Letter to the Edtor
Editorial
Over the past year, many students and faculty have looked forward to the opening of the McAlister Place Pedestrian Mall. The administration had promised an end to vehicular traffic on the most important axis within the campus. As we continued and continued to await the opening of the new eco-friendly walkway, it became very apparent that things were not as green as we were led to believe. First came the demolition of the historic Anthropology Building in order to provide replacement parking. Next, foreign palm trees were introduced to a traditionally planned oak alee on Freret Street. The final straw occurred when the campus was intoxicated under the thick, greasy smell of fresh asphalt. Many students had assumed that McAlister Place would be paved with an eco-friendly permeable material, rather than a product which employs petroleum in its production. As the asphalt was poured under the helpless eye of the student body, the past nine months of construction seemed utterly paradoxical: nothing changed. Architecture students cringed. The Tulane University Administration had hired a developer who utilized potentially foreign oil to pave over the central portion of campus. Meanwhile, the biggest source of energy on this side of the Persian Gulf sat untapped- the university’s own students. Imagine a design competition where the students are called on to design their own campus. Surely the creativity and resourcefulness would be immense. I call on the university to allow every new construction on campus to be open to a design competition. In the meantime, who else has seen the newest dorm plans? They are located in the LBC lobby. All I want to know is, when’s the review?
From the entire Charrette staff and myself, I am happy to present the first issue of the 2010 spring semester. This issue is special in many ways. Since its inception in 2006, theCharrette has greatly changed and has now entered a new phase. We have evolved into an independent study class, in which our editors and staff members can now earn credit hours in return for their dedicated work. This gives our staff recognition for their hard work but provides an incentive for others to get involved too. The new staff members share a passion in journalism and freedom of speech in the architectural realm. I enjoy the potential of debate that writing can produce in a design-based profession and I look forward to how this plays out in theCharrette. Our staff brings their own unique backgrounds of experience at many levels to help make theCharrette a force within TSA, more than it ever has. Changes are occurring rapidly. As we search for an identity that defines theCharrette, an influx of ideas comes our way; we must sift through them to find the optimum balance of content. Thanks to the generous support of Dean Schwartz through the Dean’s Funds for Excellence, we have an operating budget for our journalistic needs and fuel for generating discussion and critique within TSA. Dean Schwartz said it best during a conversation I had with him last semester. “Diversity equals success.” This arose in the context of our outstanding faculty, but it can be applied to what theCharrette strives for: diversity of self, diversity of thought, and diversity of ideas. We want to do things differently and that starts with who we bring aboard as writers and staff. Thanks to the guidance of Dean Gamard and the supervision of our faculty advisor Professor Robert Gonzalez, we have forceful backing to achieve this goal. Please do not hesitate to contact me at theCharrette@gmail.com. I want to hear any and all opinions. Let us know how we’re doing.
Arthur Ostrowski
editors
kevin michniok, eic ian o’cain brian sulley
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Kevin Michniok, eic
staff
hannah ambrose mira asher eric baumgartner xiaoyun li kristian mizes
contributors
theCharrette
february 2010
Why pulling an all-nighter doesn’t work. Alexandra Bojarski-Stauffer
The college system of getting by on three or four hours of sleep during the week and crashing for twelve hours on weekends doesn’t work. You may think that staying up all night to finish a project or study for a test will simply give you a few more hours to get the job done. But the reality is, when you starve your brain of sleep, it does not retain the information you learned during the day. Think about it. You stay up all night memorizing terms for a test and after a few days, all the information you had memorized during the “all-nighter” faded away. The fact of the matter is that by staying up all night, you never let your brain process and store the data properly in your memory circuits.
See your brain works kind of like a computer. Say you were working on a large project (on a PC and auto save didn’t exist). If you leave the computer on long enough eventually the computer will freeze and you will lose the information you worked on. In order for your brain to properly process the information you received throughout the day you need to let it properly “shut down,” that is get six to eight hours of rest, not four or five. The sort of sleeping you do at the beginning of a night’s sleep, and the sort you do at the end are different, and both are required for efficient learning. The first two hours of sleeping are spent in deep sleep, what psychiatrists call slow wave sleep. During this time, information that has been gathered during the day in the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, is transferred to the cortex, the outer covering of the brain where long-term memories are stored. This process preserves experience for future reference, like moving information in a computer from active memory to the hard drive. Without sleep, this information will be lost and long term learning cannot occur. Over the next few hours the cortex sorts through the information it has received, distributing it to various networks. Particular connections between nerve cells become strengthened as memories are preserved, a process that is thought to require the manufacture of new proteins, which is a slow process. If you halt this process before it is complete, the day’s memories do not get fully transcribed and you don’t remember all that you would have, had you allowed the pro-
cess to continue to completion. Quick hour long naps simply do not get the job done. The last two hours of a night’s “uninterrupted” sleep are spent in rapid-eye-movement or rem sleep. This is the best part of the night, where dreams occur. The brain shuts down the connection to the hippocampus and runs through the data it has stored over the previous hours. This process is important to learning as it strengthens the many connections between the nerve cells where new memory is stored. The brain goes over the information it has learned, repeating it, like a child would to memorize a new definition. This is why many people have repeating dreams, or dreams that occur over and over again, with slight variations of each dream, within one sleep. Dreams however are not stored like memory. For this reason even though everyone actually dreams, not everyone remembers it when they wake up. So the next time you want to cram for a test or stay up all night working on a project, think about how your brain will function the next day. The fact of the matter is it won’t. So if you don’t want a head full of slush, manage your time well, and be consistent in getting a good night’s rest, to the best of your ability. It will be better in the long run…like when you get a job at a firm and need to remember the maximum clear spans for C16 grade softwood. Or you could just be a doof and google it, but that won’t look too good when you boss walks by.
K EILLIN partnership
travis bost arthur ostrowski alexandra bojarski-stauffer City Center Grant
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Outside the Studio
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TSA Rennovations
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