Smoke-filled rooms

Some of those smoke-filled rooms wound up nominating better candidates than the primary system. Whether this is random chance, or a defect in the primary system, or a deterioration in the quality of candidates over the years is an interesting question that I won't attempt to answer. It doesn't appear that the primary system removes the influence of special interests.

At any rate, the observation about the smoky rooms is a bit ironic in light of some recent research on the effect of CO2 levels on judgment. (Yes, they worried about impurities in the CO2 they added to the room's atmosphere.) Received wisdom said there was no impact of CO2 concentration on human performance, but there'd been a partial study that suggested maybe there really was.

At LBNL researchers asked volunteers to take tests in a room that had three possible levels of CO2 concentration: 600, 1000, and 2500 ppm (human contribution is not substantial). They were tested on:

• Basic Activity Level (number of actions taken)
  
• Applied Activity (opportunistic actions)
  
• Focused Activity (strategic actions in a narrow endeavor)
  
• Task Orientation (focus on concurrent task demands)
  
• Initiative (development of new/creative activities)
  
• Information search (openness to, and search for information)
  
• Information usage (ability to utilize information effectively)
  
• Breadth of Approach (flexibility in approach to the task)
  
• Basic Strategy (number of strategic actions)

The results? Some things (Information Search) showed no particular effect. Others (Initiative) showed pretty dramatic changes.

Image above is taken from the paper by U Satish et al. "Funding for this research was provided by Collaborative Activities for Research and Technology Innovation (CARTI), which supports research in the areas of air quality and water resource management. CARTI, part of the Syracuse Center of Excellence located in Syracuse, New York, is supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under award EM-83340401-0." Or in other words, they get the credit for this and not me.

There is strong evidence that in schools, CO2 concentrations are frequently near or above the levels associated in this study with significant reductions in decision-making performance. In surveys of elementary school classrooms in California and Texas, average CO2 concentrations were above 1,000 ppm, a substantial proportion exceeded 2,000 ppm, and in 21% of Texas classrooms peak CO2 concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm (Corsi et al. 2002; Whitmore et al. 2003). Given these concentrations, we must consider the possibility that some students in high-CO2 classrooms are disadvantaged in learning or test taking.

In eight studies within commercial aircraft, mean CO2 concentrations in the passenger cabins were generally above 1,000 ppm and ranged as high as 1,756 ppm, and maximum concentrations were as high as 4,200 ppm (Committee on Air Quality in Passenger Cabins of Commercial Aircraft 2002).

They worried about people wearing respirators, though other work suggests that blood CO2 levels don't change much. Car and pickup atmospheres are hard to predict (vent open, window open a crack, smoking, bad exhaust--who knows?) but they suggest that there might be some effects.

I suggested to my supervisor that our next meeting be on the Memorial Union terrace, to make sure we were as alert and productive as possible.