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It has always been First Book’s mission to provide access to new books for children in need.

When children today grow up they will depend not only on their reading skills, but also their skills with technology. That is why First Book is proud to offer new Chromebooks on its marketplace along with other great devices teachers can use to incorporate technology in their classrooms and lessons.

There is no wrong way for a child to become a reader. Whether it’s through one imaginative picture book or the thousands of stories available online, when a child is able to access rich and varied content they improve their skills and flourish as readers.

These kinds of resources also offer children the opportunity to explore what fascinates them about their favorite books and stories, a chance they might not have otherwise. Many of the children First Book serves do not have consistent access to computers or the internet at home. By having Chromebooks or other devices in the classroom they can learn to do their own research to answer questions like, “how much do caterpillars really eat?” or “does the moon need to sleep?”

In First Book’s quest to ensure that every child has access to high-quality books and resources, technology resources like Chromebooks and tablets are the next frontier.

Visit the Devices section on the First Book Marketplace to learn more about Chromebooks and discover all of First Book’s newest technology offerings. Don’t hesitate though, certain resources are only available while supplies last!

 

 

The post Chromebooks Are Here! appeared first on First Book Blog.

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     On our first date, my husband-to-be asked what I did for a living.  I told him I was a school librarian.  "Well there's a profession that will be obsolete in twenty years," he chuckled. I did not chuckle. I did marry him and twenty five years later I am still waiting for his prediction to come true.

   OK, I admit that twenty five years ago I never dreamed that I would have a phone that could help me find my way around the zillion streets of Atlanta named "Peachtree."  Or a device that could download hundreds of books, cutting down considerably on overweight luggage fees. My 1989 school library had computers, but they were little more than fancy typewriters. Who knew that entering the right search words on my jazzy little laptop could find pictures of the battleships my father-in-law served on in WWII?  Or the history of the long demolished amusement park of my childhood, the genesis of The Roller Coaster Kid?  Yes, Craig was right...I could access all that information without setting foot in a library.

    But yet there are still libraries. In my neck of the woods, it appears that most people are there for free computer time and to check out videos. If I am there, it is to do research. Guess what? Not everything is available on the Internet. At least not for free.  When I wrote Jimmy's Stars and Yankee Girl I spent months reading newspapers from WWII and the 1960's....on microfilm machines.  While there are a good number of old periodicals available online these days, they never seem to be the ones I need or there is a hefty fee to join a database.  All the branch libraries in my immediate area were built in the last 15 years and don't have microfilm machines. But if I need one, all I have to do is go downtown to the main library.

   The library is a source of professional literature such as Library Journal or Publisher's Weekly. Usually they are kept in the librarians' work area, but they have always let me read them on the premises if I ask.  There are also databases and reference materials that I can't find anywhere else...at least not for free.

    I have had the good fortune to have worked in a university library which gave me access to all
kinds of information not found in a public library. My library allowed the public to use the collection for a nominal yearly fee. As an employee I had free reign, but even if I hadn't, I would have paid the fee.  It's something to investigate.

     I could go on forever about the information that you will find only in a library....but why tell you?  Check it out yourself. By the way, my husband has had to finally admit that libraries and librarians are not obsolete or likely to become so any time soon.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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We can’t keep it a secret any longer!

As of today, We Give Books has a new home at First Book. The online platform, which features nearly 300 digitally-optimized children’s books, enables anyone with access to the Internet to put books in the hands of kids in need, simply by reading online.

This generous gift to First Book comes from The Pearson Foundation along with $1.3M in cash to support We Give Books and help First Book deliver new online programs and services to our growing network of 140,000 classrooms and community organizations serving children in need.

You can get involved too!

Children, parents, caretakers and educators can visit www.wegivebooks.org and select books to read together. Reading on the site also triggers donations of new books to programs and classrooms serving children in need. Launched just four years ago, We Give Books has helped deliver more than 3.25 million books to children around the world.

We could not be more thankful to the Pearson Foundation or more thrilled for We Give Books to join the First Book family, helping us provide even more critical reading opportunities to young people across the United States and around the world.

Learn more about We Give Books joining First Book here. Then check out We Give Books and start reading today.

The post Welcoming We Give Books to the First Book Family appeared first on First Book Blog.

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Owls and robots. Nature and computers. It might seem like these two things don’t belong in the same place, but The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows (in an extract from Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence) sheds light on a particular problem: what if we used our highly capable brains to build machines that surpassed our general intelligence?

It was the nest-building season, but after days of long hard work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and chirping away.

“We are all so small and weak. Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests!”

“Yes!” said another. “And we could use it to look after our elderly and our young.”

“It could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood cat,” added a third.

Then Pastus, the elder-bird, spoke: “Let us send out scouts in all directions and try to find an abandoned owlet somewhere, or maybe an egg. A crow chick might also do, or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the Pavilion of Unlimited Grain in yonder backyard.”

The flock was exhilarated, and sparrows everywhere started chirping at the top of their lungs.

Only Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor. Quoth he: “This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?”

Replied Pastus: “Taming an owl sounds like an exceedingly difficult thing to do. It will be difficult enough to find an owl egg. So let us start there. After we have succeeded in raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other challenge.”

“There is a flaw in that plan!” squeaked Scronkfinkle; but his protests were in vain as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the directives set out by Pastus.

Just two or three sparrows remained behind. Together they began to try to work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated. They soon realized that Pastus had been right: this was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially in the absence of an actual owl to practice on. Nevertheless they pressed on as best they could, constantly fearing that the flock might return with an owl egg before a solution to the control problem had been found.

Headline image credit: Chestnut Sparrow by Lip Kee. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The post The unfinished fable of the sparrows appeared first on OUPblog.

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Author: Tony Seddon
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Genre: Graphic Design
ISBN: 978-1-61689-126-8
Pages: 160
Price: $19.95

Author’s website
Buy it at Amazon

Using hand-lettering in computer graphics can make your work uniquely your own. But how do you go about creating an alphabet? If you’ve ever wanted to know more about this art, Draw Your Own Alphabets can help.

Using thirty sample fonts, author Tony Seddon guides you as you determine what characteristics your personal font will have. Proper sizing matters, and tips and tricks are given to be sure your new font scans properly to your computer. Then Seddon provides information on uploading your font to TypeTool so it is properly matched to your keyboard.

If you’ve ever wanted to create a hand-lettered look in your own graphic design, Draw Your Own Alphabets would be a valuable resource.

Reviewer: Alice Berger

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Flickr Creative Commons Photo by newfilm.dk

Poem #20, National Poetry Month, 2012

Finally got the Internet issues resolved...this poem is a tribute to the joys and hassles of the connected life. I've got a lot of catching up to do tomorrow!




Cathy, at Merely Day By Day, is joining me in a poem a day this month. Other daily poem writers include Amy at The Poem Farm, Linda at TeacherDance, Donna at Mainely Write, Laura at Writing the World for Kids (daily haiku), Liz at Liz in Ink (daily haiku), Sara at Read Write Believe (daily haiku), Jone at Deo Writer (daily haiku)...and YOU?

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If you have a website, you probably struggled through its birthing process from concept to reality. You can take comfort that you aren't alone. Your pain is felt by many, myself included, agonizing over such questions as: What design should I use? Should I use a template or should I go with code (.html, that is) and carve out my own layout? After all, there's something to be said about being the master of my own destiny even if it is with baling wire and bubble gum. Then again, maybe I should just hire it all out. How much could it cost anyway for the basics about who I am and what I'm peddling? And what's all this fuss I hear about content anyway?

These are just a few of the questions facing those pursuing an identity on the worldwide web. Consider for a moment what drove your website decisions about both the design and content? Did you hire a website designer to help chart your course in cyber space? Whether "designed" or home grown, to what extent was the cost a factor in your website decisions? Either way, are you satisfied with the outcome? And if you had it to do over again, would you follow the same path? What would you do differently? I'll start out. Feel free to chime in about your own experience.

Relatively soon after I got into the writing game (meaning at the point when my mom told everyone from her beautician to the pharmacist that I was writing poetry), I began to feel the push toward having a website. Actually, it was more like standing on the edge of Niagra Falls with a cheering crowd behind me yelling, "you don't need no stinking barrel!" Way back in those days (meaning about four years ago), I knew nothing about websites or how to design them; or, truthfully, what to put on them.

I began with a very basic (we're talking two tin cans and a string here) "website" offered by AOL using their "AOL hometown" template. My content was minimal--mostly a little background information about me (the poet, remember?) plus what I was working on currently and a list of two poems I had published so far. The AOL template offered four or five colors, a few "header" themes and about three text boxes to key free-form text into.

Needless to say, it was a modest website. But when I finished, I thought I had indeed arrived in the cyber world. The only problem, no one knew I was there which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing. But at least if someone asked me, I could beam with pride (OK and maybe a little smugness) and give them my URL. Hey, I was nothing if not pure coolness. I mean, I could totally imagine myself in a TV ad: "Got URL?" "Well, duh! Yeah, I got URL!"

Oh, and did I mention my URL was 43 characters long and included most of the letters in the English alphabet, three carefully placed Chinese characters, half the symbols across the top of the keyboard and six forward (not backward) slashes. Come to think of it, the URL actually looked a lot like the inside of those cartoon bubbles when the speaker is really, really mad.

And I'm sure it was for security reasons that whatever was keyed into the URL line could not be copied and pasted in the event of a keying error. That is, it had to be totally rekeyed from the beginning. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of visitors to my website.

Yet, imagine my panic when about two years later, AOL announced via message that they would be eliminating their "website" feature in 30 days. Assuming ALL CAPS meant they were serious, I immediately followed their suggestion to save off my content, which I dutifully did in a Word file (with a hardcopy backup of course). Then, I sat site-less for nearly a month until I mentioned my dilemma to a cyber-savvy friend.

With great patience and forebearing (both biblical concepts), he showed me the basics of website design using .html code. I must say, after mastering my AOL URL, I actually found .html fairly easy. He also talked me through the drafting, editing, saving and uploading steps required

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The category of “school supplies” has expanded dramatically to include way more than pencils, paper, rulers, and calculators. Today’s students head into the classroom armed to the teeth with the latest technology. Laptops, cell... Read the rest of this post

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My apologies for the sudden lack of posts. All the computers on the house broke down or stopped receiving the wireless signal over the past month. It kind of creeped up on me and now I'm without a proper window into the Internet. I'll figure it out soon. In the meantime I'm working long days on Maddy Kettle. Can't wait to share this stuff.

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By Dennis Baron

Each year there’s a contest at the University of Exeter to find the most human computer. Not the computer that looks most like you and me, or the computer that can beat all comers on Jeopardy, but the one that can convince you that you’re talking to another human being instead of a machine.

To be considered most human, the computer has to pass a Turing test, named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, who suggested that if someone talking to another person and to a computer couldn’t tell which was which, then that computer could be said to think. And thinking, in turn, is a sign of being human.

Contest judges don’t actually talk with the computers, they exchange chat messages with a computer and a volunteer, then try to identify which of the two is the human. A computer that convinces enough judges that it’s human wins the solid gold Loebner medal and the $100,000 prize that accompanies it, or at least its programmer does.

Here are some excerpts from the 2011 contest rules to show how the test works:

Judges will begin each round by making initial comments with the entities. Upon receiving an utterance from a judge, the entities will respond. Judges will continue interacting with the entities for 25 minutes. At the conclusion of the 25 minutes, each judge will declare one of the two entities to be the human.

At the completion of the contest, Judges will rank all participants on “humanness.”

If any entry fools two or more judges comparing two or more humans into thinking that the entry is the human, the $25,000 and Silver Medal will be awarded to the submitter(s) of the entry and the contest will move to the Audio Visual Input $100,000 Gold Medal level.

Notice that both the computer entrants and the human volunteers are referred to in these rules as “entities,” a word calculated to eliminate any pro-human bias among the judges, not that such a bias exists in the world of Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the computers are called “participants,” which actually gives a bump to the machines, since it’s a term that’s usually reserved for human contestants. Since the rules sound like they were written by a computer, not by a human, passing the Turing test should be a snap for any halfway decent programmer.

But even though these Turing competitions have been staged since 1991, when computer scientist Hugh Loebner first offered the Loebner medal for the most human computer, so far no computer has claimed the go

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Biographer Walter Isaacson has landed a deal with Simon & Schuster to publish an authorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. iSteve: The Book of Jobs will be released in early 2012.

International Creative Management literary agent Amanda Urban negotiated the deal with editorial director Alice Mayhew. The manuscript has also been acquired by several worldwide publishers including Little, Brown Book Group (UK), Companhia das Letras (Brazil), and China CITIC Press (China).

According to the press release, Isaacson spent three years interviewing Jobs, his family members, Apple colleagues, and competitors to write this book. He has written biographies of  Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Hi, all. If you’re in the mood for some short fiction, you can now read two of my short stories, written last year while I was deep into my quantum physics research for my upcoming trilogy, INTO THE PARALLEL. You can tell my brain was pretty physicsy at the time.

They are:

A SKIP OF THE MIND: A physicist must find a unique solution to the problem of time travel if he wants to save his wife.

GAMEMASTER: They say high school is a game . . . For one girl, it’s a game she’s in charge of. A stroke of a key, an equation, a few changes in molecules and atoms here and there, and suddenly the losers aren’t such outcasts anymore. Nicki isn’t doing it to be noble, she’s doing it for sport. Because she can. But what happens to the people she’s remade? Who’s in charge of them now?

Hope you like them!

Technorati Tags: Computers, Fantasy Fiction, Fantasy Paranormal, Gaming, Paranormal, Paranormal Fiction, Physics, Quantum Physics, Science Fiction, Science Stories, Short Fiction, Short Stories, Time Travel

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By Dennis Baron

A computer at Carnegie Mellon University is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge, by soaking it all up and figuring it out in our heads.

People’s brains work better some days than others, and eventually we will all run out of steam, but the creators of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learner, want it to run forever, getting better every day in every way, until it becomes the largest repository imaginable of all that’s e’er been thought or writ.

Since the first “electronic brains” began to appear in the late 1940s, it has been the goal of computer engineers and the occasional mad scientist to fashion machines that think and learn like people do. Or at least machines that perform functions analogous to some aspects of human thought, and which also self-correct by analyzing their mistakes and doing better next time around.

Setting out to create an infinite and immortal database is a big task: there’s a lot for NELL to learn in cyberspace, and a whole lot more that has yet to be digitized. But since NELL was activated a few months ago it has learned over 440,000 separate things with an accuracy of 74% which, to put it in terms that any Carnegie Mellon undergraduate can understand, is a C. In contrast, I have no idea how to count what I’ve learned since my own brain went on line, and no idea how many of the things that I know are actually correct, which suggests that all I’ve got on my cerebral transcript is an Incomplete.

NELL’s programmers seeded it with some facts and relations so that it had something to start with, then set it loose on the internet to look for more. NELL sorts what it finds into categories like mountains, scientists, writers, reptiles, universities, web sites, or sports teams, and relations like “teamPlaysSport, bookWriter, companyProducesProduct.”

NELL also judges the facts it finds, promoting some of them to the higher category of “beliefs” if they come from a single trusted source, or if they come from multiple sources that are less reliable. According to the researchers, “More than half of the beliefs were promoted based on evidence from multiple [i.e., less reliable] sources,” making NELL more of a rumor mill than a trusted source. And once NELL promotes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief: “In our current implementation, once a candidate fact is promoted as a belief, it is never demoted,” a process that sounds more like religion than science.

Sometimes NELL makes mistakes: the computer incorrectly labeled “right posterior” as a body part. NELL proved smart enough to call ketchup a condiment, not a vegetable, a mislabeling that we owe to the “great communicator,” Ronald Regan. But its human handlers had to tell NELL that Klingon is not an ethnic group, despite the fact that many earthlings think it is. Alex Trebek would be happy to know that, unlike Sean Connery, NELL has no trouble classifying therapists as a “profession,” but the computer trips up on the rapists, which it thinks could possibly be “awardtrophytournament” (confidence level, 50%).

NELL knows that cookies are a “baked good,” but that caused the computer to assume that persistent cookies and internet cookies are also baked goods. But that’s not surprising, since it still hasn’t learned what metaphors are—NELL is only 87.5% confident that metaphors are “tools” (plus, according to NELL, there’s a 50-50 chance that metaphors are actually “book writers”).

Told by its programmers that Risk is a board game, NELL predicts w

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All Hail To The Seizers!
By Bill Kirk

Admit it. Don’t you just sit and wonder sometimes?
I mean, just to marvel at all the stuff
That’s bouncing around inside your head?
Try it if you haven’t. Who knows?
You may find it strangely satisfying to ponder
Just how many little rabbit trails
There surely must be inside the old cranium.
And talk about entertaining—that, too.

The number alone of all the thoughts
Zipping through one’s brain
Has got to be virtually uncountable,
Even if we had a stop-action camera
To freeze the brain in mid-think.
Yep. A think-o-meter is what we need, all right.

Of course, some of the thoughts are mere idle flashes,
Almost as if tiny brain segments
Are constantly dropping in and out of consciousness.
Other thoughts seem more productive,
Forming those proverbial “trains of thought”
About a certain something.
But, alas! Even a “train of thought”
May cover way too much real estate
To capture and categorize.

Why, just this afternoon,
I tracked on such disconnected things as
Bits and pieces of garage inventory—some lost, some found;
A favorite grade school teacher
Who regularly pulled unruly kids’ ears to keep them in line;
And whether a tent I soon plan to use has a hole in it.
Then it was onto where the best deal
On a bed frame and mattress might be.

Oh, and what about those boxes—unopened since 1985,
There in the upstairs bedroom closet?
Could that be where those errant bossun heads are?
Hundreds and thousands of questions,
Affirmations and reminders,
Stack up continually and almost instantaneously,
Like so many mental “sticky notes to self”.

Sure, we try our best to catalog
The endless stream of rambling ruminations—
At times in the very moment,
Or more likely in retrospect.
An image of trough upon metal trough
Filled to the brim with key punch cards comes to mind.
Doesn’t it make you wonder whether there might be
A giant queue awaiting cranial processing time?
Ah, yet another idle thought goes to the back of the line—
No cuts allowed. Or are they?

Of course, all attempts to give order to such chaos
Must inevitably be futile, right?
After all, are any of those so-called idle thoughts
Ever really idle at all?

Always in motion and, therefore, just beyond our control,
Billions of thoughtful snippets
Layer themselves one upon another,
Seeming to simmer silently until sufficient heat
Brings them to the surface.
That’s when the action gets interesting
As they bounce around like pin balls
Off the unending undulations of our collective cerebellae.
How could any of us be expected to keep track of it all?

Perhaps the answer to that question
Defines us as much more than
Mere copers and survivors.
Instead, are we not called to exercise
The full measure of our human capacity?
Indeed, are we not to be seizers of the day,
Destined to flourish, thrive and forge ahead
From one stimulating challenge to the next?

But is it the relishers of freefall—
The stimulation seekers—
Who hold human progress in their hands?
Or will those with the power to calmly disregard
The crush of competitive zeal,
Quietly lead humankind to the earthly promised land?

No matter. Either way, all those who grab the moment
And work toward the greater good deserve a cheer—

ALL HAIL TO THE SEIZERS!

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I finally got a new computer! Well, second hand one and it's great. I can't tear myself away. Ironically I'm doing this post on a PC laptop because I can't figure out how to retrieve images from my camera on the iMac.  I also got CS4 which has Photoshop, Illustrator and a ton of other amazing programs.

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April 21: “For today's prompt, take the phrase "According to (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Example titles might be: "According to Bob," "According to these instructions," "According to the government," "According to the sun," etc. “

I’ve noticed my “poetry” has shape shifted a bit in recent days and I’m not sure if I like the form it’s taking as free verse flirts with prose. Maybe it’s a matter of available time to think and compose—boundaries which hours or minutes impose. To the extent I can get close to a finish product, I will. Otherwise, at least the last few efforts are definitely works in progress….

According To Steve Jobs
By Bill Kirk

We are now poised on the launch pad
To the future of information accessibility.
App control is here,
Right in the palms of our hands.

Just think.
Adding “folders” technology to your phone
Will increase the number of apps
At your finger tips to over two thousand.
And did you know, there is now the potential
To imbed ten ads for you to wade through
Every thirty minutes while app surfing?

I can hardly wait.

We’ve come a long way
From crank phones and party lines.
But, doesn’t it make you wonder
Who or what is in the evolutionary driver seat?
Is technology evolving to meet our needs?
Or, instead, is human evolution
Being driven to keep up with technological change?

Never mind being tall and good looking
As a foot in the door of success.
Stilus-shaped pointer fingers and thumbs
May soon become the most sought after
Physical attributes
As the true indicators of human progress.
Then, again, maybe all we need to do
Is grow longer finger nails.

Who knows? Nail salons for men
May be just around the corner.

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I just recieved this really big monitor as a gift and I'm not sure what I was doing with my tiny one before....this is awesome.

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Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh

By Gary Snyder

Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,

Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,

Because it is poky when cold,

Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,

Because it is flighty,

Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,

Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;

And I lose them and find them,

Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;

And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,

Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,

And it goes with me out every morning;

We fill up our baskets, get back home,

Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

[Copyright Gary Snyder, used by permission]

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Can anyone truly doubt that had the technology existed, James Joyce would have written Ulysses as an illustrated web comic?

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There is a well-known curse, "may you live in interesting times". For the rare book world, times have seldom been more interesting (and here I speak only of the book trade, though the worlds of librarians, archivists, curators, etc have been similarly afflicted). The book trade has seen the death of book arbitrage, regional scarcity, and several of our beloved journals/institutions...we have seen a radical shift in the previously rather caste system of dealers and the emergence of a vast class of hobbyist "dealers"...we are in the midst of a radical shift from how the trade used to function to a newer-if not better, different-state of being (e.g. open shops dropping off droves, print catalogues becoming less common, the emergence of other venues for data transfer, etc).

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