Monday, February 1st, 2010
How do you store 35 million books?
35 million books could be stored on a single cartridge made using a new type of storage tape developed by IBM and Fujitsu. Can iPad beat that? Not for some time. This new cartridge has the capacity to hold up to 35TB of uncompressed data. This is about 44 times the capacity of today’s IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. A capacity of 35TB of data is sufficient to store the text of 35 million books, which would require 248 miles (399 km) of bookshelves.
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Speed reading made easy on iPad via iBook Store - revolution in ebook reading
Amazon Kindle tried to do it and Apple just did it! Apple revolutionised listening to music and now they’ve revolutionised ebook reading with iPad via iBook Store. Five big partners… Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillion, Simon & Shuster, Hachette Book Group… and more will sell their ebooks via iBook Store to be read on iPad.
“It has a bookshelf. In addition there’s a button which is the store — we’ve created the new iBook Store. You can download right onto your iPad.” The store is very similar to iTunes. Same modal pop-overs. Pricing doesn’t look too bad. The book page display is nice. You can turn pages slowly or fast for speed reading. “You can change the font… whatever you want. And that is iBooks.” “So iBooks again, a great reader, a great online bookstore. All in one really great app. We use the ePub format. We’re very excited about this.” said Steve Jobs at the launch of iPad and iBooks Store today in San Francisco (6pm London time).
iBooks Store on iPod - speed reading ebooks on the go
Watch Apple video on the iPad below (if you want to just watch the iBook Store and the ebook reader skip to minute 4)
For more info go to iPad, iBooks Store and ebook reading
Read more on speed reading on Stanza free ebook reader for iPhone
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
3D Books - Embedded electronics bring pop-up books to life
Move over Kindle, there’s a new type of electronic book on the scene - and this one’s got pop-ups. The interactive pages come alive with LED lights, sounds and even vibrate in response to touch.
The Electronic Popable book, developed by the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab, has electronic circuitry embedded in its pages that turns the tabs, flaps and wheels of a traditional pop-up into switches and a variety of sensors. The interactive pages come alive with LED lights, sounds and even vibrate in response to touch.
Watch the Electronic Popable book in action
Venus fly traps spring up invitingly from one page; sensors in the trap’s jaws respond to the user’s touch, gently closing around the probing finger as it withdraws. The sensors control the amount of electric current flowing through springs in the leaf. The springs are made of the shape memory alloy nickel-titanium and contract to close the leaf shut as their coils are heated by the current. The leaves reopen as the wire cools.
To create the pages for the book, mechanical engineer Jie Qi and Lab director Leah Buechley used off-the-shelf electrically conductive paints and fabrics, adding custom-made magnetic components programmed using a standard integrated circuit. “The innovation was in finding new uses for these easily available materials,” Qi says.
This battery-operated pop-up book will be presented at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interfaces conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next week.
Source: NewScientist
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Video introduction to speed reading - the very first steps in speed reading in the middle ages
Speed reading video - the first ever speed reading coaching video
Watch this funny video of the first ever course in speed reading and problems with the introduction of an incunabulum [in-kyoo-NAB-yuh-luhm] - a book printed during the infancy of printing, especially one produced before 1501.
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
Reading reduces stress.
Just 6 minutes of reading a book reduces stress by 68%.
A study at the University of Sussex last year indicated that reading for even just six minutes reduced stress levels in study subjects by 68%. Reading was the most prefered method for reducing stress when compared to other typical stress reducing activities like listening to music or going for a walk. Losing yourself in a book causes all of your muscles, including the heart, to relax.
Listening to music reduced the levels by 61%, having a cup of tea or coffee lowered them by 54% and taking a walk by 42%. Playing video games brought them down by 21% from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point. Dr Lewis, cognitive neuropsychologist said: “Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation. This is particularly poignant in uncertain economic times when we are all craving a certain amount of escapism. It really doesn’t matter what book you read, by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author’s imagination. This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.”
If you can’t get into a story in just six minutes to achieve relaxation? Make sure to keep a book with you at your work desk, on a trip or best on your iPod or iPhone. Just read a chapter while waiting for the kettle to boil or while waiting in a queue.
Soon librarians, like doctors will be prescribing a good book alongside exercise and a healthy diet.
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
Prosperity for you in 2010 (with speed reading)
New Year - New You - new opportunities! Even in these times of financial turmoil, with the right tools you can make this your happiest year yet. Start 2010 off right by jump-starting your PROSPERITY (using speed reading techniques)!
We’re offering a special one-day course on achieving greater PROSPERITY in 2010. Application is restricted to people who have previously completed a PhotoReading/Speed Reading course. It gives you a unique opportunity to experience ‘group syntopic processing’ and synergistic collaborative learning from which, in just one day, we can all embody the wisdom from the top books to boost our prosperity and wealth. Take this opportunity to refresh your Spd Rdng skills at the same time!
DATE: 20th February 2010 (Saturday)
TIMES: 9.30am – 5.30pm
VENUE: North London N2
SPECIAL PRICE: £102 (limited places)
Booking and more info on this one of its kind Prosperity course
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Scribble while learning - it will help you to remember
A study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that scribbling helps our overloaded brains to remember details. In this study people who were listening to a dull phone message while doodling were able to recall 29% more than the non-doodling group.
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Winter is good for learning
The days may be cold and short (with lots of snow), but new research states that colder months are good for your brain. A study form Tromso University in Norway found that people’s reaction times, memory and attention span all improve in the winter. Take advantage and catch up on your learning and reading…
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Dunce’s corner banned - but how did it all start? What’s the origin of the dunce cap?
So placing pupils in Dunce’s corner could breach a pupil’s human rights, say councils. This has been used as a punishment in schools since Victorian times. But the original purpose behind ‘Dunces’ was to help pupil to learn better.
The dunce cap can help with concentration
In the 13th century, a Franciscan monk and philosopher, John Duns Scotus, developed a ‘duns cap’ to be worn by children who needed something to help them focus. Detractors of Scotus made fun of the cap. Over time the ‘dunce’s cap’ came to be associated with ‘stupid’ children, and was eventually misunderstood and used to stigmatise and make fun of such children. Most recently, when Ron Davis was working with children diagnosed as dyslexic, he discovered that asking the children to concentrate on this point was enough to allow many of them to start reading (see his book ‘The Gift of Dyslexia’). How do we know about this point? First think about this question: What do the following have in common? Dunces, wizards, saints, yogis. All (originally) knew the importance of focusing on a point above and behind the crown of the head in order to enhance their ability to concentrate and be fully aware. This point has been well known for many years. It is depicted as a halo in many pictures of Christian saints, yogis know it as the 8th chakra (which gives access to universal wisdom), and witches and wizards wore a hat which reminded them to focus on this point in order to enhance their magic powers.
In speed reading and photoreading this point of concentration is used to help to get into a better state for reading faster and understanding more. It also helps to open the peripheral vision which helps to see more text on a page.
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
100,000 words we encounter every day - evolution of reading
The speed of modern life is 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words a day. That is the verbiage bombarding the average (American) person in the 12 hours they are typically awake and ‘consuming’ information, according to a new study ‘How Much Information?’ by the University of California, San Diego.
The average American consumes 100,000 words, or about 34 gigabytes of information, every day
More great insights from the study:
- Americans read less print media as an overall percentage of their information consumption, but they’re actually reading more than ever in quantity.
- From 1980 to 2008, the number of bytes we consume has increased 6 percent each year. Over 28 years, that’s a 350 percent increase.
- Video game consumption saw the biggest leap in time spent. That’s not just video games as you know them, but also games on your phone and on social media sites such as Facebook.
Evolution of reading 1960-2008