Jo Vermeulen

November 11, 2007

Thoughts on speed reading

On Monday afternoon, I participated in a Smart Reading course together with a few colleagues. Although the basic techniques of speed reading were explained, it left me wanting to know more. Since I don’t feel like paying more than a thousand Euros for a full, three-day course, I started to look for some more information on the topic.

If you want more or less the same information that we received in the course, have a look at this excellent overview of speed reading techniques.

For those of you who want to speed read through information on your computer display instead of in books, there is software available that uses the technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to help you read faster. One of these applications is RapidReader. They have a nice video illustrating that reading faster doesn’t significantly hamper your comprehension:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs6CGBlqulk]

There are also some free alternatives, such as Spreeder (an online speed reader) and dictator.

Apparently there is a yearly contest called the World Championship Speed Reading Competition. The current record holder is Sean Adam with 3850 words per minute with comprehension. There were also some famous people in history that could speed read, including Jacques Bergier and USA presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. There are also some claims of a child prodigy that could read more than 400 000 words per minute, but that might be attributed to her photographic memory.

Although a lot of the claims around speed reading are unrealistic and it is surrounded by the typical vagueness of pseudoscience, the idea still intrigues me. I went to the book shop yesterday and found a few books (some exclusively in Dutch, others translated from English) that seem interesting to have a look at. I also included books on Mind mapping since this is the technique used to summarize the books you read. There is another book in English that seems to be recommended by a few people: Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump.

The Dutch books I might have a look are:

Gebruik je hersens Snellezen Mindmappen Gebruik je verstand

November 9, 2007

Going further in geo visualization

I read an article about Everyscape. Everyscape tries to give its users an immersive experience by stitching together a set of panoramic photographs, in contrast with the satellite imagery that is being used by other tools such as Google Earth. I played a bit with the NY demo and was pretty impressed.

Apparently their web-based software is based on the initial software by the founder’s previous company, Mok3. There is a great video that shows a tour through a long hallway at MIT which was constructed of only 20 panoramic photographs. I found another (less impressive) Youtube video of Mok3’s software:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsZj-_E5cSo]

It reminded me a bit of Microsoft’s Photosynth, which was presented at TED this year:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0]

November 7, 2007

Interesting talks coming up

I’m attending two interesting talks this month (together with some colleagues).

Adam Greenfield is coming to Leuven on November 27th. He wrote the book Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing and gave a keynote at Pervasive this year.

Next Monday, I’m going to Living Tomorrow in Vilvoorde for a session on the Internet of Things. I still have to figure out some issues with the registration though.

October 28, 2007

Object recognition with video phones

Andrea Gaggioli blogged about the Pocket Supercomputer by Accenture. The original article was published by NewScientistTech:

Live video footage is fed from the handset to a central server, which rapidly matches on-screen objects to images previously entered into a database. The server then sends find relevant information and sends it back to user (…) The central server uses an algorithm called the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform to match objects. The algorithm uses hundreds or thousands of reference points, corresponding to physical features such as edges, corners or lettering, to find a match. The process works no matter how the object is oriented, but objects must first be carefully imaged and entered into the central database.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkqUjQj8H3M]

This is certainly a step forward compared to RFID and 2D barcodes such as Semacodes or QR codes. It reminded me of Atom tags that could recognize existing logo’s and also used server-side shape analysis and pattern recognition.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_7Yy-zQiRo]

Unlike these two techniques, the existing 2D barcodes are not human-readable.

October 18, 2007

VR: after the hype

Lode wrote in his last post (amongst others) about the fact that the hype of Virtual Reality is over. This doesn’t have to be negative in my opinion. Maybe having a fresh (and more realistic?) view on virtual reality and its possible uses can help.

As a comparison, look at the original promise of artificial intelligence (also called strong AI), versus the current, more realistic view (weak AI). Just as weak AI revived AI’s fortunes, Yvonne Rogers believes that Ubicomp research that enables people to become smart and proactive instead of focusing on a smart environment as in the original vision by Weiser can help bring success to the field.

Speaking of ubiquitous computing, I think that research in ubiquitous computing and more natural forms of interaction can benefit in some part from the previous work in Virtual Reality. Virtual Reality provided a way to interact with a three-dimensional world instead of using the traditional keyboard and mouse (albeit a virtual world), while one of the goals of ubiquitous computing is to interact in a natural way with the real world (which is of course three-dimensional).

Lode also referred to the Reality-Virtuality (RV) Continuum, which I hadn’t heard of yet. It will certainly be interesting to have a look at. I think it all depends on how you define things. Mark Weiser for example referred to ubiquitous computing as the opposite of Virtual Reality, namely embodied virtuality.