Slides from Class 6 — Tuesday 9/26

Illustration from Huff showing visual distortion of data.

In class today, we worked on body awareness and we worked on blogs. We discussed and revised posters, and looked at key ideas from the readings/viewings for today: Huff, Schnell, CARD, and Rosling.

We talked about ideas for your Project 2 presentation.

Link to slides from today, including links to upcoming readings and future assignments. Please review the slides.

And make sure to check out the crazy video linked on the last slide.

FOR CLASS 6 — TUESDAY 9/26

Biking on Market St. in 1906.

Meet in front of the library as usual — bring your bike & helmet & lock. Weather forecast: warm and sunny, high 70s, moderate breeze from the north. Great biking weather.

We’ll work on these things in class:

  • body awareness in speaking and cycling
  • biking practice on campus
  • discussing and debating assigned readings (see below)
  • revising and editing posters
  • planning and schedule for Presentation 2

TASKS due 9/26:

Post: Your in-class writing about reading from last week. What is a post?

Write: A post about something that happened in class on 9/19. Include an image if possible — photo, drawing, graph or chart, image from the web, etc. Example: this post from Jordan.

Read/Watch (total of 4 things):

  1. Huff, excerpt from “How to Lie with Statistics” (PDF)
  2. Schnell, “Data Visualization” (PDF)
  3. Video: “USF Creative Activity and Research Day” (2:37)
  4. Video: Hans Rosling TED talk, “Debunking…” (20:35)

Prepare: 

Work with your team to create a poster explaining the evidence you’ve collected. Use Powerpoint or Google Slides to create the poster.

Team Presentations on Tuesday 9/19/2017

students on bicycles riding in bike lane on John F. Kennedy Drive
Sunny bike ride in Golden Gate Park.

On Tuesday, we heard some great team presentations of evidence about the Panhandle area. Links to videos and slides below.

Strengths:

  1. Teams are finding great stuff — very interesting and often very thorough observations.
  2. Generally good work explaining your goals and methods.
  3. Great use of a variety of kinds of evidence (numbers, photos…)
  4. Very nice job generally with transitions, Carl Kwan style!
  5. Slides were generally very good — we’ll talk more in the future about slide design best practices and pitfalls.

Weaknesses (biggest weak points had to do with delivery, not with content):

  1. As I mentioned, conclusions were generally weak. Refer to this Canvas page for important advice about conclusions.
  2. Confidence: you discovered something interesting — now stand up there and own it!

TEAM 1: Users of the Shared Path    VIDEO    SLIDES

TEAM 2: Bike Helmets   VIDEO    SLIDES

TEAM 3: Pedestrian Path Users   VIDEO    SLIDES

TEAM 4: Roadway Users    VIDEO     SLIDES

TEAM 5: Speeds on the Shared Path    VIDEO    SLIDES

Class slides from 9/19 (look here for homework for 9/26).

Expedition: Marin Headlands

This is a guest post from Ettore Crocetti Marzotto, a USF student took “Speaking of Bicycles” last year. He bought a bicycle and has been exploring San Francisco and the surrounding area. Here is a recent report of his explorations:

I went for a ride over Golden Gate Bridge last Sunday. I took my camera and a picnic lunch with me and had a really good time, it was probably the furthest up I went.

Conzelman Road in the Marin Headlands, descending west, with Point Bonita lighthouse in the distance.

This road here was something out of a riding magazine – super fun to go down it! After that I left the main road to head for some trails and eventually ended up high, with a nice view, (the one in the second picture) and had my picnic there. 

View of Rodeo lagoon and beach in the Marin Headlands, site of the former US Army base Fort Cronkhite.

I find it so incredible that you can just go over the bridge and find such open nature, such a contrast to SF.  The only thing that I still have to find, is some good single track downhill though -haha. I thought I share this ride seeing as I had those pictures, really that first shot of the road and the biker, could be in a magazine haha!

Seattle Bike Share

In Seattle for a wedding. Here’s a view of San Francisco this morning, with the Bay Bridge People Path in the foreground (aka “the world’s longest bike pier,” because it only includes the east span of the bridge). BTW we’ll ride it this semester.

aerial view of San Francisco Bay, with Alameda and Oakland in foreground and San Francisco and Marin County in background.

two brightly colored bicycles, one bright green and yellow, the other orange
Bikes from two of the three new stationless bike share companies in Seattle, LimeBike and Spin.

 

Seattle has 3 different “stationless” bike share companies (2 depicted above). To get to our seedy motel from the airport, I first took a light rail and then a “LimeBike” (that’s the green and yellow one).

A short video of riding a LimeBike on Seattle’s 27-mile multi-use Burke-Gilman Trail.

IMG_5178-1w7tqkz

 

What is a “Post”?

I often ask you to write “posts.” There are a couple ways to approach this task, but usually it should take less than 10 or 15 minutes to actually write the post (reading and viewing course material takes longer, of course!).

When you write your post, think about the kind of things you are most likely to read on the internet. You can use posts for this class as a way to practice and apply strategies that will capture the audiences you want to reach.

I set up a “Post” page with some guidelines for writing your posts. But in truth, there’s no one right way to do it, as long as you aim for these goals:

  • thinking it through
  • sharing your ideas
  • demonstrating your knowledge

(and you should include an image, picture, graph, drawing, etc.)

by Nina Paley

REPLY REQUESTED – California Bicycle Summit

We have been invited to present at the California Bicycle Summit in Sacramento in the first week in October!

I need volunteers to attend the conference with me! We’ll drive up on Thursday morning (10/5) and spend the day at the conference. In the evening, there is a dance party at — wait for it — the California State Railroad Museum that evening, but we’ll only stay for that if everyone wants to.

SO this means that you might need to miss a Thursday class, but you get an opportunity to share your ideas with bike advocates from around California!

You don’t have to give a speech or TED talk or anything — we’ll make some posters and share them, kind of as described here:

I am not going to post a video of what a dance party for bike advocates at a railroad museum might look like. It’s not gonna be pretty.

Email me with questions (or post a comment below).

EVENT: Pedal-In Sunday September 17

This bike ride features talks by many noted San Francisco area writers, artists, and activists.

Unfortunately, I will be in Seattle for a wedding and will not be able to attend!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pedal-in-a-ride-from-market-street-to-the-headlands-commons-tickets-37049936357

In conjunction with the opening of The Commons, a new gathering space at Headlands’ Center for the Arts, the Studio for Urban Projects with Packard Jennings, will host a “pedal-in” to the Headlands campus. The ride will feature a series of talks focused on bicycling as a way of claiming public space from our city streets to our parklands.

Public space is critical to assembling political energy and informing community dialog. Modeled after the “ins” (teach-ins, sit-ins, bike-ins) of the 1960s and the political action they inspired, the day will connect the history of bicycling, the environmental movement, and social protest to contemporary action. It will provoke us to consider the commons as an opportunity for shared action.