Mercer County Library Blog

Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance that your body needs. But, when you have too much in your blood, it can build up on the walls of your arteries. This can lead to heart disease and stroke. There are two kinds of cholesterol: high density lipoprotein (HDL), also called "good" cholesterol; and low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, referred to as "bad" cholesterol.  High cholesterol refers to “bad” LDL cholesterol. Screening is the key to detecting high cholesterol.  Because high cholesterol has no symptoms, many people do not know that their cholesterol is too high. Doctors can do a simple blood test to check patients’ levels.  The National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) recommends that adults 20 and older have their cholesterol checked every five years. Learn ways to control your cholesterol with these books carried by the Mercer County Library System: The DASH Diet Action Plan: Proven to Lower Blood Pressure and Cholesterol Without Medicat...

Books can be a constructive way to introduce topics that deal with childhood behavior and be a springboard for discussing a child’s feelings about the topic.   It can be comforting to some kids to read about characters dealing with the same challenges.  Watching how characters overcome their problems can help families brainstorm their own solutions.  This process of relating books to real life issues is called bibliotherapy. The sites below have frequently updated lists of books that can help kids deal with different challenges.  Most of the titles mentioned are available at the library. Books That Heal Kids is a blog written by an elementary school counselor. She reviews recently published books and then adds how she shares each title with her students. The books mostly handle topics such as bullying, getting along with others, sportsmanship. There are also many books on recognizing and expressing emotions such as anger and disappointment.  Back posts a...

It was back in 2007 that the first rumblings of trouble in the US financial sector made an appearance. By 2008 the bursting of the housing bubble and mortgage subprime crisis resulted in chaos in the financial markets and the onset of a recession which has largely become endemic and has acquired global dimensions. Five years have passed by and yet the situation stays grim. The crisis in Europe in the face of soaring debts in Greece, Spain and Italy threatens to escalate and send shock waves over the entire global system. There is a slowdown in the Chinese and Indian economies with inevitable ripple effects on other countries through lower levels of demand. At the same time there seems to be no quick fix for the stagnating manufacturing sector in the US as investment and hiring continues to be held back and the high deficit levels remain worrisome. The critical question that arises is how we could deploy a combination of economic, monetary and fiscal policy measures to help rest...

August 14, 2012 marked the 30-year anniversary of the release for a classic "back to school" film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High .  The 1982 film, written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, takes its viewers on a topsy turvy ride into the antics of a Southern California high school’s student body. Fast Times at Ridgemont High , as well as other films from our collection, allow you to take a trip back to school without actually having to relive it. Our collection offers a number of the classic school comedies, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Mean Girls, but you may be surprised at the variety of genres available to you to go “back to school.”  Take a look at a handful of what our library system has to offer: Casi Casi [Almost, Almost] (2006) Rated PG Emilio, a teenager who often finds himself being sent to the principle's office, has a crush on Jacklynne, the most popular girl in school. He decides to run for Student Council President to win her he...

When asked to describe an author’s works, one of the first distinctions to make is in regard to the intended audience: adults, young adults, or children.  Most authors seem to write exclusively for one age group, but there are some exceptions, especially now that young adult (YA) books are growing in popularity.  Here is a list of 6 cross-over authors.  How many do you know?                                 1. James Patterson (1947- ) James Patterson is known in adult circles for his crime thrillers, most notably the Alex Cross series , but he has also written the Women’s Murder Club series , the Michael Bennett series , and the Private series .  He has also written stand-alone thrillers, nonfiction, and romance novels ( Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas and Sam's Letters to Jennifer ).  At least nine have been made into TV or film adaptations, including Along Came a Spider (2001)...

So you have created a terrific presentation with PowerPoint that you know will impress your audience. But being realistic, you know the audience, upon walking out of the presentation, will forget almost everything you talked about! Did they even get your contact information, you wonder, in case they have questions later on? How do you ensure that the audience will retain some significant portion of the information that you just imparted? Clearly, you need to create handouts so that long after your presentation is over, the participants will have all the data they need or want! You can use PowerPoint to create a handout or use the tool in PowerPoint to create a handout in MS Word. It’s easy and quick, and you don’t have to spend hours generating handouts: PowerPoint does most of the work for you! Here’s how: To create a handout in PowerPoint: After you have finished creating your PowerPoint presentation, click on the Office button and then click on Print . From the Print dialog box ...

Last year, I was faced with a fourteen year old daughter (whose most ambitious reading to date had been the lengthy and complex Harry Potter series and one of Shakespeare’s plays, which she had to dissect word by word) and a copy of Emma , chosen by me from her summer reading list as the most accessible classic for her. I was ready to tear my hair out trying to help. The trouble wasn’t just that the words were hard. It was that she’d never encountered anything like the society inhabited by the Bennet sisters. While the magic of Harry Potter was accessible to my daughter, the formal language, manners and mores of Jane Austen created a different world. My daughter could read the opening chapters, and have no idea why the Bennet girls were dependent on their father to meet the new neighbors. She’d read the next chapters, and have forgotten what happened in the first few pages.  In an effort to make the setting more alive, we started looking at the 1995 BBC version of Pride ...

This month, we continue our series on creating a digital archive and take a look at how to handle cassettes, vinyl and almost any other type of recorded audio.  So, if you have oral histories, music or more you want to digitize from an older format, read on. First, a quick note about oral histories and other spoken word recordings before we get to the technical details about digitizing audio.  For these, you want to keep in mind that a written transcript is often the best way to preserve the content of the recordings and make them accessible to other users.  Poetry, short stories and oral histories in text format can be published, posted to a website or collected in a printed volume.  In most cases, you may not want to keep replaying the original as you transcribe, so you will want to digitize first.  Digitizing may also make it easier to do the transcription, since you can use an mp3 player or your PC to play back the audio. Now on to the digitizing! ...

For some children, school can’t come early enough. They’ve been staring at those big yellow busses in anticipation… new friends, new faces and new fun! Others, however, need a little coaxing on that first day. Even those who’ve been through preschool and daycare are not always ready to jump into kindergarten. The first day can be rough. One way to prepare for the new experience is to read a few books together, so you and your child know what to expect. Here are some ideas for the new student in your life: Jake Starts School by Michael Wright Told in rhyme with bright colors, Jake Starts School is a story about overcoming anxiety. Jake simply won’t let go on the first day; he clutches his parents’ legs so hard that they must stay at school with him. By the end of the day, Jake is able to stand on his own, much to everyone’s (comic) relief. Butterflies in My Stomach and Other School Hazards by Serge Bloch Our narrator is only a little nervous about school. Everyone ...

Tucked away in the Technology section of the New York Times was an article that caught my attention the other day. Computer scientists at Google had built an intricate software system that had the extraordinary capability of recognizing faces. The unique feature of this software was that it taught itself to learn - a rudimentary prototype of how the human brain works. Navigating through vast amounts of data, it extracts the key knowledge components and uses them to make an inference. In 2011, IBM had introduced a powerful computer, Watson who triumphed in a game of Jeopardy against two all- time champions of the Game. The increase in computing power by several orders of magnitude and the sophistication of the computer algorithms have led to giant strides in the fields of searching, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. In a short span of fifty years, computers and processors have pervaded almost all spectrums of business. They are at the core of communication networks, t...