We have just finished a study.
The publication still needs some time.
But I can already say in advance that 25% of the subjects get great benefits in the method.
My finding before the study was that 10% of all readers gain an advantage in Bionic Reading.
And 10% is already very much...I find
I like this. I've always had to force jumping down line by line to pick up words if I was trying to speed read, but with the extra highlighting I'm picking them out and jumping almost effortlessly. It's pretty neat.
I'm honestly wondering if this would make me lazy for reading non explicitly partway bolded text.
I am very happy to hear that.
I don't think you will have problems if you can't apply BR. But you will probably find that the "reading pull" is less strong without Bionic Reading.
Just reading the example paragraph, I did feel at times speed was increased, but there were times the highlighted letters caused my brain to assume the wrong word, and when that happened it took extra effort (& time) to focus on the actual word.
Actually this made it harder for me to read. The text felt "bumpy", unlike normal in text where it felt smoother and flowing. Maybe it's just a matter of habit.
Anyways, I don't believe speed-reading to be effective, especially for comprehension and long-term retention. The best and fastest way to get an overview of a written piece is not to read it faster, but to skip most of the content. Most of it is just supporting the core arguments, and can thus be skipped for an overview.
I'd say it almost halves my reading speed. In regards to speed reading I've always been under the impression it means you take in entire lines/sentences in one go rather than reading faster, skipping the sub-vocalisation step. For instance the homepage of HN is a quick scan vertically down the page until a headline catches my eye as interesting, no real side to side eye movement needed unless the title is a bit long
Maybe this brain reading faster than eyes thing is best aimed at sub-vocalisers? I'd be interested in knowing if the people this helps read 'out loud' in their heads
Yes, corobo
that can be that it prevents you from reading. However, I would argue that you are a speed reader.
One test person in the study was also a speed reader. She had read two different texts. Once with and once without bionic reading. But her speed stayed at 800 wpm each time.
But believe me, there are a lot of people who have difficulty with reading. Surely also in your circle of friends. And for some of them Bionic Reading can help.
I felt the same way. It slows me down. But I imagine it would be very useful for dyslexic people. I have a family member who struggles to read; it's as if they have to consciously process what each character means. From that perspective, it's not so much speed reading, but bringing up people with slow reading to normal levels.
I normally have to make a conscious effort to speed read so this is intriguing. I’ve had a lot of success with Edge’s reader mode with verbs and nouns highlighted in different colours.
Thank you for your feedback.
Yes, this version of Bionic Reading is the beginning of the reading mode. Of course there are ways to structure the word types as well as the syllables.
I guess my only argument against these approaches is that I’d like to have a method that works for physical texts as well so practising speed reading seems the most impactful thing.
There's also spreeder on Android in similar spirit which I found useful to read web content. The downside is I have to copy and paste it from the browser
There are many good RSVP apps and browser plugins. I find it better for news or other things I want to skim read, than trying to power through a novel.
Any preferences for plugins and apps these days? I used to use RSVP tech a decade ago in the Windows phone days, but have not seen great modern clients.
Yes, you are right.
The problem with Spritz is that you lose the overview of the text and therefore you can't optimally absorb the context of the content.
Some users have already confirmed this to me.
But the technique is cool...
Yes, that's just me, Renato Casutt. From a small town in Switzerland.
I discovered BR in my studies as a typographic designer.
And I think it's time to show that typography is not just well-designed text pages. There are also ways to make reading easier for other people with reading difficulties (e.g. dyslexia sufferers).
This does indeed seem to work for me, but the repeated emphasis on the patents and trademarks makes me suspicious. It looks like a company who cares much more about patent royalties than about their invention - whom I would never be willing to give my money to. Having seen the principle, I could write a browser extension in an hour. I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the French patent expiry length is), though.
If you want to read the patent (in French), it's here: https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/FR3052587. I couldn't find the German patent (10 2017 112 916.2), but I'm guessing it's the same substance.
Yes, I agree. I guess this technology isn't for everyone. This is a real bummer. They did not have to patent and trademark this method, which in principle is such a basic mechanism. Just had to productize their service really well so they'd take the lead in monetizing.
I am alone and I put all my money, time and work into BR. Visible is only a small part. But I think everyone decides for themselves what is best.
But thank you for the critical feedback.
The only way to use a patent “for good” is to prevent someone else from patenting it and exploiting it.
If you’re serious, then release a copy-left license for the patent (but not necessarily your implementation/product/sdk)
Otherwise, just add your commercial licensing terms to your website already so people aren’t misled into thinking they’ll be able to do anything with this idea unless they pay you.
Plus without a patent it would be very easy to capitalize on this without compensating the guy for all the research and tuning his put into it. I think patents are ideal for new ideas that are super easy to steal/copy, right? Sure Academics working at the bleeding edge should patent for example but they're likely to have a little advantage by being the expert and actually knowing how to do the thing. But in this case the result may look simple but took ingenuity and time to produce just the same.
> I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the French patent expiry length is), though.
Is that how patents work in general?
I always thought (and could be very wrong here) that if a patent exists for something but you've developed an alternative something in total isolation without seeing the patent then you would have free reign on how to design and develop your thing without violating the patent.
The opposite is true, in fact - a patent is a monopoly on the patented technology, no matter where alternative implementations come from. You might be thinking of “clean room” techniques which protect against claims of copyright infringement.
> You might be thinking of “clean room” techniques which protect against claims of copyright infringement.
Ah yes, that's what I was thinking of -- thanks. Specifically a scene from an episode of Halt and Catch Fire (I won't describe it due to spoilers).
That's a real bummer for patents though and makes me wonder how something like Amazon's 1-click checkout was able to be patented. I wonder how "save billing details for future use" can be considered a novel idea.
I believe those scenes were an amalgamation of Tim Paterson’s clean room implementation of DOS from the CP/M manuals [0] and Compaq’s IBM compatible BIOS implementation[1].
They are a some of my favorites, and are fun to watch.
For a long time, software patenting law was famously lax. You could basically patent anything software-related if you knew the right legalese. The situation has apparently gotten better after a 2014 SCOTUS ruling, but in the '90s and '00s it was pretty dire.
> Standards organizations, therefore, often require members disclose and grant licenses to their patents and pending patent applications that cover a standard that the organization is developing.
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_patent
Please not that this is less of a "You have to offer licenses or else" and more of a "Hey please do that."
The rules are more clearly depicted on page 4, with different variations depicted on the pages following that.
Looks fairly straightforward to implement. Until this is more widely available "officially", I'll probably just hack up some Chrome extension for personal use and try it out.
We were taught "speed reading" in my first year of an electronics diploma. This feels very similar. I found speed reading only good for searching through text. Comprehension and memory goes out the window when I try it. If I want to get information in fast text to speech at 4x speed is more effective.
Surprisingly pleasant. I haven't speed read in a while, but this felt better than highlighting text, or centering word on screen (although those work better with audio support, but I guess that could be mixed together).
Few questions:
From what I understand BR figures out 'what part of the word is unique enough to be a good enough approximation of the word'. Is this somewhat context aware or generic (with parameters available for developer)?
This is how I speed read for decades (autodidact); I swoop over the page once with my eyes and then just jump over it more or less like they show here. Allows me to read multiple books per day.
It would be interesting to see what demands this places on the source material.
There's a fair bit of work in say philosophy where for example the concepts being discussed may be things like relationships between things, or things themselves, or being, also unavoidably something that crops up in the actual discussion, you're comparing comparisons or saying that that that thing that is is. You kinda usually have to slow down considerably to break these things down to have any hope of actually understanding them.
The rules implemented are very simple (taken from the patent application [1], the exact numbers are configurable).
If there are <= 3 letters, one letter is bold.
If there are == 4 letters, two letters are bold.
If there are > 4 letters, 40% of all letters are bold.
There is this claim as the first text on the website:
We are happy if as many people as possible can use the advantage of Bionic Reading. For this reason, Bionic Reading should be able to be integrated into existing apps and services. The benefit for the reader should be the main focus.
If that is truly correct, why not publish these 3 rules? Why hide it behind multiple patent applications and trademarks? Why spend all this time and money on patents and an API that probably involve sending all text to some servers, just so that these 3 lines of code can be executed?
Great product that might get lost because of overthinking the business model (say that even as a fellow Swiss). Think the giga-opportunity here is for a chrome extension, releasing it for free or freemium won't interfere with your patent (and if you don't, someone else will, regardless of the legal aspects). Either way, congratulations on this innovation, it's elegant.
Ja ich hatte bereits zwei Browser Extensions (Chrome, Firefox) als Beta-Versionen. Aber die Erkenntnis war, dass sehr viele Websites — da diese ja individuell erstellt werden — keine gute Experience ergab.
Deswegen habe ich mit Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) getestet, wie es am besten nutzbar gemacht werden kann.
Hab aus Fehlern gelernt, aber wir denken dass es viele Entwickler gibt, die BR in ihren Leseprodukten anbieten möchten...
Aber vielleicht liegen wir da ja auch falsch. Man muss es versuchen und dann weitere Erkenntnis daraus ziehen.
The problem is that since you've patented these 3 lines of code, I'm not sure many other can legally write a browser extension for this functionality. I'd like to use this in Safari on iOS, for example, but... I can't.
Clearly these three rules are a fact about human pyschology rather than an invention and should be ineligible for patents. I understand that New Zealand law for example classifies pure software inovation as categorically not being invention. I'm unsure of what hoops you'd have to jump through to take advantage of this fact to release a browser extension for example, but it seems like it should be possible, though code signing and stuff might cause problems.
Thank you very much noeltock.
Yes, I already had two browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) as beta versions. But the finding was that a lot of websites - since they are created individually - did not give a good experience.
That's why I tested with Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) how it can best be used. Learned from mistakes, but we think there are many developers who want to offer BR in their reading products...
But maybe we're wrong about that. You have to try it and then draw further knowledge from it.
A dear greeting from Chur Renato
I came across BR during my studies as a typographic designer.
There was a language problem there.
That's why I realized that reading and listening are completely different.
You can understand a language by listening to it.
But reading the same language does not mean that you can understand it.
No problem, but the second half of my question was genuine.
I can't imagine this working too well with German words ? e.g. how much of Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung, Lebensabschnittpartner or Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän would you need to highlight ?
I don't speak German, but surely with compound words, your concept doesn't work that well ?
Slightly off-topic - while I know that there are these lists of “crazy long German words” to make fun of each one of your examples besides the “Donau..” I actually used normally in conversations in the past.
Even just a couple days ago I came across “Personalisierungsinfrastrukturkomponente“ [0] in a news article, so it is not just a rumor that Germans like long-ass words :)
[0] Apparently these are the devices used by the government to verify passports and / or fingerprints of refugees.
For languages with compound words it looks like you'd need to parse out the sub-words and bold the first few letters of each one. That's doable but now you need language-specific dictionary files etc.
I wonder how bolding more on uniqueness would work? Instead of just first characters.
For instance now THeir and THere will be bolded the same, on a quick glance that can be confusing. (Using caps as HN can't do bold)
Would it increase pattern recognition in the brain if it instead was THeIr and THeRe, or some other variant where the bolding highlights the unique parts of a word compared to other common words?
Well I wrote the idea here, so don't try patent it, hehe.
Haha...nice
The basic problem with reading is that your eye needs a fixed point...that's why they should be "blocks". This one doesn't have to be at the very beginning though ;)
But cool comment Hehe
True. You made me remember a different concept, where words would flash at the same point, but centered around some fixed highlighted character per word.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ky8DP55YEO0
Edit: but thank you for sharing your concept here, very interesting, and I like the discussions it created.
I had an iOS speed-reading app at the time and considered integrating their API because users requested it. Not only would they have required individual users to sign in to their API via my app, IIRC their terms allowed them to track what each user was reading. Naturally I declined. I hope OP’s terms of use are more respecting of user privacy.
I don't really see it that way. Yes, the about link leads to a page where the goal of improving the way people can read is described, but it would be odd to see them say, "and we expect to make money from working on this project".
Each of us is motivated by different goals. I am motivated to have a comfortable life, and I've worked for different companies over time to achieve this. I also find personal satisfaction in helping others so I've occasionally make charitable contributions of time and money, but I don't expect that everyone else is going to make the same choices I have. We don't know the motivation that drove the inventors of this new reading technology. Maybe it was to simply make money for riotous living, but it could be that they have a critically sick partner that needs expensive surgery. These are personal and private choices that I don't feel a need to weigh. Improved reading technology sounds like a good thing for not just the inventor, but for all of us.
When I buy some peaches from a farmer at a stand by the highway, I want the peach more than I want the dollar I have in my pocket. The farmer wants the dollar more than the peach. After I buy the peach we are both better off. I don't need to feel that the farmer is a non-profit farmer. I expect the farmer to be happier after the sale, for otherwise next year he may not even be there for my benefit during peach season. What I do expect, is that the farmer doesn't misrepresent his product, that he doesn't steal my credit card number, that he holds up his side of the bargain; if so, next year, I will be there to buy his peaches again.
I've invented a number of important technologies and benefited from doing so. Some, when I worked for others, ended up being patented. Such is the environment we find ourselves in, but for many of my ideas I chose not to protect them by patents and let these be adopted by standards organizations instead. Personally, I don't think patents are a good fit for software, and I would rather see better use of copyright protection for software or a simpler much shorter patent, say three years for software. The open source software movement has been an amazing gift to humanity, but so has the deluge of products (and peaches) produced for the profit motive.
If we expect everyone to innovate and build useful tools solely out of the goodness of their heart, then we can expect far fewer useful tools & innovations in the future.
I think the opposite is true. Patents are hampering further progress that would built upon the innovation or make use of it to increase productivity. but said progress often is not happening, if the costs of obtaining a license is high, or if first tedious communication has to happen with the author to obtain green light to use his invention. Rapid innovation looks different.
If you innovate without filing a patent, you get a head start. The time the you have until other catch on - that is how you can monetize your invention.
I have mentioned this a few times here already, but I will mention it again, even if I risk looking like a spammer, as it seems this point hans't been made strongly enough in this thread: This discovery is not new.
So I am absolutely against patenting something that is 1) not new 2) that has a very simple implementation and could thus easily be disseminated widely if patents weren't "protecting" it. Reminds me strongly of the various patent wars regarding scrolling on the smartphone and other simple user interface gestures; in the end everyone looses out.
As GP said, the exact numbers are configurable, therefore your simplification may not work. BTW, none of the examples (the first text and all the subsequent variants) on the web site follows exactly these 3 rules, it must be something more.
Looking at the example in one of the apps (Reeder 5) doesn’t work 100% the same as the patent. For example, neumann (a last name) is bolded as NEUMANn the first time it appears and NEUMann the second time it appears.
> If there are > 4 letters, 40% of all letters are bold.
Very cool :)
I would have thought there is also value in bolding the last-x-amount of letters.
I forgot the name of the "concept" but it's been shown that the beginning and ending parts of words are the most "recognizable". You usually see a sample of that on those 'silly-facebook-posts', example:
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg"
I just wish most software were smarter about the speed ups. Naively playing everything X times faster can be weird. Either the pauses are too short, the words spoken too fast, or something. But it should dynamically stretch and squish more, I feel, to make it sound like a person actually speaking faster.
> I have started to watch more videos at > real-time speeds.
I started doing this too.
But mostly because it helps with those videos where the speaker is speaking about an interesting topic but is speaking very slowly, or with large gaps or with many fillers. It helps making the viewing experience much more bearable.
While in general I find that speedreading is mostly for poor content, since our speed of information comprehension is slower than any reading, this seems to be the most effective implementation I've come across.
It might help the website more if the testimonials themselves were in the same way.
I was actually not able to read their example text at all. I had to slow down, to read this slowly word, by word.
I trained myself since my time at university to mark important parts in text (either with text marker in a book or with bold typesetting in a digital text).
I then primarily scan only the bold/colored parts and skip over the non marked parts. So my eye/brain jumped from bold letters to bold letters. As these were not full words, I just had gibberish in my head.
Maybe for the untrained reader this might work. I know that I am just anecdata.
Hi mdp2021
I understand your skepticism. The point is that the reader needs a fixed point to absorb the text. That's why this definition is placed.
As shared in other comments, I unfortunately had to make very bad experiences. And the responsibility I perceive among others Marco (feedback website), I do not want to jeopardize.
But I understand your objections.
How do you decide which letters to highlight? Is it the first half in every case? Did you conduct any trials to see whether this yields the fastest reading speeds?
Are there any actual studies on the gained speed being done by Independent scientists? I could not finde anything on their (quite beautifully done) marketing/landing page.
I see patent registrations, but no mention of any studies underpinning the claims being made.
To me this smells like all the other pseudo-scientific BS marketing and product people are trying to spoon-feed me every day.
Also as said in a sibling comment, for me it killed my reading speed. From their examples I would estimate by about half.
So thanks, but no thanks - this is not an offering for me. But it will probably find its audience. I could imagine it will be a big hit in the self optimization scene.
We have just completed the preliminary study but I cannot publish any results yet.
And you are right, of course. It does not help everyone. That's the way it is. But there is a lot of feedback thanking us and hoping that it will be available to as many services as possible.
I don't doubt that this will help people. I know how it helped me to train myself in the way I read today during my university years.
So as said - there will be people who benefit from this. Still - being an empiricist I just like to see independent and scientifically valid representative studies being done before I believe marketing claims. ;-)
I don't have links to studies but last time I checked and from anecdotal experience reading speed with high comprehension is limited by information throughput in the brain. It's also why languages spoken faster carry less information per word, because the limit is information processing. To experience that if you are a good reader, you can try to speak out loud a sentence while memorizing a second sentence and see that you'll not have process and understand the words until you have spoken them, even if you have read and stored them (short sentences like in TFA, obviously doesn't work on HN).
280 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadMy finding before the study was that 10% of all readers gain an advantage in Bionic Reading. And 10% is already very much...I find
However, not in the form of a font, but in the way of highlighting within the text.
A big advantage of Bionic Reading is that the reading setting can be adjusted individually by each reader. In other words, individual.
I'm honestly wondering if this would make me lazy for reading non explicitly partway bolded text.
And what you have to remember is that your brain has already absorbed the words. So your eye jumps back instead of gliding over the text.
However, this will turn off and you will find that you understand the text without having read every letter.
For example with 'theists', 'the' would be bold by default, but maybe bolding 'th' or 'thei' would result in less confusion.
Anyways, I don't believe speed-reading to be effective, especially for comprehension and long-term retention. The best and fastest way to get an overview of a written piece is not to read it faster, but to skip most of the content. Most of it is just supporting the core arguments, and can thus be skipped for an overview.
Maybe this brain reading faster than eyes thing is best aimed at sub-vocalisers? I'd be interested in knowing if the people this helps read 'out loud' in their heads
One test person in the study was also a speed reader. She had read two different texts. Once with and once without bionic reading. But her speed stayed at 800 wpm each time.
But believe me, there are a lot of people who have difficulty with reading. Surely also in your circle of friends. And for some of them Bionic Reading can help.
The website needs more attention to detail, this typo is one of the first things a visitor sees:
Sorry for the error. My english is not so good. Can you write me the sentence 100% correctly? That would be very kind of you.
(Though I'm not sure if the typo was intentional.)
Mch lk n cn rd wtht vwls.
If you would like, send to me an email (my gmail username is the same as my HN username) and if I spot anything else I'll reply back with corrections.
Its the BR verion1
Best regards from the Swiss Alps, Renato
https://spritz.com/
I think if you want to read a book in a relaxed way, but you have dyslexia (10% of people), then Bionic Reading can help you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9046034
If you want to read the patent (in French), it's here: https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/FR3052587. I couldn't find the German patent (10 2017 112 916.2), but I'm guessing it's the same substance.
Best regards from the Alps Renato
This is amazingly innovative.
We have seen letter switching examples and how the brain will try to fill in the gaps.
This is superbly unique and justifiably a patent and trademark.
The demo works.
The rules may be simple. But as the old boat repairman story says, sometimes you need to know where to hit the hammer.
Please, please don't use this for evil.
Best regards from the Alps Renato
If you’re serious, then release a copy-left license for the patent (but not necessarily your implementation/product/sdk)
Otherwise, just add your commercial licensing terms to your website already so people aren’t misled into thinking they’ll be able to do anything with this idea unless they pay you.
More info detailed at my top-level comment.
Is that how patents work in general?
I always thought (and could be very wrong here) that if a patent exists for something but you've developed an alternative something in total isolation without seeing the patent then you would have free reign on how to design and develop your thing without violating the patent.
Ah yes, that's what I was thinking of -- thanks. Specifically a scene from an episode of Halt and Catch Fire (I won't describe it due to spoilers).
That's a real bummer for patents though and makes me wonder how something like Amazon's 1-click checkout was able to be patented. I wonder how "save billing details for future use" can be considered a novel idea.
They are a some of my favorites, and are fun to watch.
[0] https://dfarq.homeip.net/did-microsoft-steal-dos-from-cpm/
[1] https://dfarq.homeip.net/first-compaq-computer/
For a long time, software patenting law was famously lax. You could basically patent anything software-related if you knew the right legalese. The situation has apparently gotten better after a 2014 SCOTUS ruling, but in the '90s and '00s it was pretty dire.
https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608772/the-battle-against...
> Standards organizations, therefore, often require members disclose and grant licenses to their patents and pending patent applications that cover a standard that the organization is developing. > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_patent
Please not that this is less of a "You have to offer licenses or else" and more of a "Hey please do that."
Looks fairly straightforward to implement. Until this is more widely available "officially", I'll probably just hack up some Chrome extension for personal use and try it out.
𝐖𝐡a𝐭 a𝐛ou𝐭 𝐭𝐡i𝐬 𝐭e𝐱𝐭? 𝐖ou𝐥𝐝 a𝐧y𝐭𝐡i𝐧𝐠 𝐰o𝐫𝐤 𝐛e𝐭𝐭e𝐫 𝐭𝐡a𝐧 𝐬i𝐦𝐩𝐥e 𝐩𝐥ai𝐧 𝐭e𝐱𝐭?
Bionic reading does not have to be learned, it happens intuitively. Because we humans read the way we read.
Few questions:
From what I understand BR figures out 'what part of the word is unique enough to be a good enough approximation of the word'. Is this somewhat context aware or generic (with parameters available for developer)?
How focused are you on iOS?
There's a fair bit of work in say philosophy where for example the concepts being discussed may be things like relationships between things, or things themselves, or being, also unavoidably something that crops up in the actual discussion, you're comparing comparisons or saying that that that thing that is is. You kinda usually have to slow down considerably to break these things down to have any hope of actually understanding them.
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102017112916A1/en
Because money.
With the rules it depends on whether it is short, medium or long words. But in principle it is simple.
As simple as we humans read. Eye - brain - representation products (words)
Ja ich hatte bereits zwei Browser Extensions (Chrome, Firefox) als Beta-Versionen. Aber die Erkenntnis war, dass sehr viele Websites — da diese ja individuell erstellt werden — keine gute Experience ergab.
Deswegen habe ich mit Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) getestet, wie es am besten nutzbar gemacht werden kann. Hab aus Fehlern gelernt, aber wir denken dass es viele Entwickler gibt, die BR in ihren Leseprodukten anbieten möchten...
Aber vielleicht liegen wir da ja auch falsch. Man muss es versuchen und dann weitere Erkenntnis daraus ziehen.
A liaba Gruass us Chur Renato
Thank you very much noeltock. Yes, I already had two browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) as beta versions. But the finding was that a lot of websites - since they are created individually - did not give a good experience. That's why I tested with Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) how it can best be used. Learned from mistakes, but we think there are many developers who want to offer BR in their reading products... But maybe we're wrong about that. You have to try it and then draw further knowledge from it. A dear greeting from Chur Renato
That has to be the most unfortunate choice of wording !
More seriously though, does BR work in your native Swiss German ?
I came across BR during my studies as a typographic designer. There was a language problem there.
That's why I realized that reading and listening are completely different. You can understand a language by listening to it. But reading the same language does not mean that you can understand it.
I can't imagine this working too well with German words ? e.g. how much of Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung, Lebensabschnittpartner or Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän would you need to highlight ?
I don't speak German, but surely with compound words, your concept doesn't work that well ?
Even just a couple days ago I came across “Personalisierungsinfrastrukturkomponente“ [0] in a news article, so it is not just a rumor that Germans like long-ass words :)
[0] Apparently these are the devices used by the government to verify passports and / or fingerprints of refugees.
For instance now THeir and THere will be bolded the same, on a quick glance that can be confusing. (Using caps as HN can't do bold)
Would it increase pattern recognition in the brain if it instead was THeIr and THeRe, or some other variant where the bolding highlights the unique parts of a word compared to other common words?
Well I wrote the idea here, so don't try patent it, hehe.
Edit: but thank you for sharing your concept here, very interesting, and I like the discussions it created.
Each of us is motivated by different goals. I am motivated to have a comfortable life, and I've worked for different companies over time to achieve this. I also find personal satisfaction in helping others so I've occasionally make charitable contributions of time and money, but I don't expect that everyone else is going to make the same choices I have. We don't know the motivation that drove the inventors of this new reading technology. Maybe it was to simply make money for riotous living, but it could be that they have a critically sick partner that needs expensive surgery. These are personal and private choices that I don't feel a need to weigh. Improved reading technology sounds like a good thing for not just the inventor, but for all of us.
When I buy some peaches from a farmer at a stand by the highway, I want the peach more than I want the dollar I have in my pocket. The farmer wants the dollar more than the peach. After I buy the peach we are both better off. I don't need to feel that the farmer is a non-profit farmer. I expect the farmer to be happier after the sale, for otherwise next year he may not even be there for my benefit during peach season. What I do expect, is that the farmer doesn't misrepresent his product, that he doesn't steal my credit card number, that he holds up his side of the bargain; if so, next year, I will be there to buy his peaches again.
I've invented a number of important technologies and benefited from doing so. Some, when I worked for others, ended up being patented. Such is the environment we find ourselves in, but for many of my ideas I chose not to protect them by patents and let these be adopted by standards organizations instead. Personally, I don't think patents are a good fit for software, and I would rather see better use of copyright protection for software or a simpler much shorter patent, say three years for software. The open source software movement has been an amazing gift to humanity, but so has the deluge of products (and peaches) produced for the profit motive.
If you innovate without filing a patent, you get a head start. The time the you have until other catch on - that is how you can monetize your invention.
That’s like Microsoft saying they want as many people as possible to use Azure: no shit
A different company published almost an identical product more than 3 years ago (see https://web.archive.org/web/20190119032121/http://br.craftwo... as well as my top-level comment).
So I am absolutely against patenting something that is 1) not new 2) that has a very simple implementation and could thus easily be disseminated widely if patents weren't "protecting" it. Reminds me strongly of the various patent wars regarding scrolling on the smartphone and other simple user interface gestures; in the end everyone looses out.
Seems like a great use of time.
1 * .4 = .4, 1 bold letter (minimum)
2 * .4 = .8, 1 bold letter
3 * .4 = 1.2, 1 bold letter
4 * .4 = 1.6, 2 bold letters
etc.
Very cool :)
I would have thought there is also value in bolding the last-x-amount of letters.
I forgot the name of the "concept" but it's been shown that the beginning and ending parts of words are the most "recognizable". You usually see a sample of that on those 'silly-facebook-posts', example:
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg"
[1] https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/can-you-read
Depends on the quality of the video but can get at least x1.25 and upto x1.75 without my brain frying.
Instead of reading what if this was text->speech at a multiple?
I started doing this too.
But mostly because it helps with those videos where the speaker is speaking about an interesting topic but is speaking very slowly, or with large gaps or with many fillers. It helps making the viewing experience much more bearable.
It might help the website more if the testimonials themselves were in the same way.
I trained myself since my time at university to mark important parts in text (either with text marker in a book or with bold typesetting in a digital text).
I then primarily scan only the bold/colored parts and skip over the non marked parts. So my eye/brain jumped from bold letters to bold letters. As these were not full words, I just had gibberish in my head.
Maybe for the untrained reader this might work. I know that I am just anecdata.
Best regards from the Alps Renato
Is there an app that can 'un-bolden' letters so I can slow my brain back down.
I see patent registrations, but no mention of any studies underpinning the claims being made.
To me this smells like all the other pseudo-scientific BS marketing and product people are trying to spoon-feed me every day.
Also as said in a sibling comment, for me it killed my reading speed. From their examples I would estimate by about half.
So thanks, but no thanks - this is not an offering for me. But it will probably find its audience. I could imagine it will be a big hit in the self optimization scene.
So as said - there will be people who benefit from this. Still - being an empiricist I just like to see independent and scientifically valid representative studies being done before I believe marketing claims. ;-)
The rules seems to be simple, so i don't know if somebody uses an api for that.