James Mortland's blog

For all you armchair generals out there who think you know something about war and pay lip service to the troops in support of your own political ideology (ahem, without actually doing anything to actually "support" the troops), elements of the Champaign guard unit (B Co 634th BSB) are returning with the rest of the Mattoon unit (A Co 634th) on Saturday.

There will be a welcome-home ceremony at the Mattoon Armory on the 6th. I don't have any hard times for you at this time, but I'm sure the N-G and other local media will be on top of it as time gets closer.

They've been in Iraq for the last year-plus, and they're currently stateside at an active duty post conducting DEMOB ops.

There's a good 20 soldiers (thats a conservative estimate) from the Champaign unit attached to A Co that will be returning to the Champaign unit upon repatriation, so this definately impacts the community.

If you have the time and inclination, I'm sure the Champaign troops would love to see a big showing from the community down there on Saturday to welcome them home.

There's a time to argue intelligently, and there's a time to laugh at ourselves. At this time, I would like to laugh at one of those "ourselves."

Enjoy!

***UPDATED: Includes downloadable PDF 8 1/2 X 11 "Long Live The Chief" poster.***

The Chief has danced his last dance.

But there's a bunch of unanswered questions out there, some in "our" (unofficial) control, and some out of "our" (official) control.

"Official" control questions:

1. What of the logo? The University still controls the copyright. Where's it going to go, who will have control of it, will it be maintained in a lockbox by the university simply so they can say others can't use it, or will it be transferred to another entity for use in sales, or for other reasons?
2. Similar questions for the Chief himself, although I'm not sure how the "copyright" works for the actual person who does the dance.
3. What of the development of a replacement symbol, or an actual goofy mascot (so that if nothing else, the community can agree that "yes indeed, our mascot is a mascot")?
4. What will next football season look like? Surely the three-in-one won't change that much, except for the obvious...

"Unofficial" control questions:

1. Tailgating, specifically, but also the logo and pictures of the Chief around town. Will the Chief image and community love of the Chief persist forever? When someone you love dies, their memory tends to live on, you pass on stories and memorabilia to your children...in short, you don't stop loving them because they are gone. And there's a LOT of people who love the Chief.
2. Would an "unofficial" Chief, present outside of a sporting event, not sanctioned by UIUC, be appropriate? Would it even be legal, at present?
3. Would a "memorial," of sorts, perhaps a statue of the Chief with arms upraised and a plaque (similar to the SunSinger) be appropriate? Maybe not on UIUC property, but even funded by an individual, business or fundraising group and placed on city property or high-visibility private property?

 Please share and expand (or flame me) as you see fit.

*UPDATED: Includes Unit 4 demographics-at-glance report, broken out by grade level, for easy comparison of apples-to-apples when comparing schools accross the district.*

Knocked out 6 more maps, hopefully these might be a little more useful:

There's two categories - low income percentage of students per school vs CU property values (1 ea for primary, middle and high schools); and minority percentage of students per school vs CU census block minority percentage (1 ea for primary, middle, and high schools).

This only covers evaluated public schools in the 2004/5 school year in districts 4 and 116.

The pie charts spatially represent the location of the school, and relative student body size of the school is depicted by pie chart size.

Whether or not the school made AYP in 2004/5 is noted by either a red or blue school name on the point.

Bottenfield apparantly had 0 low income students - I think there was some missing data.

All non-spatial school data is from http://iirc.niu.edu.

For all spatial data source info, see my previous blog post.

This is a map of champaign-urbana schools (Champaign Schools.pdf), color coded by school type (public/private) and 2004-2005 performance for public schools, against a backdrop of 2000 census block by percentage of minority residents in CU. This is in response to the thread: http://www.illinipundit.com/2006/10/16/charter-school-for-champaign-boys#comment and http://www.ucimc.org/node/497.

The school layer does not differentiate what level of schooling (k-5, middle, jr, high).

It does, however, indicate whether or not the school made AYP in 2005, if the school is a “spotlight” school or an “AEWS” (Academic Early Warning) school per the interactive schools report from NIU, or no indication for either (“OK”).

Non-spatial data for the public schools came from: http://iirc.niu.edu/.

Spatial data (street addresses) for all schools came from: http://Illinois.publicschoolsreport.com and http://Illinois.privateschoolsreport.com. Street addresses for all schools were geocoded to a street shapefile from the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission (CCGISC), current as of Oct ‘06. Minor local streets were left out for clarity, major roads were left in for visual spatial reference.

2000 demographic data (spatial and non-spatial), water features and rail features came from US Census.

Minority percentage was derived for each census block by creating a field for “(POP2000 - POP_WHITE) / POP2000,” and then equal-break visualizing the blocks in 5% intervals, with darker shades indicating a higher percentage of minorities in that block.

Census blocks with no color indicate that there is a 2000 population of “0” in that block.

I have no idea of the spatial makeup of each school (ie, what percentage of students come from what part of town, or demographic makeup of each school), so no correlation should be inferred between location of a school, performance of a school, and demographic breakdown within each school.

There is no intentional political motive behind the map; it is designed to be an unbiased point of reference for the blog users to work with, so we’re all on the same sheet of music.

UDPATE BY IP:  The file is here.  I'm not sure why anonymous users couldn't see it before , but I'm trying to fix it.

UPDATE BY IP #2:  Fixed now.  You can view the file just below the post, whether you're anonymous or not.  I love Drupal!

**UPDATED: Includes a map (Champaign Density.pdf) with the same school and infrastructure/natural data, but I've changed the census block visualization from equal-interval minority percentages, to natural-breaks (Jenks) population normalized by area (acreage). This will give a pretty accurate idea of density only (no race demographics), but please note that the color ramp for density is NOT equal-interval**

**UPDATED: Includes a map (Champaign Parcels Schools.pdf) of schools with a backdrop of assessed residential property values within the boundaries of Champaign, Urbana and Savoy, color ramped such that darker is more expensive. The purpose of using property values is to have a subjective indicator of household net worth and income. I have worked pretty hard to get all residential properties on there, but there's clearly some missing rental properties, especially around campus (as you can imagine, a shapefile like this is HUGE, and a monster to work with - not to mention that the fields in the file aren't intuitive). I believe I have all owner-occupied properties on there. I have excluded properties with no assessed structure. I believe that it's "good enough" for what we're doing here. Note that the color ramp is for property values is NOT equal-interval. This is the last map I'm going to do for this "project."**