I keep thinking about this very good 11-minute Not Just Bikes video about traffic calming. In it, a simple argument is made: the posted speed limit of any given street or road doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the street feels. Generously wide and separated lanes, sparse traffic lights, and the road being straight past the horizon will make you unconsciously speed up. Reducing the posted speed limit or adding flashing YOUR SPEED signs won’t help:

The truth is that many drivers will not slow down because of signs or speed limits. They’ll slow down either because they don’t feel safe, or because they’re afraid of damaging their car.

The only answer is redesigning the street for the desired speed limit – narrowing the lanes or joining them, creating choke points and speed bumps, adding posts and planting trees close to the road, and even adding visual cues like “dragon’s teeth.”

One of the great thing about driving in the Netherlands is that it’s rarely necessary to look at the speed limit. The road design takes care of that for you.

There is an app I use a lot called Forklift, a suped up Finder, with one of its functions being syncing files to a remote server.

In its version 3, the syncing window looked like this:

This is a pretty straightforward and dependable function – and I’ve depended on it for years.

I recently updated to version 4 to check it out, particularly since it promised faster syncing. But I was thrown aback by how it randomly deteriorated:

It’s not that there seem to be some UI challenges: the new icons make it harder to understand hierarchy, and one of the switches starts with “Don’t” in contravence of rules of avoiding double negatives.

No, the worst part is this:

This is a new temporary state that meant to help me understand the details of what’s changing.

On the surface, it’s a thoughtful thing. But it’s done in the worst possible way for this kind of a power-user interface: It’s very slow to invoke and slow to cancel. I often activate it by accident – it makes large swaths of UI a minefield where you can no longer rest your cursor safely. It also changes the hierarchy of the output in a way that’s confusing – and it even animates the text wrapping in a distracting way. Then, if you press Esc instinctively to get rid of whatever happens, the window closes altogether.

It’s a “delightful,” luscious transition that is completely out of place. I think this is how many people misunderstand craft – that it’s only about “high polish” without any thought underneath. Here, the effort was spent on executing something that couldn’t be saved this way and needed a more serious rethink. It seems like its creators forgot who’s using the app and for what, and embarked on accidental UI calming.

There are other challenges along the same lines, both downgrades from version 3:

• when the app analyzes the differences, I can no longer press the Sync button and walk away
• even when the button becomes active, I can no longer press Enter to activate it – I have to use the mouse

In version 3, I could invoke Sync, immediately press Enter, and get on my merry way, with syncing continuing in the background. It was exactly what I wanted. Version 4 slows me down by requiring me to pay constant attention to the interface: it matters where I rest my mouse, it matters when I click the button, it matters what input device I use to commit.

It’s okay to think of friction and sometimes transitions are indeed very helpful for UI calming to avoid drastic movements or accidental activations. But here, this isn’t great at all; the creators of Forklift promised me faster syncing and achieved the opposite.

A Meta employee who works on AI safety let an AI agent named OpenClaw loose on her inbox and it deleted all her email. (This tracks; companies like Meta actually don’t care about AI safety and hire accordingly.)

Just over half of U.S. teens say they've used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support from these tools. Teens tend to view AI's future impact on their lives more positively than negatively.

The post How Teens Use and View AI appeared first on Pew Research Center.

A new hobbyist developed app warns if people nearby may be wearing smart glasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which stalkers and harassers have repeatedly used to film people without their knowledge or consent. The app scans for smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signatures and sends a push alert if it detects a potential pair of glasses in the local area.

The app comes as companies such as Meta continue to add AI-powered features to their glasses. Earlier this month The New York Times reported Meta was working on adding facial recognition to its smart glasses. “Name Tag,” as the feature is called, would let smart glasses wearers identify people and get information about them from Meta’s AI assistant, the report said.

Non-Japanese athletes have competed in sumo, but no nation has swept the sport like Mongolia. Since the early ’90s, Mongolian wrestlers have succeeded at the highest levels, even becoming yokuzuna—grand champions—at disproportionate rates. Meanwhile, Japan has seen the rise of its own version of MAGA: the far-right Sanseito party, buoyed by fervent nativism (and young, extremely online voters), has gained increasing power in Japanese parliament. Tokyo resident and sumo fan Joshua Hunt sets out to trace these converging paths.

At the grand sumo tournament, very few people were willing to pass judgment on Sanseito. Instead of calling the party’s electoral victory “regrettable,” as they had Onosato’s performance, most simply said they were surprised. A number of people used the word fukuzatsu to describe their feelings about the party, which can either mean that something is too complicated to put into words or that they are of two minds about it. Many seemed to find it equally difficult to explain the nuances of sumo’s ethnic politics, but in Nagoya I started to get the sense that I was looking at the issue backward—that the longing for the great Japanese hope had less to do with a sense of national superiority than an anxiety over whether the country’s best days were behind it.

“It’s very important for Japanese people when there is a Japanese-born yokozuna,” Naomi, the tour guide, told me. “Recently Mongolian wrestlers have been so strong, and I think it has become the basis for a kind of inferiority complex.” She paused for a while and then paraphrased the same words that had inspired the name of the Kokugikan in Tokyo: “After all, sumo is the national sport of Japan.”

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Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Join us next month for our online event on whether higher education is still worth it.

Are American schools facing an imminent financial bubble?

More people are working in public schools, even as fewer students attend them. To some observers, this math just isn’t math-ing. Schools, some fear, are setting themselves up for disaster by spending beyond their means. This has led to broad concerns about the financial state of American public education.

“Where staffing and enrollment are diverging, something eventually has to give,” says a recent analysis from the Edunomics Lab, a school finance think tank. “Current staffing levels are unsustainable,” agrees a report from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

The reality, though, is more complicated. Schools have been hiring additional staff for well over half a century. This is not inherently unaffordable, so long as the economy keeps growing and the public continues to support using additional tax revenue to fund schools.

Adding staff may be “more sustainable than people tend to assume for a lot of districts,” says Paul Bruno, a school finance expert at the University of Illinois. “If there are fewer students in the system, you can make the choice to spend more on each student.”

Yet there’s no guarantee that politicians will choose to keep spending more or that the economy will continue to grow. Whether staffing increases are fully sustainable will depend on a number of factors and will vary from place to place.

Here’s how to understand what’s going on.

The long-sustained staffing surge

The oft-cited graph below comes from Edunomics Lab. Based on federal data, it shows a divergence in the number of students and school employees in the last decade. Some are teachers, though most are non-teachers, including paraprofessionals, support staff, instructional coaches, counselors, assistant principals, and others.

Below is another graph using essentially the same numbers but presented differently. This simply turns the student and staffing numbers into a ratio (students per staff) and extends the time horizon.

Here the recent trends look less stark. The dips in staffing ratios in the last few years may have been slightly faster than normal but not dramatically so.

In fact, American schools have been lowering staffing ratios for quite some time. Private schools have done so too. Over the years, critics have warned that such trends were not sustainable. Yet, with the exception of budget cuts in the wake of the Great Recession, they have been sustained.

How is this possible? Won’t schools eventually run out of money?

That’s not what has happened because school funding has tended to increase over time. As the U.S. economy has grown, tax revenue has gone up, and politicians have tended to give a bit more to schools each year. Taxpayers don’t usually revolt because their tax rates aren’t necessarily rising. The same tax rates on a larger economy generate more funding.

What would be alarming is if the share of the economy devoted to K-12 schooling were sharply increasing. That would be tough to maintain. But that’s not what we see.

What about the recent decline in student enrollment, which will likely continue for years? Won’t that finally mean that schools will have to make cutbacks?

Not necessarily. Lower enrollment could actually mean more money for schools on a per-student basis if the same amount of money is spread across a smaller number of students. This is possible because enrollment drops do not necessarily affect the tax revenue that goes toward funding schools.

Recent reports nationally and in California have described this phenomenon in more detail.

Uncertainty, politics, and trade-offs

Yet schools can hardly rest easy. Here are the financial risks and challenges that lie ahead.

• Some of the staffing increase may have been funded with temporary federal COVID aid that has run its course. It’s not clear precisely how many new staff were funded with this money or whether other revenue can sustain these positions.
• Losing students can add complications and costs to districts. They may keep underenrolled schools open or face added transportation costs after closing schools. In those cases, the same amount of money may buy less.
• Schools have benefited from a rising economic tide and politicians’ continued willingness to use extra revenue to fund education. Neither is guaranteed to last. Policymakers and voters may decide they don’t want to keep investing as much in school systems with dwindling numbers of students. Increasing demands for other public services, like health care, may crowd out education.
• Enrollment declines have not been evenly spread across school systems. Some places have seen much sharper drops. Those schools are facing increasing financial strain since state funding is tied to the number of students.

Even if schools can afford to continue adding staff or at least maintain staff, that doesn’t mean that they should. There is an open question about whether that’s the best use of scarce funds.

Research has found some benefits of additional teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, and teacher coaches. One trade-off, though, is that new funding is not going toward raising teacher salaries. Adjusted for inflation, teacher pay has actually declined in recent years. Meanwhile, in part due to the growing economy, many other professionals have seen their salaries rise. This could have troubling long-run consequences for who enters and stays in teaching.

“What if instead [of adding more staff] we had really spectacular teachers in the classroom who are paid really, really well?” says Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab. “If so, maybe we wouldn’t need so many specialists.”

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.