So today’s classes were interesting. By interesting I obviously mean that there was something awry with them…well most of them.

In online journalism I felt like I was suddenly in the fourth grade. I really like this class and so far have left each time feeling very good and excited about what was going on. Today was not one of those days.

We were learning how to do tables in html, and the following took place: Professor: “So the grad students have four pages, and thus have four boxes in their table. Now for you undergrads, you only have three pages. So how many boxes will be in your table?” An eternity of silence. Another eternity of silence. For the love of Pete people, if 4=4, then 3=3. I feel like I should bring apples next time.

In my broadcast journalism seminar, rudeness smeared an otherwise quality class. There are I think 6 people in the class, the professor is retiring after the semester, and we have basically told that we can show up…or not…So the atmosphere is pretty laid back and conducive to having good discussions and having a good time. Today one girl shows up 20 minutes late–to a class that has had its starting time pushed back a half hour already.

Perhaps next time you should just not come if your time is worth so much more than the rest of ours.

Halfway through the class she whips out her tupperware and starts eating. Class is from 5-6:30. There are other times you can eat. Then during a discussion of media profitability, she interrupts the professor to tell him that the 600 page book he has published on the topic is wrong. When he begins to explain the details of his point to show that she is not exactly correct, she interrupts again. When he asks her questions to try to get her to actually think about what she’s saying instead of just “I know you are wrong,” she interrupts again.

I’m all for open and free discussion and challenging someone’s points. Another girl in the class managed to question the same points, without being rude. Let the man finish what he has to say, speak when your time comes.

Oh…that’s right…her time is more important than ours. She can’t wait.

Back in February I wrote about automatic doors and how it was entirely unnecessary to be warned that they are, in fact, automatic.

Basically they move out of your way, requiring no action from you and should only require a warning to those who have A) never seen them and B) have heart problems that can be worsened by seeing such shocking things.

Writers usually have a lot of story ideas, including many “evergreen” topics that can be trotted out whenever they have no pressing items to cover or just don’t feel like doing anything “new.” Sometimes, you sit on a story because you are lazy.

Such is this update.

A month or so ago I had dinner with some family, including my cousin Lauren. She brought up a piece to this automatic door puzzle that had completely escaped my mind: The automatic revolving door.

Now it’s not that I hadn’t experienced one before. The building that houses the post office in Hyattsville, Md., where I used to reside, has exactly such a beast. It’s pretty sweet since most revolving doors are pretty heavy and require a lot of initial force to get them to rotate.

These no-effort doors only move when you trip the sensor, and then only move at one speed (after accelerating up to that speed of course).

That’s where the danger comes in.

With a normal revolving door, you approach with several things in mind. First, you peer through to see if anyone is coming from the opposite side, which would make the door suddenly start spinning out of your control. Second, you know it takes effort to get it going, so you’re hopping into your compartment with a little speed to strike the door with.

When the door moves on its own, both of those become different situations. When someone comes from the other side, the door is going to start moving out of their control as well. That means they will probably wait an extra second or two to judge the speed of the door before picking a compartment to enter. For you, that means adjusting your speed as well since you no longer have to worry about them moving the door too fast or slow for you to get in.

When you do enter, your speed must be different than in the old-fashioned setup. You need only to judge the speed and jump in, then walk fast enough to avoid the back of the door but slow enough that you don’t run into the front.

With so much to consider, it’s no wonder these doors have warnings on all sides letting you know of their automatic nature. Those are truly valuable stickers.

And in case you thought this was the end of my musing on revolving doors–after all, how much more could there possibly be?!–don’t fret. I bring to you also the quasi-automatic door, the ones that open for you once you press a button.

Now these are usually designed for the handicapped, as denoted by the international handicapped symbol on the buttons that one must push in order to engage these doors. But sometimes they are built for the lazy or the guy who just has a lot of stuff in his hands and finds it easier to get into the building that way. To each his own.

This too is another place where I applaud the signs warning you about the door. You may have seen someone in the past walking through without opening it themself and thought it was fully automatic. In such a case you’re probably walking right into that bad Larry, causing at least a few broken bones and probably spilling that double mocha frappuccino you had in your hand.

So seeing the sign, you are then given ample time to make a few adjustments. You can either sidle over to that button–performing the underused hit is with your hip maneuver–or proceed as if it is a normal door.

A further note, sometimes these doors don’t open very easily by hand and thus the warning can allow you to put some more mustard into your pull and not look like a weakling in front of passersby. And I sincerely hope this is the end of this train.

Wednesday is one of my favorite days of the week. And no, it’s not because it’s Hump Day, though that does add to its appeal. Wednesday is interesting-study day in the Washington Post.

Richard Morin, a fellow at the Pew Research Center, has a Wednesday column that analyzes some interesting studies that have come out of the academic and think-tank world. There’s one longer analysis followed by three or four annotated studies. It’s usually in the last three or four that the true gold lies.

Take this week. The last study is from some business professors in the Netherlands, who Morin says found that “people will accept two mailings from charitable organizations soliciting donations before they start to get really irritated.”

The professors conclude through their study that the more times you ask for money through the mail, the less you’re actually going to get because you are going to just end up pissing off the people who would have donated.

Now that’s pretty much what you would expect to happen, but when empirical data is put behind it, you hope that somewhere people are paying attention and can adjust their actions accordingly…maybe…

One of the more interesting ones was a study about how clueing people that one of their attributes might be being tested can affect how they do on a particular test. So a survey that asks questions about gender issues can make men and women score differently on a subsequent math test.

Morin says, “The phenomenon is known as ‘stereotype threat’–a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.”

In this study, women did worse on the math test after being asked questions that made them think about gender. Later, the women did much better on a math test after being asked about their experiences living in the northeast–no gender involved.

ABC’s 20/20 tackled this kind of study in an episode this month called “Race and Sex: We think, but can’t say stereotypes and biases.” They talked about a teacher who told her students one day that those of them with blue eyes were smarter and always did better on tests. The next day, the kids with blue eyes completed a flash card drill minutes faster than those with brown eyes. The kids with brown eyes cried because they thought they were inferior. The next day, she said she had made a mistake, and that actually it was the brown-eyed kids who were smarter. Those kids did better on the flashcard drill by minutes that day. When the kids were finally told that it didn’t make a difference, the times evened back out. Being told they were inferior made them perform as an inferior.

You might think such an exercise is bogus because kids are more impressionable. But today, that same teacher conducts seminars with adults using the same methods…with the same results. She does the seminars to show how an inferred bias can affect performance, presumably so that the participants can adjust their own behavior to avoid such actions.

Though there is also recent data that shows such sensitivity-type training isn’t working so well, that the participants go back to work without really changing the way they act even with the new information they have received. (I read this story earlier and for the life of me cannot remember where, thus no link…)

In case you didn’t know, one of the best defenses our nation has put forward to combat bio-terrorism involves having our drinking water monitored by fish.

There’s no scientist taking daily samples or filtering system that’s supposed to send off alerts when certain substances appear in the water. No no, one of our most precious resources is being left up to fish.

As reported in the Washington Post this morning, water supplies in Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco are being monitored using a system developed by the US Army and a private firm using bluegill fish.

Basically, a set of fish swim in their own little tank that has continuously changing water from the region’s water supply. The fish act normally when everything is ok–or at least as OK as the water ever gets. When a toxic substance is introduced into the water, the fish freak out, alerting a human to take some sort of action to prevent people from drinking the contaminated goods.

In case you’re wondering, the fish work for just two weeks before getting a vacation. I mean, we really can’t have the fish being overworked now can we? But I suppose if we are leaving our water supply up to a few fish that I could go catch myself, we want them to be in tip-top shape. God forbid we would have some other way of measuring if there is something toxic in the water.

Though we don’t know exactly how many people are being serviced by the bluegill detectors–for security reasons, of course–at least 4.5 million people in the D.C. area have been drinking the fish-monitored water for at least six months now.

I definitely feel safer.