For most Spanish-speaking students attending José Martí Middle School, it takes four to six years to achieve sufficient English-language skills to move out of bilingual classes. In contrast, most students in Grace Poli’s classes make the leap in just a single year. That’s after media specialist Poli introduced an innovative education tool: the iPod. “The school here in Hudson County,” writes Winnie Hu (New York Times), “has been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs.”
By studying ice cores extracted from deep within the Ross Ice Shelf, scientists with the Antarctic Geological Drilling Program hope to learn how this area of the Antarctic has responded to climate change over the past 15 to 20 million years. The cores have much to reveal, and thanks to their Mac Pro computer and two tiled 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, scientists can now study high-resolution enlarged images of those cores.
Once you’ve created a shape, chart, or table in Pages ’08 and have assigned it custom colors and styles, you can save what you’ve done and apply it to inserted elements. You’ll learn how by watching the new Quick Tip of the Week on the Small Business site.
If you’re a high school or college filmmaker, you have just seven days to register for the 2007 Insomnia Film Festival. Just seven days before the Insomnia begins. Then your team has 24 hours to write, cast, shoot, edit, score, and upload a 3-minute film. Voting to identify the 25 most popular films begins almost immediately. Find out how you can enter (terms and conditions apply)—and what you can win—on the official 2007 Insomnia Film Festival website.
To Keep Adding, the Santa Fe-based artist group that has been creating multimedia and installation art together for more than a decade, the Mac has become integral to the evolving nature of their work. Explains Keep Adding partner Noah MacDonald, “I might work on a painting, then take a photo of it, put it in the computer, open it in Photoshop, digitally rework it, and from that get a sense of what I want to physically do next on the actual painting. The computer influences the physical end of what I do, because I can work on the paintings offsite, then come back and paint what I’ve envisioned on the Mac.”
At Princeton University, sales of Mac computers have increased for each of the last four years. In fact, reports the Daily Princetonian’s Doug Eshleman, “this year, the University’s Student Computer Initiative has sold more Macs than PCs. Students were offered a selection of Dell, IBM and Apple computers, and 60 percent chose Macs, up from 45 percent last year.” Nor is the trend an isolated phenomenon. Princeton’s manager of support, Leila Shahbender “found that Mac sales also had significantly increased at MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Duke, Stanford, Cornell and Brown over the past few years” when she attended a recent college technology conference.
Skiing and snowboarding photographer RIchard Walch can’t afford to leave the mountain behind until he knows he’s bagged “the perfect light, the perfect snow, and the perfect trick or turn.” So he takes his studio with him whenever he hits the slopes. Aperture running on a 15-inch MacBook Pro forms the foundation of the mobile digital darkroom that carries in his backpack on a shoot, allowing him to import images when his crew breaks for lunch. “This is great for me,” Walch says, “because I can isolate any shots I’ve missed during the morning session and get them in the afternoon.”
“For sheer multimedia portability,” croons Arik Hesseldahl (businessweek.com), “it’s hard to beat the new iPod nano.” “The image quality,” he reports, “is gorgeous, especially with animated fare like Japanese anime.” That’s because “the screen density,” Hesseldahl explains, “is the highest of any iPod that Apple has ever shipped, and the end result shows it.” Of course, “the nano sounds as good as any iPod.” “And browsing albums on the screen with Apple Coverflow—a special effect that makes the covers look like they’re whizzing by as you scroll through them —is incredibly cool.”
Naming it an Editors’ Choice, Sascha Segan (pcmag.com) awards iLife ‘08 four (out of five) stars, explaining that it’s “the easiest way to turn your digital photos, movies, and mumblings into beautiful online and DVD content.” While Segan singles out iPhoto (“the best program out there for organizing and ordering prints of your photos”) and iMovie ‘08 (an “almost unbelievably easy video editor”) for special praise, he calls iLife ‘08 “a great value,” noting that “each of the individual programs is worth the price for the package.”
Want the text you copy from one document to match the formatting of the document you’re pasting that text into? SImply use the “Paste and Match Style” command. We show you how in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.
