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...fixed-width websites that can't even make use of a full HD screen...

There's a good reason for that.

http://psychology.wichita.edu/...

Pick some keywords out of this and you'll find plenty of studies done on the subject. It's also the reason why newspaper have columns instead of writing text the full width of the page.

http://psychology.wichita.edu/...

The numbers pretty much match up. This is simply a gender based preference. Argument that "women play more but are discriminated against in competitive scene" which is what these claims usually push appears to be patently false - the issue is that women are simply not interested in comeptitive gaming, preferring cooperative gaming instead.

print " Set metadata tags for artist, album, and track number on all FLACs in a directory tree.\n";

It happens. Strings for printing especially are much clearer when not folded. Especially if you're flowerboxing. Or hardcoding data structures.

The "10 inches" bit isn't actually mentioned in the original study write-up, 95 characters was. "10 inches" seems to just be editorial. Probably reasonably close anyway.

The 95 also just happened to be the longest line length they used. Longer might have resulted in even faster reading (and less preference). The 10 inches the editorial refers to has to be at a certain distance, too, right? They really mean a viewing angle.

participants were seated approximately 52 cm from the screen

... and the screen was how big with what resolution?

There is no significant difference in latency or duration for vertical vs. horizontal saccades (eg: see ), and you're dead wrong about reading speed: In English, the optimal column width for fast reading is somewhere between 50 and 100 characters per line, depending on exact circumstances.

However, there are two other relevant facts: 1) The lower visual hemifield has a larger cortical representation than the upper visual hemifield, and shows modest improvements in visual performance (this is unsurprising, since our hands/tools/ground near us is usually in our lower hemifield) and 2) We can move our head side-to-side more rapidly, and with a larger range of motion than we can up and down, which changes some saccade distributions.

Irregardless of the mechanics of the situation, reading is a highly trained activity, and direction of reading is not universal. Chinese, for instance, can be read top-to-bottom, or with either horizontal possibility as the initial direction, with the reader cued by slightly differing strokes and punctuation . I'm not aware of any bottom-to-top sequential reading in any culture, which is probably due to the above mentioned processing differences. However, there are also mixed reading sequences that use multiple horizontal and vertical elements in a single block, like Mayan hieroglyphs (2x2 blocks LR->TB within block, blocks are read TB->LR ) or the Korean Hangul system (variety of block sizes, read TB->RL). Arguably, the latter systems are most efficient in terms of leveraging the early geometry of the visual system (log-polar, with resolution dropping exponentially with distance from the fovea.

This is nonsense. It IS NOT and NEVER HAS BEEN easier to read stupid magazine/newspaper columns than fully wide pages of a book.

Well, that settles it. The expert has spoken.~

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/columns.asp

When evaluating the effect of passage type on reading rates, the narrative passages were read significantly faster than the news articles. in this experiment the 35 characters per line condition resulted in the highest comprehension score for the narrative passages. In the news article condition, the best comprehension score was at 75 cpl.

from: http://soar.wichita.edu/dspace/bitstream/10057/482/1/grasp0637.pdf

see this study: http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/81/PersonalityofFonts.asp

and this one proves (even with a tiny sample) that kids love this font: http://psychology.wichita.edu/mbernard/articles/UPAfontchildrenpaper.pdf

Yeah, it's (somewhat) easy to read, but it's only suitable for kids books. The problem is that it's been used in all the places the summary mentions, and the person who chose to use it obviously had zero knowledge about fonts. Some fonts are used for content, some for presentation, others are easier to read on computer screens and others are suited for print.

Learn your goddamn fonts or stick to the defaults in MS Office. Arial is a sans-serif font, easier to read on computers (so it's used in Outlook & Excel). Times New Roman is used in Word because serifs help guide the eye along the line in large blocks of text. These fonts are overused and boring, but at least they don't distract the reader from the message.

His Writing Efficient Programs is out of print, but in my opinion it's at least as good as Programming Pearls. Here's an edited version of Bentley's rules from the appendix of the book.

There's nothing more annoying than trying to read a novel while pressing a button each time one has read 5 or 10 lines of text. I can think of plenty of things more annoying, like not having the book on me in the first place, having to deal with slow refresh, carrying multiple devices, etc. ... There's a reason books come in standardized sizes. Yes, like paper handling, binding, and paper waste. A 3" diagonal book with 2000 pages is not practical. A 3" diagonal e-book with 2000 pages is.

Right. Even if we could get the kerning right, I'd bet we would still retain more by reading from the printed page rather than from the computer screen. That's why books and newspapers will never go away.

Really, other than on blogs and news sites, if you are presenting on the web you should write for the web. That means writing something clear and coherent and then paring it down as far as you can. News sites and blogs should just use a good serif font on the web and move on. If someone really wants to nitpick, let them get the hard copy.

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/4 2/text_length.htm indicates that the preferred line lengths on-screen, measured in characters per line, is about the same as with printed text.

So I scanned TFA in hope of some new research on web typography re: readability. And found nothing but opinion, not even references to research done elsewhere.

Sure, the author seems to know his typography 101, but how is he backing up his various claims? All I see is "established and time-tested principles of typography" and similar hand-waving.

This-or-that font is more legible than some other font, because ... "I fall firmly in to the camp that believes that sans-serif faces are a more suitable [readable] option." In the article he even states "It is [low screen resolution], more than any other [factor], that defines the recommendations and principles behind good Web typography."

So without research/testing (or references to research/testing), how the hell does the author know which font is more readable than the next?

I'm not saying he's wrong (or that good guesses are worse than no guesses), but he's pointing to various best practices without any research/testing to back up a lot of these claims.

A quick search produced some promising-looking results. Perhaps too much work for a busy web usability professional.

Second link from the search results: Usability News performed user tests on readability in 2001 (A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When? by Michael Bernard, Melissa Mills, Michelle Peterson, & Kelsey Storrer).

Several observations can be made regarding the examined font types. First, no significant difference in actual legibility between the font types were detected. There were, however, significant differences in reading time, but these differences may not be that meaningful for most online text because these differences were not substantial. It may, on the other hand, be helpful to consider using font types that are perceived as being legible. In this study, the font types that were perceived as being most legible were Courier, Comic, Verdana, Georgia, and Times.

Suppose that you are a Canadian employer and you have to hire a new systems administrator. If you want to hire a foreign worker, would you choose someone with a PHD from the University of Ouagadougou (http://www.univ-ouaga.bf/) or someone with a bachelor degree from the Wichita State University (http://www.wichita.edu?

There are two challenges with the candidate from Burkina Faso. First the employer must find a way to confirm that he studied at the Ouagadougou University. Then he has to find reliable metrics to validate the quality of the education.

On the other hand, there is none of these issues with the candidate from WSU.

So if the WSU candidate is ok, why bother? What added value would an employer get from the other candidate? Cultural insight?

Does Sun own ECC? "Sun's elliptic curve cryptography in OpenSSL"
Neal Koblitz gave a talk about ECC at one of the CCC conferences. From here, we find
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) was proposed by Victor Miller and Neal Koblitz in the mid 1980s.

So what does Sun have to do with all this?

[A side note: the most important thing to remember is that for this to be successful, you must make the students feel comfortable. I know many students who were turned off to science, and it was always by a bad experience in high school. Students will be interested in science, but it must be understandable to them.

High technology is fun, but the average student doesn't know the first thing about programming or building a robot, and might not find something interesting if they don't understand it. So your project should be aimed at things that build interest, but are also easy for high school students to understand. Take care to emphasize that anyone can do it if they're willing to work at it a little. Students must not be allowed to feel dumb or stupid, or to think that the teacher feels they are.]

If you want something like a fair or competition, you might try a pumpkin' chunkin' competition. I don't mean large scale, though. You could have fun with a smaller competition such as the one at my university. The launchers must fit in a 4-foot cube and must be human powered. These limitations make it fairly safe, and the competition is an entertaining and respected event. In the process, students can learn some basic things about ballistics and engineering.

Alternately, you could form a project to build a larger single device, like a trebuchet or catapult. This can be a lot of fun to fire (for a rally before a big game, perhaps?) and provide a larger project where students can use a variety of skills including math, physics, and metal- or wood-working.

On the other hand, if you want smaller projects that might fit into a short class, here are a few suggestions:

- Anything with liquid nitrogen is cool by definition. :-) You can make liquid nitrogen ice cream, freeze a rubber ball and shatter it, let the nitrogen roll off the back of your hand... all the standard tricks. In addition you could get one of the small superconductor kits and levitate a small magnet; you can talk about new materials research.

- Bring in a strobe light and look at things under it like water from a faucet, a turning bicycle wheel, or other semi-periodic phenomena.

- Astronomy, with a good telescope, can be really fun. Start off with something easy like looking at the surface of the moon, and save calculating orbits for much later. ;-)

- Photography appeals to non-technical students but also introduces a lot of more technical subjects in a non-threatening way.

There are all kinds of great activities that will catch the interest of students. I don't think the kind of activity is as important as its level.

Ask yourself: will the average high school student see your activity advertised and think "I wish I could do that," or "I know I could do that!" ? Use that as your guide.

Good luck!

[A side note: the most important thing to remember is that for this to be successful, you must make the students feel comfortable. I know many students who were turned off to science, and it was always by a bad experience in high school. Students will be interested in science, but it must be understandable to them.

High technology is fun, but the average student doesn't know the first thing about programming or building a robot, and might not find something interesting if they don't understand it. So your project should be aimed at things that build interest, but are also easy for high school students to understand. Take care to emphasize that anyone can do it if they're willing to work at it a little. Students must not be allowed to feel dumb or stupid, or to think that the teacher feels they are.]

If you want something like a fair or competition, you might try a pumpkin' chunkin' competition. I don't mean large scale, though. You could have fun with a smaller competition such as the one at my university. The launchers must fit in a 4-foot cube and must be human powered. These limitations make it fairly safe, and the competition is an entertaining and respected event. In the process, students can learn some basic things about ballistics and engineering.

Alternately, you could form a project to build a larger single device, like a trebuchet or catapult. This can be a lot of fun to fire (for a rally before a big game, perhaps?) and provide a larger project where students can use a variety of skills including math, physics, and metal- or wood-working.

On the other hand, if you want smaller projects that might fit into a short class, here are a few suggestions:

- Anything with liquid nitrogen is cool by definition. :-) You can make liquid nitrogen ice cream, freeze a rubber ball and shatter it, let the nitrogen roll off the back of your hand... all the standard tricks. In addition you could get one of the small superconductor kits and levitate a small magnet; you can talk about new materials research.

- Bring in a strobe light and look at things under it like water from a faucet, a turning bicycle wheel, or other semi-periodic phenomena.

- Astronomy, with a good telescope, can be really fun. Start off with something easy like looking at the surface of the moon, and save calculating orbits for much later. ;-)

- Photography appeals to non-technical students but also introduces a lot of more technical subjects in a non-threatening way.

There are all kinds of great activities that will catch the interest of students. I don't think the kind of activity is as important as its level.

Ask yourself: will the average high school student see your activity advertised and think "I wish I could do that," or "I know I could do that!" ? Use that as your guide.

Good luck!

Because they're really hard to do. Seriously, the guy who designed Tahoma was paid quite well for it. Further, Mocrosoft tweaked their font-rendering code (not sure what parts, or maybe it was the TTF file itself...) to get the glifs looking exactly as the font-designer wanted them to.

That being said, there is a family of fonts included with Gnome that absolutely love. I even copied them over to my Window's box [gasp!]. (I think it's the bitstream vera fonts, but I'm not certain cause I'm at work.)

BTW, if you like Tahoma, Verdena is considered better on many fronts and is basically a wider variety of Tahoma.

It may not be a paradigm shift, but maybe it will help you read faster...the work on Rapid Serial Visual Presentation is pretty persuasive, and has recently shown promise for Palms.

Imagine you can pull up your date file an impress her with all the stuff you remember about her. Also you can have that poem there for you to recite that will rock.

Greetings - I am from the future. I brought with me a picture of you on your first date using this technology. Unfortunately you can see that your date has left the table.

Doppler shift, related to Hubble's Law, except in the expanding universe, everything is redshifted, going away; if you're going fast TOWARDS something, you'll get blueshift. If the Red stop light (or stop-sign) looks blue or even amber or green, you're approaching the ultimate speed limit. Try this at home.

I also found more detailed information on quipus, if anyone is interested.

Here's some good research about pagination versus scrolling:

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/5 1/paging_scrolling.htm

There's tons more research on web usability that you should also check out at that site.

I find Times New Roman much harder to read on screen than Georgia, at least at small point sizes. Times was designed to be thin so that The Times could fit more text at the same point size into their newspaper. I'd rather have easier to read text and scroll a bit. Georgia is also hinted very well. I also have a personal preference for fonts that have large lowercase letters. Since font size is based on uppercase letters, and most text is lowercase, having large lowercase (relative to the full text height) makes things easier to read. I also have a preference for lines being rendered at 1 pixel width.

See this page for some screenshots. You'll see that in Times, some areas look darker than the rest. Look at the word "The" for example. Things like that distract me while reading.

- Amit