Overturned the Death Penalty

This was my last Action Projects of my Policy course and the last project of my junior year at GCE. The purpose of this project was to choose a case from a list that was given to us and make a Prezi Presentation about the case that basically sums up the history of the case. I chose the 2005 Roper v. Simmons case. The case was about a 17 year old boy that was charged with a very serious crime (read more in my Prezi). I chose this case because I was interested in seeing the outcome of a case of a minor and I'm very interested in how the use of the death penalty has changed. I learned a lot about how this one case changed the history of how america views the death penalty. I am very proud of the Prezi I made and the research I did because I feel that I got the most crucial information from my case. I feel that my Prezi was successful because I took a real interest to the case. Please enjoy My Prezi below and if you have any comments please feel free to leave one in the comment box.

The Alley With a Street Sign

This project was for my math and science course named Urban Planning. I learned a lot about what urban planners do and also how they make places look better. I also learned about what makes certain urban planning decisions good and what makes some decisions bad. I also learned how to rethink how a space is laid out and how you can make it better. The purpose of this project was to choose a city block/blocks and redesign them to make them better. We were asked to change 5 things about the current space and try to make the space the best it can be, thinking about what cities around the world have done to make their streets better. I am proud of the changes I made to my space because now I feel it is at its best and is actually more efficient.

The current space I am redesigning is on Strong street and Pulaski to Strong and Avers in Albany Park. This is meant to be a side street but it is currently used as an alley because it has the feel and look of an alley and has no real use. Nobody ever uses the street and it is close to my house so I use it as a shortcut but it doesn't have a real good use to other people other than me. One of the worse things about this space is it has the look and feel of an alley, it has potholes, it's narrow and has a rusted broken fence. First thing I would do to make this space better is Make it wider, take the fence away, make it feel like an actual street, repave the street to cover the potholes.

My space is a rectangle that is 200 meters by 84 meters and the total area is 16,800 meters^2

The volume of the pyramid on top of the first house is 2,666 and the volume of the rectangular prism under it has a volume of 4,800 the total volume of the house is 7,466. Another one of my houses has the same volume for the rectangular prism (4,800) and the volume of the pyramid on top of the other house is 3,373 and the total volume is 8,173.

A few things that  would do to make the space a little bit better is

1.Take away the garden space on the side of the school

2.Take the ugly dangerous fence and make it a concrete barrier or a brick wall
3.Expand the street
4.Add a sidewalk so the kids still have a walkway next to the school
5.Take Springfield street and make it go through the useless parking lot so it doesn't just stop and start and have the parking lot on one side of the street and the school on the other so kids have less risk of car accidents and don't have to worry while they play.

BKJ, School Sketch (2015)

One thing that inspired me was the alley directly next to Aspira Haugan middle school because currently it is a pretty nice alley that is paved and still bigger than Strong street. London inspired me to change the width of my street because over there the streets are very narrow and I don't think that's a good thing in a place like Chicago.

One way me redesign will make transportation easier is that it adds an extra side street for people to drive through and since I extend Springfield you wouldn't have to go around to get to the next intersection of Springfield so it would be easier to get places using that route. I don't feel that my design would directly effect the houses in the area but it will extend the street which may make it easier to drive on that block because as of now it is a dead end. it will also cut part of the side of the school making the side of the school a bit smaller. I affected the infrastructure of the space by making one road more noticeable and connected an already exciting one.

some of the problems i encountered is that I wanted to expand the street but I didn't know how to cut into the school in one place and make it up by giving back in another place. Then, I realized that the school has a useless garden space directly next to Strong Street that they don't use so I ended up taking that space to extend the street. Along the way I realized that I have to make sacrifices to make things better in the end. If I has to do this project again I would pick a space that has more opportunities for change and can be easily manipulated

The Circuit for the New World

This was the second action project of the Urban Planning course and this unit was all about circuits and electricity. I learned a lot about how a circuit works and what the different components of a circuit are. I also learned about AC and DC currents and which one works better in certain situations. Another thing we learned about is resistors, conductors and insulators. The project is basically asking you to make a full functional circuit with 5 resistors. I am most proud of the speaker and the light because they are both functional and the speaker actually sounds pretty cool and can make different sounds when you press the parallel switch.

MV, Circuit board. (2015) 

The photo above depicts our circuit board with all the wires attached and the photo below shows the circuit diagram my group made.

AG, Circuit Diagram. (2015) 

Lamp: an average bulb takes up 20 watts of energy whereas our bulbs take up 70-90% less energy.
Radio: A radio takes up about 4 watts an hour whereas our hand cranked radio uses 0 watts of energy
Washer: our washing machines use 25% less energy and 40% less water than a regular washer
Dryer: an average dryer would use 3,300 watts and the cost of that load would be $0.36 but hang drying would save $1.08 ever 6 and a half minutes and if repeated about nine times it would save $9.96
Generator/solar panel: on average installing a solar panel instead of a normal generator could cut your energy bill anywhere from 50%-90%

BKJ, Circuit Cover. (2015)

6 batteries each battery is 1.5 volts 9 volts in total. Ohm's law states that voltage = amps x resistance. If we had a resistor of 4.5 ohms the current would be
9 = amps x 4.5
Amps = 2

AC is alternating current which means that it can go multiple paths and each resistor is independent. DC current is direct current and means that it flows in one constant motion and in only one path. Our circuit is direct current because it runs in one path and if you were to disconnect one of the wires then none of the resistors would work. Another thing we learned about direct current is that it always runs on a battery. 

So at first we knew that we absolutely needed 5 resistors and 2 switches so when we got the kit we immediately just started connecting wires and tried to see what worked. After playing around for a bit we eventually got the LED bulb to work and from then on we started to get the kit and the process became easier. After the LED bulb was working we then tried to make the speaker work. In my opinion the speaker was one of the most difficult parts to make work because we had no idea what to connect it to to make it work. After a while we eventually got it to work and connected it to the main and parallel switch so it successfully worked with both. The purpose of the resistors in our design are to stop some of the flow of electricity so the power won't be so strong and blow out the bulb or burn out the speaker. Some of the connections were unsuccessful at first because when we would try to connect two wire to the same circuit sometimes it would create a spark and that basically meant we had to find a new place to put that wire.

CITATIONS

Hamm, Trent. "How Much Do You Really Save By Air-Drying Your Clothes? - The Simple Dollar." The Simple Dollar How Much Do You Really Save By AirDrying Your Clothes Comments. The Simple Dollar, 23 Apr. 2010. Web. 15 May 2015.

"Clothes Washers." Clothes Washers. EnergyStar, n.d. Web. 15 May 2015.

Evans, Tara. "How Much Do Household Gadgets Cost to Run? 16% of Electricity Bills Wasted by Appliances Left on Standby." This Is Money. This Is Money, 26 June 2012. Web. 15 May 2015.

"Light Bulbs." Light Bulbs. EnergyStar, n.d. Web. 15 May 2015.

Hamm, Trent. "Turn Off the Lights to Save Money...But How Much? - The Simple Dollar." The Simple Dollar Turn Off the Lights to Save MoneyBut How Much Comments. The Simple Dollar, 18 Nov. 2007. Web. 15 May 2015.

Americas Policy to Police

This project was for my humanities course called Policy. In this unit we learned about the executive branch and how the president uses his power to make policies. Something I found interesting that we learned was the difference between an executive order and an executive action. The purpose of this project was to choose a war and decide based on facts and events that occurred if the war was a just or unjust war. Then we had to give our reasoning for what we said and what events let you know it was a just or unjust war. I learned a lot about the Vietnam war and all the shady things that the U.S was doing at the time and why we ACTUALLY got involved in the war not just the reasons they told us. I am pretty proud of the research I did and I am also proud of my reasoning for America being wrong in this situation.

National Archives (1966). Long Khanh Fallen. Wikipedia

The Vietnam War was a controversial, long-drawn out war that took place primarily in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from November 1, 1955 through April 30, 1975. The first U.S troops were deployed to vietnam on January 30 1968. The people involved in this war was North Vietnam And their allies Vietcong versus South Vietnam and their allies the United States. Some of the key strategies used in this war was guerrilla tactics and the Cu Chi Tunnels. The immediate reason this war was fought was because the U.S was afraid that there would be a domino theory and communism would spread. Then there was the underlying reason which was the fake Gulf of Tonkin incident. I feel that this war should not have been fought by the U.S because it was not our problem in the first place. The U.S has no right to tell another country that they cannot be communist if they want to. The U.S always tries to interfere with other countries because I feel that we are scared that if other countries get too powerful then we will no longer be the "best" country anymore.

There were 5 presidential terms during the time of the Vietnam War. The U.S President as the war was starting was Dwight Eisenhower, who got us involved in the war. After the Geneva Accords were signed and Vietnam split into North and South, Eisenhower decided to create the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) with the intention of stopping Communist influence in Southeast Asia. SEATO, however, was basically used as a cover-up for Eisenhower to build a new nation in the South to fight its Communist neighbors in the North. The U.S Congress also played a big role in the Vietnam War by passing a joint resolution to take military action against the Viet Cong on August 7, 1964 by a vote of 88-2 in the Senate and 416-0 in the House.

One of the most important policies related to the U.S’ involvement in the Vietnam War was created two decades before our country entered the war--the Truman Doctrine. President Harry S. Truman created this policy after the U.S fought in two world wars and basically authorized millions of dollars in military aid and grants to train foreign armies, and the allocation of U.S. military advisors to countries facing Communist threats such as Greece, Turkey, and later Vietnam. This policy was created when the British government announced that it would no longer provide military and economic assistance to the Greek and president Truman asked congress to help Greek against the communists. At that point in time the U.S also had the Neutrality Act which basically meant we won't join wars that don't directly affect us. With Communism on the rise, though, we felt the need to stop it in its tracks before it basically took over the world and we didn't want to be the country that just stood there and did nothing. During the time of the Vietnam War, U.S presidents were very concerned about the domino effect. U.S foreign policy after the Truman Doctrine is still based on this idea that America's job is to act like the number one police nation and if we feel that a country is being controlled or is starting to be controlled by a dictatorship, then it is our duty to go fight against them.

In conclusion, the U.S involvement in the Vietnam War was unjust. Specifically, the Truman Doctrine was a good idea, but as a foreign policy for this many years it has turned out to be a bad idea because even now America feels that it has to invade or fight every time that we feel something wrong is going on in another country. While I can understand why America wants to stop Communism, but I just don’t get what is so bad about the idea of that political system in general. If it’s the right thing to do for other countries, what makes us feel like it’s our duty to go to those places and stop it? We don’t have to choose Communism for ourselves, and should let other countries make their own political decisions. The U.S should spend its time cleaning up its own country--we’re not perfect, but we pose as if we are. So, instead of trying to make other countries more like us, we should practice what we preach.   

Works Cited

Nichols, Christopher M. "Consequences of the Truman Doctrine." OUPblog. OUPblog, 22 May 2014. Web. 13 May 2015.

"The Truman Doctrine, 1947 - 1945–1952 - Milestones - Office of the Historian." The Truman Doctrine, 1947 - 1945–1952 - Milestones - Office of the Historian. Office of the Historian, n.d. Web. 13 May 2015.

Shmoop Editorial Team. "Politics in The Vietnam War." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 13 May 2015.

Allison, Carolyn. "What Role Did the U.S.. Congress Play in the Vietnam War?" What Role Did the U.S.. Congress Play in the Vietnam War? ChaCha, 2012. Web. 13 May 2015.

Rexy. "Who Were U.S Presidents during the Vietnam War? - The Vietnam War." The Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, 26 Nov. 2012. Web. 13 May 2015.