Save the Words

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the dictionary.

Old Words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie abandoned and forgotten.

You can do your part. Help save the words!

If not for yourself then for generations yet to come.

This touching plea appears on Oxford's Save the Words website , a clever little widget where the words vie for your attention, begging you to adopt and use them.

Visit the web site! Then you, too, can write sentences like this:  The woundikins of the teterrimous snollygoster were worse than the affictitious graviloquence of the legatarian historiaster who studied ptochology.

Grim Online Toys

Peace is a good thing.

In our 1950s youth, we lived 13.7 miles from Offutt Air Force Base, under the flight pattern of bombers coming in for a landing. Given the movies we were shown in school at the time (urging us to "duck and cover") and the Cold War atmosphere, it was hard for a kid not to worry about all the Soviet warheads pointing at Offutt. Childhood consisted of anxiously computing blast radii, fretting over the prevailing wind direction, and counting the containers of water down in our farmhouse basement (which was our family's bomb shelter plan).

All that was guess work . . . now the internet gives us Ground Zero , a little mapplet using Google Maps to compute the blast radii of various nuclear ordinance from any ground zero one wishes to set. Just enter a location, choose a bomb, and then click "Nuke it!"

If one were to drop a "Tsar Bomba" (1961, USSR) on Offutt . . . well, the outcome doesn't look so good for the family farm:

To help keep these things in perspective, however, the mapplet also allows one to compute the impact of an asteroid strike.  It makes all the bombs look puny.

On the Nightstand

If you--ahem!--find the reading on people's nightstands much more interesting than what they have on their office bookshelves, then take a look at Discover Magazine's regular web feature On the Nightstand .

Example: Here's what Yale primate psychologist Laurie Santos has on her nightstand (which is actually a filing cabinet)--

• The Squad by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a graduate student of Santos . . .  who “doubles as a teen-girl-fiction writer.” The book is about cheerleader CIA agents, Santos says. “It’s awesome. I think all cognitive scientists should read it.”
  
• The stuffed frog she sleeps with
  
• The Freedom Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson, which Santos describes as a “wonderfully British, philosophical attempt at promoting idleness”
  
• A new iPhone to wake her up in the morning
  
• Watchmen, an apocalyptic graphic novel (“a fancy way of saying it’s a big comic book”) that is due out as a movie in March
  

That's funny . . . we have Watchmen on our nightstand, too. Nice to learn that the sciences and humanities share so much.

N-Effect . . . Another Argument for Small Class Size

Psychologists asked a question basic: "Modern life often seems like a rat-race. But does one's motivation to run the maze, to compete, depend on how many other 'rats' are in the race?"

Well . . . yes, apparently so.

The researchers found that people do better in smaller competitive situations than in large ones, which they call the N-Effect, "the discovery that increasing the number of competitors (N) can decrease competitive motivation." Their studies show "that average test scores (e.g., SAT scores) fall as the average number of test-takers at test-taking venues increases." That is, people do better on some tasks if they think they are competing against only 10 other other people instead of 100 people.

The psychologists suggest where further study is needed but note that their findings may shed light on debates about class size and student success:

. . . One such example concerns the debate on the role of class size in education (Mishel, & Rothstein, 2002), where some suggest class-size is rather insignificant (e.g., Hanushek, 2002) while others deem it important (e.g., Krueger, 2002). The N-Effect, however, sheds new light on this debate by revealing that as the mere N of students in the classroom increases, motivation to compete and exert academic effort are likely to decrease. In fact, perhaps the N-Effect could partly solve the mystery of the falling SAT scores in recent years (Finder, 2007), if one were to find that the average N test-takers reporting to testing venues is continually increasing.

Finally, we conclude by qualifying Zajonc’s (1965) recommendation in his seminal facilitation article, which stated: “If one were to draw one practical suggestion . . . he would advise his student . . . to arrange to take his examinations in the company of many other students, on stage, and in the presence of a large audience. The results of his examination would be beyond his wildest expectations…” (p. 274, Zajonc, 1965). Our social comparison account of the N-Effect would recommend having only a few others on stage; adding too many competitors may dampen, rather than enhance, the motivation to compete.

 (Picture of large psych class courtesy of Karma Moths )

The paper by Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor--The N-Effect: More Competitors, Less Competition -- is forthcoming from Psychological Science.

Reading on the Rise

According to a new survey from the National Endowment for the Arts, reading is on the rise in the United States, reversing a 26-year trend of decline.

The report concludes, "Whites, African Americans, and Hispanics have all shown significant growth in their reading rates, as have both adult men and women.  . . . Best of all, the most significant growth has been among young adults, the group that had shown the largest declines in earlier surveys."

The report lists 12 statistical findings, including the observation that "The U.S. adult population now breaks into two almost equally sized groups--readers and nonreaders":

The report doesn't include any statistical reason for the rise in reading, although the increase among a broad demographic suggests that no single age-based reading program can claim responsibility. Instead, the rise seems the result of numerous efforts throughout schools and communities.

The New York Times reports that Dana Gioia, chair of the NEA, attributes "the increase in literary reading to community-based programs like the 'Big Read,' Oprah Winfrey’s book club, the huge popularity of book series like 'Harry Potter' and Stephenie Meyer’s 'Twilight,' as well as the individual efforts of teachers, librarians, parents and civic leaders to create 'a buzz around literature that’s getting people to read more in whatever medium.'"

You can download the entire, readable report from NEA's website: Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy .

Software for Starving Students, Part Deux

 

We posted previously about Software for Starving Students , but--sadly--the main source of those valuable links at SoftwareFor.org has gone the way of the dodo.

So we're pleased to tell you about OpenDisc's education project, OpenEducationDisc , which provides high quality open source software for Windows. As OpenDisc explains,

The purpose of [the OpenEducationDisc] is to provide students with the software that they need to complete school work at home. Most students don’t have jobs and it is unfair to ask for them or a parent/guardian to buy expensive software to get the best out of their education.

We agree.