Clarke University Partners With Akademos to Launch New Hybrid Bookstore Model | Hybrid Bookstore - PRUnderground

Liberal arts college at the forefront of national trend to optimize textbook services and affordability by PRUnderground.

Hybrid Bookstore Model

Clarke University, a nationally recognized liberal arts college with a focus on global awareness and social responsibility, has partnered with Akademos to deploy a hybrid online and on-campus college bookstore beginning with the Summer 2020 term. The university is on the forefront of a rising trend to separate the complex management of  course materials from operating a campus store. As a leading online college bookstore and course materials solution provider, Akademos is well positioned to support their forward-thinking new hybrid model.

Formerly fully self-operated, Clarke University’s hybrid bookstore will allow students to order and access a wide selection of low-cost textbooks and other course materials online. With textbook services managed by Akademos, students can choose from new, used, eBook, and rental options, including discounted textbooks sold through third-party marketplaces. Textbooks and other materials may be delivered to a student’s residence, email, or to the physical store.

Clarke University will continue to operate a campus store, which will sell a range of branded clothing and other popular merchandise. By engaging Akademos to handle textbook adoptions, pricing, sales, and more, campus staff will be freed to market a mix of higher-margin merchandise, ultimately funneling greater profits into student programs...

“With more and more course materials going digital, the hybrid model is a future-proof strategy,” said Akademos CEO Raj Kaji. “Students gain greater savings and convenience, and campus stores are freed to focus on products and services that provide for the best and highest use physically.”

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About Clarke University

Clarke University is a Catholic, coeducational, liberal arts college founded in 1843 by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa. Clarke educates students at the postsecondary level in the liberal arts and sciences, the fine arts, selected professional programs, and graduate programs. The faculty, students, staff, and administration are a caring, learning community committed to excellence in education. Clarke provides a supportive environment that encourages personal and intellectual growth, promotes global awareness and social responsibility, and deepens spiritual values. 

 
About Akademos
 

Akademos provides higher education institutions with a full-service online platform to manage course materials, from monitoring adoptions and compliance to purchasing textbooks to measuring utilization. More than just an online bookstore, we give school administrators a single platform to streamline course adoptions and meet compliance regulations. For students, the platform simplifies the purchasing and access of materials through a personalized portal that connects with school SIS, LMS, and payment systems. Akademos gives colleges and universities a more transparent, convenient, and cost-effective solution to manage how course materials are used and measured, helping to improve textbook affordability and student success. 
Learn more at www.akademos.com

Source: PRUnderground 

There’s a bookshop in Canada where kittens up for adoption roam free | Books - Metro.co.uk

Turns out Belinda Carlisle was right: Heaven truly is a place on earth, according to Ellen Scott, Lifestyle editor. 

The kitties are free to roam the shop
Photo: Facebook/Otis & Clementine\’s Books & Coffee

That place is Otis & Clementine’s Books & Coffee, a bookshop and cafe that happens to be host to a bunch of kittens, all of whom are up for adoption. 

The book shop, just outside of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, often has multiple kittens wandering freely around the store and happily jumping on customers’ laps. 

Each kitty is from the South Paw Conservation Nova Scotia rescue group, which gives the bookshop young kittens in need of care so the animals have a comfy place to live while they search for their forever home...

Some people come to Otis & Clementine’s Books & Coffee intending to adopt a kitty, some come just to hang out with feline pals, and others go in to get a book and are pleasantly surprised when a kitten appears on a nearby table. 
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Source: Metro.co.uk

Books about life in the Anthropocene | Climate Science - Yale Climate Connections

Michael Svoboda, Author at Yale Climate Connections summarizes, Human beings are a dominating force in this geological era. These books examine what that means.
 

Photo: NASA

New years that end in zeros often prompt longer-range reflections. Not just “What does the New Year hold?” but “What might the new decade bring?” (as with 2020) or even “What should we hope for in the new century or new millennium?” (as happened with 2000).

And when that turn in the calendar coincides with unprecedented and catastrophic wildfires, such as those having ravaged large parts of Australia, then an even more foreboding question might be asked: In what new age are we living?

The titles selected for this month’s bookshelf provide several different answers to this last question, but all agree that the name of this new age is the Anthropocene, the geological age in which humans are leaving the most indelible marks on the planet.

It has been three years since Yale Climate Connections’ first bookshelf on the Anthropocene.
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Source: Yale Climate Connections

Rutgers, Google Partnership To Provide Online Access to 190,000 Books | Education - TAPinto.net

Students, faculty and the global public will soon be able to discover nearly 190,000 titles from Rutgers University Libraries’ collections online, thanks to a new partnership with Google by Tapinto New Brunswick Staff.

Photo: JumpStory

The Google Books Library Project aims to “build a searchable catalog of the world’s books online.” Through Rutgers' participation in the Google Books Library Project, a variety of books, journals and other documents spanning centuries and crossing genres will be scanned and made searchable via Google Books, the HathiTrust Digital Library and QuickSearch, the Libraries’ online search portal. 

“The Libraries are committed to serving as an essential information resource for the state and beyond, and we are excited to work with Google to bring more of Rutgers’ collections to a worldwide audience,” said Krisellen Maloney, vice president for information services and university librarian at Rutgers. “Digitizing these materials will allow us to increase access to our collections, contribute to the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s goals for cooperative curation and preservation, and advance the local, national and global service missions of Rutgers University.”...

In the coming months, Google will begin to scan the Rutgers materials at their off-campus facility. After scanning, the physical books will be returned to Rutgers and a digital copy of all items will be deposited into the HathiTrust Digital Library for preservation. Once added to Google Books and HathiTrust, the full text of each title will be searchable.
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Source: TAPinto.net

Top 10 Books Recommended by Crypto Thought Leaders | Bitcoin - Cointelegraph

Cointelegraph asked crypto leaders about their favorite books and compiled the top 10 to read in 2020 by Elena Perez, independent writer.
 

Photo: JumpStory

At the end of 2019, Cointelegraph collected an interesting and sometimes unexpected selection of books from people without whom the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain would be completely different.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Changpeng Zhao, John McAfee, Grigory Klumov and the Cointelegraph team shared the most interesting books that they read in 2019. These recommendations are for those who want to immerse themselves in the crypto industry. They also aim to help readers understand the ideas that have influenced the worldview of these industry leaders.

Here are the top 10 books that the best crypto minds of our time recommend reading.

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Source: Cointelegraph

Men who explained our world – Steve Matthews' book review | News & Star

John Gough was blinded before his third birthday as a result of smallpox. He was born in Kendal in 1757. 

Natural Awakenings by Ian Hodkinson

Remarkably he became a very capable mathematician and classicist and most remarkably he became one of Cumbria’s greatest naturalists.

He learnt by touch and through the observations of friends. He collected plants and animals and he experimented with growing plants in various locations. At a time when few people recorded the weather, he kept a meticulous record of the weather over several years...

This book makes a very important contribution to a part of the history of Cumbria which is largely forgotten.  
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Source: News & Star

Here are the benefits of taking online music lessons | Technology - IMC Grupo

Technology now allows an aspiring musician or beginner access to a wealth of resources on how to play an instrument. Online exercises, training modules, pre-recorded videos and Skype can let you hone your talent right in the comfort of your own home, continues IMC Grupo.

Benefits of Learning Music Online
Photo: IMC Grupo

Here are the benefits of taking online music lessons  

Convenience  
Want to learn to play piano online?, A few clicks and you’ll be getting started, which is a far cry to the lessons of yesteryear. Today, all you’ll need is a stable internet connection, your instrument and a laptop or smartphone to start. It’s convenient in a way that you won’t need to leave the comfort of your own home to learn an instrument.

More Choices
There are times when people won’t be able to find a professional teacher or someone who’s experienced enough to teach them about their instrument. Finding a good teacher can be a chore and can put a damper on your plans. 
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Source: IMC Grupo

Are Humans the Only Musical Species? | Science & Technology - The MIT Press Reader

Even those of us who can’t play a musical instrument or lack a sense of rhythm can perceive and enjoy music. Are we alone? reports Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands now.

After a decade of exciting new findings, it seems that Darwin was at least partly right.
Photo: MIT Press Reader

We are all born with a predisposition for music, one that develops spontaneously and is refined by listening to music. Think, for example, of relative pitch, recognizing a melody separately from the exact pitch or tempo at which it is sung, and beat perception, hearing regularity in a varying rhythm. 

Even human newborns turn out to be sensitive to intonation or melody, rhythm, and the dynamics of the noise in their surroundings. Everything suggests that human biology is primed for music at birth with respect to both the perception and enjoyment of listening.

As such, the human capacity for music appears to be special. But what makes it special, and is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic ability? Or is musicality something with a long evolutionary history that we share with other animals?

Charles Darwin assumed that all animals can detect and appreciate melody and rhythm simply because they have a nervous system comparable to that of humans. He therefore had no doubt that human musicality had a biological foundation and a long evolutionary history, an idea that inspired a new field of scientific study — biomusicology — and set me on the path to writing my book, “The Evolving Animal Orchestra.”...

This theory led me to visit the Primate Research Institute in Inuyama, Japan, where the primatologist Yuko Hattori was investigating the musicality of chimpanzees. Her initial findings suggested that chimpanzees do indeed have beat perception, thus allowing us to date the origins of human beat perception to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, some five to ten million years ago. Last month, the study was published in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences and confirmed the GAE hypothesis.
Read more... 

Recommended Reading

The Evolving Animal Orchestra:
In Search of What Makes Us Musical

Source: The MIT Press Reader 

STEM class makes music by adding Art | Education - WSIL TV

Joe Rehana and Victoria Idoni, Authors at WSIL says, It's easy to imagine a high school art student bringing home a water color, or even ceramic art, but what about a musical instrument?

Monitor GFX
Photo: WSIL TV

Cobden High School created a new STEM program to do just that, but in a twist, they call it, “STEAM.”

"It's STEM guitar building. I like to refer to it as ‘STEAM’ guitar building because I'm an art teacher, and to me, there's nothing more artistic than building a guitar,” said Cobden Art instructor Jeremy Crawford, noting the addition of "A" to the traditional STEM acronym.

Nine high school seniors are enrolled in his Science-Technology-Engineering- ART-and Math class.

"Aside from the art aspect, it's definitely science, technology, engineering and math,” said Crawford. 

“I had to go back and learn some math to actually teach this too; so, they're learning all those skills, they're learning hands-on skills they might not get otherwise."...

The students choose their shapes and colors and then let the construction process begin.
"I really like purple, and I thought it probably would make a really cool after effect with the black with it."
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Source: WSIL TV

‘You still can!’: Music teacher champions adult students learning violin | Life - GazetteNET

It’s a common maxim that children gain considerable benefits from studying music by Steve Pfarrer, Daily Hampshire Gazette.
 

Violin teacher Lynn Newdome, right, leads students, from left, Jin Sun Park of Enfield, Connecticut, Ben Levy of Gill and Mandy Cohen of Hadley in a 17th century baroque piece, “Fantasia: Three Parts Upon a Ground,” by Henry Purcell, during an evening lesson at her Florence studio.
Photo: Kevin Gutting

Studies have shown that it stimulates the brain in many areas, leading to greater reasoning power, as one example, and that kids can develop discipline and good learning habits useful in other walks of life. Consider as well the dexterity and strength children can develop in their fingers from playing a musical instrument — and, of course, a love of music itself.

But is there any reason you can’t do that as an adult as well? Not at all, says Lynn Newdome, who teaches violin to a number of adult students.

“Whenever I hear someone say, ‘Oh, I wish I’d studied violin or some other instrument when I was younger,’ I say ‘You still can! Learning doesn’t stop when you’re an adult,’ ” says Newdome, a veteran violin performer and instructor who lives in Florence. “It’s a complete fallacy that only children can learn music.”

Newdome was making just that point during a recent evening at her home studio, where three of her adult students — Mandy Cohen, Ben Levy and Jin Sun Park — joined her for a combined lesson and performance...

Never too late
Newdome says the conventional wisdom is that children and teens make for better music students because, in a general sense, they’re more malleable: their brains are still developing and in theory can absorb more. Young students can also more easily be taught good habits, the thinking goes — proper posture and positioning of the hands and fingers for playing piano, for example — that become a critical foundation for progressing on an instrument.

But Newdome says adult students have other factors in their favor. For one, there’s an intellectual capacity for grasping abstract concepts that are beyond most children, such as applying music theory to their practicing rather that just doing repetitive exercises. Adults have also developed an appreciation and understanding for a range of music — knowing a lot “by ear” — that gives them a base for learning more, she says...

Never too late:
My musical life story

Newdome says one of her inspirations for teaching older students is the 1979 book “Never Too Late,” a memoir by the late educator and writer John Holt about how he learned to play cello beginning at age 40. In the book, Holt describes the challenges he faced studying music as an adult but also the joy he had in the process, and he makes the argument that “It is never too late” to learn something new, including music — even if you’re never going to be some kind of standout.

“That’s true,” says Newdome. “Age is no barrier to learning music.”
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Source: GazetteNET