The Lifelong Effects of Music and Arts Classes

The Pacific Standard on a recent study that highlights the importance of arts education: 

 New research suggests [arts educators] are creating arts aficionados, and cultivating the next generation of patrons and performers.

“If one aim of music education, as many music educators report, is to engender a lifelong connection with the arts,” writes Kenneth Elpus of the University of Maryland, “the results of this study suggest that music — and arts education more broadly — is achieving this aim for many alumni.”

For his study, published in journal Psychology of Music, Elpus analyzed data from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, an ongoing project of the once-again-threatened National Endowment for the Arts. It included data on 9,482 American adults regarding “their childhood experiences with music and arts education.” A larger group of 35,735 were asked about their arts-related experiences over the past year, as an audience member and/or creator.

“Rather than disengage from art-making and arts attendance upon graduation, students of school-based music and arts education were significantly more likely (than their peers) to create art in their own lives, and to patronize arts events,” Elpus reports.

Indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world

Sam Leigh in The Guardian:

It would be a cliche to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs.

Why Does NASA Study Earth?

Earth is a complex, dynamic system we do not fully understand. To learn more about it, NASA, as the agency with access to space, was tasked with launching the first weather satellite back in 1960. Today, NASA uses satellites, aircraft and even an occasional boat to study our planet's air, land and water. It's called "Earth System Science" and we are trying to answer some big questions: How is the global Earth system changing? What causes these changes? How will Earth change in the future? And what we learn benefits society through applications such as weather forecasting, freshwater availability and disaster response.

The Universe in a Cup of Coffee

What happens in a cup of coffee. 

Graphic Design Legend Milton Glaser on Design & Art

Anne Quito for Quartz: 

Design is not art. It’s a distinction understood by practicing designers, but it still eludes many. In an Oct. 29 talk at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the 87-year-old graphic design legend Milton Glaser gave the best definition of the practice of design.

“Design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one,” said the 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient. “Observe that there’s no relationship to art.”

This confusion is not just a matter of semantics. In businesses, schools, offices, even newspapers, design is often associated with the art department. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the aim of design. When art and design are confused, the designers’ domain becomes limited to style and appearance.