The Buzz

Award-winning author Walter Dean Myers (above with SLJ Book Review Editor Trev Jones) visited the offices of School Library Journal last month for a podcast recording of selections from Jazz (Holiday House), his 2006 collection of poetry for children and winner of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award. Myers’s podcast helps launch an SLJ series honoring National Poetry Month, which will feature readings by popular writers mentioned in this month’s Focus On article “What Rhymes with Math?” So stay tuned to hear the poems of Myers, Douglas Florian, Kay Winters, and others. Subscribe to the RSS feed at www.slj.com/podcasts.

The littlest tots, it seems, are avid tech users—among all children six and under, 43 percent have used a computer, and 27 percent use a computer several times a week or more, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported last year. The trend has not gone unnoticed by the toy industry, which featured a slew of tech-related “playthings” at the recent International Toy Fair held in New York City. Kutoka Interactive showed off a new line of brightly colored optical mice, sized for children as young as two. Meanwhile, the Montreal-based company’s new digital camera comes complete with a mad-scientist version of a photo-editing program, which enables kids to morph their faces for maximum silly fun. For teens and tweens, Kutoka has two fully featured graphics tablets. www.kutoka.com.

Visitors to Random House’s Web site will find a handy new feature. Insight is the publisher’s online book content search and browsing service, which allows users to search 5,000 new and backlist titles from across the company’s U.S. publishing divisions. Random House expects to add several thousand more titles to Insight this spring. The Insight service enables readers to access a fixed number of pages of an archived book’s content, which readers can view by either directly accessing the sample pages or entering a search term. www.randomhouse.com.

Those hankering for a Vista-enabled machine might consider the TravelMate 2480-2779 from Acer. The 14-inch notebook computer, which comes equipped with Vista Home Basic, retails for about $540—a steal when you consider that a Vista upgrade alone costs $99. The TravelMate sports a 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron M processor, 512 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW combo driver, a PC Card slot and a 5-in-1 card reader. However, the Home edition lacks Vista’s highly touted Aero graphical interface, so no translucent windows, animation, and other such eye candy. Still, a lot of bang for your hardware buck. us.acer.com.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has recently released Leaders and Laggards, a state-by-state report card on educational effectiveness. The interactive report, which features a bar chart that shows how each state is doing in public education—from student proficiency to learning standards—is a handy tool that’s also been generating some buzz for measuring states on “return on investment” and “flexibility in management and policy,” standards usually applied to for-profit ventures.

Action-packed video games are good for your eyesight. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that people who played a first-person shooter game for a few hours a day over one month improved by about 20 percent their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test. Game playing changes “the brain’s pathway responsible for visual processing,” says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive studies at Rochester. “These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it.”

No sooner had we fallen for the iPhone, than Samsung comes along, wagging the comely new Ultra Smart F700 under our noses. Tech reviewers gushed over the mobile phone’s “tender touch” screen-user interface in all its “slick, sliding glory,” according to Engadget. This beauty has a full QWERTY keypad, a 5-megapixel camera, and a 2.78- inch display. And VibeTonz technology allows a user to feel the buttons accompanied by responsive vibrations. But Samsung has no plans to release the F700 in the United States. Oh well, it was probably too much phone for us anyway. Samsung.com.

Music students can undergo an ear-training program using their iPods. Created by a Duke University student, iTheory is a free downloadable series to help students practice concepts such as scale recognition and perfect pitch. Zipped files contain quizzes, with links to more than 200 audio clips. iTheory is compatible with 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation iPods, as well as the iPod mini and Nano. woz.cs.duke.edu:16080/~sarah/itheoryhome.html.

RFID tags, those teeny computer chips used to identify and track products, have gotten even smaller. Japanese electronics company Hitachi has developed an RFID chip that measures .002 by .002 inches, resembling powder. An improvement on Hitachi’s earlier Mu-chip (pictured above)—which, at .4 by .4 millimeters, is 60 times larger—the new powder tags carry the same amount of data and are small enough to be embedded in paper. Currently, there are no plans to manufacture the powder smart tags. Meanwhile, Kodak is pursuing a patent for an edible RFID tag to aid medical personnel in monitoring a patient’s vital signs. Sci-fi enthusiasts will have a field day with this one.

Fergie (at right, center), lead singer for the Black Eyed Peas, will help judge the 2007 John Lennon Songwriting Contest (JLSC). The international, year-round competition is open to amateur and professional songwriters who may submit original entries in any one of 12 categories, with winners receiving EMI publishing contracts, recording equipment, and software. JLSC is a companion event to the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, a nonprofit state-of-the-art mobile recording studio that provides free hands-on programs to high schools and community groups nationwide. www.jlsc.com.