Teachers: Open Your Windows

All these years, I have been right: a classroom with an open window is better for students. Amanda Erickson reports:

Not so long ago, elementary school teachers regulated classroom temperature by opening up a window or cracking a door when it got too hot. These days, of course, modern school buildings have fancier climate control systems that offer cooler temperatures at the push of a button, no outside air required.

Turns out, that might not be such a good thing.

According to a new study published in the journal Indoor Air, students in classrooms with high levels of fresh air stayed healthier and took fewer sick days. Those results come from researchers out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who analyzed ventilation rates in 162 elementary school classrooms over two years.

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NSA Whistleblower: Hero or Not?

In the week following the public declaration that low-level contractor Edward Snowden leaked the information about the NSA spying program, there has been a great deal of debate about his actions. The New Yorker offered two assessments of his actions worth reading.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old former C.I.A. employee and current government contractor, has leaked news of National Security Agency programs that collect vast amounts of information about the telephone calls made by millions of Americans, as well as e-mails and other files of foreign targets and their American connections. For this, some, including my colleague John Cassidy, are hailing him as a hero and a whistle-blower. He is neither. He is, rather, a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.

John Cassidy:

I’ll leave the last word to Ellsberg, who, for revealing to the world that that Pentagon knew early on that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, was described in some quarters as a communist and a traitor: “Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA’s surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.”

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Knowledge Isn’t a A Database

Ray Kurzweil on learning:

Knowledge is doubling every 13 months by some measures.And knowledge isn’t just a database. Knowledge is a symphony or a jazz band or a poem or a novel or a new scientific insight or an invention.

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American Englishes

Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Voux’s linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words.
His results were first published on Abstract, the N.C. State research blog.

Want to know how other Americans pronounce words like caramel or pecan? Check it out here.

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Gatsby: Still Great

Prompted by the Baz Luhrman film, there has been a great deal of discussion about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby lately. Austin Allen at the Big Think offers a defense of the work:

Gatsby is not only a dissection of the American Dream but of dreams in general: their terrible necessity, their built-in futility. Its best lines on the subject–“the high price of living too long with a single dream”; “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”; “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”–have an almost scriptural quality, resonating far beyond their immediate context.

It’s also a particularly trenchant study of male desire, male illusion. Although the female characters in Gatsby don’t exactly come out looking well, there’s something ferocious about the way the book skewers men. What is Gatsby’s house but a failed mating display, one of the most extravagant in literature? Is there a harsher portrait of waning virility than Tom Buchanan: insecure bully and womanizer, “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax”? Meanwhile George Wilson is a hysterical cuckold, and even Nick cuts a slightly Prufrockian figure, looking forward at thirty to “a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

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