Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
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Oh - what a Monday! Hope you're making it through alright.
Grant enjoys finding Star Trek stories just to razz our executive producer, Adam Thomas, who is a major fan. Someone thought it would be a good idea to model their home theater after the Enterprise NCC-1701D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The result is super geeky, but actually rather cool. Named the best theme theater installation at CEDIA 2007, this Palm Beach County, FL home features motion-activated air-lock doors with series sound effects, and a "Red Alert" button on the Crestron TPMC-10 controller to turn all of the LEDs bright red and flashing. The system also features "one of the largest Kaleidescape hard-drive based storage systems" ever created, amassing eight servers with 3,816 DVDs.
Grant and I want to invite all of you to join the community at Trolley Square tomorrow, Tuesday night, at 6:00 PM for the official lighting of the Christmas tree. Mayor Ralph Becker will be there along with the East High Madrigals.
Grant and I were both interested in this story about the drop off in reading for pleasure. "Americans are reading less. That's the conclusion of a new report by the National Endowment for the Arts. "To Read or Not to Read," draws upon a variety of public and private sources. In 2002, the report says only 52 percent of college-age Americans read a book voluntarily, down from 59 percent in 1992. Employers have deemed the writing skills of 72 percent of high school graduates as "deficient." And the number of adults with bachelor's degrees and "proficient in reading prose" dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003. Still, reading comprehension scores among nine-year-olds have soared since the early 1990s. And publishers say teen fiction is rapidly expanding in an otherwise flat market."
