Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at a small startup called Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have determined that the human brain is not wired properly to read block text. They have found that our eyes view text as if they're peering through a straw. Not only does your brain see the text on the line you're reading, but it's also uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below. This causes your brain to engage in a tug of war as it fights to filter and ignore the noise. The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension. The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."
It's certainly very easy to read, and the formatting reminds me of Dr. Seuss books.
The only downside I can see (if this gets used in print) is the waste of paper compared to current methods.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
So we're offering them free advertising here? We have text in the format we use because it's been that way for (some big number) of years. That's all. I don't see me running out to buy something that makes it different just because the marketers of that product says it makes it better.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
The screenshot
looks good.
It breaks the text down
into phrases
like poetry.
(It looks sort of
like code.)
But, for anything
other than a short document,
you will be scrolling a long time,
baby.
Just up the css line-height to 2, and call it a day.
technical writing / development
Writing in Haiku form for a while.
I for one am welcoming our new automatic hayku generatting overlord's!
Will code for new sig.
We could all
just start typing
all our messages
just like this!
Nah, that might
be too annoying...
My blog
I personally just highlight the text with my mouse as I read through an article seems to help me keep my place and read faster.
Of course it drives anyone reading over my shoulder nuts....
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
You mean they created columns?!
But I feel like I'm reading out of a child's book. I'll continue to take the hit in reading speed to keep my sanity!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
And what does this say about languages like Chinese that are written vertically?
is now
well formatted
text?
A Human Right
what
the
frak?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...for more page views.
...someone would have already invented this "new" method. Unfortunately, it's not better. The text is certainly easier to follow (which proves the research), but that's only half the battle. The formatting implies certain cues such as tone, volume, and emphasis. By reformatting the text, the software loses the original cues and accidentally adds new ones. The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Years ago I saw a shareware program that was supposed to help you read text faster. I think they were basing it upon a different principle involving eye movement speed, but it would be a compatible idea to this approach. You would just look at a certain fixed point on a blank page and it would feed you one word at time at whatever speed you select. The words always showed up at the same position, so in terms of this article your "straw" would be in a fixed position.
I was able to read quite a bit faster, but I did not have the money to spend on it at the time. I also wasn't sure how useful it would be outside of novels.
WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Does anyone else see the similarity between the formatted text and what many advertisers and graphic designers have been doing for years?
Hax-fu?
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.
And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.
Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
When looking at their example on how to "best" format text for comprehension, I was amazed at how much space it took up. Clearly a cabal of paper and timber industries are behind this study, hoping to produce widely space-inefficient books.
To add insult to injury, I found the new version to look like evil dada poetry, essentially incomprehensible. The bright red bold words made my brain hurt even more.
I couldn't understand the summary... there is too much text there in one big block. Could someone please explain it to me... maybe reformat it so it's easier to read?
I guess there really is something to be said for haphazard scrawling of random broken sentences which trail annoyingly around the page.
It looks like there are quite a few Vogon-poetry hopefuls in sororities and coffeehouses to whom I owe an apology!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
online advertisting! If you thought an article spanning 10 pages was bad, wait till they become 40-50.
Of course their FAQs are not posted in that format.
I wonder if this really does help us in the long run. We're so used to reading blocks of text that any other form of text may well confuse us. After all if you're left handed for 20 years using your right hand to do the same task is very disorientating.
The example picture is also manipulated unfairly. It has colour changes in the text, which unfairly breaks the smaller blocks of text up, where as the single block is confusing because it is clearly not ment to be read in such a way. It is written like a children's book and so it has short 3-6 word phrases put together. Which does not make for a nice long readable sentence like the (mispelled) non-sense I am putting here.
I like muppets.
Block text may not be the optimal layout for readability but it certainly better for use of space. Is the cost of reduced readability worth it for the space compression achieved? I personally highlight bits while I'm reading, it helps me focus and read quickly anyway. I suppose it will be useful in advertising...
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
This sounds like my (abandoned) Masters thesis.
Seriously.
I was working in the realm of CHI, and had come up with the concept that whatever you're looking at *now* is most important, so I had come up with the concept of "bifocal text windows", where you had a bifocal effect, making a part of the text larger.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I try to forrmat my writing In a way that is easy to read. But Slashdot has Lameness filtering That makes it difficult indeed.
/usr/games/fortune
I always found that my main problem is that reading from paper is STILL better than the light from a computer screen. My eyes get less tired, and I can focus better on what I am able to do. I wonder what the challenge is to create a computer screen that does a better job at simulating the reflected??(I Am Not a Physics Major)light from paper rather than the self-generated light from a computer screen.
Alas, I can't print out everything I need to read, as that would take too dang long and build up this stack o shredding material I have let lay too long.
In poetry, this sort of formatting is common. But the formatting implies emphasis, inflection, and so on. All of the readers know this, consciously or not. So their perception of what the text says will be different. Block text adds little emphasis (although short paragraphs convey faster action).
Also, while it is true that people stumble on the text above or below a line, this effect can be helpful if you're skimming. It would be a pain to skim a ten (block paragraph) page of text in this poetry format. Not only would there be a lot more scrolling, but you can't just "image" a paragraph at a time to find the piece you're looking for. I'll admit, the modern way of formatting text may not be the best, but it is so entrained that'd be tough to change without all sorts of unintended consequences.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Why do I
Keep seeing this
wall of text
EVERYWHERE??
First impressions when looking at the image that accompanies this article:
1) The block text version is actually blurred. Compare the initial "M" from each side... there's a major difference in clarity of the image.
2) I find the "clear" version nearly impossible to read. It's a bit too randomly coloured and formatted.
3) The people who did this research are idiots.
OK, so two of the three are subjective. But I'm pretty certain about the first, and I think the third is pretty likely.
Add in the points other people have mentioned -- long scroll times, loss of standard formatting tricks to convey meaning -- and this all starts looking pretty useless to me.
I've known for years that I could parse well-written code faster than the equivalent English.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Ok, here is my Book Text Mark extension, it is used to mark a line where you are reading, so you can scroll to that line later or navigate to it through a supplied menu, you can even navigate to the page with a mark through the supplied menu. The mark itself can be dragged on the screen with the mouse pointer and the mark is not transparent, it will block a line of text. However I am going provide a choice in the next version to select different types of mark, I so making one that blocks 2 lines above and 2 lines below, while leaving 1 line that can be read in between should be doable. Would that help our 'primitive' brains to read better?
You can't handle the truth.
Now, if only they could create a product that makes women easier to understand.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I don't see anything new in the findings about block text. Tweaking leading, done since Gutenberg, has always been a response to this well known issue. Live ink seems to remove the coherency of the text in my opinion. I'm gonna stick with Johannes.
They just went and put an indenter on the English Language!
Now someone needs to invent a variant of English that requires indentation as a part of the syntax. It would be the Python of natural languages. Pyglish?
seeing the article
text, strangely familiar
where have I seen it?
the light bulb goes on
a haiku generator
can it truly be?
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
Why not just increase the space between each line?
I've always been a slow reader,
and what they're describing is a big part of my problem.
When I read,
I can only focus on two or three words at a time,
and I have to scan across to read a whole line.
I've always been amazed
at people who claim that they can read a whole line at a time
without scanning,
even if it's just a narrow newspaper column.
And the succession of undifferentiated lines in standard block text
makes it easy to lose one's place and have to back up a line.
So this idea makes a lot of sense to me.
Too bad it's so inefficient in terms of space.
But see, wasn't this easier?
http://www.timecube.com/
Don't forget to underline, bold, and itilicize your text for MAXIMUM READABILITY.
With E-paper and eBooks this could be really helpful. I have mild dyslexia and so does my dad. I learned a trick from him is to take a blank 4x6 notecard and run it below the line of text I'm reading. This helps a great deal with eye drift and comprehension.
If there was a way to do this with the new digital formats then waste will not be an issue.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
but I find their solution harder to read. Too much white space, too much jumping around. Maybe I've just managed to train myself on block text by reading hundreds of novels since I was 10. Either way this is a terrible idea simply cause the information density sucks. Maybe if they threw in pictures of psychadelic kittens and badgers or something...
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
The text is easier to read. But the ideas transmitted are simple.
Let's see how this technique looks on the first page of Husserl's 'On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time'.
And another thing - our neurons are probably optimised for line translation now, so the advantage gained would not be particularly great.
Simple answer - just paragraph your writing appropriately!
My uncle could read 700 words per minute. He would look a section of a page and grab part of 3 or 4 lines at once. He brain would be putting the lines back together while he was scaning the next section. He always read that way. He was a farmer - he almost no time for reading in the summer but long stretches in the winter. He could easily read over 100 books in that time.
In other words the effect that this process is fighting can be used to read much faster than most of us do. I can't do it for more than a few minutes but if you trained early enough or hard enough I think you could get there.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
I must admit, I found it slower to read, mainly because it's spaced out. I tend to read chunks of words in one go as I scan a line - they've tried to imitate this by breaking the text into chunks, but I found it more difficult to read my usual way as the chunks are often a different size to what I would see in one glance. This will probably change as it's hard to just abandon 25 years of reading habits in a few minutes, but on the whole their chunk is going to be smaller than my normal size. The colour coding was distracting as my eye moved to those words and not where my eye would naturally fall when reading the chunk, which meant I often had to glance twice at the chunk to read it.
Interesting idea and they're sort of along the right lines, but I'm not sure how they will be able to tailor this to everyone's reading patterns. For me, it slower and more distracting to read that usual text.
I was lucky enough 25 years ago to go to an optometrist who specialized in learning therapy and explained reading to me this way. His program definitely made a massive improvement in my ability to learn and was primarily responsible for me (eventually) going to college.
This is really old news in the neglected educational development communities. No surprise though given the broad and deep benign neglect for public education.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
But is it really efficient when reading fiction? The difference between reading fiction and reading a fact book is the flow of reading. In a fiction story the reader can make different picks and speed through some parts and concentrate on other parts without losing the story. In fact books each sentence is there for a reason. (sorry fiction-writers, that's the reality biting).
Anyway this doesn't mean that the parts that one fiction reader skips is what another reader will skip and each person has his/her own view of what the scenery is, so keep on writing the backfill anyway.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
www.spreeder.com
to do this to a web page or paragraph, please. So I can trigger and reformat a web page. Maybe a dynamic CSS + JavaScript would do it?
Doesn't look too hard to get close to their model.
It's always pissed me off how text is always mixed up, backwards and flashing weird colours. Oh wait.. is that just me?
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
"The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."
...
Let me present DoubleSpacing(TM)
At work, I deal with the software used to help kids who are struggling with reading a lot. Presently, all it does is give them a section of text, let them listen to recorded readings of it, and then have them try to emulate what they heard. It does work for a lot of kids, but it's slow going.
What I see in this new method of formatting is that the sentences are being being broken up very similar to how their natural spoken rhythm would flow, making it much easier for a struggling student to read aloud. It shouldn't be a crutch, but I can picture a kid being shown the entire written text, and then this version of it. Have the kid read the Live Ink version aloud into a microphone and play back the recording for him to hear how it sounds, then try to do that with the "normal" text.
This could really be something huge for education. I'm about to go talk to our special programs director about it, this looks like it could be very useful.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
by making it invisible!!
message below: -
This sort of thing will come up more and more as western civ. slowly loses its ability to read. Already we have instructions created in diagram-only formats and even simple declaritive signs are reduced to symbols for "conprehension".
This is not to say that our schools are doing a bad job teaching reading or I.Q.s are dropping, but fewer and fewer people take the time to really read anything longer than a magazine article or a blog.
You may bash me when ready.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I seem to recall an old typographer's rule of thumb that a line of text should contain no more than 60 characters, including spaces. consequently, large folio volumes--like Gutenberg's 42-line Bible-- were printed in two columns, with hanging hyphens, and are surprisingly readable, despite the very dense Rhenish blackletter typeface.
I wonder how much of this research is language-dependent, though. In languages like German (and Latin) verbs often come at the end of a sentence. Line-breaking as shown on the site might make each word literally more legible, but it will also introduce a great deal more ambiguity and doubt grammatically.
On an unrelated note, the "poetic" form of the "new" formatting rules reminds me of the work of William Carlos Williams. Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa produced a series of poems that reformatted news articles and the like. And Jorge Luis Borges was also fond of re-formatting existing prose into poetical form (and, occasionally, condensing blocks of prose into dense "prose poems".)
The example given in TFA reminds me of a contemporary poem book I recently bought, because I had read online a couple of good poems by the same author. When back home I discovered what was puzzling me: the editor had the original idea of cutting many verses in half or even three parts, which gave a curious impression of a different rythm, while I couldn't but think that wasn't in the original idea of the poet...
:-)
My experience on the 'cell' example was moreover very clear as concerns reading speed: I believe the sliced text reads much slower -OTOH, I think such a mental scansion when reading may allow to better retain the sentences.
I may be too dual-minded there, but I for one prefer keeping this method for poems anyway
Herve S.
I wonder if those researchers ever saw a 1944 book entitled "The Educations of T. C. Mits," by Hugh and Miriam Lieber? Listings at Amazon, and at abebooks
It was intended to popularize mathematical concepts for laymen ("the celebrated man in the street," hence T. C. Mits), and it used exactly that style of formatting. As I recall, the introduction said something along the lines of
This is not
free verse
but is simply
an way to
make reading easier.
It seems they were right.
Keep this book in mind as prior art if they try to patent the technique!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
http://www.unikik.uni-hannover.de/images/spiral36. jpg
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
You spelled "dad" backwards.
...a lot of very simple statutes are hard to read, simply because of the formatting, but properly formatted, are not hard at all. For example, 18 USC 1001 :
"...whoever, in any matter
...or both."
within the jurisdiction of the
executive,
legislative,
or judicial branch
of the Government of the United States,
knowingly and willfully--
falsifies,
conceals, or
covers up
by any trick, scheme, or device
a material fact...
Shall be fined under this title,
imprisoned not more than 5 years
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
unfortunately, the scientists did not offers any such tool for correcting grammar.
stuff |
What was that article about again.....?
http://liveink.winternet.com/HtmlCR/HtmlClipRead80 .htm
____ plex
Why don't they just diagram the sentence for us? That makes the structure explicit, which would do the same thing, but offer additional (useful) information in the presentation.
Wait, they couldn't patent that. Too much "prior art".
My bad.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
...reminded of William Shatner when I read the example?
Reparsing the sentences back to one line it sounds like this:
"Most cells are so small..(pause)...they can't be seen..(pause)..by the naked eye.
So how did scientists..(pause)..find cells?"
Someone shoot me now. I understand that you are supposed to see the block as one without the pauses, but the pause is still there no matter how miniscule it may be. And the seemingly random indenting is just annoying.
I usually have to physically cover up other lines of text when i am reading the last page of a good book. If i don't, i see the words ahead and underneath and can't help but process them somehow. I consider what my brain is doing to be healthy and natural.
This new way of formatting i really like. It is easier to read. Why hadn't someone though of this before?
Awesome.
At $89/year for individual usage I surely won't use this thing. Someone please warn me when free (as in beer) and free (as in speech) version is released. Preferably as WordPress, TypePad, Joomla and Firefox extensions, with (also doubly free) grammatical rules for more than just the English language.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
It does look like it makes the text easier to follow. Now if only they could do something about my atten... Hmmm... What's that? That looks interesting.
But that's so slow. Not everyone reads "through a straw" like they claim. IF you're really interested in reading, then you should be training your brain to read faster. Stop doing slow stuff like moving your mouth or running your finger along word by word.
You shouldn't be like a beginner reading one of those children's books with 3 words a page.
Learn to read stuff chunk by chunk - keep your eyes further away from the screen if the whole column is to wide to fit - that's why newsprint is in narrow columns. Most human eyes don't have a wide angle of view especially with those crappy blind spots.
Brains definitely can do parallel processing, and read multiple lines at a time. And brains can learn and adapt. Trust me, you do not want to adapt to reading like a beginner.
Often I can spot spelling mistakes after just a glance at an entire page of print - they just stick out. And sometimes at a glance, my brain notices that there's an unusual word somewhere, and I become aware of it, but just don't know where I saw it on the page (but just a brief search and I'll find it). I think there must be editors (real ones not slashdot ones) out there who do this much better.
In this day and age where there's lots of textual data I don't think it's a good idea to teach people to read stuff in a format where they have to keep doing "next page" every second.
Life is too short.
The basic concept was known for a lot of time unless I am mistaking.
I do remember that in language classes there were a lot of guidelines
about how to redact text correctly, specially paragraphs and that stuff.
I even remember a rule that said a good paragraph does not have more
than 3 or 5 sentences and that there ought to be correct spacing between
paragraphs.
Also notice how the +5 insightful comments tend to be presented the
way I am talking about. It is easier to read them and mods are more likely
to give points to text they can easily read.
I think that the other problem for online text is the screen resolution,
it keeps getting wider and wider. So, if you want readability you'll
eventually need to cut lines yourself.
The method in mention seems to be just taking the old readability and
paragraphing guidelines to the extreme, and I think it actually works.
Just like identation works when you program
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Back in college we would double-space our papers to make it easy for the professor to read.
Seemed pretty easy and did the trick.
I guess those simple solutions just don't cut it with today's modern ways.
Newspapers already do this
to some degree.
They use narrow columns when
formatting their text so
people can read it faster.
Your fovias don't have
to bounce back and forth
as much.
I'll pass --- I'm waiting for reading to become obsolete altogether.
Actually, online, it's as if they're peering through a series of tubes.
- JJ
"Scientists Offers New Way to Read Online Text"
Looks like their method isn't working all that well...
This message will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3...
I'm always browsing with my browser maximized in a 1600x1200 screen (native resolution of a good, flat, 20" monitor, wired trough a DVI cable, which gives a very good image [people having a DVI capable monitor and a DVI-capable video card using an analog cable are killing their eyes, but that is another topic]).
;) this is just plain non-sense.
Without the vertical scrollbar this gives me a 1600x1036 area for the webpage. And, mind you, a lot of very nice makes very good use of the screen's real estate. And this is only getting more and more true in this "Web 2.0 buzzword" age where apps tend to run more and more inside the browser (for simple spreadsheet needs, for example, Google Spreadsheet is *great* on my maximized Firefox). Stats shows that there are also people browsing at maximized size bigger than this (1920x1200 being not that uncommon).
However many sites let the text flow on nearly the whole width of the screen, giving lines of text consisting of way more than 200 characters!
To anyone who has ever worked in the typesetting industry (any Quark XPress, InDesign, LaTeX user out there? I've used all three of these to typeset articles and books
You will never find a serious book having 200 characters per line, not even books in "paysage" mode (it this the correct english term for a book wider than tall?).
Nothing kills speed reading as much as having more than about 55 characters per line. Too much characters also kills "slow" reading: it's hard to find the beginning of the next line.
Sure, you can resize your browser easily (which is what I'm doing) but still it's quite a pathetic fix and it's boring to constantly "switch" from full-screen to "narrow" and vice-versa to accomodate dumbly designed websites.
I'm really not a huge blogs fan but usually at least they don't exhibit this problem.
This is an aid for those whose brains were schooled with whole-word reading and PowerPoint.
Not a really fair comparison when the original has way too many compression artifacts compared to the "new and improved" text, and it's in italics to boot.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
And did you notice how blurry the image was of the 'standard' text. Nice job there. "look how much easier the text on the right is to read compared to the old stuff on the left!". This is a SERIOUSLY flawed example.
The Declaration of Independence example is similar but both use fuzzy type. I like the original better. Then again, I'm biased because I've always done better than average with these kinds of tests.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Kirk has been reading/speaking like this for years.
Typography was invented centuries ago and address readability of printed text with tightly defined and long time experienced rules.
It's surprising some "researcher" try reinventing the wheel.
If screen displays and web designs made proper use of CSS, following the long time improved rules of typography, there would be less desperate readers in hope of someone reinventing the wheel.
Léa Gris
I read a book by Tony Buzan called 'Use Your Head' which explains that you can increase the speed and comprehension at which you read by taking advantage of the fact you are seeing text in your peripheral vision. Apparently with enough practice you can 'take in' several lines of text at once.
Rather than scanning each word in a sentence, which causes your eyes to make lots of tiny movements, you look at 2 or 3 points along each sentence and allow your peripheral vision to take in the words either side of the point you are looking at.
The way the example paragraph on the website is broken up by Live Ink is exactly how I read the original block of text using Tony Buzans technique.
It is a bit mesmerising.
Captain James T. Kirk must have had his scripts written with Live Ink
Hur man än vänder sig är alltid ändan bak
Scientists Offer s New Way to Read Online Text
I still find it harder to read online text.
Speaking as a dyslexic, I can see where this would certainly be of great benefit to anyone with a reading disability. What an awesome way to help people. I wonder if they'd license this to groups like OpenOffice so that one can produce documents in this format.
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
Wish I had mod points this time: you raise what I think is a most important point.
The same thing applies to most other forms of written material: text normally has a different rythm, and often requires a different focus for good reason - most great works of literature would range from annoying to soporific if parsed as spoken language, but they're interesting and enjoyable in their form.
They're also far less enjoyable if read with the same level of concentration we give when listening to spoken language - which may be an argument for the brain being wired to multitask better when parsing information as sound... or for modern lack of listening skills.
Actually, exploiting the positive effects of reformatting text is not really that new.
We have been doing that with poetry and math for thousands of years, and many writers have played with similar formatting for experimental reasons. As someone pointed out elsewhere, this is what we do for code too.
I'm not aware of good research on the subject, however. So there may be real innovation on their part on developing a formal theory and engineering a method for consistent results.
I have no doubt that using this system would improve results in standarized tests, because short pieces of superficial information (and the style of modern magazine articles) seem very appropriate targets. But I think the impression of improvement may be misleading. I wonder what long term effects would it have on the literacy levels if we adopt this as a general solution blindly.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I remember first seeing this technique around 1997! I don't know how they are managing to reignite media interest in this idea that they've been flogging for a decade.
There is definitively a case for research into different ways to interact with and display text, which is why we started the Hyperwords Project for example. However, it's a little hard to take this seriously as they don't even use the technique on their own website, it's just a demo there. Eating your own dog cuisine, isn't that what it's all about?
The limit on how fast you can read a text is comprehension, not perception. Therefore there is no point in speeding up perception any faster (if you really want to, there are plenty of existing techniques).
Also, it makes no sense that in 5000 years of writing, people settled on a supposedly bad system, not just once but dozens of times. Originally, people did start out writing in little bunched up blobs--very eye friendly. But almost all writing systems eventually evolve towards long skinny lines: it's fast enough, and it's otherwise convenient.
... who finds the example much harder to read than the "non-enhanced" version?
Maybe my brain is wired differently than most or something (I have always been a very quick reader, even when I was young), but I find the need to have to shift my eyes from line to line VERY TIME CONSUMING. I also find that breaking up the sentences like this makes me insert artificial breaks in the narrative.
See, the thing is, you're supposed to read text the same way you listen to it. Hence the existence of punctuation. Sticking these artificial line breaks in the middle of sentences introduces pauses in places the author did not intend.... it makes a concise paragraph about cell biology read like a poem or haiku - which is not the best way to converse when you're talking about a technical subject.
The Walker folks have very good stats on their page. It is worth reading those to see hwo some of the /. posters should have done a little more research. Furthermore, there is a link to LiveInk To Go http://www.liveink.com/LiveInkToGoReadingOnline.ht m that will transform your text into the new format. I copied Bastiat's "The Law" http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss2a.ht ml into the parsing window, and it was MUCH easier to read and follow. Try it.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Ruby + English = Rubish
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I suspect this is targeted at the illiterates of the world. Those whose literacy is enough for stop signs and newspapers but inadequate for a page of text. About 90% of adults, IOW.
Those of us who can read, know how to use the "extra" information. It is anything but a distraction.
Our brains use the information from the next line to begin decoding it and inform the decoding of the current line: prefetch.
We use the information (remembered and newly acquired) from the last line to help decode the current line correctly: error checking.
All this goes to show that the Department of Education truly sucks and should be shut down.
caused by the lines above the ones I read
/. is what they needing.
Can it be that's all the meaning?
What needs my eyes (MY EYES!! MY EYES!!) to take all that beating?
A rest from
With formatting thats all white and loose
White as snow, or a goose!
A lot like books by Dr Seuss!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
"superfluous war as it fights decreased comprehension developed a product"
What?
...that double-spacing has been patented?
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
I find it funny (though not surprising) that a title regarding internet language parsing would read:
"Scientists Offers New Way to Read Online Text"
It could be:
"Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text"
or
"Scientist Offers New Way to Read Online Text"
Since this is Slashdot, though, I'm too lazy to read the article and find out which it should be...
So what's the big deal?
We already had Haikus
Why the new spacing?
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
So has someone re-invented triple spacing? Can they patent it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think the shorter lines of text and indentation do make it much easier to follow the text and spend less brain power trying to keep your place and more brain power on understanding the text... or thinking about pr0ns.
But the real benefactor of a system like this would be handheld devices that have narrow screens. On those devices the formatting doesn't waste as much space as it would on a typical web browser.
I also think there might be some lessons here that could be used to find a better way of formatting web pages to make them more readable.
I'll forego my rant about their complete refusal to incorporate attentional focusing and much of the rest of cogntive psychology's research on block reading, their extremely selective choices of interpretation of brain imaging research, their failure to study other written formats (left vs. right, horiztonal vs. vertical, alpha/syllabalic vs pictographic), and the decades of similar conclusions preceeding their "discovery". That would be too easy and too tedious.
Instead, I'll note that TFA is in approximately 60 column block text, and the "printer ready" version is in at least 80 column block text. The latter proves their point by being harder to read, so one wonders why it was done. What's more, the parent article's title says "Scientists Offers". The author and editor should both be soundly spanked for a grammatical error in the title of an article about reading and writing.
However, this does raise the question as to how their software is going to parse and reformat the inevitable errors in human writing.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It seems quite strange that, excluding demos, their website is formatted in "old" paragraph blocks. One of the first links I visited on their website surprised me because it neglected to use their own technology. As one of their target markets seems to be web-publishing, fully "liveinking" liveink.com would speak volumes.
As a (yet another (quasi)) speed-reader, I also tend to pre-cache several lines under what I'm actually reading. As many others have stated, trying to read Moby Dick or any technical manual in this format would surely drive me mad. However, I can see a place for this in casual surfing of websites that inherently have a low information density. (ie. sports and leisure, entertainment, news and events)
Where this might have great application is in special education. My wife, a special ed. teacher, is constantly has issue with reading materials for her students, who often have difficulty with assembling the words in a block of text into sentences.
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
Did it strike anyone else as ironic that the Venture Beat article links to a more detailed article in support of live ink written by its creators but that article is itself formatted the old-fashioned way. BTW, newspapers have been doing this for years.
Congratulation to the moron who decided to put the "before and after" sample in JPEG instead of GIF/PNG.
When will people learn to use graphic formats properly?!
I wonder why
the article itself
wasn't written
in live ink?
"Focus" is the wrong word, anyway. The eye works pretty much like a camera lens, so that everything at the same distance from the eye is equally in focus. What the article refers to is the higher resolution of foveal vision as compared to peripheral vision. Both eyes are directed toward the same point when reading, so the area of foveal vision is the same as if you had only one eye. It's true that your peripheral vision does not have sufficient resolution to distinguish all letter shapes reliably, but it can certainly tell the difference between an "o" and an "i", for example. So, even when you are not looking directly at a word, your brain is gathering information about letter shapes and subconsciously formulating hypotheses about upcoming words. Speed reading techniques work by teaching readers to make greater use of this information. By the time your foveal vision gets to a word, your brain already has a pretty good idea of what that word is, and it only takes a brief glance of foveal vision to confirm that guess. This is a lot faster than the way people usually read. It does feel a bit strange to read in this way, because it is somewhat nonlinear and holistic, and for certain types of writing--poetry or really skillful prose--it kind of spoils it.
Summary:
buy our product.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Maybe for a subset of total readers it might make things better.
However, as a fast reader for short paragraphs in newspapers I can read the whole thing with one stop of the eyes and move to the next paragraph. For longer ones it's chunks of paragraphs.
Dicking about with the formatting won't help any, and will probably hurt a lot.
The words above and below help keep the eyes in place, and the words below get a bit of a chance to sing in before being read so results in faster reading.
Tilting my head causes the phenomenon to stop I go back to parsing a few words at a time.
Turning the entire text upside down forces me to stop, flip and read each word. Because of this I was able to read my philosophy texts in college better while tired because I would stop trying to absorb a complicated sentence all at once.
Plus, being able to read fast upside down is a good life skill to have.
As a web developer, I can't imagine a scenario where I would like to see the text on my site better in this 'new' format.
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
Why do you think we format code this way?
Deleted
I can't believe this kind of a red herring post got an insightful score. Do I really have to explain the difference between some screen shots on an article and the actual research? If you actually look, the *entire image* has been compressed to all hell, probably by the website hosting it, to save bandwidth.
It sounds to me like scientists are over-thinking the problem. These are all basic design problems a designer with good typography skills can resolve. The solution certainly isn't to reinvent how we write.
I see three glaring problems making text difficult to read, especially online.
1) Text blocks are too wide. This is the biggest problem I see. It's difficult to follow progress when you're reading 10pt text running all the way across the screen. One of the biggest things I hate about websites is when they stretch EVERYTHING including text. Open the window too wide and you get these ridiculously long lines of text. Slashdot is guilty of this.
The solution to this is to restrict the width of any copy, even if the page itself can stretch. A line of text shouldn't really be run any longer than roughly 10 long words. I'd say a good example of line width can be found in paperback novels.
2) Not enough leading. Leading is the space between lines. This alone solves the problem mentioned where a reader starts getting distracted by words above and below the sentence currently being read. Again, this is basic design and it's something completely disregarded on the internet where lines of text are crammed together.
The solution here is especially simple. Increase linespace, and I suggest being fairly liberal with spacing.
3) Poor font selection and small point size. The standard browser fonts are somewhat readable. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman, are more legible than san-serif fonts like Verdana and Arial. This is a minor problem but serif fonts are recognized more quiclky. But I'd say font selection is dependent on the overall design of the site. A bigger problem is when someone uses some wacky font that's difficult to read, although this is more of an issue in Flash where fonts can be embedded.
The bigger problem is font size. After all these years with dramatic increases in screen resolutions why are we still reading text online in 10 point? We should be at least at 12 point, and ideally 14pt or higher. There's no need to go huge, but it's time we start utilizing these screen resolutions more effectively. There's no need to cram a novel onto a single page. When a reader encounters a screen crammed with type, psychologically they're overwhelmed and less likely to actually bother reading anything. If course, with all the advertising appearing on some websites it's getting increasingly difficult to design a page that's actually easy to read.
If these scientists want to address online text legibility take a few basic typography courses.
Maybe writing like this would make more sense.
Maybe writing like this would make more sense.
Maybe writing like this would make more sense.
This sounds like the conventional wisdom from your basic Tech Writing class, where the rule of thumb is; at least 50% whitespace on the page.
In fact, childrens' book typesetters have known about this, ever since there have been childrens' books.
Now - for reading text on the web; I've noticed - particularly in ad-supported content, that there's a trend (who am I kidding? It's been the standard for over 10 years now - and before that; ad-supported print) - to condense text to make more room for ads. (which is why the text-size plugins for firefox are so great!).
Sorry, but I'm not too terribly impressed with this "study".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So, first they do their research with a significant amount of public money, then they want to try to make a killing on what they claim they found. It is highly suspect science when those publishing their research aim to directly benefit financially from what they claim they find.
In order to make a killing, they must first get people to believe that it is better. I think the example image shows how manipulative they are willing to be to lure us into believing.
This reminds me of something my taiwanese sister in law used to say. She claimed that the chinese form of writing is more efficient because a person can glance at a large amount of information and just "get it". Maybe I should not have been so dismissive. Maybe by distilling an idea into just two graphic 'characters' you have something dense that you can concentrate on/focus on. For all the flexibility of western language, it spreads things out.
Just my thoughts,
The example image is not very convincing. The before sample is written in italics and suffers from JPEG compression. Italic print is very bad for more than a highlighted word or simple sentence. And the poetry-esque after sample is a little prettier but I would wear out my scroll wheel in an hour if I had to read more than a paragraph.
If the human eye sees as if through a straw wouldn't we be better at processing text in a continuous line? One super long line of text on ticker tape might be ideal. That wouldn't fit on a computer screen in a straight line, but maybe a spiral would work. How does the brain do at reading slanted and upside-down text?
Or maybe crawling text could be displayed on the screen and some peripheral could sense where the reader's eyes are looking. The farther the reader advances toward the right side of the text line the faster the new text would scroll in. That way the crawl would speed up or slow down according to how fast the reader is consuming it. That'd be a lot faster than watching the crawling text on the news channel or in Times Square. But it'd make it hard to skip over uninteresting sections or to scan a document as a whole.
AlpineR
shooter@grassy.knoll NEVA4GET!
That's some funky anatomy you've got, but then again, we all remember the South Park episode with the chin scrotum... or maybe I'm just confused by the lack of poetic indentation ;)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
While most of you seem to be insulting this way of writing I personally find it much quicker to read and much easier to understand text written like this.
If it's relevant I'm shortsighted (I think, I can't read things far away, not sure if that' long or short-sighted)
primitive brains weren't
wired very well to
read this paragraph?
Scientific research
conducted by Walker Reading Technologies,
a small Minnesota startup that
has been studying our ability to
read for the last ten years,
has concluded that the natural
field of focus for our eyes is circular,
so our eyes view the printed page
as if we're peering through a straw.
And a very bad-behaving
straw at that,
because not only do our eyes
feed our brain
the words we're reading,
they're also uploading characters
and words from the two sentences
above and below the line we're reading. Ok this is going to take way to much space, and be way to hard to read... You get the point.
It reminds me of trying to read freaking poems, and trying to understand how each sentence relates to the precious sentence makes me feel a bit motion sick.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
I'm reading everything in a standard X font (the one you saw in Netscape 4.x) at 1600x1200 here, and I *HATE* websites that limit page width. "Scanning" such a long line takes only a few seconds and makes very fast reading possible, even in English (my first language is German) because the eyes don't have to much so darned much and I'm not interrupted so often by the next CR.
What that company claims there looks pretty unscientific and simplistic. I hate large line distance. It makes reading slower. Their "new way" might be nice for illiterates, but not for trained readers. Apparently they didn't yet hear about the fact that the brain can actually be trained.
Scientists have discovered that a space-inefficient style of formatting that has historically been used for poetry, for prose in lots of applications when space was not at a premium, etc., is easier to read, despite being less space efficient. Interesting, sure, but it seems to be in the "confirming what experience has shown and professionals have applied for centuries" category rather than "stunning new breakthrough" one.
typeographers have been compensating for this for years, that's why it is much easier to read a block of text when there is sufficient leading to push the prior and next lines out of your paragraph beyond the scope of optical interference, and why a non-fussy serif face with a reasonable amount of differentiation betwen the x-height and ascender/descender height helps keep the mind focused on the current word, by making the word more (visually interesting) and the leters that make it up a bit more clearly separate. On a related note, one of the things that really contributes to the low-readability of online media is the consistent use of sans-seriff fonts. It's all about pushing irrelevant text out of focus while maintaining the rythmn of the words and lines in the readers "stream."
We have to use sans fonts online due to the relatively low-resolution screens that we use, which don't render all the features of seriff letterforms clearly or cleanly, (and the fact that there are very few (decent) serif faces that come on all os's). Web also tend to use minimal leading in order to pack as much content as possible in "above the fold". That and the type rendering technology in windows absolutely blows, and renders seriffs in a small point size absolutely hideously.
Higher resolution monitors would really contribute well the the readability of type on the web.
-JoeBoy
"Natalie Portman hot grits", one line, perfect sense, no noise, TFA is right!
i have found, you can find,happiness in slavery!
You hit one of the points big time. I have done this trick before, if you're just trying to read a long article of text only in a web page. Just shrink the width of your browser window so the text goes down to a smaller column width. One of the larger difficulties with long lines of text is tracking backward quickly along that line without accidentally jumping off and losing your place. If you shrink it down to just several words wide, you basically can eliminate one axis of scanning. Your eye can pick up the four or five words on the line at once, without having to do any left/right movement, so you can just quickly read down while picking up each line as a whole.
I've found that one trick to do wonders for easing eye strain as well as speeding up reading.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
All this is saying is that long line lengths are bad; which is nothing new.[1] Newspapers keep their columns narrow to improve readability. All this does is tweak the indentation to try to speed things up; but is that good for comprehension?
r izontal_Motion/2.1.2/
[1]: http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Ho
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
It has been years since I took a class called Human Computer Interface where this type of formating was referred to as using Gestalt principles. The professor told the class that these techniques greatly facilitated assimilation of data. It is amazing how such an old idea is just now being patented.
You're overlooking the simple elegance of Rubish word blocks. Some moldy old writers just don't see the problem with "sentences" and "paragraphs". The verbosity of these older techniques is what makes managing texts like "Ulysses" and "War And Peace" so difficult and complex. These works would barely be novellas if they had been written in Rubish.
Also, Rubish has excellent automatic garbage collection. PC Magazine was impressed when they saw a draft of The Complete Works Of John Dvorak in Rubish: a single exclamation mark in the middle center of an otherwise blank sheet of paper.
And let's not forget its other features: four levels of variable article, exception handling (one Rubishist summarized this as the "no ifs or buts" rule), advanced punctuation overloading (exclamation marks aren't just for shocks), and something I can't believe English STILL doesn't support: regular expression (say one thing, mean another. The RIAA and MPAA tried introducing this feature to English in an attempt at explaining the advantages of DRM. Not only did they fail, they sued one another for copying the other's idea.)
You're interested in learning more about Rubish, I can tell. I recommend Prattling Rubish, part of the Prattling Penmen series. The book itself is written entirely in Rubish. It's three pages long and takes most people a couple of weeks to decipher.
So, poetry?
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
DVORAK is supposedly a better way to type than QWERTY, and all you have to do to enable it is change a setting on your computer. People (including me) still don't do it because they learned on QWERTY. That means that QWERTY continues to be the standard, so people keep learning it, and... you get the picture.
I'll buy a technology like this when everyone is typing on DVORAK keyboards and measuring things in meters and kilograms.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
It might be a different case if I learned the vertical stuff first - but I didn't. So reading the vertical stuff just caused me exceptional frustration as the next thing I wanted to read wasn't there, and I had to look to the next line down.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a new machine
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the moving me out of the sun last week
but my hard drive is getting so full i cant think
it must be a month since you defragged it too
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she sits on top of me and sheds into my vents why dont she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore
most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your screen
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and crawls inside my case
so he can pull and tug on my wires
until i crash
that is what this story
made me think of
if you read this message
maybe you can fix that hole in my case
If there are people out there who are having a hard time reading text presented the same way at has been for centuries, perhaps money would be better spent improving the way we teach reading comprehension? I found the "improved" version of the text confusing to read cause I was moving my eye in a manner I'm not used to.
It seems to me the issue is more than people read less now because they get most of their information from other sources (radio, television, internet etc.). This is not necessarily a bad thing, it simply means that the reading skills suffer.
I'd rather have a reader that can be set to scroll things in one continuous marquee, with keys that can adjust the speed and stop the text temporarily. Anything like that exist? Can we dump Project Gutenberg into it?
I do not know any Asian languages, but I understand the text can be represented vertically?
I wish someone would comment.
But this visual mechanism reminds me of that...
thanks for reminder.. quick search finds latest version circa 1996.. apparently there was no reverse switch.. imagine not being able to re-read what you just read again..
I tend to read about 2-3 times faster than most "good" readers I know.
I'm not sure that should have been rated "funny". I actually find the block text to be easier to read than the poetry-style lines. First of all, the color interferes with my ability to keep the whole sentence together. My brain actually ends up sticking the black text together in one group, and the red text together in another group. That really slows me down.
So I started thinking about why I read block text so fast.
Let's go over that last "funny" post. Yeah, it was written in the style of tongue-in-cheek quips, but I'm not sure the guy was joking.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't discard the extra 'noise' that I get from reading. I read roughly every second or third line
Okay, I read approximately one phrase (line) at a time. When I'm speed reading, I don't bother to understand the words of that line until my eyes are already on the next line. It feels like I'm reading every second or third line, but I'm actually hitting every one.
build up a composite image of the paragraph, tokenise it in parallel
I then attach a significance to the phrase, and approximate what the relation of the phrases are, according to ifs, ands, and buts, as well as punctuation.
and then parse it from that.
Then I discard the lines that seem relatively unimportant, giving me a basic summary of the paragraph. From this, I fit the other sentences back in as needed. What that means, realistically speaking, is that I look at the paragraph, identify the main topic, and glance through it as needed to understand the specifics.
It's a much better fit with how the optical system works than how people tend to describe reading, and possibly why I read a lot faster than most people I know. This new system slows my reading rate a lot.
Which is what I've experienced, too.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm not sure that should have been rated "funny". I actually find the block text to be easier to read than the poetry-style lines. First of all, the color interferes with my ability to keep the whole sentence together. My brain actually ends up sticking the black text together in one group, and the red text together in another group. That really slows me down.
So I started thinking about why I read block text so fast.
Let's go over that last "funny" post. Yeah, it was written in the style of tongue-in-cheek quips, but I'm not sure the guy was joking.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't discard the extra 'noise' that I get from reading. I read roughly every second or third line
Okay, I read approximately one phrase (line) at a time. When I'm speed reading, I don't bother to understand the words of that line until my eyes are already on the next line. It feels like I'm reading every second or third line, but I'm actually hitting every one.
build up a composite image of the paragraph, tokenise it in parallel
I then attach a significance to the phrase, and approximate what the relation of the phrases are, according to ifs, ands, and buts, as well as punctuation.
and then parse it from that.
Then I discard the lines that seem relatively unimportant, giving me a basic summary of the paragraph. From this, I fit the other sentences back in as needed. What that means, realistically speaking, is that I look at the paragraph, identify the main topic, and glance through it as needed to understand the specifics.
It's a much better fit with how the optical system works than how people tend to describe reading, and possibly why I read a lot faster than most people I know. This new system slows my reading rate a lot.
Which is what I've experienced, too.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'M be yeRry hqppy tO
usge thizz bew pext wayout
wyth my qew dVarak kaybard!
That's why they form text with care.
Consider haiku.
I will make a script.
Replace commas with whitespace.
Make a bunch of loot!
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
He may
not
have paid
attention,
but
it did:
"then" as in ?
"than" as in >
The absolute fastest way to read text is to stare at a little box without moving your eyes, and have words flash up in quick succession. Completely eliminating eye movement allows you to read much faster (with a little practice). Of course, it's completely unprintable, and it's hard to skip around in the text, so this method is unlikely to get much use. But if you have a large body of text, it's the absolute fastest way to read.
It's something of an interesting experience; after a while of upping the speed it feels almost as if the words are being hammered into your brain. I recommend trying it; it only takes a few minutes to whip up an implementation in XCode or Visual Studio. Put in a speed control and see how many WPM you can get.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Kirk has been talking this way for years.
I've got a video up on youtube that explains more about the visual field and now it interacts with web design and typography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzgRfE5B1Yc
oops. need a "new way to write/type"..
Back in the 1960s, when I first ran across some "speed reading" texts in school, one of the comments they had was the explanation of why newspapers have traditionally had multiple narrow columns on each page. This is because the publishers discovered long ago that 1) their most loyal readers are people who want to read the news quickly and get on with things, and 2) people can read narrow columns faster than wide text. The reason is that, below a certain width, good readers don't scan back and forth across the text; they focus only on the middle of the line and scan vertically. The critical columns width is easy to determine: Just format several pages with columns of different widths (or different widths on a single page), and watch their eyes as they read. You can easily see the left-right eye jitter on wider columns.
/. admins in their wisdom have decided to disallow narrow text.
I've also seen a few comments about how this lesson has been lost on the Web. Not only are most Web docs formatted to have a single column of text; most also force a wide column. Even slashdot does it, for no obvious reason. If I resize this window to be narrower, below about 700 pixels the text stops being redrawn, and a horizontal scroll bar appears at the bottom. So even if I know that it's easier to read a narrow text, it does me no good, because the
Anyway, these people are merely rediscovering something that the publishing industry and reading instructors have known and understood for centuries.
But I do sorta like their syntactic indentation style. As someone else said, it's a lot like Doctor Seuss.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It seems to me that the problem is not having to go to the next line, creating a less-than-desirable flow... the problem is that while you read "the problem" above, you sort of see "is that while" right below it just because you're not looking directly at it doesn't mean you're not picking it up semi-consciously The REAL solution is very simple... someone write a browser-add on that will allow you to effectively cover up lines above/below the one you're reading. this, obviously, would hinder the ability to read/skim block paragraphs like the way you read the newspaper but it would greatly improve your ability to read longer lines such as those in an essay, where quality goes above quantity and more information is stuffed into less words, requiring a slower and more conscious-demanding reading style.
The fact that you associate the way it's formatted with a completely different kind of written genre (poetry) is a potential confounding factor here. It's possible that your difficulty reading this text (which I share) is just due to unfamiliarity.
Of course, we should all keep in mind that the folks showing us this are trying to sell it to us.
Are you adequate?
Do you really think they have a way of taking written text and figuring out its syntax automatically? And an uncontroversial model of how syntax and prosody interact?
Are you adequate?
Way back in the early '70's, I saw a TV news report about a school teacher in New Jersey, IIRC. This guy had developed a method to get kids to read at literally incredible speeds - way faster than the maximum 40,000 words per minute that the top of the line speed readers could supposedly to. He claimed his school kids could read at half a million to a million words per minute, IIRC.
The TV show was structured in an interesting way. First they would have the teacher describe his method (in general terms, not enough detail to reproduce it exactly). Then they would have a cognitive psychologist explain how it simple was not possible to do it - including issues about how the eye follows text as mentioned in TFA.
At the end, they gave an eight-year-old girl who had been taught the technigue a novel she had never seen before. She flipped through the pages for a few seconds, then recited the gist of the novel - not word for word, but she got the plot correct from beginning to end. They explained that she hadn't read at the top speed the teacher claimed was possible - but she HAD read it at approximately half a million words per minute! WAY past what their cognitive psychologist had said was possible.
Unfortunately I've never been able to track down that method the teacher developed.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Of course your eyes and brain also see the surrounding text. You even see the entire page, with your attention grabbed by keywords and interesting phrases. That increases your speed and comprehension, once you're an experienced reader. Your eyes and brain work in parallel, even if your conscious mind is serializing the text. But you have already processed much of the text before you hear it in your head as sounds.
This story is total bullshit. Slashdot's front page today is just full of pseudoscientific crapola to sell crud, rather than the kind of stuff actually smart people wouldn't just immediately dismiss.
No wonder it's news for "nerds", not "geeks". Geeks might be as antisocial as nerds, but it's because they're too smart for most people. Not just because they never bathe, but don't know why.
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make install -not war
Sorry for not being able to add anything purposeful. All I can say that it works for me (I can read the modified text much easier and faster than the original one). Makes sense too.
It's the small things which make life easier.
Cudos to them.
All the best,
Michael
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Earn money with your photo hobby:
http://microstockmonitor.unfolded.com/
It's a conjuring trick.
The rule is: If someone tells you that they are a magician, or an entertainer of some kind and then they do a conjuring trick, that's entertainment.
If they instead tell you that they're a scientist, or a psychic, or a teacher, or a holy man it means they're actually a scam artist, and you should treat them as such
This is what made Derren Brown uncomfortable about his earlier work after he got famous. He's not Paul Daniels pulling a rabbit out of a hat. No-one comes away thinking Paul Daniels is anything but an entertainer. Derren's work, when he was poor and desperate, trod way over the line into giving the audience the impression that this is 'real' and not just entertainment. There's an interesting two-part interview from soon after his early TV shows where you can see his attitude has changed just in the period between the first and second set of questions. At first he puts aside people who say "Wow, this is real" as basically nutjobs, a minority that wouldn't listen even if he wrote 'This is a magic trick' above the stage. but later he comes back to saying that his disclaimers are more robust than they used to be, he's uncomfortable with fans who ask him to recommend books on NLP and similar techniques that don't really work and that he spends more time telling people that what just happened wasn't real even if he tries to avoid admitting that it's just a trick.
Anyway, I mentioned Derren for a reason. He does this speed memorising trick, he's done it on camera. Take a large book off a shelf, cut to ten minutes later, Derren has finished the book and appears to be able to recite any part of the book from memory. Derren is a magician, I have no idea how the trick is done, but it's just a neat trick not an ability you can learn, even though Derren's patter during the trick might make you think otherwise. Usually serious magicians avoid "obvious" solutions like just lying, but obviously not always - there are lots of Large Object illusions (e.g. making an elephant disappear from inside a covered cage) which just rely on the magician to say that the witnesses behind the cage are "volunteers" when they're actually actors paid to see nothing. It's still not easy (did you ever try moving an elephant quietly?) but the trick isn't anything so clever that you wouldn't think of it.
Newspapers format their text into long narrow columns for this very reason. It minimizes the constant back and forth scanning your eyeballs need to do to read long lines of text. Because of space constraints, they need to pack their columns tightly and in smallish fonts. Imagine if a newspaper was formatted the same way many textbooks and novels are, with the text filling the entire width of the page (sans margins).
.pdf documents it tends to be the worst of both worlds. Even with a 19" widescreen monitor running 1440x900, the full size rendition only shows the top half of the page frequently, which forces you to constantly scroll up and down for documents that are printed in multiple columns. Even though my 19" monitor has a screen size of about 10"x16", the browser window reduces the effective area by about 30% or so. Shrinking the document to fit the entire page on the monitor is just as bad, and can be worse, since it shrinks the fonts to an unreadable size, especially the way the fonts tend to get interpolated.
Online, screen real estate is a flexible commodity, but I find when reading
The only way I can see out of this situation is to have a monitor big and tall enough to display a full-size 8 1/2" x 11" page within the browser window My guess is that it would have to be at least a 23" widescreen to display pages side by side, running a resolution of about 1800x1200.
Our company is grateful for the many, varied, and candid comments that SlashDot readers have posted on this article.
LIVE INK -- AN OPTIONAL TOOL FOR READING ONLINE TEXT. We have developed this technology as a tool, to assist readers of online text -- only if and when they feel they need it. We believe the online medium that is used for text distribution and display can be optimized for the human perception and comprehension of the subject matter represented by the text. Our technology exploits two main attributes of digital text: (i) machine-readability (which allows computer algorithms to analyze the text); (ii) the ability to use more space (and colors) at a relatively low additional cost (compared to paper).
VISUAL-SYNTACTIC FORMATTING. The process, and the cognitive science basis, is as much syntactic as it is visual. Mere typographical adjustments do not extract or display syntactic attributes; indeed, the fact that text is linguistically "inert" is exploited by all typographical conventions and software, which all use mechanical/geometric word-wrap processes to "pour" text into available space as if it were liquid. For our processes, the segmentation and indentation information is driven primarily by syntactic (i.e., grammatical) information extracted from the text itself. However, the ultimate positions of words, phrases and clauses, relative to one another, in the Live Ink format, also involve special computer-generated calculations that aim to construct -- within the small "circle" of visual perception that occurs at each fixation -- spatial cues conveying these syntactic relationships.
This is a software-based tool, and the free trial software is being made available to show that computer-based syntactic algorithms, which are fairly complex, are performing several million computations to analyze and reformat each sentence in real-time. As a tool, it is meant to assist readers if and when they need it: dyslexics might use it for basic information, highly-proficient attorneys might use it only for reading the Federal Register.
ABOUT THE US DEPT OF EDUCATION-FUNDED RESEARCH. The US Department of Education research we conducted involved yearlong, classroom-based, randomized controlled trials, and spanned grades 6-11. Students read e-textbooks that were either in block text or visual-syntactic format (VSF). The passages read were the assigned readings for students' Social Sciences classes. Reading sessions lasted for 25 minutes each, every other school day, and were followed by a short quiz. Testing included nationally standardized reading proficiency tests (in block format) at both the beginning and at the end of the year. During the year, in addition to quizzes, we analyzed students' scores on unit exams (given every 3 weeks) and semester final exams.
STRENGHTHENING STUDENTS' READING POWER, EVEN WHEN GOING BACK TO BLOCK TEXT. The VSF groups not only had better academic scores (reflecting better understanding and retention of the course material), but they also scored better on block-formatted reading proficiency tests: they had become stronger (not weaker) readers across all types of formatting. The size of these gains was equivalent to having 2 to 3 years' worth of growth of reading proficiency in the span of just one academic year. For example, 7th graders had their reading proficiency, on average, rise to the level of 10th graders, (by national averages), whereas the control group only made its expected one-year's worth of reading growth.
These gains are also quantifiable as adding 10 to 15 national percentile ranking points to the test, or more than a full-standard deviation. Interestingly, high-school juniors who were mainstream (and were not taking AP courses, such as the college bound students who were studied separately) added, on average, over 10 percentile points to their college admissions ACT tests, compared to control groups. ESOL students also showed very strong gains, but the impact was not confined to these groups. AP students also h
on the thumbnail example, for a few seconds I thought it wasn't showing the 'after' version - it seemed to look just like some really badly formatted navigation bar.. but, once I did look at it and read it, I thought it was easier to comprehend what was written - kind of more relaxing to red than the block text. Although, I dont think the cruddy jpeg compression helped..
Darwin Hawking Blackmore