71 Monell Avenue
Islip, NY 11751

T: 631-581-5933

F: 631.277.8429

71 Monell Avenue
Islip, NY 11751
T: 631-581-5933
F: 631-581-8429

71 Monell Avenue
Islip, NY 11751

T: 631-581-5933 

F: 631-581-8429

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Archive Monthly Archives: July 2016

Summer Activities on Long Island and Manhattan

Free and Affordable Family Activities:

Long Island and Manhattan

This summer, and year round, take advantage of free and affordable family activities that Long Island and Manhattan have to offer. The Islip Public Library’s free museum passes/vouchers are a great way to get started. You and your family can enjoy visits to the following venues:

  • American Museum of Natural History, Manhattan
  • Cradle of Aviation, Garden City
  • Fire Island Lighthouse at parking field #5 on Robert Moses Causeway, Bay Shore
  • Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Manhattan
  • Long Island Children’s Museum, Garden City
  • Old Bethpage Village Restoration, Old Bethpage
  • Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan
  • Sagtikos Manor, Bay Shore
  • Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium, Centerport
  • Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, Huntington Station

Reserve a museum pass by clicking on the following link, https://isliplibrary.org/museum-passes/ Have your Islip Public Library adult card handy. Read and accept the terms. Each pass is reserved and checked out for 3 days.

The following Children’s Librarians Association of Suffolk Country, Inc. (CLASC), Inc.-sponsored link includes 12 pages of affordable things ($8.00 and under) to do on Long Island. Additional links are included for even more activities. The Islip Public Library offers free passes to some of the listed locations!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2jHfOsX8vqCUjZ3cFdXbnZqY00/view?pref=2&pli=1

The Islip Public Library’s Children’s Department also has a display of regularly updated information that includes local and Island-wide activities. Check us out on your next visit!

Better You

Write Your Way to a Better You

Did you know that writing can have a number of benefits to you both physically and mentally? Below are a list of ways writing has been proven to benefit your body and mind:

1. Writing can help you recover from a traumatic event:

Writing expressively can help injuries heal faster. Expressive writing, according to a study from New Zealand researchers, involves writing about your most personal, deep-rooted feelings, desires, and fears. An article from Harvard Health discussed how stress, trauma, and unexpected life developments — such as a cancer diagnosis, a car accident, or a layoff — can throw people off stride emotionally and mentally. Writing about thoughts and feelings that arise from a traumatic or stressful life experience — called expressive writing — may help some people cope with the emotional fallout of such events.

2. Writing can help improve your memory:

Write it, don't type it, if you want knowledge to stick. Writing can help you better retain the information you are writing, according to research. That’s because in the physical act of writing, signals are being sent from your hands to your brain to build motor memory.

3. Writing can help you sleep better:

Spending just 15 minutes a night writing down what you’re thankful for could do wonders for your sleep, according to an Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being study. Researchers found that study participants who wrote down a list of things they were grateful for before bed experienced longer — and better — sleep.

4. Writing can make you feel happier:

Keeping a gratitude journal may help you feel happier. An article from The New York Times reported that people in the study who kept a gratitude journal that they wrote in once a week for two months were more optimistic about life compared with people who did not keep a journal.

5. Writing can reduce stress:

Articles from Everyday Health and Healthy Women say that keeping a journal or diary is an effective stress relief exercise, and people who write in a diary or other notebook reap both physical and emotional benefits. You can use journaling to help you deal with stressors you don't feel comfortable sharing with others. Stress psychologists have shown that journaling enhances immune function and can alter the course of chronic conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.

Come and tone up your writing muscles at the Islip Public Library during a two-part workshop in August, Writing to Exercise Your Mind: Mondays, August 15 & 20 from 2- 4 pm. Your writing coach, Anne Kelly-Edmunds, will lead stimulating writing exercises, group discussion, and offer constructive feedback that will help you to hone your talent.



Got Empathy?

Got Empathy?

Do you have trouble “reading” the emotions, thoughts, or body language of other people? Is it difficult for you to imagine lives different from your own? Do you wish you could be less quick to judge and have more empathy for others?

Two recent studies show that reading literary fiction helps to increase your capacity for empathy. Wow! Besides expanding your mind, reading can also help you to become more compassionate!

One of the studies, published in the journal, Science (10/18/13) found that “after reading literary fiction people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence.” The researchers who conducted one study are social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan; the other study was conducted by researchers in the Netherlands and produced almost identical results. They discovered that when you are engaged in reading literary fiction your brain is literally living vicariously through the characters. This is because literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) requires you to put yourself into someone else’s position. By contrast, in popular fiction, the author is in control; the story tends to center around plot, and the characters tend to be more stereotypical. Characters in literary fiction tend to be quirky and idiosyncratic, just like real people; they do not fit into a certain ‘type’. Because of that, according to one of the researchers, “each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is something that you also have to do in real life.”

If you already love to read literary fiction this is hardly news to you. One of the likely reasons that you enjoy doing so is because of the humanity and uniqueness of the characters. You can puzzle out psychological traits and motives and feel as if you are getting to know these characters as real people. You care about them and can imagine how you might feel or react if you were in their shoes.

How often, as we go about our day, do we encounter people who seem to care only about things that directly affect only their own lives - who see things only through their own limited viewpoint? We encounter people who seem to have almost no capacity to imagine themselves living another kind of life - be it as a person who speaks a different language, is a different race or sex, practices a different religion, is living with a disability, has a different sexual orientation, is homeless or fighting addiction or mental illness, or countless other variations. Unfortunately, a deficit of empathy seems to be increasingly common in our world.

The studies that link reading literary fiction to an increased empathy quotient provide especially useful information for parents and teachers. By encouraging young people to read literary fiction, and speaking with them about it, we can help them grow into adults who have the ability to imagine how it might feel to be a person living a life different from their own. They could grow up to be kind, understanding, and compassionate instead of judgmental, critical, and hurtful. Now wouldn’t that be refreshing?!! It’s never too late. We can all become more empathetic. Read some literary fiction today!

Here are some suggestions of literary fiction for adults and teens:                                                                                        (For suggestions of Children’s Literature, please see one of the librarians in our Children’s Room!)

 Americanah

Adichie

Angela’s Ashes

McCourt

Angle of Repose

Stegner

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Diaz

Calling Me Home

Kibler

The Color Purple

Walker

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time 

Haddon

Cutting for Stone

Verghese

Digging to America

Tyler

The Ghost at the Table

Berne

The Good House

Leary

The Grief of Others

Cohen

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Alvarez

The Invisible Bridge

Orringer

The Kite Runner 

Hosseini

The Light Between Oceans

Stedman

The Last First Day

Brown

The Lowland

Lahiri

Middlesex

Eugenides

Our Souls at Night

Haruf

The Piano Teacher

Lee

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Irving

Salvage the Bones

West

Snow Falling on Cedars

Guterson

The Space Between Us

Umrigar

State of Wonder

Patchett

A Thousand Acres

Smiley

Vaclev and Lena

Tanner

Waiting

Jin

White Teeth

Smith


best selling science books

These 20 Best Selling Science Books Are Truly Fascinating

When you think of best selling books, you probably think of novels, but many bestsellers are nonfiction. The NY Times compiles a Fiction list as well as a Nonfiction list each week for the NY Times Book Review.

If you’re looking for something interesting, factual, and informative to read try one of these fascinating books about science. All are available at the Islip Public Library and all are (or recently were) on the NY Times bestselling books list.

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

The Gene

Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Wright Brothers

David McCullough

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

Mary Roach

The Power of Habit

Charles Duhigg

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Being Mortal : Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Carlo Rovelli

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Susan Cain

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell

How Not to Be Wrong

Jordan Ellenberg

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Mahzarin R. Banaji

What If ? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Sean Carroll

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren

Inside of a Dog

Alexandra Horowitz

The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports

Jeff Passan

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert

teen books

Why Parents of Teenagers Should Read Teen Books

More than 4,800 books are published each year to be marketed to a teen audience. Reading teen books is an opportunity to put yourself in your teenager’s shoes, and to learn more about challenging topics. Many of the stories are appealing and well written. Reading teen books may help you to remember being a teen yourself and so make you more empathetic to what your kids are going through. Teens are dealing with new adult challenges at the same time that they are striving to form their own identities. Teen books can help you start a conversation about a difficult topic, especially if you and your teen simultaneously read the same title – form your own mini book discussion! Though times have changed, many of the complexities are timeless. A famous quote by Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is a reminder of that:

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

Here are some suggestions of books to read – all are available at Islip Public Library:

Anderson, Laurie Halse

Speak

Bray, Libba

Going Bovine

Brown, Jennifer

Hate List

Chbosky, Stephen

Perks of Being a Wallflower

Forman, Gayle

If I Stay

Lynch, Chris

Inexcusable

Myers, Walter Dean

Monster

Rowell, Rainbow

Eleanor and Park

Sepetys, Ruth

Out of the Easy

Woodson, Jacqueline

If You Come Softly

upgrade to windows 10 for free

Time Is Running Out to Upgrade to Windows 10 for Free

Microsoft offered its newest operating system to Windows 7/8.1 users at no cost for an entire year. If you’re still running windows 7/8.1, your time is just about up to get the free upgrade to Windows 10. Once the free upgrade expires on July 29, 2016, Windows users will have to pay to get Windows 10.

How to Upgrade to Windows 10 for Free

Click the button below to get started with your upgrade:

Click the button below for how-to information on scheduling and notifications, and other upgrade information:

4 Benefits of Upgrading to Windows 10 for Free

1. New Features

Brand new for Windows 10 comes virtual assistant Cortana, the new web browser Microsoft Edge (the long overdue replacement for Internet Explorer), better security, significantly increases boot up times (especially from Windows 7) and more. Although Microsoft Edge gets excellent speed ratings on reviews, I find it can freeze up a little bit upon loadingbusy/heavy webpage. However, with a few tweaks down the road, this web browser should be on top of the competition and the browser itself offers new features currently not available on the top two web browsers, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

2. Longevity

You might get a couple of chuckles seeing the title longevity when talking about technology. It sure feels like you’re totally cool, hip, and rad the day you buy a new piece of technology . . . until you wake up the next morning feeling like it’s out of date already! That feeling is mutual and the technology industry is to blame because they come out with new hardware or software every year. However, there is some longevity support for Windows, and Windows 10 will guarantee you the longest amount of support to date.

Microsoft has offered mainstream support for 5 years after an operating system is released and then an extended support for an addition 5 years. Mainstream support provides substantial updates, new features and of course security patches. The extended support provides security patches for the operating system.

The mainstream and extended service support is expected to expire in the following years for Windows operating systems:

  • Windows 10: Mainstream – 2020?/ Extended – October 2025
  • Windows 8: Mainstream – January 2018 / Extended – January 2023
  • Windows 7: Mainstream – Expired / Extended – January 2020

There has been no official word on Windows 10 mainstream support end date but the operating system was released in 2015. Windows 8/8.1 users only have another year and a half of mainstream support remaining.

3. The Start Menu Returns!

For Windows 8/8.1 users this was a warm welcome. Working with the Windows 8 start tile screen was a mess. Users found it difficult to navigate and the power button was hidden from the screen. Windows 8.1 updated this screen a little bit to make it a bit more manageable but, users still had some trouble using it. With Windows 10, users of Windows 8/8.1 can say watch out for the door on the way out! The new start menu does incorporate Windows 8 tiles. Live tiles were fairly popular by displaying current news for a given topic. Windows 7 users can experience this for the first time on Windows 10 however, if you don’t like it, don’t worry. All tiles can be removed from the start menu to appear as a menu you’re used to seeing in Windows 7 and previous versions.

4. It’s Free But, Not for Long

Windows 10 is free but, the offer ends on July 29, 2016.

After July 29, users upgrading to Windows 10 will have to pay $119 for the home edition and $199 for the pro edition. Of course, Microsoft could offer some sort of discount as well but, free sounds better to me.

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