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Posts Tagged ‘miller-mccune’

Arts Education and Achievement

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Thank you ArtsJournal.com for another good link!

Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard offers new evidence from the National Endowment for the Arts that arts education is associated with better overall student performance.

“Students from the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder,” he writes, “tend to do less well in school than those from more upscale families. But newly published research identifies one sub-group of these youngsters who tend to exceed expectations: those who participate heavily in the arts.

“ ‘At-risk teenagers or young adults with a history of intensive arts experiences show achievement levels closer to, and in some cases exceeding, the levels shown by the general population studied,’ a team of scholars writes in a new National Endowment for the Arts Research Report. ‘These findings suggest that in-school or extracurricular programs offering deep arts involvement may help to narrow the gap in achievement levels among youth.’ ” Read more.

Doesn’t surprise me that the arts can do that. But I think the key word here may be intensive. What do you think?

Photograph: Richard Thornton/Shutterstock

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Opera Extends Life in Mice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2012| 4 Comments »

Mice find Verdi and Mozart more healing than Enya. Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune (now called Pacific Standard) explains.

“Writing in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery,” he says, “a team of Japanese researchers led by Dr. Masanori Nimi describe an experiment in which a group of 8- to 12-week-old mice underwent heart transplants. The rodents were randomly assigned to one of five groups: those exposed to opera (a recording of Verdi’s La Traviata, conducted by Sir Georg Solti); instrumental music by Mozart; New Age music (The Best of Enya); no music; or ‘one of six different sound frequencies.’

“After one week, the mice whose personal soundtrack featured Enya, one of the sound frequencies, or no music at all ‘rejected their grafts acutely,’ the researchers report. …

“In contrast, those exposed to Verdi or Mozart ‘had significantly prolonged survival.’ …

“In explaining the results, the researchers point to the immune system. They report exposure to classical music generated regulatory cells, which suppress immune responses and are thus vital to preventing rejection of a transplanted organ. …

“In any event, this provides more evidence that classical music has a health-inducing impact on the body.” Read more.

Hmmm. You want to suppress your immune system when you have a transplant because you don’t want your body to reject an organ from a donor. But suppose you want a strong immune system for some other reason? Would classical music be bad for you (or a mouse) in that case? Hard to get my head around that one.

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A (Completely) New Calendar

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2011| 2 Comments »

Today I read an article at Miller-McCune on an astronomer and an economist who want to dump the calendar we all use (Gregorian) in favor of something completely new.

It reminded me of my late friend Doc Howe, who was commissioner of education under Lyndon Johnson and who often spoke of an idea for a calendar that he learned about in his Ford Foundation days. (It might have been the World Calendar seen here, but I’m not sure. Like invented languages, new calendar systems keep popping up.)

Writes Emily Badger at Miller-McCune, “The ever-changing calendar, with its periodic leap years and mouthful of monthly mnemonic devices, has irked timekeepers almost since the system was introduced in the 1500s.

“ ‘It’s a very accurate calendar,’ says Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. …

“That said, he wants to get rid of the thing. He and Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke are now lobbying to replace it with their invention, the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. In the long tradition of calendar reformers, they believe they’ve settled on the elusive solution to the Gregorian calendar’s floating days of the week: one calendar that remains constant every year, where New Year’s Day falls without fail on, say, Sunday every single time.

“The big advantage to such a system is that nobody — businesses, the NFL, universities, beleaguered governments — would have to go through the exercise every year of rewriting holiday schedules, course calendars or sports seasons.”

Henry and Hanke believe it preferable to insert “an entire extra week onto the end of December every five or six years. … The rest of the calendar would remain constant with four equal quarters of 91 days each, with two months of 30 days and a third month of 31.”

Does this solution speak to you?

Read more on the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar here.

(Read more about Doc Howe in the Cincinnati Enquirer obit.)

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States Where Artists Find Work

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Miller-McCune.com tweeted today that the National Endowment for the Arts has new data on where artists are finding work.

Four of the six New England states are among the states with the most arts jobs: Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

“The report on artists in the workforce supplements and expands upon a 2008 paper, which found about two million Americans list a job in the arts as their primary source of employment. That comes out to 1.4 percent of American workers.

“New York heads the newly released state-by-state list, with artists making up 2.3 percent of its labor force. California, home to the film and television industry, places second with 2.0 percent.

“Not far behind are Oregon and Vermont, each of which has a workforce in which 1.7 percent of workers are artists. That means they exceed the national average by a substantial 20 percent.

“ ‘Writers and authors are especially prominent [in Oregon and Vermont],’ the NEA report notes.

“Also exceeding the national average: Colorado and Connecticut (where artists make up 1.6 of the labor force), and Hawaii, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, Nevada, and Minnesota (at 1.5 percent).”

Although there likely to be different perceptions of what kind of work constitutes arts employment, I find the report interesting. And since I know anecdotally that there are arts jobs in Maine and New Hampshire (the two New England states not among the top few), I can’t help hoping that some organization will do an in-depth study of the region. Unfortunately, ornery New Englanders don’t often think regionally.

And more generally, what are the reasons some states have more arts jobs? Public policies? Landscape? Accident?

Read more here.

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