April 12th - D.E.A.R. Day (Drop everything and Read Day)

April 12 has been named national Drop Everything and Read Day, in honor of author Beverly Cleary's 90th birthday. Cleary's spunky character Ramona Quimby is the day's spokesperson because it was in Cleary's 1981 book, Ramona Quimby, Age 8, that Ramona's school started having D.E.A.R. time. Several organizations have joined with HarperCollins to establish this nationwide initiative, meant to encourage families to take at least 30 minutes a day to put aside all distractions and enjoy books together. Resources and ideas for celebrating the day are available here. Printed materials, including a poster and reproducible handout, can be obtained by contacting HarperCollins.

Books for your dolls house

A dolls house cannot be complete without books. Here are instructions on how to create them for your own dolls.

With formats becoming obsolete so quickly, how will we preserve documents in the future?

Fading fast Deep inside an abandoned iron mine in upstate New York, forklifts move pallets of sealed containers around an atomic storage centre. The facility was set up during the Cold War to protect millions of government and corporate documents.The Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Centre is now part of a vast network of archive centres - a lot like the warehouse that became the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Each is an Aladdin's cave of priceless treasures storing millions of historic documents that have been painstakingly catalogued, many shrunk onto microfilm and sealed into airtight containers to preserve them for centuries.In an era exploding with digital formats it seems that microfilm has become the last back-up, a simple strip of celluloid film that only needs a torch and a magnifying glass to access it. Read the whole article

Is Google being a fair use user?

by Bessie Mayes Some technology revolutions can be very subtle in the beginning. Perhaps you have noticed that the number of computer commercials outnumber commercials for television products, with the exception of the Super Bowl season of course. The technology markets are driven by the consumer’s desire for convenience, relaxation, and saving time. There are many new technological surprises these days to accommodate those masses too. For instance, Sony Corporation has a new product that may change the way we read books in the future. You are familiar already of course with email, e-journals, and e-commerce, but are you aware of e-paper? Sony’s new device will allow the user to read up to eighty books on a device they call the Sony Reader. The company developed this reader last year, and is now marketing it to the public. The device weights only 9 ounces, and looks just like a book with a LCD screen. The Sony Reader is adjustable, meaning you can manipulate fonts, and is easy to carry around. Just think, instead of thumbing through a paper copy of your favorite novel, you now have the luxury of pressing a button to flip to the next page. However, my question after reading about this new item was how could I acquire a digital book that could interface with this device and how much would I have to pay? What if I told you that someday in the future, you may be able to download your favorite book into your Sony Reader directly from a library’s website? Read the whole article

Talk doesn't come cheap when you're high profile

Celebrities net thousands on lucrative public speaking circuit TALK doesn't come cheap when you're a high-profile journalist, politician or celebrity. Read the whole article from the Irish Independent

wannalearn.com - free instruction on the web

Over 350 categories of free, first-rate, family-safe online tutorials, guides and instructionally oriented Websites!  Visit the site

Conused about copyright? Looking for public domain content?

by Marilyn P. Arnone
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The purpose of this TIPS column is to provide a brief introduction to three types of copyright issues and provide suggestions of where you can find some public domain sites for acquiring photos, clipart and other media for use in your S.O.S. lessons.  Read on …

Micromodules - short lessons on using the internet

IMSA's Free Online MicroModules teaching and learning packages are short, self-directed lessons covering a wide range of Internet topics.
MicroModules address knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to locate, evaluate and use Internet resources in a learning environment. Taking only 10-60 minutes to complete, the individual modules can be used by anyone from sixth grade through adult learners. Many modules have audio/video components, making them more interesting.

Potter magic reignites novel interest

News that 'Harry Potter' heart-throb Daniel Radcliffe is starring in the film adaptation of Michael Noonan's The December Boys has sent international publishers racing for their cheque books.  Read more

Parents complain about book's undertones

SAVANNAH, Mo. - A children's book about two male penguins that raise a baby penguin has been moved to the nonfiction section of two public library branches after parents complained it had homosexual undertones. The illustrated book, "And Tango Makes Three," is based on a true story of two male penguins, named Roy and Silo, who adopted an abandoned egg at New York City's Central Park Zoo in the late 1990s.  Read the whole article

e-Tutoring courses

An exciting range of courses developing e-tutoring skills is being launched Spring 2006.
The courses are in line with a curriculum developed as part of the European ISEeTT project (Implementing Standards for European eTutor Training) for people involved in online and blended learning.
What are the courses? There are 6 courses to choose fromRead more

Pride, prejudice and happiness - readers choose happy endings

“· 41% prefer novels that make them feel better · Young people most likely to welcome sad finale
A truth which has the downside of keeping many true artists poor in garrets and many false ones rich in mansions was universally acknowledged yesterday. It is that most of us crave overwhelmingly a happy ending to a novel; and that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - in which Elizabeth and Mr Darcy ride off to Pemberley in the sunset and live happily ever after - is our runaway favourite of a perfect ending.”

  Read the whole article

Something to sink your teeth into?

 By Seana Mulcahy
Greetings from the world of now-I've-heard-everything. I don't think I'm the last to know, but I sure might be. I was just made aware of a new cyber-dating trend called "toothing." Apparently it began as a hoax by a British Internet journalist a couple of years ago. Ste Curran, then editor at large at the magazine Edge and ex-journalist Simon Byron created an online forum for folks with Bluetooth-enabled devices that wanted to find a date, a partner or other types of "encounters."
According to Wikipedia, in toothing a Bluetooth device is used to "discover" other enabled devices within about 30 feet (10 meters), then send the expression toothing? as an initial greeting.
There are bars in Japan where men and women program their likes, dislikes, what they want in a mate, etc. into a device. They then drink, dance, hang out with their friends as they normally would. However, when someone who matches their profile is within short range, an indicator will flash. I guess this has been successful for a few years now. It makes sense, as the culture in Japan is very different. Men don't typically walk up to women in bars and ask them out there.  Read the whole article

Interactive fiction

Three new interactive fiction Pieces in Inform 7

Google's literary land-grab

Publisher Nigel Newton calls for a boycott of the Google search engine in protest at its plans to scan books
If you click on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens in Google Book Search, you may find yourself taking an unexpected journey. Google's ambient advertising programme hotlinks to a dating agency called Great Expectations Dating ("Find Your True Love Today"). How crass is that? We can be sure that Dickens would have thought it so. Indeed, he would probably have reserved a special vituperation for Google's literary land-grab.  Article continues

The Deepening - reading online and saving trees

Every month, The Deepening publishes a new issue containing the best short stories by premier authors, stories that span every wholesome fiction genre, including: Action-Adventure, Children's, Crime, Detective, Crossover, Fantasy, Graphic Fiction, Historical, Horror, Humor, Literary, Mainstream, Mystery, Paranormal, Psychic, Spiritual, Supernatural, Romance, Science Fiction, Slipstream, Thrillers, Westerns, and Young Adult. Read and review the stories yourself. online with the authors.In time, The Deepening will also feature episodic novels as well as traditional novels available for download or to read online.One of The Deepening's primary goals is to save trees while bringing the best fiction to readers in an affordable, fun, and easy-to-use electronic format.

Investigation into the effect of comedy on national identity

Researchers have won a $300,000 taxpayer-funded grant to study how comedies such as Kath and Kim affect our national identity.Kath and Kim executive producer Rick McKenna says he is shocked as the amount is more than what the cast would earn in a series."I would have preferred to see the $300,000 spent on either producing more comedy or on medical research for children, or something," Mr McKenna has told the Sunday Herald Sun.The Australian Research Council is funding the three-year study that will focus on local comedy from the 1950s until now. Read the whole article

Milions celebrate NEAs Read Across America Day

Reading Tour 2006 Culminates in New Orleans As Celebrities, Athletes, Politicians Join NEA to Deliver New Books to Gulf Coast Public Schools
(Chalmetter, La.--Mar. 2, 2006)The ninth annual National Education Association's Read Across America Day was more than the nation's largest reading celebration. With nearly 45 million participating nationwide, it was the party with a purpose that brought together celebrities, athletes, politicians, education leaders and other notable public figures for a very special cause: to bring the gift of reading to children who have been affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.   Read the whole article

Independent foreign fiction prize - the shortlist

Great novels can triumph over tragedy: Boyd Tonkin salutes the shortlist for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize  Read the article

AbbreviationZ.com

AbbreviationZ.com
http://abbreviationz.com/
“Launched on 2001, AbbreviationZ.com is the largest human-edited acronyms and abbreviations directory on the internet with more than 350,000 entries classified by over 120 different categories and sub-categories.
The new innovative meta-search feature allows users, who are searching for acronyms and abbreviations definitions on the local AbbreviationZ.com directory, to locate additional meanings on the internet by using a meta-search engine, which is based on proprietary natural-language-processing algorithms, that lookup and parse multiple search-engines simultaneously.”

Australian author wins SF award

Canadian Published Australian Author WINS Coveted Top Australian SF Award. [Calgary, AB, Canada: February 27, 2006] EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing issued a statement today  announcing that the science fiction novel ECLIPSE, by Australian author K.  A. Bedford, is the hands down winner of the coveted Australian Aurealis  Award for best science fiction novel of 2005.