believe that you showed significant consistent improvement over the course of the semester (65%->75%->85%) and should receive special consideration; or
e) you want to submit late work under an excused absence.

If you are going to argue your case on a subjective grade, you certainly should focus on the SPECIFIC element of the grade (like "Test #2", or "the graphics grade on the final studio project") that you think should be reconsidered, not the overall final grade.

If you are close to the next grade and don't see any justifiable reason to request a change, you should at least try to get a copy of your final (by the first week of classes of the next semester) and check that there was no scoring error.

You certainly should EXPLAIN why a change of grades would be appropriate. I won't even respond to vague general requests to reconsider.

GENERAL TIPS AND REQUESTS:
Ask yourself this simple question, is there some strong evidence that clearly demonstrates that your ability and knowledge are superior to your performance on the measures used in class? Is there a specific and appropriate reason that your test scores were not as high as they should have been considering your level of knowledge and ability?

Your grade is YOUR grade. Please do not ask me to change it because of someone else's (e.g., "I worked harder than him but didn't get as good a grade". If I erred and gave him a higher grade than he deserved, it doesn't mean that you deserve it too.) Instead, show me how your grade would be wrong even if you were the only person in the class.

Try not to insult me in your requests. Telling me that I am not FAIR is a really good way to make me feel less like helping. Plus, if I am really unfair, you should probably be discussing the matter directly with the department chair.

Try to avoid obvious lies. Students shouldn't tell me that they never missed a class when they know that I called on them 6 times and they answered twice. Don't tell me that you are a good student when you know that a quick check of your GPA will reveal otherwise.

I am more than willing to discuss these matters further, but would encourage you to contact me with specific questions or concerns at dtulloch@crssa.rutgers.edu

New Urbanism

After our recent lecture on New Urbanism, I did want to mention some online resources.

Another notable project within a few hours drive is the Storrs Center near UConn's compus. They have an official site up for this planned community.

Washington Town Center, here in NJ, has been written about plenty including this older piece saying it was a smart idea and this newer one pointing out that it has been too successful.

I also recently saw this piece on the new Dardenne Prairie, which is a little more from DPZ.

You could look at the firms like Rutgers-related A. Nelessen Associates or the (in)famous DPZ.

The Congress for the New Urbanism maintains an official presence online that includes projects and images.

What I don't have handy is any written critique of New Urbanism. Maybe next time...

Takings cases

While we talked about a number of takings cases in class, we didn't have a reading to supplement those lectures. To help I've rushed to slap together some links, altough I can't claim to have read them. Which also means that I cannot vouch for their quality or usefulness other than in the most indirect ways.

From Wikipedia:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolan_v._City_of_Tigard
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central_Transportation_Co._v._New_York_City
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_v._Ambler

Cornell Law School has pulled up some of the SCOTUS texts:

• Penn Central - http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0438_0104_ZS.html
• Dolan - http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-518.ZD.html
• Nollan - http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0483_0825_ZS.html
• Kelo - http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZO.html
  

Planning Magazine has some information on the APA's perspective and official filings with te court on Kelo:
http://www.planning.org/amicusbriefs/kelo.htm

How do you resolve this?

It turns out that even the wealthiest communities have problems worth people building homes that are too large. It has been added to our map.

Great Orange Graphics

The Great Park of Orange County is moving ahead with new details being revealed regulalry. This week, the OCRegister has detailed graphics showing how the Orange balloons would work. The ballons are designed to give up to 30 people a ride at a time.

Great Falls State Park

I meant to link this a while ago, but since it happened before I started the blog, I was always going to be a little late.

Last year the NJ DEP ran a design competition to develop a masterplan for Paterson's Great Falls. The competition entires have been posted online by NJIT, with entries from notable landscape architecture firms including WRT, Field Operations, and EDAW. The jury included Lance Neckar, a landscape architecture professor from Minnesota.

The final outcome was announced late in the year:

The competition winner, Field Operations of New York City, proposed a plan called "Paterson's New Outdoor Living Room," allowing residents to walk along the river, under the shade of its cliffs and up to the foot of the falls. The $10 million vision for the project's first phase centers on using a loop path to tie the park's various elements together -- linking the falls and Overlook Park to the ATP site, which would be restored as a landscaped path, the Valley of the Rocks and Mary Ellen Kramer Park.

Battle of Bound Brook

After spending a chunck of the spring talking about the American revolution, I was looking forward to seeing the re-enactment on the 230th Anniversary of the Battle of Bound Brook this weekend. Sadly, it has been cancelled due to the flooding earlier this month.

Instead, I can spend some time this weekend reading up on the recently found George Washington letter.

The World Series is coming

The World Series of Birding is just 14 days away and things are getting pretty exciting. Since the playing field is the entire state of New Jersey, we get a pretty good view of the action. I am sure that some teams are making a final review of the more unusual rules (it is, afterall, a sport of honor) and cleaning their lens. As a non-competitor, one way to prepare is just reviewing old entries. You can see how a team of 1-5 graders identified over 100 species last year. La Puma et al. competed in digiscoping, which involes taking digital photos of birds through scopes (my favorite is their Black Skimmer photo).

Ouch!

The Yankees brought up their 20-year old phenom pitching prospect, Phil Hughes, last night. How did he describe the experience? “Hopefully, I won’t remember it too much."

Ag Field Day

Just a quick reminder that this Saturday is the 89th Annual Ag Field Day. It is a great chance to catch up with other alums, the faculty, and our current students. The School has a website up with a full list of activities (http://agfieldday.rutgers.edu/events.asp) but I thought a few were worth mentioning.

1) Our highlight every year is, of course, the daylong open house at Blake Hall. We'll have up new student work with both students and faculty around to give tours to prospective students and interested parties. Make sure you check out the giant model of Paterson, NJ in the upstairs back studio. We'll have our list of alums who we've lost touch with, hoping that other alums can help us find them again. And we'll have lots of stories and news to share.

2) My second home on campus, the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, is holding an open house from 10 to noon. We'll be giving away posters and showing off high-tech mapping toys.

3) The Marine Science program is showing their highly acclaimed IMAX film on the somewhat smaller screen in the Alampi Room at IMCS. "Volcanoes of the Deep" is showing at 10am with the lead researcher there to introduce it and answer questions. It is a fascinating film and yet another RU product to be proud of.

It'll be a great day that we look forward to sharing with you.

Map Contest

We are excited to announce that the Advanced Environmental Geomatics class has returned from the NJDEP Map Contest in Trenton with three map awards. The team had ten members: Vanessa Beuschel, Philip Bosco, Angela Gorczyca, Peter Hugger, Maura McShane, Emmanuel Ndiema, Dennis Quinlan, Matthew Vitullo, Kaitlyn Walsh, and Michael Yaffe. Their map of the Spatial Dimensions of the Revoloutionary War in New Jersey captured hundreds of events and places that are an important part of New Jersey's history. You might want to note that the above map is a draft and not final. We'll try to update it and give it a more permanent web home in the coming days.

The awards they brought home were:

• 1st Place Best Newbie
• 2nd Place Most Unique
• 2nd Place Best Overall (Non-NJDEP)

And as an added but fitting twist, they won them at the War Memorial. But the story of the data may prove to be more interesting than the map. We'll have to save that for another day.

What makes the birds sing?

Is it love? Is it spring? Is it streetlights??? According to a new study, urban birds are singing at night because the noise during the day drowns them out.

St. Guadi?

The Belfast Telegraph reports that there is a possibility that Gaudi will add still another credential to his resume: saint. Some already call him God's Architect, but that could make the title really stick.

Jose Manuel Almuzara, an architect and president of the Association for the Beatification of Gaudí, said: "We do not see any serious obstacles to him becom-ing canonised. His greatest creation has made faith accessible to the average person and inspired thousands who were not Catholics before they visited. We do not know how long this may take but we are confident.

Landscape Change

We've updated our Landscape Change webpage.
You might want to look it over.

What is a tree worth?

Someone wrote to ask me about the valuation of landscape architecture, and I had to admit that I know very little about the process of assigning value to designed landscapes and elements.

But I do know that there is a fairly well established process for estimating the value of existing trees in the landscape, either as a fixed value to the owner (what you you owe them if you killed their tree) or as an annually accruing value (what are the benefits of this tree to the community). Researchers have just conducted a street tree survey of all 5 boroughs of NYC and found that after you factor in costs for planting and maintenance, the city is benefitting $122 million per year from its street trees. According to the NYTimes, these benefits aren't evenly distributed...

The tree census found that Queens has about 40 percent of the city’s street trees, followed by Brooklyn, with about 25 percent; Staten Island, with about 16 percent; the Bronx, with about 10 percent; and Manhattan, with roughly 8 percent.

Spring migration

Dave, at woodcreeper.com, says the spring migration is in full swing.

From cornfields to backyards

In yet another Slate slideshow, Witold Rybczynski explains the details of how a farms turns into houses. These slides are in support of Slate's publication of excerpts (1, 2, 3) from his new book, Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville. The development he looks at, New Daleville, isn't that from us, but instead of driving there you could just visit the website. Or look at it on the EPD map.

If you read the details you'll find that his ideas on sprawl and architecture are probably not as simple as you might first have suspected.

Weekend Eye Candy

Last Summer I finally made it to Peter Walker's classic project, the Weyerhaeuser Headquarters. As you can see from the photos, it was extremely hot and dry (98 degrees), but it still felt lush. A sign of the timlessness of the project is that the Walker firm posts their photos of the 1972 Weyerhaeuser Headquarters in the same project list as the very recent Novartis campus in Basel. After those, look at the other 100+ PWP projects that are online.