Author: Shaunacy Ferro

If you’ve glanced at the news this election season (so like, the last two years), you’ve probably found yourself bombarded with election polls. But not all polls are created equal. We the Voters, a video-heavy voter education project from the documentary company Show of Force and the social impact-focused Vulcan Productions, has two polling experts explain just what makes a good poll in the video above.

All polls are conducted with an angle in mind, and sometimes, that angle isn’t just to figure out what the electorate is thinking. Many newspaper polls tend to be more neutral, because news organizations have the public interest in mind, but partisan news organizations also conduct polls that might have more of a bias. Campaigns, too, conduct their own polls, in part to figure out what’s driving different groups of voters.

Good polls survey a random, wide sample of likely voters. The questions themselves matter, too, since some questions can lead respondents toward a certain answer in the next question. We the Voters has some metaphors that help you understand exactly how this works.

Even the best polls are only estimates of public opinion, and Election Day will always bring some surprises. President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, writes in The New York Times that many election campaigns don’t even bother with national polls, opting instead to target specific groups of voters they deem likely to support their candidate (say, young Cuban American voters in Florida) and remind them to show up to vote. Public polls “often use conversations with just a few hundred people to make predictions about the entire electorate,” he explains. “Getting a truly representative sample has become ever more difficult because of the growing percentage of households with only cellphones, the number of voters who prefer to speak a language other than English, and the difficulty in contacting younger voters, who generally don’t have landlines.”

Unfortunately, we, the anxious voters eager to suss out our favorite candidate’s chances, don’t have access to a campaign’s voter data. Until November 8, all we have to go on is polls, but at least there are some helpful hints when it comes to figuring out which ones to trust.

[h/t Digg]

Images: iStock

Most wheelchair designs are often focused around users’ comfort in everyday use, promising a better fit or a greater ease of movement. But wheelchair users want to do more than just move around without getting chafed. One wheelchair design in development supports dancers who can’t necessarily perform without mechanical aid. Science Friday reports that a University of South Florida-born power wheelchair is made to allow its users to move expressively, giving them the freedom of movement that dancing requires.

Wheelchair dance isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, for some people, dancing is more than just sport. It’s a form of therapy. Parkinson’s patients, for instance, often show symptom improvement after regular dance training. But performers often use chairs that are rigid and not designed for modern dance. The Rolling Dance Chair, by contrast, has greater flexibility to move in any direction. And when users move, the chair follows.

Through a wireless connection with the accelerometer and other motion sensors on the user’s phone, the chair can sense the person is leaning, and lean with them. The wheels are tucked away to prevent costumes from getting tangled. And like a Segway (which partially served as a design precedent), the chair moves faster the more the user leans.

Merry Lynn Morris, the inventor, has been working on the dance chair for five years, and it’s the subject of five different patents. She began working on the device while working with dancers with disabilities who couldn’t control their lower bodies, but whose upper bodies were strong enough that the chairs they were using did more to hinder their performance than aid it.

The first prototype debuted in 2013, but Morris and her colleagues are working on a new one with hopes to put it on the commercial market. Right now, the seat isn’t powered to rotate or adjust the height, requiring manual manipulation, and it needs better wheels to make it quieter on all surfaces.

[h/t Science Friday]

Header image by Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

When it comes to helping students succeed in school, academic factors like curriculum and teacher quality are only part of the puzzle. How happy and unified the school feels as a community has a big impact too, according to a study in the Review of Educational Research recently reported by NPR. Happy schools, it turns out, produce better students, even accounting for socioeconomic differences.

Israeli and U.S. researchers analyzed 78 studies on school climate published between 2000 and 2015 to study the links between school climate, socioeconomic factors, and academic achievement. “School climate” encompasses the personality of the school, including how well its students, teachers, and administrators work together.

As one example of a happy school environment, NPR describes an elementary school where each morning starts with an all-school assembly that includes a dance party, birthday celebrations, a “Student of the Day” award, and learning about a different international city. Positive schools “see themselves as vehicles to change society”—as study co-author Ron Avi Astor told NPR—”that these kids are going to go out and not just reflect where they came from and who they are, but change all that.”

The study [PDF] found that positive school climates—where there’s a mutual sense of respect and support between all the students, parents, and employees, and a communal sense of engagement with educational goals—do raise grades, and not just in wealthy areas. Sure, a yoga-centric school in Beverly Hills might have a positive climate, but so can a public school where most of the students receive free lunch. Indeed, schools with more positive environments tended to offset the negative impact that lower socioeconomic status has on academic achievement, according to the study.

Unfortunately, what constitutes a positive school environment is hard to pin down from a scientific standpoint. And without a clear definition of what makes a positive school, it’s a little hard to help schools move in that direction. Still, in the U.S., where educational policy is geared toward raising student grades, it’s pretty important that educators realize that creating an environment where everyone at the school is happy and excited about learning can be just as important to academic achievement goals as reworking the math curriculum.

[h/t NPR]

An expanded waterfront park in West Palm Beach will soon be getting a plaza that floats atop a lagoon like a submarine. The peninsula extension of Currie Park is part of a master plan designed by Italian architect Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab.

Located in the Lake Worth Lagoon between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach, the floating plaza stays above the water using air chambers that open and close to take in or release water based on the weight of the crowds above it. Much of the floating park will be below sea level, and if looking at the surrounding water isn’t enough, there will be water plazas and pools within it. It will also feature an auditorium and a restaurant that will grow its own hydroponic food onsite.

A previous estimate put the cost of Ratti’s work at $520,000, to be paid for by the city of West Palm Beach and the billionaire developer who owns land near the park. The project is scheduled to be completed by late 2018, the architecture firm told mental_floss in an email.

All images courtesy Carlo Ratti Associati.

Modern life is full of cords—from phone chargers to earbuds to USB connections for your camera, Kindle, and more. And boy, do tangled cords make things annoying. No one wants to spend five minutes trying to undo a mess of headphones before they can listen to music.

While you can buy cord-organizing solutions to keep your earbuds and lightning cables neatly stored, doing so means one more tiny object to keep track of. Plus, you can keep your cords organized for free, if you master a few simple wrapping tricks.

Dieter Bohn of The Verge uses a simple, easy-to-remember technique that only takes a minute to master. While it can be a little more difficult with thick cords and earbuds with large microphone pieces (like these), for the most part, it’s foolproof. You just need to hold on to the larger part of the cord (like the earbuds) and wrap your cord around your first three fingers, scout’s honor-style. When you’re nearing the end of the cord—about eight inches from the end—pinch the middle of your newly created circle of cord, and wrap that remaining piece around the center, perpendicular to the rest, so that it holds the circle together and forms a figure eight. Tuck the last bit through the hole in the bottom of that figure eight, and give it a tug to secure it.

If you really want to make it easy to free your wrapped cords, you should use the “over-under” technique, so that your cords don’t get twisted. The technique is particularly useful with video and audio cords. Essentially, you make one loop in one direction, then the next one loops in the reverse direction. It’s easier to see in demonstration:

If you have trouble remembering the equipment-free technique, you can also keep a twist tie (like the ones that keep your bag of bread sealed) around the end of your cord, and simply twist it around the looped cord to keep it together. You can also buy a specially designed rubber twist tie for cords, which tends to be a more long-lasting, attractive option than the one that comes from the grocery store. Or, you could cover the bread loaf twist tie in masking tape or Japanese Washi tape to make it softer and more colorful.

To design a map of the world is no easy task. Because maps represent the spherical Earth in 2D form, they cannot help but be distorted, which is why Greenland and Antarctica usually look far more gigantic than they really are, while Africa appears vastly smaller than its true size. The AuthaGraph World Map tries to correct these issues, showing the world closer to how it actually is in all its spherical glory.

Created by Hajime Narukawa at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance in Tokyo, the design just won the grand prize from Japan’s Good Design Award as Spoon & Tamago reports. It beat out over 1000 entries in a variety of categories. 

Unlike the Mercator projection, the 1569 mapping technique that you’d probably recognize from the world maps you saw in school, the continents on the AuthaGraph aren’t lined up straight across—they’re angled in a way that provides a more accurate representation of the distances between them. “AuthaGraph faithfully represents all oceans [and] continents, including the neglected Antarctica,” according to the Good Design Awards, and provides “an advanced precise perspective of our planet.” No longer does Africa look the same size as North America, or Antarctica look like one of the biggest continents (it’s smaller than everything but Europe and Australia).

The map—which is used in Japanese textbooks—can be fit into different shapes without losing its accuracy, and AuthaGraph sells paper assembly kits where you can fold it from a sphere to a cone to a flat map, mimicking the way the projection itself is made.

[h/t Spoon & Tamago]

All images courtesy AuthaGraph.

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Your high-brow Halloween soundtrack has arrived. BBC Radio 3’s Words and Music, a show that sets poems and other writing to classical music, celebrates the holiday with an episode on witches and sorcerers.

The 74-minute episode features a diverse cast of magical individuals from the literary canon, including the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, Goethe’s 1797 poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” C.S. Lewis’s titular villain of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare’s magician Prospero from The Tempest. The classical music by composers like Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi is interspersed with theme-appropriate blues and jazz hits like Nina Simone’s “I’ll Put a Spell on You” and Eartha Kitt’s “I’d Rather Be Burned as a Witch.”

Listen to the program over on the BBC website.

[h/t BBC]

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Americans are flocking to cities in high numbers—and you can see it in the skylines. A renewed interest in urban living and the concentration of new tech jobs in cities have led to a boom in new urban construction, and not just in places that are notorious for recent growth like San Francisco or Austin.

The apartment search site RENTCafé put together a comparison of Street View images of different urban intersections with notable growth over the past decade or so that allow you to visualize just how dramatically some city skylines have changed. Below are seven different visual comparisons from cities across the country. Toggle the slider back and forth to compare images from 2007 to today.

1. MASON STREET LOW-INCOME HOUSING // SAN FRANCISCO

2. BAYSIDE AT THE EMBARCADERO DEVELOPMENT // SAN DIEGO

3. DOPPLER – AMAZON HEADQUARTERS // SEATTLE

4. CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT // CHARLOTTE

5. L.A. LIVE ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX // LOS ANGELES

6. AUSTONIAN CONDOS // AUSTIN

7. SKYLINE // MANHATTAN

All images from Google Street View via RENTCafé unless otherwise noted

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When most people talk about international borders, they’re being somewhat metaphorical. Rare is the person who’s actually traveled the full border between two countries and has a real idea of how they are separated by geography and political history. You may have crossed through one border checkpoint, but you may not have climbed the middle-of-nowhere mountain that forms the border a few hundred miles away.

In light of the political discussion around border walls, The Intercept and Field of Vision created a timelapse of some 200,000 images showing each of the 1954 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. All the images were downloaded from Google Maps according to the geographic coordinates of the international boundary line. Some of the images show urban stretches, with only roads and fences to separate one city from the other across the border; other parts are simply a stretch of flat desert; and still other parts of the border contain very real geographical obstacles like mountains and rivers.

“The southern border is a space that has been almost entirely reduced to metaphor. It is not even a geography. Part of my intention with this film is to insist on that geography,” writes data artist Josh Begley on The Intercept. He wrote the code that downloaded and stitched together all 200,000 images. “By focusing on the physical landscape, I hope viewers might gain a sense of the enormity of it all, and perhaps imagine what it would mean to be a political subject of that terrain.”

The whole thing is almost seven minutes long and pretty dizzying, both in the metaphorical and physiological sense. You can watch it here.

[h/t The Intercept]

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The world’s first horror movie doesn’t seem particularly scary these days, but in 1896, Le Manoir du Diable (released in the U.S. as The Haunted Castle) had the most cutting-edge special effects of its day. Made by famed French filmmaker Georges Méliès, whose films include the influential A Trip to the Moon, the short revolves around a bat that turns into the demon Mephistopheles. 

The soundtrack sounds like a weird little lullaby, somewhat taking away from the horror of it all—it actually makes pretty good work music, if I’m being honest. But there are some fun 19th century special effects, some of the first ever to appear on film. People appear and disappear in clouds of smoke, and bats suddenly take human forms! On the less frightening side, there are quite a few men in funny hats, and the demon pokes people in the butt—which is what really makes the film come together. (After all, nothing says “Happy Halloween!” like a pitchfork to the rear end.)

[h/t: Open Culture]

Banner image screenshot via YouTube