E-READERS BENEFIT SOME DYSLEXICS
E-readers such as Kindles and Nooks can make reading easier for some people with the learning disability, dyslexia. The short lines of text in e-readers, not the device itself, make the difference, report researchers from the Harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The researchers compared the reading comprehension and speed of more than 100 dyslexic high school students when they read text on paper and e-readers. Those who struggled most with sight-word reading had faster reading speed on the e-reader than on paper.
The findings suggest that short lines with fewer words, on e-readers, may help some people with dyslexia focus on individual words by removing additional, potentially distracting text on the same line, says the study
SO
The thorns attached to Nina Davuluri’s crown and the consequent smiting and blighting, wuthering and blasting going on in America and at home make me realise with some astonishment that I have never been made to feel bad about myself because I am dark-skinned. And, if I’m not wrong, many Indians share my experience.
It can actually work out as a dire cultural responsibility abroad to be a dark-skinned ‘Indian woman from India’ because you‘re almost always expected to be ‘exotic’, swathed in gauzy saris, keep your eyes constantly kohl-rimmed and exude whiffs of sandalwood like an aromatherapy candle when perhaps you’d rather hang out in shorts and a faded (though clean) tee, eating takeaway and watching Devon Ka Dev Mahadev, football or Grey’s Anatomy, like, you know, normal? The nut-brown maid or café au lait woman must be prepared therefore to encounter attitudes — even today — that seem straight out of Franz
Lehar’s ooey-gooey 1920s operetta,
‘Land of Smiles’, in which Lisa, the Viennese general’s daughter, falls in love with Prince ‘Sou-chong’ of
China and wants to marry him and go settle in the East. And when her father sadly asks why she’s going so far away, she says, “Papa, ich liebe das Exotische…” (Papa, I love the exotic…).
At home, neither my own clan of pink or golden mothers, aunties, cousins and grannies nor my close galpals who are all much lighterskinned than I have ever made me feel bad about being the coffee bean. Nor have I complaints on this score about gentlemen of my acquaintance.