{"id":27795,"date":"2020-03-02T08:42:33","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T14:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=27795"},"modified":"2020-03-02T08:42:33","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T14:42:33","slug":"its-the-little-things-sometimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/03\/02\/its-the-little-things-sometimes\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s The Little Things Sometimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I liked this report from a few months back on improving students’ grades<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what NYU\u2019s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled \u201cAir Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement<\/a>\u201d that looks at the surprising consequences of the\u00a0Aliso Canyon gas leak<\/a>\u00a0in 2015.<\/p>\n

The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we\u2019re talking about. The school district didn\u2019t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it\u2019s consistent with a\u00a0growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution<\/a>, which finds that everyone from\u00a0chess players<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0baseball umpires<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0workers in a pear-packing factory<\/a> suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.\u00a0[Vox<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I shouldn’t think this is surprising, since we didn’t evolve for polluted atmospheres – by definition – but it does appear that some are surprised. Or perhaps at our sensitivity.<\/p>\n

And I do recall reading, somewhere, about 40 years ago, about how the passengers on steam engines actually liked the fact that their clothes were covered in soot, because that was symbolic of their separation from Nature, that Nature that took lives suddenly and randomly through disease and wild animal attacks.<\/p>\n

But mostly, I think, we just think we’re too damn special to be afflicted by minor air pollution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I liked this report from a few months back on improving students’ grades: An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27795"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27803,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27795\/revisions\/27803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}