Brain Games

See how quick (and accurate) you are at spotting a break in the pattern. Go here to check out a game that will test your reflexes and wit. . . Come on it's short and pretty easy. 

The Way It Was

Build Your Own

Book ID

When we walk into the library, the atmosphere is somewhat dreary and cold. Unfortunately, it is not the most inviting of places, we go out of necessity. The library can also be a bit intimidating while we go aisle for aisle looking for the books that we need. Even then, we come upon the section where the book should be located, yet the call tag is someone rubbed off or maybe even the ink has smudged on the paper and we can’t really tell if this is the exact book that we need.

Valeri Madill has created a way to bring color to a once dreary space, a rainbow- if you will -sitting on the shelves housing numerous bland colors of books. With colorful call number labels, we rid the books of taped on labels and the risk of the labels falling off. Each of Madill’s call number labels allow for each section in the library to be color coded, as well as allowing the call number information to be displayed without covering the spine of the book. Each books’ information is displayed on the label for easy scanning by the user and also contains citing information on the label’s side.

With Madill’s design, the library atmosphere is transformed and is more inviting, and the user has much more success in locating the books that they need. This takes organization to an entirely new level. (Full Story at yanko)

Let me tell you, this would have been a huge help in school. Those footnotes and bib pages would have been a lot less hassle.

Glad We Cleared That Up

"Is Google Making Us Stupid"

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »

brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. (Full Story at theatlantic)



I was actually commenting yesterday to a co-worker that something about the Internet is ADD. I can spend hours at a time reading a book (empirically refuting claims of the above article), but you can forget about me reading anything on the Internet that would require 15 minutes. It's one of the reasons that I think paper books are here to stay. I don't care what kind of electronic device you create to read books on - I just can't see myself using it. Maybe that will change with the next generation though. What do you think?

Colour Lovers

The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks crackled along the wall. Somewhere a red light blinked, like a silent, threatening eye, and a vial behind Joachim’s back was filled with a green glow. Then everything calmed down; the spectacle of lights vanished.

—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods. Mann is describing the workings of a primitive X-ray machine.

___________________

Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes. Try to guess the exact hue of each. Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words. Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue. Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research. (From colourlovers)

Morningness For Better Grades

ScienceDaily (Jun. 9, 2008) — Morningness is a predictor of better grades in college, according to a research abstract that will be presented on June 9 at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).

The study, authored by Kendry Clay, of the University of North Texas, focused on 824 undergraduate students who were enrolled in psychology classes. The subjects completed a health survey which included questions regarding sleep habits and aspects of daytime functioning.

According to the results, college students who are evening types had lower GPAs, while those who are morning types had higher GPAs. (Full Story at sd)

Is "morningness" really a word?

Seconds Please

Police in Russia are investigating after pupils stripped off their clothes, climbed walls or lay on the floor laughing after their school dinners were spiked with drugs.The teenaged students were given ecstasy in their soup and drinks at their school in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in eastern Russia.

Doctors who were called in said the students showed signs of intoxication and prosecutors later found traces of ecstasy.

The students ranged in age from 13 to 15-years-old. (From 13wham)

I would assume this was a prank done by one of the students, but whose to say. I would like to hear how this eventually turns out.

Sad Kids Perform Better

ScienceDaily (Jun. 3, 2008) — Psychologists at the University of Virginia and the University of Plymouth (United Kingdom) have conducted experimental research that contrasts with the belief that happy children are the best learners. The findings show that where attention to detail is required, happy children may be at a disadvantage.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments with different child age groups who had happy or sad moods induced with the aid of music (Mozart and Mahler) and selected video clips (Jungle Book and the Lion King). The groups were then asked to undertake a task that required attention to detail -- to observe a detailed image such as a house and a simple shape such as a triangle, and then locate the shape within the larger picture. The findings in each experiment with both music and video clips were conclusive, with the children induced to feel a sad or neutral mood performing the task better than those induced to feel a happy state of mind. (Full Story at sd)

So I guess this makes Emo kids regular geniuses, eh?

Parents Make a Difference

ScienceDaily (May 28, 2008) — New research from the University of New Hampshire shows that students do much better in school when their parents are actively involved in their education.

Researchers Karen Smith Conway, professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire, and her colleague Andrew Houtenville, senior research associate at New Editions Consulting, found that parental involvement has a strong, positive effect on student achievement.

“Parental effort is consistently associated with higher levels of achievement, and the magnitude of the effect of parental effort is substantial. We found that schools would need to increase per-pupil spending by more than $1,000 in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement,” Conway said. (Full Story at sd)

I wonder if they could invest $500 per student into parent involvement then? The problem is what program would actually increase parent involvement? Parent report cards? Prizes for parents?

We're Just Friends

(AP) -- Erik Youngdahl and Michelle Garcia share a dorm room at Connecticut's Wesleyan University. But they say there's no funny business going on. Really. They mean it.

They have set up their beds side-by-side like Lucy and Ricky in "I Love Lucy" and avert their eyes when one of them is changing clothes.

"People are shocked to hear that it's happening and even that it's possible," said Youngdahl, a 20-year-old sophomore. But "once you actually live in it, it doesn't actually turn into a big deal."

In the prim 1950s, college dorms were off-limits to members of the opposite sex. Then came the 1970s, when male and female students started crossing paths in coed dormitories. Now, to the astonishment of some baby boomer parents, a growing number of colleges are going even further: coed rooms.

At least two dozen schools, including Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, Clark University and the California Institute of Technology, allow some or all students to share a room with anyone they choose, including someone of the opposite sex. This spring, as students sign up for next year's room, more schools are following suit, including Stanford University. (Full Story at cnn)

So what do you think? Personally, I don't think I would have wanted to room with a co-ed unless I was hoping for some funny business to go on.

Women's Lib Ruined Public Schools

A post on Cosmic Variance:

The comments on Sean’s post below brought to mind a conversation I had long ago. I had been a postdoc at the Carnegie Observatories, which was a research foundation funded by donors. We were having a meet-n-greet with the folks who had given money to the institute — showing them the machine shop, the offices, etc. I was sitting down with one of the more elderly donors, who announced, “Women’s lib killed the public school system.” (Full Post)


The premise is, basically, that women had very few carrier choices in the past. They either taught or nursed. So, presumably, our schools got all the best and brightest women as teachers. Now those women go into other carriers (Cosmic Variance is not necessarily endorsing this view, just reporting).

I can see where the donor was coming from, but I just can't buy it. It seems to me that the school systems are more fundamentally flawed than just not getting smart or talented enough teachers. I think you could even make an argument that the school systems can't work in the current social environment.

What do you think? What is the starting point for improving the public schools?

[Picture via friendsfabricart]

Ask What She Reads Before Committing To a Date

"Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.” (Full Story)

[Photo via LikeCool]