Research & Rescue

I write like Chuck Palahniuk

Every once in awhile, you have to indulge in these cutesy little web tools. This one takes a passage you've written (a blog entry or paper is suggested over tweets - unless you want to be E.E. Cummings) and compares your writing to prominent authors, based on a textual analysis of your writing style.

Hat tip Bookworks of Albuquerque

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like Chuck Palahniuk. Proof: http://iwl.me/s/2b568272

Books for Thinkers

So, I have decided to indulge in the nirvana of nerdiness and I put a page in the Research & Rescue Amazon Store, called Thinkers - Global Issues. As I discover new books (or books that have been around but I hadn't noticed them), I'll add them in. Some of these are ones I've read; others are wish list items (if you're a personal friend, there's a hint). This is the first of a series of store pages in the Books for Thinkers category but I haven't quite decided what the others will be. Since I have a background in AI, perhaps the next shelf will be technology books with a bent toward philosophy and cognitive science.

Not to worry, I don't make a fortune of of Amazon Associates fees. In fact, I make pretty much nothing. You're welcome to change that, of course! In the meantime, think of this as just another venture into internet curation :-)

Happy reading!

 

Lost Remote: News and media on the iPad

Typo? Freudian slip?

Lost Remote | News and media on the iPad: A mixed bad so far

This is a good blog entry, though. I don't have an iPad (yet) but I see the same phenomena they discuss, using the iPhone. Being the new junkie that I am, early on, I downloaded a number of news and magazine apps - some local news, Rachel Maddow, HuffPost, and a few others. Quite frankly, I prefer MobileRSS for reading any of it. It lets me tweet or e-mail or save to Instapaper and I'm happy. Perhaps I'll feel differently when using the iPad but I rather doubt it.

The advantage of the iPad is a big enough screen to be able to read these things comfortably. Safari will do just fine for reading the blogs and new sites I normally surf, and if they address the Flash issue, all the better (although lack of Flash hasn't yet been devastating for me on the iPhone). I see no reason to get all a dither about what the iPad is not, for new media. Can you still read what you want? Can you disseminate it effectively? Is it it portable and easy on the eye? Have we maintained the content? If so, to me, it's a good thing.

Kindle Software Update 2.5 is out!

Yaaaay!!! Finally!

Amazon.com Help: Kindle Software Updates

Degrees of Separation

Who else but Good could come up with the link between Mary Shelley and Kevin Bacon?? Click through on the image for a bigger version.

via www.good.is

Sir Ken Robinson TED Talk and book

I would have normally passed by The Element in a store as self-help fluff but the video below, which is a TED Talk by Ken Robinson, convinced me to download it to my Kindle last week. As you might guess by the full title - The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything - has to do with how many people don't really recognize what their true calling is. According to Robinson, our school systems encourage conformity and actually kill creativity in our youth. I see this in the corporate world, as well, and the sad thing is that most adults simply accept it and either suppress their calling to do what lies in their hearts or, sadder still, never bother to figure out what that is.

Book owners have smarter kids

If I have a vice or addiction, it's books. My parents were the same when I was growing up. Most of the clutter in our house was books or magazines or journals. I got my first library card at the age of 3 or 4. Now I have 4-legged children and I even find them occasionally perusing the bookshelves (at home - going to the library would involve a car ride). I firmly believe that there are different variants of "intelligence" and some of the cleverest people I know didn't even finish college - but many returned in their later adult years (and I think as better students for having the life experiences they had before). But I do gravitate to well-read people both IRL and in my social media circles.

I retweeted a post by Chris Merle the other day (and subsequently heard the story on NPR) that the rise of use of the internet has cause us to lose focus and not be able to concentrate on tasks because of the way we hop around between hyperlinks and multitask. If I recall correctly, the term used was lack of deep reading. I have been considering buying an iPad and the Apple salesperson pointed out that I could use the Kindle Reader on it and dump my Kindle. I told him that I preferred to read on my Kindle because of the eInk but another selling point for me is precisely because I CAN'T surf on my Kindle and I am better able to concentrate on what I'm reading.

I'm curious about friends who spend a lot of time in social media and whether they have less books in the house and/or do they or their children read less than when they were younger themselves?

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling

via www.salon.com

Think Geek shirt to celebrate Towel Day

"People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you." [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]

May 25th is Towel Day (the anniversary of two weeks after the passing of Douglas Adams in 2001) and Think Geek has a great shirt to celebrate in style (Well, OK - in geek style).

Then again, perhaps you actually need a towel. They've got one of those too:

via www.thinkgeek.com

Who ya gonna call? NY Public Library uses improv to fight budget cuts

I would wager that if more public libraries pulled stunts like this, more kids would hang out there - maybe adults, too.

AZ students protest ethnic studies ban

I'm neither Native American nor Hispanic and I don't live in Arizona - but I was fortunate enough to take at least a few different ethnic studies courses when I was still in Michigan. I firmly believe that understanding different cultures makes us a better society. Furthermore, I don't believe that you can just one multicultural course and be done with it, as some proponents of the AZ ban suggest. There is a wealth of wonderful literature from many ethnic communities from which students could benefit and there is absolutely no reason for this ban except to deny students information from those diverse perspectives. What a shame to perpetuate ignorance out of fear of the different.