Architecture Theory

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This course stresses contact with primary texts, along with listed key buildings, projects, and documents, through which weekly topics and questions are posed. The type of reading you will be required to do in this class moves beyond finding information or locating an authors purpose or identifying main ideas and dig deep in theoretical texts to reveal meaning, systems of relationships between ideas, and examine your own response to these ideas and their impact on the world around them. You might imagine that you are engaged in a conversation with the author, and you are in a position to speak back, to say something of your own. Such critical reading requires that you question intensely, make your own conclusions and synthesis, and follow your own agenda.

Elections & Campaigns in Texas Assignment – Campaign for County Commissioner Pct. 3

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After 11 years as a police officer and 4 as a county constable, Steve Radack was elected to represent Precinct 3 on Harris County Commissioners’ Court in 1988, and has served there ever since. On the last day for candidates to file in December, 2019, Commissioner Radack announced he would not seek reelection, setting off a scramble of candidates for one of the most powerful positions in government.

The voters of Precinct 3 have leaned Republican over the past 30 years or so, but growth in the area’s minority population combined with the unpopularity of President Donald Trump among suburban and exurban voters have made this a competitive seat in a general election. Republican Donald Trump carried this area in 2016, despite losing Harris County, but Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried it in the 2018 senate race.

Before even getting to the general election, though, candidates have to compete in party primary elections to become their party’s nominee.

For this assignment. You are now the virtual campaign manager for a candidate for Harris County Commissioner, Precinct 3. If your client is a Republican, they’re trying to win the Republican Primary. If your client is a Democrat, they’re trying to win the Democratic Primary. Don’t worry about the November election yet. If you were in charge, what would you do to help your client get elected to this office?

Choose one of the candidates and design a campaign to win the primary election. Write this assignment as a 2 – 5 page memorandum (memo) (with cited sources) from you, the campaign manager, to your candidate. Outline the race for them, how much money you think they need to raise, how you will raise it for them, what you propose to spend it on, what issues they should talk about, how you want to deliver their message, etc.

Some things to keep in mind:

Remember, party primaries are only for that party’s voters. If your candidate’s a Republican, you’re only campaigning to Republican voters. If your candidate’s a Democrat, you’re only campaigning to Democratic voters.
Precinct 3 is huge – geographically and demographically. At 1.2 million, it has more people than Montana.
Nearly half the population is not in the city limits of any city, meaning county government is the only source of many government services like law enforcement, parks, libraries and code enforcement.
If nobody in your primary race gets a majority (50% plus one) of the vote, the top two finishers will go to a runoff election on May 26. Will any voters still be paying attention on May 26?
Not everybody who lives in Precinct 3 will vote in this election. Some are under 18 years old, or they’re not U.S. citizens. Some simply won’t register or show up. Some voters just don’t vote in party primaries. How do you target people who are going to vote in this election?
What sort of people live in your candidate’s district. What motivates them?
What is your candidate’s background and experience? What will be his or her key issues?
How much money will you need? How will you raise it? How will you spend it?
How will you get your message out? Be cautious about television. Remember – anybody who lives outside Precinct 3 can’t vote for or against your client. You’ll waste a lot of money if you use TV. Same with radio, although radio is a lot cheaper, so some candidates think it’s worth considering. If you use direct mail, you can mail only to people who are registered to vote. Or, you can be more surgical – only people registered to vote who voted in the 2018 general election, for example.
This can be a challenging assignment, but it can also be a lot of fun. Keep in mind that campaigning is more art than science, and that there are few absolutely right or wrong answers. If I asked five campaign professionals to do this assignment for the same candidate, I would probably get five totally different campaign strategies (and they’d charge me a lot of money).

Hint: Remember, this is a memo to your client, not an essay about your client. Talk to your client. Do not spend the first page telling them where they were born, where they went to college or how many kids they have – they know this already. Talk to them about your strategy to win the election for  them.

Submit in Word. Cite your sources.

Voice of change

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In Assignment 2, we ask you to consider the actual words or works of an important spokesperson for their times. After reading that speakers words, you will use the provided template to write a two-page response that shares your thoughts about the work in question, the historical events happening during the time the work was produced, and the relevance of the work in the present day. Completing this assignment will give you real insight into the thoughts and feelings of an actual participant in historical events. You will also begin to see how learning from past perspectives helps us better understand the issues we face in our own time period.

Sojourner Truths famous 1851 speech Ain’t I a Woman?
Read the speech and background
https://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm

Use the template to complete the work the link is to be used to complete the template

Student staff app

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implement a new student-staff management software app.  In the first instance you have been asked to build a console proof of concept or prototype.

Write a Console application in C# to implement the details given in the assignment specification below.

Your programme must support the ability to do basic CRUD operations such as adding/editing/removing/finding students, lecturers, etc.  Students, Lecturers and Administrators should be stored in one or more lists.

Create an inheritance hierarchy for this application, below are the minimum amount of classes to use in your programme.

Person Class with properties Name, Phone and Email.

Student Class (should inherit the functionality of the base class Person) with properties Status and StudentID.  A students status can only be either Postgrad or an Undergrad.

Employee Class (should inherit the functionality of the base class Person) with a properties called Salary and EmployementType with a value of JobSharing, FT or PT.

Lecturer Class (should inherit the functionality of the base class Employee) with a properties called Subject Taught and Department, where Department having a value of Arts, Business, Professional or Law.

Administrator Class (again, this should derive from Employee) with properties Grade (with a value of Registrar, Exams Officer, Senior or Junior).

Ensure each class provides an override ToString() method.

Start your classes as immutable, i.e., having read-only properties and only then add setters if you cannot avoid them.

Test your app by writing code in your Main() function that executes all of your functionality to show that it works as expected.

UML Documentation
Create UML documentation which describes the details given above. You will need to determine for yourself any details which are not given in the specification. You should submit the following:

Use Case Diagram
Class Diagram

Technical Merit

You can add additional functionality to your application; you can choose any additional Classes you wish, whether it was something we covered in class or something you researched yourself. 

Whatever you consider as technical merit must be included in your report and, where relevant, in the Use Case Diagram and/or Class Diagram.  Explain in your report the value of this technical merit to your programhow did it make your program better (where better could be more maintainable, more compact, more readable, etc.)

Note: Do not make use of any database functionality or any third party libraries.