One thing is certain when you sit down to talk with David Rigby: you will learn something. The man knows his history (especially of the World War II variety), he is passionate about it and he wants to share that passion. Fortunately, I’m a history buff so our interview ended up lasting longer than I planned—and it was time well spent. Rigby holds [...]
This summer, Lori surprised the staff with a party bus trip to Kimball Farm in Westford, MA. The party bus was filled with gift bags of snacks and the music we played from our own devices. The team enjoyed some (unexpectedly competitive) mini golf, bumper boats, batting cages, and other activities. It was a hot, sunny day, and we topped off the afternoon [...]
In July, some very old guests visited New Jersey: dinosaurs! If I had the time for the four-plus hour drive from Boston, I would have definitely gone to the Walking With Dinosaurs show. When I was little, my mom painted my whole room into a dinosaur mural. I had a Stegosaurus on one wall, an Apatosaurus (a.k.a. Brontosaurus) on another and even a Velociraptor tucked under the window. It was amazing. There was, [...]
The world is constantly moving toward an overwhelmingly technological future. Every day, there is a new high-tech innovation or breakthrough—it’s rather exciting to be living in the forefront of the Information Age. With the way technology seems to be incorporating itself into everyday life, it’s essential that schools and classrooms become more equipped with digital-based curricula and devices. To get the ball rolling, in [...]
From the bright lights of the city, to the thousands of stars I loved to look at nightly from my porch, I grew up moving between city living and farm living with only a few miles spanning in between. I learned a lot living in a farm town directly outside of New Haven, Connecticut. Even though I did not live on a farm [...]
I just graduated from college, and I can guarantee that at least half my classmates were sometimes more concerned with how the football team did than with whether they could explain the thematic convolutions in Great Expectations or find the rate of flow through a wire suspended on the surface of a four-dimensional plane. (I knew that calculus class would pay off someday.) It’s expected [...]
Music may have even more benefits than many of us thought. From playing an instrument to being exposed to music during surgery, recent studies suggest that music can have positive effects on both mental and physical health. A 2011 study conducted by clinical neuropsychologist Brenda Hanna–Pladdy and cognitive psychologist Alicia McKay, PhD, measured the cognitive benefits of playing a musical instrument as a child. [...]
When I was little, I wanted to be a drifter when I grew up. Then a farmer. Then a geneticist. Let me know if you sense a trend here, because I certainly don’t—after all, now I’m interning with an educational publishing company on the opposite end of the country from where I was born (I guess I got the drifting part down, at [...]
On stage, Dr. Rupal Patel is a commanding presence. She speaks clearly and passionately about her work. Patel is an associate professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology at Northeastern University and the creator of the VocaliD project. She leads a team of researchers that is developing a system to create personalized synthetic voices for people with speech impairments, called target talkers by the folks at [...]
Though it has existed in the public domain for years, Thoreau’s Walden; Life in the Woods is going digital in a new way. Though the book has been easily accessible in the domain since the “Internet Age,” and text-based web pages can rewrite and place the entire book online (such as here), technology has helped enhance reading the work of Thoreau. Digital Thoreau aims to improve Thoreau discourse [...]