Our e-Books are Reading Us (WSJ 6/29/12)

Wall Street Journal article by Alexandra Alter, "Our E-Books Are Reading Us" is worth reading, sharing, and discussing.  http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2012/06/our_ebooks_are.shtml

As publishers and authors learn more about how readers read, which books they read faster, which lines are highlighted the most by readers... it will change what readers are offered.  That is not necessarily a good thing.  Think I'll stay offline book-wise and keep my reading choices a little more to myself.  On the bright side, it might help text book publishers learn how to better engage students. 

 

Here's how Alexander Alter's article starts...

"It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them." And on Barnes & Noble's Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first "Hunger Games" book is to download the next one."  more

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PLEASE NOTE:  Senior Summer School for iPad and Kindle users starts Tuesday afternoon, July 3rd.  Instructor is John Chan and his Tablet Team. See the San Mateo Senior Center Computer Group newsletter at http://www.ackerfield.com/smsccg/newsletter.pdf

iPad/Kindle (Conference Room)

Tuesday 2:00 pm – 4 pm 7/3 thru 7/24

8/7 thru 8/21&22

9/4 thru 9/25

OnGuard Online - Stop Think Connect Campaign

OnGuardOnline looks like a worthy site to follow, bookmark, and share. It is sponsored by the IRS, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of State and more.

Here is what the site says it is about:  "OnGuardOnline.gov is a partner in the Stop Think Connect campaign, led by the Department of Homeland Security, and part of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology."


See  http://onguardonline.gov/

JUNE 2012 Computer Club

June 4, 2012  Monday at 2pm

TWO TUESDAY SUMMER CLASSES

1. Healthy Computers. New class.  Learn to clear the problems from your current computer and keep it working.

2. Tablets. iPad and Kindle. What’s different. A user community.

Healthy Computers – next class in July

·        A preview of wicked, mischievous news. What the North Koreans did two years ago, what some guy with a fixation on a local stripper named Melissa wanted to immortalize, what happened one Tuesday night to Microsoft, AOL and a host of others which lasted for three days. More commonly called funny stuff.

·        Now, the change from mischief to corporate extortion.

·        New vocabulary: virus, antivirus, malware, spyware, phishing, DOS, botnet, Trojan Horse, sniffing, robots – an alphabet soup of new words to “laugh while you’re crying”.

·        YouTube videos showing the chaos and mischief in living color. This time it is slightly different, you’ll know what it is called.

·        Notable solutions. Software that you can download for free.

·        Practical tasks to defend yourself. Check the BOTTOM of this page for examples.

Tablets: iPads and Kindles – Monthly class

·        The iPad 3 is announced to be release sometime this week month, complete with rumors of changes to screen pixels, quad processor, better camera, SIRI, etc. Does it make it better? How to keep an eye for the prices of iPad1 and iPad2.

·        The Kindle Fire is seen as 1/3 the price for everything but the cameras, the microphone, the Blue tooth, with a size of 7” vs 10”

·        Impact of the Thailand floods: world’s supply of hard disk drives dwindles

Do Something Quick - What you can do immediately:

·        Disconnect the LAN cable or turn-off the wireless.

·        Change passwords

·        Use strong 8 character passwords: uppercase + lower case + numbers + non-ASCII characters

·        Turn on your firewall

·        Keep a minimum of three types of antivirus software running and updated:

·        Avast or AVG

·        Malwarebytes

·        SD Spybot

·        Don’t reply or open emails to “innocuous inquires” especially from websites you don’t know or don’t normally use.

·        Don’t use the same password in your web buying sites as your Windows’ password.

·        Don’t leave your computer powered-on when you are not using it. TURN IT OFF.

·        Run your antivirus daily (or setup the scheduler to do this). Be sure to update your antivirus, Malwarebytes and SD Spybot.

·        Be suspicious, be vigilant, recognize what is normal vs. what is unusual.

·        Don’t leave passwords or credit card/social security numbers on the net or on your monitor.

It is too late to put duct tape on your teddy bear’s mouth!