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P. J. O’Rourke - American - Comedian Quotations for P. J. O’Rourke 10829 |
iBooks 1.5 includes new fonts and ways to customize your reading experience, including a night theme which switches the display to white text on a black background. Besides providing you with excellent readability in low light, it also significantly reduces glare than might distract your “ready to go to sleep” companion if you’re reading in bed. To activate it, tap the Font icon in the controls at the top of the page, then the Themes button, and then Night (if the controls at the top aren’t visible, tap the page. Tapping it again will hide them). On the iPad there’s also a Full Screen switch at the bottom of the Themes list which hides the graphical elements that frame the text within a virtual book and gives you a few more words to the page.
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James Carroll (via azspot) This is a thoughtful epitaph to the demise of Borders, which reverberates quietly through our shared intellectual life. I understand that to some, this will smack of digital dualism. Therefore, I think it is incumbent upon those who embrace both the public and the digital to inhabit social media haunts thoughtfully, and in ways that provoke discussion of idea,s and promote public discourse. |
From The New York Times:
In the book, and in an accompanying study being released Tuesday, the authors followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at two dozen universities, and concluded that 45 percent “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.”
The universities are not identified — the authors only say they represent “a wide range” of the nation’s approximately 2,000 four-year institutions — but the yardstick against which such judgments are made is the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that is essay-based and open-ended. (It is worth noting that in measuring broad analytic and problem-solving skills, the exam does not assess how much students concentrating in particular majors — physics or psychology, for example — have learned in their respective fields of study.)
The authors of “Academically Adrift” — Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia — also question the degree of rigor of many students’ college course schedules.
For example, they found that 32 percent of the students whom they followed did not, in a typical semester, take “any courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week” and that 50 percent “did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages over the course of the semester.”
Emphasis is mine, just because it surprises/saddens me the most.
Really, what the hell is the point of going to (and paying for) college if you aren’t even going to try to learn anything?
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Satisfying Street Art of the Day: Spotted in Williamsburg.
[eyeteeth.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1ihg6T2rU1qzpwi0o1_500.png)
