Yale hands out 64GB iPad 2s to entire Medical School student body

By David Goldman:
From http://www.edibleapple.com/

You just never know where the iPad 2 is going to show up these days. From airplane cockpits to the NFL, the iPad is increasingly becoming a favored replacement for massive reams of paper.

Not too long ago, we reported that the Tampa Bay Buccaneer football team gave all 90 of its players iPad 2s to serve as replacements for gargantuan playbooks that made the Yellow Pages seem small by comparison.

And now the iPad 2 is making inroads into medical schools, a fact which shouldn’t be too surprising given its current popularity with doctors and hospitals.

Starting this Fall, Yale Medical Students won’t have to worry about carrying around obscenely large textbooks. Nope, their shoulders will be spared the wear and tear of carrying around a collection of books that can seemingly way upwards of 30 pounds.

So out with the old textbooks and in with the iPad 2.

But far from solely serving as a textbook replacement, students will can use their new iPads to check out Yale’s curriculum and “read and handle confidential patient health information.” What’s more, students will be able to download lecture notes and access course materials as well.

Even better, the iPad 2s are genuine gifts and students will be allowed to keep them after graduation. Of course, that sounds like a great deal until you ponder the insane price of a Yale medical education these days.

All told, Yale plans on distributing 520 iPads to students this year at a cost of $600,000. In contrast, printing up, collating, and distributing course materials via paper eats up $100,000 every year. Not to worry, though, as Yale expects to cover the initial cost of the iPad 2s with the money it will cumulatively save on printing going forward.

The School of Medicine tested the use of iPads in the classroom with a pilot group of nine first-year students last spring. The group included some students who self-identified as not “technology-savvy,” but even they responded positively to the device, Schwartz said. For those who remain committed to pen and paper, printed course materials will be available for purchase.

Robert Stretch MED ’14, a student in the pilot group, said he much preferred reading course notes electronically to having them on paper.

“We get binder upon binder of notes, literally several feet of notes, and carrying them to the library or to class is just unrealistic,” Stretch said.

Oh, and did we mention that the iPad 2s supplied to Yale’s medical students are of the 64GB 3G variety and come with Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. Must be nice to be a Yalie!

The iPad is also a more secure device than a laptop for handling Electronic Protected Health Information, Schwartz said. Students work with this confidential information when they do clinical training, and in the past campus staff needed to set up special security on students’ laptops for them to be able to handle it safely. By contrast, the iPad is encrypted and can be remotely locked or erased completely if it is lost or stolen.

Now you can bet that this is the type of story Apple would love to bring up the next time it holds a special media event centered on the iPad.

via Yale Daily News

Movie Theater Kicks Customer Out for Texting, Turns Her Angry Voicemail Into PSA (Video)

The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, now airs her expletive-filled rant before all R-rated movies that it shows.

by Kimberly Nordyke
from http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/

You might want to think twice before texting the next time you are at the movies.

A movie theater in Austin, Texas, has gotten its revenge on a customer who insisted on doing that very thing.

In a blog post on the Alamo Drafthouse's website, the theater claims it has a strict no-talking policy that was adopted in 1997.

"Recently, we had a situation where a customer persisted in texting in the theater despite two warnings to stop," the blog post reads. "Our policy at that point is to eject the customer without a refund, which is exactly what went down that night. Luckily, this former patron was so incensed at being kicked out, she quickly called the office and left us the raw ingredients for our latest 'Don't Talk or Text' PSA."

That's right: The customer not only got kicked out of the movie without her money, but her angry, expletive-filled voicemail is now being played as part of a video airing before all the R-rated movies shown at the theater.

Watch the video -- and listen to her rant -- below.

Why Hasn't the Person You Texted Responded Yet? (Flowchart)

by Susanna Wolff 

from: http://www.collegehumor.com/

U. of Notre Dame Reports on Experiment to Replace Textbooks With iPads

By Ben Wieder

From http://chronicle.com/

It was quieter this past fall in Corey Angst’s project-management course at the University of Notre Dame, but it wasn’t because he and his students were talking less.

Every student was given an iPad to use during the seven-week course, which meant fewer of them brought laptops to class to take notes.

“There was no clicking,” said Mr. Angst, who is an assistant professor of management at the university. Even external keyboards that some students used for their iPads were silent.

Mr. Angst’s class was the first of several at the university to replace traditional textbooks with iPads as part of a yearlong study by the university’s e-publishing working group into the use of e-readers. Many colleges and universities are in the midst of similar experiments, but Notre Dame is one of the first to report results from its effort.

The professor said students were more connected in and out of the classroom because of their use of the tablet device.

Laptop screens can create barriers between professors and students during class, Mr. Angst said: “Students think they can hide behind a laptop.”

Students were surveyed several times throughout the course and said that the iPad made it easier to collaborate and manage group projects.

Mr. Angst said he asked students in the class to download the Dropbox app, which allows material to be saved and shared online, to post class assignments. Many students used it to share documents in their group projects, as well.

Mr. Angst said he often sends out additional videos or relevant articles just hours before class. And for the first time he could incorporate these last-minute additions into class discussions because students always had their iPads with them to access the materials.

There were some downsides to the iPad, though.

Students lamented not being able to write in the margins of their assigned readings, which Mr. Angst said he hopes will be improved in the future. And some had trouble taking notes without a keyboard.

And when it came time for their computer-based final exam, 39 of the 40 students in class put away their iPads in favor of a laptop.

Work is constantly saved within iPad’s writing programs, Mr. Angst said, but there’s no actual “save” button, which unnerved some students. “When they’re working on something important, it kind of freaks them out,” he said.

The group that conducted the experiment includes members of the business school, law school, college of arts and letters, and office of information technology, among others. It hopes to look at other tablet devices—particularly Android-based models—in the future.

Notre Dame Begins Test Run of iPads With a Paperless Course

by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California
from: http://www.treehugger.com/

Photo by Jaymi Heimbuch

The University of Notre Dame is taking the use of e-readers in classrooms seriously, embarking on a one year study of how the devices integrate into classrooms. The first course to have students use an iPad instead of any text books is Project Management, a class with 40 students that will not only use the iPad as a book, but will also be encouraged to use it for everything else in daily life and report back their impressions (hmmm, could that possibly have been at Apple's request?). Apple is making a big push to turn iPads into the next big thing in education. The company wants to corner the market for electronic readers in schools, and has been discussing getting text books into digital format for some time now with major text book publishers. This new test run with Notre Dame could have big consequences for how speedily the device replaces paper books in schools.

The move isn't without competition. The Kindle has been touted as the solution for textbooks in schools for a couple years, though when it had a test run at Princeton, the students were less than impressed, wanting something easier to interact with instead. And Barnes & Noble, while not yet getting close to the classroom with their e-readers, has started angling for students to use e-books for their studies.

Tuaw reports that while the iPad is more than just an e-reader, allowing students to do a lot more with not just the ebook but with searching for articles and other information as well, the Notre Dame course professor, Corey Angst, wants to make clear that the iPad is part of a bigger kit of resources for students. No one device has come close to being a catch-all for students, but Apple is hoping to inch closer to the iPad being one tool that can't be left out of any classroom.

Whether or not the use of e-readers in classrooms makes a difference on the environmental footprint of scholastic is yet to be seen. While thousands of paper books can fit into one device, reducing the number of trees sacrificed to the printing industry, the embodied energy of electronics, let alone their e-waste at end of life, creates a massive footprint for the devices. Which will end up having the smaller footprint in the long run depends on many factors, including how thoroughly students use e-readers as opposed to books. It'll still be years until we know which is "better" and until then, we're using the earth's resources from both sides -- trees and water for books, and raw materials, electricity and recycling energy for e-readers.

Creating the Star Wars text-crawl effect

From: http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/

Maxim “magazine” (whatever that is) recently did a feature on the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back for their May issue. The article included some cool pictures like this one, which shows how they created the text-crawl effect for the opening sequence.

Nowadays, anyone with a computer and an Asian friend can easily create a text-crawl, but back in the day, they had to use these things called “lens effects,” an exhausting process which involved first writing the text on papyrus (note: NOT the Avatar font) using ink made of crushed-up dung beetles, then lashing together a team of donkeys to take your scrolls (which weighed up to 400 pounds) to the village print maker, who would then lay out the text in movable type, and once it was finished, fire it in his kiln. After that, the text had to be photographed on a collodion, which required it to stand perfectly still often for days at a time to allow the daguerrotypes time to clot, which was difficult as it was the 70s, and everyone was high on cocaine back then. If you look closely, you can see that the photographer is wearing an onion around his belt, which was the style at the time.

****
[via /Film, more pictures here]

BY: Vince Mancini CRAWL

Amazon Caves to Snippy Authors: Kindle's Text-to-Voice Feature Now Optional

By Dan Nosowitz

We reported the Author's Guild's litigious anger about the Kindle 2's text-to-voice feature, claiming it violates audio book copyrights. It's an arguable position, but Amazon has gone ahead and caved to the literate man.

Amazon has backed down for the Guild's comfort rather than for any legal motivation, since it's pretty clear that a robotic reading isn't the same as an audio book. "We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat," Amazon said.

But instead of removing the feature, Amazon has simply made it optional, so publishers can decide for themselves what's best for their property. That means it's unlikely the much-advertised (though not necessarily much-loved) feature is going to be too useful for Kindle 2 owners. We're not thrilled, since the Guild has no real legal leg to stand on and seems to need Amazon more than Amazon needs them, but then again, we're not fancy-pants authors. [CNET]

I'm a fancy-pants author and I say this is crap! -JC