CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

Geography 558: Hazards and Risk Management

Checklist for Collaborative Group Project

Content

The final report should cover the following (probably in different proportions, depending on the topic and interests of the group):

• The physical dynamics underlying the specifc hazard you study
• The social dynamics: Who is at risk and are some of these unusually vulnerable? What is the specific spatial distributions of risk and heightened social vulnerability?
• The structural mitigations in place to reduce risk (and any ways that they may, in fact, backfire)
• What sorts of preparedness measures can be put into place ahead of time to help protect people beforehand?
• What resources are available now or could be assembled quickly during the impact assessment phase to identify stricken communities, households, and individuals efficiently and equitably?
• What recommendations do you have to optimize emergency response activities ahead of time?

Presentation

• Have you sorted out who speaks which pieces?
• Have you practiced the presentation in person, complete with computer management, at least twice? (after recovering from how awful that first pass through usually is)
• Do you have a Plan B if there's a computer malfunction or incompatibility? (save different versions of your viewgraphs, as pptx, the older ppt, odp, and bring a computer and flash drives -- or, if you're really paranoid, have them converted into transparencies). Our department laptop is a plain vanilla Acer Aspire PC running Windows 7, so there shouldn't be any problems for a PC-based presentation. If you're doing it in a Mac, there could be problems, so, in that situation, bring in a Mac laptop and run your viewgraphs in the OS they were designed in (generally works fine with our data projectors).
• Will the talk fit comfortably in a 15-20 minutes format? Really?
• Have you anticipated probable questions (sometimes a good trick is to leave a glaring gap for the sake of time, knowing full well you have a well practiced patter ready for the inevitable question ...)
• Can you handle some really out-in-left-field questions (not that I plan to ask them) -- "well, that is outside the scope of our research, but, if you like, we could speculate blah, blah, blah." You've marked your perimeter so, even if your answer is arguable, you've protected the integrity of what you are responsible for.

Deliverables

• Title page: Title of project, done for GEOG 558 (Hazards and Risk Management), taught by Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue, Summer 2014, and listing your formal legal names. I'm okay with it being merged with the executive summary or with it being free-standing.
• Executive summary: bulleted statements of purpose, findings, recommendations that "even a manager can understand."
• The report will probably need about 6-12 pages of double-spaced text to develop properly. Use your judgment here.
• Graphs, maps, tables, either in the text (can be hazardous as the paper is done in one software package and read in another) or in an appendix in the back. Make sure that every one of them is referred to in the text (Figure 1, 2, 3 for graphs and maps, Table 1, 2, 3 for, well, tables). Make sure the text calls and the numbers on the visual aids are consistent...
• Reference list, with every item on the list actually referred to in the text or in visuals' credits and with every citation in the text or visuals supported by an entry in the reference list.
• Please use the parenthetical reference system, as outlined in your individual reviews (the guidelines for that are pretty detailed).
• When in doubt, cite (cover your intellectual debts ... and it makes you look professional besides).
• I would prefer the document be in odt format (Open/Libre Office) but I'm okay with Word 97/2000/XP doc format. The newer docx format is really unpredictable (it really messes up graphic alignment, even in different versions of Word itself). I would appreciate also getting a pdf copy (extremely easy to do in Open/Libre Office). That way, you know that it will look the same on my computers as it does on yours and I have something to refer to if there are problems with the word processor version that I'll probably use for commenting.
• I would also like a copy of the viewgraphs from your talk (ideally in either ppt or odp formats, not in pptx, please).

Writing standards

You need to edit the report to professional standards! Look out for the following:

• Organization (overall structure of argument/presentation is clear, so reader doesn't feel lost in places)
• Spelling (inexusable, but sometimes hard to catch)
• Grammar (subject-verb disagreements are especially common)
• Syntax/sentence structure (incomplete sentences and comma splices are common problems, as is a lack of variation in sentence structure, which gets really boring after a while)
• Punctuation and capitalization (some students are "cap-happy," and commas seem to be the punctuation mark that most people have trouble handling, with misuse of apostrophes a close second)
• No sexist usage (this frosts me no end -- see https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/writmech.html for more on this and on the other writing mechanics)

Staff evaluations

• I would like a "personnel evaluation" from each of you.
• This includes a listing of who was responsible for which facet of the project.
• It also includes a score from 1 to 10 for each member of the team, including yourself.
• There can be no ties.
• The real kicker: The average score for the whole group HAS to be exactly 5.5.
• A functional team that works harmoniously would, then, have a 4, a 5, a 6, and a 7. Mean = 5.5. If the group is functional and gets along, it can arrange among itself that each person is awarded a 7 by one other person and a 4 by one other, such that each of you has a 4, 5, 6, and a 7. If you "cook" the scores like that, it tells me that you are, indeed, a harmonious team.
• If there have been "issues," with one person being carried by the others' work or one superhero getting exploited, it isn't fair that s/he gets the common grade. Such groups are generally too sore with one another to conspire to fix the scores. So, there might be, say, a slacker with a 2, a superhero with a 9, and two normal people who did their fair share with a 5 and a 6. Again, the average is 5.5. Or one slacker with a 1 and everyone else working roughly equally getting a 6, 7, and 8. What generally happens in this situation is a lot of agreement on who the slacker is, though s/he might get a 1 or a 2 from various members of the group (usually including himself/herself) and who, if any, is the superhero.
• So, between knowing who was responsible for what and peer perceptions of each person's workload, I can decide whether to adjust the common score for an individual, if necessary. If your average score is somewhere between 3 and 8, you were probably a roughly equal participant, so there'd be no adjustment (unless I thought your section was badly messed up or superlative). If it averages out somewhere around 1 or 2, I will adjust your individual score down; if it averages around 9 or 10, I will adjust your score upwards.
• Please put your "personnel evaluations" on a separate sheet or file or e-mail at the time of the presentation.
• Peer evaluation of this sort is very uncomfortable for most students. It is, however, an important skill to have in the professional world, where you may be doing personnel evaluations at much higher stakes: Someone could lose his or her livelihood because of your assessment, rather than just a grade on an assignment. So, the point of this peer evaluation exercise is to help you develop the objectivity to do such uncomfortable assessments as fairly as humanly possible.

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Last revision: 08/06/14