Books your toddlers can read by themselves

Brown Bear Brown Bear What do you see by Bill Martin and Eric Carle

You will see the crescendoes in your child's voice when they repeat the starting lines, and recognize the animals in the next page.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

After a few readings, the kids will practically read this book to themselves. One question that was wormholy is the page of 'Goodnight House' where my daughter asked me Whats in the house? Then we recalled all the tings in the house.

The Alphabet Book by P D Eastman

Once your kids are able to recognise some animals and things, this is an easy book for them to read and connect two of a same kind or not.

For my daughter, everything is a story. She points to the reindeer soft toy in the car and asks me if I told her the reindeer story. One saturday mornign she wakes up and wants to heat papa story and then the whole family and neighbors story. In that vein, this is the alphabet story according to her.

Bruno Munari's Zoo

Bruno Munari's Zoo

Butterflies like Clover, Hover on every page.

The illustration have a special style of having an animal in smaller size afar and  a bigger one in the front, with some color dabbled in spots. The text adds energy to the drawings with observations and pictorial metaphors.

BlueBird

by Bob Staake

Some readers feel that this book is similar to the film Red Balloon.

Personally I did tumble a bit reading the picture book. I like the circle approximation of trees. The rest of the city buildings lend to square and rectangles.

Hide and Seek

According to the book by Il Sung Na, the illustrations were created by combining handmade painterly textures with digitally generated layers, which were then compiled in Adobe PhotoShop. They are very reminiscent of Eric Carle's illustrations.

Usually counting books have gimmicky animals but his one has care not butterflies. My daughter is just beginning to learn the concept of hide and seek. This book is a good companion in that aspect.

The kids learn a bit about one thing resembling another, Chameleon's ability to blend with the environment.

The Eyes of a Snail

Looking at the back of the snail
she asks
"Where are its eyes?"

Hunters of the Great Forest

by Dennis Nolan

The Hunters of the Great Forest set out with many tools - looking glass, scope, spear, walking stick, bag and camp bed. They help each other on their journey just like us. There's only one difference. They belong to a place like Whoville in 'Horton hears a Who'. They are double the size of ants. Its like Gulliver Travels but instead of Gulliver in the Land of Lilliputs. Its Lilliputs in the Land of Gulliver, who is actually a sweet girl enjoying her marshmallows by the campside. After running into a bunch of hostile, huge animals like frog, a blue jay, the campside is the success point of their mission. After their find, they go to their village and party. Their tools are now the find of a band of ants.
If the girl were to trace the route of the hunters back to the village, it would be a 'Walk in the Woods' from her perspective. You dont realise that it is a picture book, with the illustrations speaking for themselves. Each page has a clear agenda.

I would have thought that I would be bored of reading the same story book again. But its amazing to see how many new things are seen on a reread. In the first reading, we were concentrating on whole mushrooms and frog. In the second reading, we realised that there was a foreshadowing of these elements partially in the previous page.

Buzz

Should bees fly?

Bumble Bee Tumbles the Fact

in Buzz by Eileen Spinelli

I didnt know about this myth that 'Buzz cant fly'. That aside, the illustrations and clear pictures of the sky, mountains, hills and brambles make it an amazing game to identify. The elements of the illustrations in each page are limited, so its easy to get your toddler to interact with it, by pointing to and asking them to tell what they see. Buzz has friends she care about and swoops to them high and low, as they are not all who can fly. In an emergency, she 'rises' up to the situation despite the professors's words.
For grownups, this will lead you to a concept called 'Dynamic Stall' that begins with “Aerodynamic bodies subjected to pitching motions or oscillations exhibit a stalling behavior different from that observed when the flow over a wing at a fixed angle of attack separates”.
Oh well, I think you will like the Buzz saving his friend at the end of the day better..

Just for curiosity sake, I asked my daughter if the snail could fly. She said No. When i asked why, she had it all pat down about it not having wings. I was surprised that she could infer it from our everyday conversations about birds and planes being able to fly by having wings. But in all honesty, when we reread the book, I noticed that the text too refers to the snail being unable to fly.
She retained the word flipped from this book.

Prisms in the hair

Sunlight through hair
Tons of Prisms

Feral

George Monbiot referred to the wild life extinction a an artist work in gallery burning and wanting it to preserve before it vanishes.

Bad Address Fee

Bad Address Fee

This was new to me. After calling the bank, I found out that they had a very old address. I regularly get their mails showing their love through loan approvals and all, so didnt see any broken link. But that could have been because of the USPS address forwarding. 

Tracking package

Do you track your packages? The route they take is fascinating. If it is taking long and toping at too many places, then you learn of many new places like this packagw which started in Dallas TX and went through
Merkel, TX
Odessa, TX
Monahans, TX
and then Tucson, AZ which is a known city.

Customer Experience for Dummies

End of the roll of Mason's line

In my experience, Dummies series hasnt been a book which improves my interest in something new. Sometimes I am very lured by my favourite subjects only to be disappointed and confused with the piece meal information. with that in mind, I looked at the table of contents of 'Customer Experience' and found EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) as something very interesting. For once, I awaited a Dummies book. Now I am even more pleasantly surprised with its very brainy approach to the whole customer experience thing.
The book has a very clear framework of having the customer experience in view of everyone, so there is accountability to customer feedback. Touchpoint and Customer journey map are the two major mantras. If you understand this much, your organisation will already be on the bright side of customers (i.e your NPS - Net performance score will be as that of a good company. Showing off lingo from the book). The customer journey map example in the book reminded me of Systemigrams I learnt in 'Systemic Thinking: Building Maps for Worlds of Systems'. so you can see how with the systems approach, you already get a one picture of the whole customer experience. And that view will be shared by all the employees. That visibility is the key to the betterment of customer experience.
There are many questions and points to assess your current customer feedback management and a process to redesign it so you listen to your customer grievances, respond to it in time with real-time monitoring and make them happy.

Stratex

How to Hide a Lion

NYTimes review

Why the Lion came to Town?

The lion/tiger stories that I from my childhood usually involve animals and morals (The Story of Bahula Cow ). By chance, if they have humans in them, its mostly in the cautionary tale vein ( An old tiger and greedy traveller).
But once children get involved, we see how kids are so enamored by animals and will do anything to have them for friends, like Annie with her puppy. What if the animal is a huge lion. Still it does not deter them. In this 'How to hide a Lion" story, Iris helps Lion by hiding her in the house. The illustrations and the one line text in each page move the story effortlessly. Sometimes Iris looks so small when compare to the lion, I couldnt help but think of the tiny mouse in the Aesop's fable of The Lion and the Mouse. And sometimes when they are playful and jumping on the bed, the lion looks amiable as a life size dog. My toddler enjoyed this book and asked for an encore reading. As the story goes on, when the Lion asks for his wish, we almost forget, why he came to the town.
Most of the time the Lion is sleeping in the story. We went to the zoo recently and found the Lion sleeping. This resonated with the actions of the Lion in the story. 

library lions - Patience and Fortitude

The Innovators Hypothesis

Indian farmers receive prices by SMS
Electric starter for cars
Walmart partners - P&G, Colgate Palmolive
Exploding Coupons

To begin with, the innovations talked about in the book are not brand new like introducing an automobile, diaper or pharmaceutical drugs into the market but more about their easy adoption ad solutions to problems along, like an electric starter instead of a dangerous crank for a car, a diaper that glows in the dark, so kids dont have to be disturbed from their sleep, ways of making sure that the patients actually take the tablets. These alterations increase the value of a product, but the companies cannot increase the price way too much than they began with unless it is an earth shattering invention. Once we have that cleared, its easier to appreciate the book for its emphasis on quick experimentation instead of a blanket change of products all around the globe. In companies with fast turn around time requiremnt, the engineers are not left with the luxury of testing something, always trying to beat the competitor by bringing the actual modified product into the market.
The author mostly deals with fast paced companies like Amazon and Google that are required to come up with results faster than in quantity.
In the Fruit-Roll ups production line breakdown, when a statistician brought chemists, production engineers and line operators into a room to find solution o the problem. It brought home the idea of importance of TWI (Training within industry).
The author wants to show instrumentation engineering as the de facto route to success, but every experiment begins with an idea. Its the scope of the idea implementation that can save companies losses. Evident from the battered examples of Blockbuster, Netflix, it doesnt hurt to run some quick sanity check on your next moves.

Firestone crisis

iGearPro 16GB USB Flash Drive Digital Audio Voice Recorder

iGearPro 16GB USB Flash Drive Digital Audio Voice Recorder

A friend had said that iphone is the best camera o save and treasure a baby's finest moments. But When I have to record something my toddler sings or says, iphone is too distracting and endangers the show. This small device that fits in the palm is very handy for such situation, The manual is very concise and helpful regarding the operation of the device. Recording is hssle-free. Play back has good quality without any noise.
You cannot record while playback via computer. Each time you plug off, new recording is saved in a new wav file.