Holbrook, E. (2011). BEHIND THE MUSIC. Risk Management, 58(5), 19-22. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.redlands.edu/docview/1010325378?accountid=14729

This article focuses on how music festival owners manage the many risks revolving around music festivals such as Electric Daisy Carnival and Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. After an introduction about what happened on “Rock and Roll’s Worst Day” in Northern California in 1969, the article begins with quotes from Ben Stern, who is the vice president of California-based Hefrernan Insurance Brokers and insures the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC). The number one priority of festival organizers is keeping the crowd safe and when these festivals are notorious for illicit drug use and underage drinking, Stern says, “When you’re dealing with someone under the circumstances, you have to do so very carefully.” The article continues on to discuss other massive, multi-day festivals such as Coachella and Burning Man, where risks have been escalated due to overcapacity events due to sneaking in with bolt cutters or counterfeit tickets or massive bonfires. Music festivals, or really any large-scale event, involve a massive amount of people with an equally massive amount of risks. This article directly relates to my topic, discussing risk management of the exact festivals I had in mind when I came up with this topic. How risk managers handle all the different possible variables will determine the true success of the festival.

Kim, Tae-Woo, et al. 2017. “Convergence Technique Study on Red Tide Prediction in the Littoral Sea.” Journal of Coastal Research, 2017, 79: 254–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44289518. (Kim et al.  2017)

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the ocean cause “red tide”, which impairs the functionality of desalination plants because the microbial matter produces a lot of harmful chemicals that can continue to exist in water post-desalination. This research aims to discover how to reduce the impact of red tide on desalination plants by utilizing a convergence technique. In order to do so, reports of events must be collected, like tidal movements and concentrations of HABs. Most of this data is a combination of remote sensing, monitoring, and modeling, and it must be collected through public or private records, considering that much of that information is available from research by institutes like NOAA. Instead of relying solely on satellite imaging to determine where the HABs are, GIS specialists have started to superimpose the distributions of HABs on top of tidal prediction maps in order to track when and where desalination plants are at high risk of being affected by red tide. The data analysis in this study is the key difference to many research methods in the past, because the convergence of spatio-temporal techniques provides new insight into how to present the distributions of red tide in a new way. The greatest limitation of this technique was relying on satellite imagery in cloudy conditions, in which case it would be more difficult to accurately track the flow of red tide. Regardless, people that manage operations and maintenance of desalination plants will be able to use this technique to make clearer and more informed decisions about the desalination plant and be able to prepare for the impact of HABs in the future.

Ronchi, E. ; Uriz F. Nieto ; Criel, X. ; Reilly, P. “Modelling large-scale evacuation of music festivals.”  Case Studies in Fire Safety, May 2016, vol.5, pp. 11-19

This article goes into detail about a case study that was looking at the use of multi-agent continuous evacuation modelling for representing large-scale evacuation scenarios at music festivals. Using the model Pathfinder, the researchers came up with three different scenarios to be simulated to explore the predictive capabilities of evacuation models during certain incidents. The scenarios varied in severity beginning with the evacuation of a few stages (~ 15,000 of 65,000 people), while continuing to grow in severity and the number of people needing to be evacuated. Variables such as physical abilities of people in the festival were acknowledged by using an approximate unimpeded walking speed distribution split up into two categories, “standard occupants” and people with locomotion impairments. The case study discussed in this article shows how multi-agent evacuation modelling tools are able to either explicitly or implicitly represent the behavioral factors that affect people’s decision making at a music festival if there were to be a complex evacuation scenario. Even though the impact of different initiators can be simulated in these models, they still have limited capabilities in explicitly representing complex behavioral variables present in a massive group of people. This relates directly to my topic so I think it will help me a lot with my research.

Pugh, Kelley, “The Effect of Music on Creative Writing” (2014). Student Publications. 4.

https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/student_publications/4

This source covers the discoveries of listening to music has an effect on writing. “In this paper, Kelley asks several research questions about the effects of music on creative writing, and then uses empirical research methods to answer those questions. The paper is organized like a social science research article, with a literature review, methods section, results, and discussion. The data that Kelley collected is fascinating and really shows the power of her research design and method. Her data yielded interesting results and conclusions that have implications for people interested in creative writing. She was also able to give some evidence for the, previously under- investigated, “Mozart effect,””(Cedarville). This source covers the discoveries of listening to music while writing. This article has two research questions: 1) How much of an impact does music have on our emotions? 2) To what extent can those emotions can be transferred to our writing? The types of data used was a survey, a case study, and textual analysis from the case study to evaluate the written works of the people in the survey. This research was well written to the point that after reading I wasn’t left wondering, it was straightforward and did not cut any corners from the research question to the analysis. Others might find interesting like I did, was pretty simple. That there is actual research and evidence done proving the fact that music does have an effect on emotion and writing and that it is not just a floating accepted concept.

California mobilizes to save invaluable kelp – will efforts be vain?

California’s north coast used to be covered in a bull kelp forest creating a safe ecosystem for fish and other organisms to grow. Four years ago an epidemic wiped out the sunflower sea star leaving the purple sea urchins without their main predators and freedom to graze on kelp and grow their population. Today this once thriving ecosystem is known as an “urchin barren” because it is only inhabited by purple sea urchins and not many other marine animals. This problem is still made worse by the fact that kelp forest are unable to thrive in the growing temperatures of the ocean making growing these forests back even more difficult. Normally sea otters are unable to keep sea urchin populations low but that is not what they are seeing in Monterey.  One solution to this problem is sending kayaks and boats out with a giant vacuum and sucking up the urchins and then turning them into compost. Some places have used hammers and gone around smashing urchins but there is currently a law against doing this. To take this further I would look more into this law and see what it is protecting and how reversing it could benefit or harm the ecosystem. Also looking at how if there are sea otters in the area the population of sea urchins still continue to grow? Is it worth looking at efforts to bring back the sunflower sea star?

Bland, Alastair. “California Mobilizes to Save Invaluable Kelp – Will Efforts Be in Vain?” Oceans, News Deeply, 9 Apr. 2018, www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/04/09/california-mobilizes-to-save-invaluable-kelp-will-efforts-be-in-vain.

Gould, Kevin & Magdalena Garcia, M & A.C. Remes, Jacob. (2016). Beyond “natural-disasters-are-not-natural”: The work of state and nature after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. Journal of Political Ecology. 23. 93-114.

This article deconstructs the idea of a ‘natural disaster’, reframing natural disasters as only part natural and the remainder as a political play. The authors Gould, Garcia, and Remes focus their research on the natural, socioeconomic, and political impacts of the earthquake that hit Chile in 2010 under the Bachelet administration. They reframe natural disasters as something to be managed and place the State as the manager, embodying what they call the Managerial State and Manageable Nature. They state, “The critical disaster scholars were not denying the existence of natural hazards such as earthquakes and hurricanes, but they argued that it was the social, political and economic relations that made people vulnerable to such events.” (95). The researchers also look at historical systems of oppression, including permitted force and violence against civilians who were stripped of rights in “states of catastrophe” as done under the dictatorship of Pinochet. While they state that such extreme uses of militarized force and rule have not been used since Pinochet, similar tactics of authoritative—and often violent—force are used against indigenous Mapuche communities, especially in the chaos that the earthquake and tsunami brought. Much like the disproportionate force used against indigenous communities created a militarized, violent atmosphere, the role of the media aided in framing specific narratives to elicit sympathy and patriotism from Chileans, pitting them against communities that were shown to be “disrupting”, rather than seeing them as people in need. Beyond that, they look at economic data and funding proposals in response to the earthquake, namely the ways in which economic systems are often laid out in times of natural disaster to best benefit economic institutions. They assert, “In this scenario, companies and markets are ideally positioned to respond to disaster, because according to natural laws of the market, when companies respond to disaster, they build the economy rather than contributing to inflation.” (106) While such a statement could be seen positively as working to stabilize the economy, further policy details expose the exploitation that underlays such political and economic tactics. The researchers call this strategy a ‘neoliberal approach’ that enables the growing term ‘disaster capitalism’. They declare that such approaches “permitted private firms to accumulate profits by reconstructing houses with shoddy materials and locating replacement housing on low-value land.” (107). Indigenous and lower-income communities were systematically pushed out of areas that did have higher land values in areas that were central to larger centers and cities in order for them to be reclaimed and reconstructed by companies that saw their displacement as opportunities to develop real estate and tourist facilities. While this research is very helpful in confirming exploitative actions by governments and companies in the wake of natural disasters, and further demonstrates their priorities of land development over fellow citizens, it did not provide the amount of raw data that I had been hoping to find. Nevertheless, the impact and actions taken by both governments and corporations seem to align seamlessly with other instances of natural disaster and development that I have found prior, setting what seems to be an unfortunate baseline of naturalized exploitative action.

Dunaway, Johanna, Robert K. Goidel,  Ashley Kirzinger, and Betina Cutaia Wilkinson. “Rebuilding or Intruding? Media Coverage and Public Opinion on Latino Immigration in Post-Katrina Louisiana”.  Social Science Quarterly. Vol.92(4). Dec. 2011. pp 917-937.

This article covers topics to better understand the public opinions of immigration regarding the studies of different aspects, be it political, geographic and media backgrounds. They used post-Katrina Latino immigrant migration to Louisiana as an opportunity to study these relationships. They use survey data and context analysis of news coverage to examine the influence of news exposure on attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. It concluded that local news coverage of immigration increases awareness and wide spread concern about immigration, and heightened news exposure increases perceptions about personal interactions with Spanish-speaking populations. I find this research to be something that can continue into my search for looking for citations for my research question, which is “How does the media’s portrayal of immigrants affect their own perception of self-identity?” because a persons self-identity can be affected by other people’s opinions, especially if they are surrounded by those opinions constantly in the media. I am wanting to try to incorporate  the self-identity of immigrants, the media’s perception of immigrants, and how the media affects the immigrants self-identity.

Laugan Miller

Jim Spickard

EVST Research Methods

2/18/19

Effects of predators on sea urchin density and habitat use in a southern California kelp forest

Kelps form the base for many ecosystems by providing safe places for prey to hide. Sea urchins are disturbing these kinds of ecosystems by preying on the kelps. Researchers wanted to look at the possible effects of predators consuming the sea urchins and dropping their population numbers to stop kelp deforestation. While normally sea otters prey on urchins this research looked at an environment with sheepheads and lobsters as top predators. In this ecosystems the predators had to be a certain size in order to break the sea urchins apart which then prompted smaller predators to eat the scraps. This means that even though there might be an area with a heavy population of predators only a few can prey on the urchins and so they probably wouldn’t be able to control their population levels. This lead to researchers observing that urchin mortality rates were lowest were urchin populations were highest. These predators are unable to control the population of sea urchins. What to look at next would be what is limiting these predators sizes like overfishing and what introducing other predators would do to the ecosystems. What could also be helpful is other strategies that researchers have found worked to reduce sea urchin population sizes.

Nichols, Kathryn D., et al. “Effects of Predators on Sea Urchin Density and Habitat Use in a Southern California Kelp Forest.” SpringerLink, Springer, 24 Apr. 2015, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00227-015-2664-2.

Furbish, D., & Reid, L. (n.d.). Best practices in career education and development in                       New Zealand secondary schools. Australian Journal of Career  Development,  22(1), 14–20.Retrieved February, 2019

In this article, two professors from the Auckland University of Technology, Dale Furbish and Lynette Reid, explored New Zealand’s unique Career Education and Guidance (CEG) programs. New Zealand’s Ministry of Education feels that every school is able to make career education and guidance a pillar in their academic structure. They looked at 20 schools that were nominated, by distinguished organizations, for their CEG programs. The research was centered around interviews with each of the school’s career advisors that asked opened ended questions centered around the school’s career education and guidance program, resources and specific activities. After reviewing the interview transcripts, the authors found seven themes that were apparent throughout each of these distinguished CEG programs. I found that, like this article, many of the articles that I have chosen to study have been from other countries, which means it cannot be generalized to American schools. However, I feel that this adds a certain level of diversity to the study along with different perspectives on the same types of programs. This easy, ‘light read’ article is certainly for anyone who is interested in an in-depth look into current CEG/ CTE programs. This article is a great example of current career education methods and has given me many topics to address when analyzing the best methods for re-engineering the United States CTE programs.

Milliman, R. (1982). Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket lkdvnlkiShoppers. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86-91. doi:10.2307/1251706

This article about music and the effects it has on shopper behavior at the supermarket was written by Ronal Milliman and published to the Journal of Marketing. This article attempts to review the current literature on the subject and disclose the results of their own study on how music affects shopping behavior in the store. Using the research question of How does background music affect in-store shopping behavior, the type of data needed to answer this research question would be Acts/Behaviors/Events, Reports of Acts/Behaviors/Events, Personal/Psychological Traits, and organizational data. Milliman used detached observation to use gather the data, and a type of latin square experimental design with controls was used to examine the effects of 3 treatment variations (no music, slow tempo music, and fast tempo music) on supermarket customers’ behavior (Milliman). Usually things like behavior relating to music are generally accepted assumptions that background music does have an affect on behavior, but now having this article as actual evidence from real research helps me move forward with my own research project. That I am not just shooting in the dark hoping that changing the music tempos would make a difference. This research being published in a marketing journal rather than a behavioral studies journal was really interesting to me, but now after reviewing it I see why. This information now becomes quite resourceful to businesses trying to increase sales with in-store consumers. Now with this knowledge of music tempo having a causal effect on in-store traffic flow and sales volume, businesses can use this information to increase their sales and to take this variable into account if their sales are low.