VentureBeat

Are you sold? Will we see Live Ink's technology applied to VentureBeat soon?

Can I
get funding
if I start writing

Everything like this

too?

Lee, the company will probably offer it to sites like VentureBeat, who would then offer it as an unobtrusive option to their readers. Readers would click on a small feather icon (part of the logo of Live Ink) and then a screen would pop up with the text in Live Ink. I doubt any site would try to force it down readers' throats. The company says they're still considering different models for this. One option is to offer it for free to sites and support it with Google Adwords.

Hmmm
who knows

You might as well
get sued for patent infringement
or copyright claims

". . .also uploading characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line we’re reading."

"Uploading"? Mis-applying technical words to sound cutting edge? The editor should be fired for allowing this through or for making it that way, whichever was the case.

What about speed readers who can read not in words, but in whole lines? This wouldn't be of any use for them. I mean, if your eyes "feed" your brain the characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line you're reading, you might be able to memorize them instead of ignoring.

This could wipe out half of the poetry industry.

Thank you. I really have problems concentrating on text sometimes. My mind jumps around being interrupted by other words on the page. I find this way of reading to be really relaxing and easy. I hope Live Ink spreads.

I find it interesting. It feels more like Japanese or Chinese. Words in those languages are broken up into blocks (or straw-like circles if you like) instead of words which vary in length, as they do in English. I find it especially easy to read Chinese in vertical formatting. Hmmmm....

Hahaha...that is such a ridiculous idea...the good thing about block text is that it condences text down so it takes up less space. "Live Ink" would make text take up so much space, this page alone would be miles long!...if you really have a problem reading text, hold down CTRL and scroll down on your mouse --> WOW, the text is bigger!

gg nbs

The problem is that their solution does not actually solve the problem but makes it worse. My eyes wander all over the place on the reformatted block of text. It is simply not easier to read. Sorry...

I think the real reason people may be having trouble reading online is a white screen with black lettering. This could also be the case with book reading (of course here it would be a cost issue).

I would love to see the stats behind their research. Does anyone know where to get them?

i think that
e. e. cummings
already has
the patent

So the fact that you're not used to one sample block of text makes you the authority in refuting them? Oh but also without any research you are able to offer an alternative "real reason".

Since they have a commercial interest, they might not release their research.

Actually, I was rather impressed. While not a speed reader per se, I am fast reader, but I found the sample paragraph easier to read and comprehend when reformatted. It does look odd, but I suspect that is something you would get used to.

I do have some concern about the breaking down of complex syntax into simpler syntax; hopefully that feature can be turned off as an option.

Instead of 'page up' and 'page down' keys for navigating through long passages, we would need something new. Perhaps continuous scrolling, with a pressure sensitive button that would control the speed and direction of the scrolling. There would also need to be a new approach to illustrations. Perhaps they could be displayed alongside the text as long as the text is relevant to that illustration.

In any case, if this is successful, we're going reading text on computers in a way very different from the way we've been.

-- Bill

As someone who's been clocked at >1000 words per minute, I can tell you that no speed reader ever reads more than one line at a time. Anyone who says so is lying.

The key to speed reading is content priming. When you anticipate what the next word is going to be, based on your experience reading, your knowledge of the material, and your mastery of the language, you can read it and move on a lot faster than normal.

I love how the "before" picture is a lot blurrier than the "after" picture.

This may be OK for half illiterate people. For people who read fast, the idea of reformatting the text is laughable. It took me 2 seconds to read the left paragraph and 10 seconds to read the improved version on the right. It seems to me that technology lately is making people "stupider and stupider", as they simply don't want to be human anymore, i.e. to use their brains. The exagerated dependence of technology will ultimately annihilate our civilization as we experience it today.
Ŝainas esti ja nia sorto kaj malmulte fareblas.

Someone's got to say this - it's a bit like reading haiku.

I was really surprised at how much faster I could read the right hand side. I can see this leading to using fewer (but more efficient) words to convey information. no one will want to read an article if it's the size of a novel. =)

Everyone crack open your dictionaries and thesauri.

So basically
they are patenting
the annoying
way that
some
people send
IM's?

Programmers have been coding in this format forever -- And for the same reason, readability.
While it's great this will be applied in other mediums, it's not exactly new. At least, not to a computer dork.

This may be interesting, there may be some truth to it... but it will never catch on.

Reminds me of Twain's "Simplified Alphabet". Interesting, but it never caught on.

Well, at least, now college kids who drink too much and study too little will have a new excuse to blame for their piss poor performance. "It's not me!! It's my brain!!" :-P

Congrats on the idea, it is interesting... but it will never catch on.

Yikes!

I've been writing email
this way

for at least two years

Heck, that's the way I
have been writing for years!

I claim PRIOR ART!

(Seriously!)

I think I noticed someone mentioning using this method for print media, and that got me thinking...

Let's think for a bit here. What if this were to apply to print media? Well, then we would become quite frustrated with it. I would hate to read a novel that was 300 pages but now is 3000 pages long (I can't imagine how long War and Peace would be), involved a page turn every five seconds, and threatened me with a hernia every time I carried it around. As well, if every book were to be printed in Live Ink format, we would require ten times more storage space, at least. Your typical two story public library would become a massive ten-story monstrosity and we'd require carts to carry our books around. I don't know about you, but when I read a novel for enjoyment, I like curling up with a six by four by two inch 1lb paperback and settling in for a good long reading session. In fact, when I'm INTERESTED in what I'm reading, I get quite focussed on what I'm reading and I don't get distracted by the lines above or below (I sometimes cheat and look on the next page to see what happens, but that's besides the point). Therefore, I would say that this kind of thing (Live Ink) is only suited for online, or screen-printed media. As soon as you start printing it out, it becomes cumbersome, and only useful as a teaching tool.

So, when can we
expect the
Firefox Plugin?

I find it interesting that the "Live Ink" style is almost exactly what is commonly used in advertising.

Did anyone else notice that? Go look at a lot of marketing and promotional materials.

You'll see this style present in much of it.

- Saj

Different people, read (see) things differently. Some folks read block text just fine, others may find this 'poetry format' more helpful. For some, a little text zoom will be useful, for others a change in color. Local CSS can be helpful in many cases. Live ink is really nothing special, and carries a dubious name. There is however nothing "wrong" with its existence. It shall now be duplicated by others.

So basically
everybody can now write
in haiku form

This is annoying to read, but it's true re: how our eyes/brain read, so by breaking a sentence down into the three lines you can read the whole thing with one glance instead of having your eyes do the left-to-right across the entire page. I think it will catch on, if you want to skim news quickly in the morning. But I don't think I'd be able to read an entire on-screen book in haiku...

I don't think the process
of writing like this
is patentable.

However, a specific process
and algorithm
to scan and reformat
some existing text
automatically,
respecting the language's grammar
and sentence structure
so to make it easier to understand.

That's a very different thing.

I made a software
10 Years ago
that formats sentences to be read
just as a poem should.

This software was sold and therefore,
It's prior work...
Copyright laws
exists.

It was noted that the text on the left was blurrier than the "after" text. But it's even worse than that --- they use entirely different fonts. One has serifs, the other doesn't.

There may be something to this approach, or maybe not. To find out, you have to do a fair test. This is completely un-scientific!

In essence, they are creating a technology to help people with short attention spans. Ever since the invention of the manuscripts, text has been represented in blocks. Yet, we still had a multitude of brilliant academic minds come through the ages. Live Ink might have a good idea, but there's other alternatives (See IEEE Spectrum article on Text) for improving readability and comprehension.

Eugene: As someone who has been clocked at over 10kwpm, sustained, with >85% retention, I can say you're quite off your rocker. (I feel positively poky at my current speed of ~2k.) Train your brain to let the words flow in and be assembled ad hoc, and you'll triple your speed. I don't read linearly, unless it's fiction. Instead, my eyes make a series of figure eights down the page, reading backwards and forwards, up and down, all at once. Consciously, I get a summary. Subconsciously, it all gets hooked into the framework that the summary creates. I find that I can answer questions on the material I didn't realize I read.

Don't try and read more than one line at a time, try and read more than one *paragraph* at a time, and you'll find your reading speed jumps appreciably.

LiveInk looks like an attempt to create the same sort of broken phrase digestion, but in linear form. It becomes easier to have semantic blocks pre-determined for the reader, so while they are reading they get cues as to how items are related, both within and between sentences. Nice. Not sure if it's going to revolutionize online reading, but it's certainly a nice bit of work in semantic analysis and leveraging how we organize incoming data.

I think the text on the left is hard to read due to its font size and style and excessive blurring compared to the image on the right.

I had no idea
that
free-form beat
poetry
was
easy to
read

Wow, Different fonts are easier to read, what a breakTHROUGH...

Hmm... I agree with Dallin.

Yes, the right side reads easier and quicker than the left side. However the first thing i noticed was that the left side actually read much more difficult than i am used to.

Just look at it. They actually maimed the text on the left side! First off it has a different font. One that is difficult to read actually. Also it is mostly italic, which is almays more difficult to read. Then it is somewhat blurred, making reading it even more tiresome. And if you zoom in on the picture, you see that it is full of artifacts, probably the due to the compression used. For the font on the left side, this seems to have much more impact than the right side. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Now for the killer: They use the same font in the 'Source' line below the comparison... Just look at it... hey... they forgot to maim that part! And it seems much more readable at once! They actually give themselves away there...

Maybe they are on to something, but I guess they just had to make it more beuatiful than it actually is. A shame...

Line height and font size (whitespace) - that is what makes things easier to digest visually.

It REMINDS me
of NOTHING so MUCH
as Doctor SEUSS

I agree... A Firefox extension is definitely warranted for this. A button on the tool bar to reformat the text for easier readability would be perfect.

But I really see this being useful on mobile technology more than anything.

I agree the example in this article is bias, but click the link in the paragraph below where is says "A more detailed". And for all the people who are just hitting a return after they typed a couple words are missing the point of the article. It doesn't say put 3 words on each line, it says your eyes pick up the line above and below that is why they offset the lines.

I agree with the comment on font-size and whitespace. Our eyes don't have any problem moving from left to right, so whitespace between lines would help to reduce that peripheral information. Teachers have required their students to do this for years now, as reading 80-100 cramped essays in a single sitting would be hellish without it.

Personally, I find myself trained to 'break' at the end of a line, even when the line is a sentence fragment. I think it would take a good deal of training and de-programming to make the live-ink formatting not seem broken and distracting for me.

I love it!

It's the indentation that draws the eyes.

Bring it on. Online media can be miles long, bcause there is no length, its perceived. Why build support structures in 3d space? Why worry about the length of a non-existent "page"?

-AC

They required $400,000 in grants from the DOE to figure out that the eye's focal area is larger than one line of text?

Speed reading techniques have been around for years that rely on this: you deliberately scan across several lines at once to get the whole image in your brain, and then your brain starts processing the lines you just eyed while you start scanning the next set of lines. It takes a bit of mental reshuffling to pull this off but it's much faster than deliberately crippling yourself.

This might work for some people but for me the example just doesn't read naturally. I tend to read as if the words are spoken, though slightly faster, so my mind automatically inserts a pause at the end of each sentence fragment and that is far more distracting than words or sentences I am not currently focused on. Maybe their experimental ground consisted of people that A) do not regularly read text on the computer and B) a bunch of kids with Attention Deficit Disorder

I thought it was very good. I know exactly what they mean with other words distracting your focus if you want to call it that. Especially when I'm tired. And I'm tired as all hell right now. I was still able to let my absorb the entire sentence very fast now. I would pay for a reader that can format text in this way. It would save me a lot of headaches. Well done!

The "Powerpointing" of America.

Reduce all complex thought to bullet points. Content doesn't matter, does it?

Completely crazy. Of course less text is easier to read. And of course if you colour by part of speech it's easier to read. But look what you've done. You've destroyed aesthetic formatting, you've required at least two additional colours, and you require crazy amounts of space in very odd shapes.

Incidentally, this is nothing new. Three words come to mind:

"See Spot run."

When you learn to read PROPERLY, you do not read word by word, but process whole blocks of visible information, sometimes including a whole page. However, recent reading programs used to teach in schools in the UK, US and other places, have had the specific goal of teaching people to read in an incorrect way, reducing the ability of those people to aquire knowledge in the future. Now we have these idiots at Live Ink attempting to push the meme that the wrong (and horribly inefficient) way of reading should be formalised by adopting formatting patterns that make it impossible for those that read properly to benefit from their skills.

One should understand that those that never learnt to escape the "sounding out" method of reading do not realise what they are missing, anymore than a person with colour-blindness understands what a person with full eye function perceives every time they see an image.

So if the Live Ink examples seem to be improving your reading skills, understand that this proves that you suffer from a type of "reading-blindness", but unlike colour-blindness, this is unlikely to be a mechanical deficiency in your brain. Understand that millions of people like myself read by the "pattern shape" of the words, not by the "sounds" and as such "see" every word on the page at the same time. Now this is not the same as comprehending the meaning of every sentence at that moment of first seeing, but not having to work to recognise any given word means that subsequent reading for meaning occurs at a vastly enhanced rate.

Live Ink formatting has the effect of speed-bumps in the road for cars. No effect on the electric-powered granny vehicles that only travel at 10MPH anyway, but forces all other vehicles to slow down to that speed as well.

Note that reading properly is NOT the same thing as so-called speed-reading. Proper speed reading is based on selectively ignoring information in the written text, using various methods to focus only on the valuable content.

Proper reading allows the same level of complete comprehension as "sound out" reading, but at vastly greater speeds, and more importantly with far higher confidence.

In the old days slaves were often denied the right to read and write. Today the trick is modified to give the children of targetted populations significantly inferior language skills. Live Ink is simply trying to capitalise on this.

I think this company is doing readers everywhere a huge disservice. Ouch. Are people getting so stupid that they can't read something if it's not chopped up into tiny little pieces for them? And what's with the irritating red highlighting? Maybe as an ESL reading tool it can be useful but I would hate to see this become a standard. If people stop watching 8 hours of television a day from age 2 to 20, you develop brain circuitry that can read ALL the lines in that blurred circle (this is how speed reading works) and absorb it. The brain needs to be stimulated in order to develop the right pathways. This is the reverse. Pretty soon they'll have to have little words that come zipping in from the right and left margins for anyone to see that they're there. How about a computer program that actually makes it harder to read...so that regular reading seems like a breeze by comparison? Let's experiment and see how overall reading improves if people are given a chapter of Toqueville at 8pt font (properly blurry, as is the left side 'example') in dark light...and see what happens for an hour. Then give them a regular novel or newspaper and good light. I bet people would find they're able to read the latter just fine. They wouldn't feel "tired." They'd be like, "Wow! Now this is _reading_ in style!!" All because they've been challenged to USE their brain instead of _not_ use it. This method of word placement is like saying, "Oh, we've got a crime problem? Let's reduce crime rates my calling some crimes 'disturbances' instead." You're not improving reading rates. You're giving people less challenging work. People already assume they'll never make heads or tail out of Shakespeare or Dickens. Now we're going to ensure that their eyes go glassy if things are shaped like a paragraph? Great. Just great.

It's a freakin' haiku! How do you make money off of that?

I'm a very fast reader, could read any English word by the time I was five, and I DON'T see the lines of text above or below the one I'm actually looking at. They don't even occur to me, and I had never even thought about this before. I can SEE that there are lines of text above and below the line I'm reading, but I can only read the text there by thinking really hard about what I'm doing - i.e. I've never done it before, my mind isn't TRYING to read it, because there is no reason to.

This won't improve 'literacy' rates either: people who are good readers are only good because we recognise that words are made of smaller parts called phonemes, whereas poor readers (or so-called 'dyslexics') have unfortunately not been taught this code, and try to memorise every single word as a picture of the word itself, with little idea of what phonemes are within it. Imagine trying to memorise 1,000 Chinese characters. Then try memorising 100,000 Chinese characters (there aren't that many, only about 2,000, but this is what every so-called 'dyslexic' reader has to do - memorise EVERY SINGLE word as a picture of the word. No wonder they have problems reading.)
Read the book "Why children can't read" for a full explanation. It's a worldwide scandal that a minority of stubborn idiots are still refusing to even investigate the REAL cause of poor reading, thus literally destroying the lives of millions of people who will never live up to their potential.

This 'Live Ink' stinks. It's worse than useless, and it avoids the REAL cause of the problem.

might be nice without the color option

Reading is contextual so it requires reading the so called superfluous material mentioned. Walker apparently has done no reading on reading - its called thinking through a straw.

This is stupid. Block text lets you scan quickly while this scattered mess has to be searched-for almost consciously. It's more difficult and it's slower.

This is not so new. The book "As the Future Catches You" was laid out like this. It's a sufficiently good book that you don't mind all the "extra" white space.

http://www.amazon.com/As-Future-Catches-You-Gen...

So the propagandist John Salmon uses racism to advance his argument.

QUOTE "Then try memorising 100,000 Chinese characters (there aren’t that many, only about 2,000, but this is what every so-called ‘dyslexic’ reader has to do - memorise EVERY SINGLE word as a picture of the word. No wonder they have problems reading.)"

I guess I must have imagined all those chinese doctors, engineers and mathematicians, including the ones I went to university with.

Ever day Mr Salmon must curse his brain for recognising every object within his vision by using its inherent parallel processing functions. Why? Because Salmon states that he only desires to see that which he is focusing explicitly on, and that anything else must only be seen by "thinking really hard about what I’m doing".

The book “Why children can’t read” deserves the same place in history as all the similarly motivated tomes on the subject of "why slaves must never be taught to read and write".

Mr Salmon boasts of his reading skills, but this is no different from the skills shown by a person using their feet to replace their missing arms. Yes, they can do almost everything I can do, but the effort and dedication required to match me is of a level they would never have volunteered for if they had a choice of having arms instead. In other words, an insane amount on effort can sometimes make a bad method appear to match a correct one.

Salmon pushes the "sound out" method of reading precisely because it maximises the chances that kids from poorer backgrounds will give up on formal education at a grade when enhanced reading skills matter.

The proper way to read is basically the same as the method we use to think, or see. Our brain is highly optimised to be a pattern recognising machine. "Sounding out" kills the brain's ability to leverage its parallel processing , because the brain mostly serialises sounds.

In reality, Salmon is a "colour-blind" person telling us that there is no point seeing in full colour, and that we should remove this ability from all future children.

QUOTE "whereas poor readers (or so-called ‘dyslexics’)". ??? Dyslexia is a synonym for "poor reading"? If Salmon had ANY reading comprehension skills, he would understand the difference between a synonym and a "member of a class". Most poor readers are people who were not taught to read properly. Dyslexia ia a pattern processing disorder that MAY effect reading and/or writing, or neither. In the worst case, SOME dyslexics may benefit from special teaching methods, but this is hardly an excuse to make the rest of the population suffer inappropriate teaching.

It should not be hard to design websites who offer content with both types of reading text online.

To JK and John Salmon:

Taking potshots at people with legitimate disabilities is just plain ignorant.

Some cultures read right to left, others read up down. This doesn't make them any less intelligent or less attentive -- it only shows they are adhering to the current social language contract.

There are a near infinite number of ways that an embryo can be mutated or otherwise become abnormal during development; legitimate disabilities are not laziness.

Certainly there are people who do take advantage and act as if they are disabled when they are not, but they are not the same as people who actually have disabilities.

The research as a result of this study confirms the use of flash cards for study aids as well -- shorter pieces of information for retaining memory. The lines above and below a line of text are periphery. It only makes sense that our best snapshot of vision is one most suited toward the way our eyes work.

want to see some real slick new reading technology that blows this stuff away, check out my website:

http://book-bot.com

Really didn't their own study just conclude



that the lines have to be farther away



in order for them to be easier to read?



Is it just me or did they take a simple finding



and make it sound really complicated



just to make a profit?

there's a reason they don't do haiku and limericks in the newspaper. Anyone who can read a line at a time has no use for this gimmick.

What a shameless exercise in flawed logic. If the reading eye is distracted by the lines above and below, why not just triple space everything in short blocks?



It would look something


this - maybe it would really


work. Looks a bit annoying,


though. Maybe we should just


be happy with our current



reading efficiency?

Oh, such a nice fair test too: The sample they put the "old way" on black text on a white background, and the "new way" with different background colors and font.

Add to that the image is in what's called "JPEG" format, which is designed to represent photos nicely, but is well-known in information technology and graphic design to be terrible for representing high contrast and regular structures like (you guessed it) written text. Look carefully at that text on the left. Doesn't it look a bit fuzzy? That's called artifacts.
The colored background on the new-style text helps to cut down on this effect.

Color me ever so skeptical until I see some research confirming this from someone not trying to make money off of it.

I thought it was easier to read the text on the right. They should provide more examples though. This could just be a special case.

Comparing two fundamentally different writing systems is hardly "racism." Such inflammatory nonsense is hardly conducive to civil discourse. It is easier to teach a child a phonetic mode of writing. With the latin alphabet as an example, said child only has to learn 26 characters. (Give or take depending on the language in question, it also may require learning additional phonetic rules.) With this base of knowledge, the person can then read any word he knows. It also makes it easier to discover the meaning of words unknown. Pattern recognition develops with experience. I would hazard a guess that television and similar forms of entertainment are more to blame for poor literacy than methods of teaching children to read. Those who enjoy, and spend a significant amount of time, reading train their brain to recognize the patterns in their written language.

Mr. Salmon did not imply that the Chinese were somehow less intelligent or capable due to their writing system, only that it is less efficient. I would add to that that it is only less efficient when beginning to learn, when each symbol must be memorized without phonetic reference. (2,000 characters would actually be only basic literacy in Chinese. When taking into account specialized vocabulary, the number would be many times that.) Once a certain level of mastery has been achieved, the pattern matching ability you esteem so highly takes over and the differences between the writing systems even out.

it appears to me that quite a bit of thought has gone into this, certainly far more then "let us reformat everything like a poem". The colours play a major role. Words in the same sentence are a different colour in order for the eye to only concentrate on what it's reading (notice how when you are reading a magenta word in one of the paragraphs the other magenta words stand out, the black do not, and vice versa). The same can be said for the paragraphs, by changing background colours you are essentially locking in a persons attention to that particular space.
Smart.
If there are genuine studies showing a 10-15% retention on tests, well that's just brilliant!
I'd be happy to test this out for myself for a few months and see how I went, 10% is a huge amount when it comes to a test.

All you people who claim to know more about this than the researchers should read the more detailed article linked to in this story. Otherwise you have no room to criticize.

I must say that it does make the text much easier and faster to read. Suprising but positive.

Countdown till we see an emacs major mode and a Greasemonkey script for this.

For sneaking this into a real-world application, I suspect you can get most of the benefit of this effect by organizing text into narrower columns and using double or triple line spacing.

timeless

ly this
(merely and whose
not

numerable leaves are

fall
i
ng)he

lift
ing against the
shrieking

sky such one

ness as
con
founds

all itcreating winds

The verbs are the words colored magenta. Also, this system works in varying degrees for different people. Younger people obviously will find it more agreeable. Although the text takes up a lot more space, that can be circumvented. I personally like this system, as I can read a lot faster and more relaxed.

This is crazy... Even if it's easier to read, it's not prictical in print or on screen. In print, a book would be too large to carry, and on screen you would have to SCROLL SO MUCH more that the amount of time it would take you to find the line you were on would negate any benefit.

I found this example given to definitely work. perhaps it works better for some than others but i definitely noticed this made it exceptionally easier for me to read the given text with their example. Exceptionally. I am very surprised and happy about this development, personally I would like to know how I can get that working in my browser on any website content I have to read straight away. I find it very difficult to read large amounts of text online especially instructions and manuals which I often have to do - I'm always zooming in and squinting - this really made a difference, it was fast, and pleasant to read! Amazing. I would like to try it out with a larger a mount of text to see how it fares over time, but, for now, this is a really cool invention!

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.liveink.com Port 80


That's not too hard to read....

"bill: ...but I found the sample paragraph easier to read and comprehend when reformatted."

I would say they used a basic trick in their sample. I would assume that you would read the paragraphs in the order they appear on the page. Since they are identical, and you are reading the block text first, i think it's safe to presume your brain has already comprehended the majority of the content in the first paragraph, making it MUCH easier to read their version regardless of formatting. just a thought--

-RPC

Ryan you are so right!

After scanning the comments,

I notice I only read

the ones
broken into short lines.

Interesting.

That 'after' sample was a real pain for me to read. Some commenters reported the opposite, so I'll try to give you some idea why I say that. To start, look at the first sentence of the 'before' text:

"Most cells are so small that they can't be seen by the naked eye."

It's on one line, of reasonable length, and all its words are short and common. I would wager that *anything* matching those criteria can be taken in whole at a glance. I know I had this sentence finished before I had even moved my eyes to the first paragraph to begin reading!

And how did this sentence fare under Live Ink? Well... First, I had nothing just coming to me at a glance. I couldn't take anything in whole because *there is no whole*! They've insured that I'm faced with nothing but a series of fragments, none of which are enough to convey meaning on their own.

"Most cells are so small" is indefinite on its own. It gives me so little that I have to keep it in mind as I move on to the next fragment. (Reading has now become string building!)

"they can't be seen"

Ok. I guess I can combine these two fragments right now into a clause.

"Most cells are so small they can't be seen"

But this is still a clause, not a sentence, and the final meaning can still surprise me. A work in progress, I've got to keep this clause in mind as I read on.

"by the naked eye."

Ah. It's finished. Combining the clause I've been keeping at the tip of my brain with this ending I've just got: "Most cells are so small they can't be seen by the naked eye."

Though the sentence is finished, *I'm* not. This process of taking in meaningless, indefinite fragments and holding onto them to build up this final product... it's left me unsure. So I read the sentence a second time.

This pattern continues, virtually unchanged, through the sample text. The 'after' example forces on me conscious, laborious, low-level details of mental reconstruction rather than letting me just read.

Of course, this is just my first paragraph-gone-LiveInk. (A learning curve?) I would love to try some more examples but their site's been slashdotted. If I'm simply doing this wrong, can someone describe what I *should* be doing? It would be appreciated.

DeSelby, for more samples, you can poke around where I found the sample for the story - http://www.hrw.com/liveink/ Click on FREE DEMO and then follow the instructions to see Live Ink translations.

BTW, several posts here have commented about the artifacts in the image when you click the thumbnail. Those are from me when I merged the two images into one. Visit the HRW link above for more representative experience.

Mongrel wrote: "All you people who claim to know more about this than the researchers should read the more detailed article linked to in this story. Otherwise you have no room to criticize."

I read the more detailed article and I'm still not impressed. Their first demonstration, for example, is of a block of closely spaced text that's also a run-on sentence! OF COURSE it would help to add carriage returns and space things out more.

Would their version be best if they were comparing it to a block of text that was:
1) not in some archaic, out-of-use, pre-1900s form of English
2) not using a bold, closely space font
3) not full of run-on sentences

Hard to say... as they never seem to choose such examples.

Perhaps this research only holds merit for reading badly-written and/or badly-formatted material.

so this is why poetry is successful! ;)

Uhmm.. Learn to read four lines at a time. There is a great book called "Rapid Reading" that explains how to do it. Bumped my reading speed from average 150wpm to average 740wpm with full comprehension.

The trick? Read more than one line at a time. This is not a formatting problem. This is a problem with how our system teaches reading and rarely, if ever, teaches people advanced reading techniques after sixth grade.

This is why papers in school have always been 1.5 or double-spaced -- for readability. But for newspapers, journals, and other mediums, space is the issue, not readability. Sure, there are LOTS of ways to make text more readable (fonts, size, kerning, etc). But this crap is like reading Bottom Line -- OK (but JUST OK) for headlines, but useless for real communication, since it throws out information.

Oh my God! You naysayers are overreacting. I have had the privilege of obtaining a CD rom of 100 classics in Live Ink. Though I am a Professor at the U of Minnesota - I have always been a slow reader. It took me some time to get used to this Live Ink format. But now I find I can read an entire novel in a couple of hours - Huck Finn last night - where before it would have taken me the better part of a week.

This is so cool that time flies when you are reading. It also makes one feel some sort of pleasure as the eyes go down the page - kind of like downhill skiing.

Stash

I did this ten years ago with all of my notes. I should have patented it then. But it is nice to see experts now agree with me.

This is a great idea, but how will it be applied to the myriad of already existing text on the web? (in terms of licensing fees?)
The fact that poets have used it as an effect for quite a long time is a bit ironic too ;)

Our company is grateful for the many, varied, and candid comments that VentureBeat and 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. The text is not otherwise edited and none of the words in the text are removed or changed.

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 in reading proficiency in the span of just one academic year. For example, 7th graders in the VSF group had their reading proficiency, on average, rise to the level of 10th graders, (by national averages), whereas the 7th graders in 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 had increased scores (when tested for comprehension of the college textbooks they were using in their high school's AP History classes).

To use the words of one of the SlashDot commenters, we really did "reformat the brain" not just the type-setting; the method, for these students, strengthened their capacity to recognize phrase and clause structures, and to appreciate the hierarchical nature of sentence grammar.

MORE DATA AVAILABLE ON REQUEST. The Reading Online article (link at our website) summarized data from college and 9th grade students. We also presented the data for the other grades (which were similar to the 9th grade results) to the National Educational Computing Conference at Philadelphia in 2005. We can email a copy of this report to anyone who asks for it at: info@liveink.com.

One commenter felt that our sample sentence in the Reading Online article was a "badly written, run-on sentence" -- it is the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. There have been many informative and considerate comments. We welcome this exposure and feedback.

THANK YOU AGAIN,
The Reading Research Team at Live Ink
www.liveink.com
info@liveink.com

Is it just me or does this reprocessed text look like haiku?

1. Yes, it LOOKS like haiku. No, it is not. It is obvious from even a glance at their examples that the sentences are broken down and situated according to component and literary purpose.

All of
you
trying to be
clever simply by chopping
up sentences have
completely
missed the
point.

2. Most of the dismissive comments seem to be from snobbish "power readers." While I've never been clocked, I read voraciously. I'm accustomed and trained to read text in blocks, but I'm intrigued by ways to possibly read faster, and gladly entertain the educational gains it may provide for students. (Off the top of my head, a similar example might be the backlash to independent-handed ergonomically designed keyboards from 'traditional typists.' Yet those typists rave about the improvements the keyboards have made in their typing speed and ease).

3. To many above: how is any of this "dumbing down" reading, or "lazy" education? As several other commenters noted, they've similar approaches have been used for years for notetaking, coding, legal documentation, etc. How does this method (which relies heavily on principles of sentence diagramming) make reading lazy or dumb?!

4. Directly related, while they are a for profit company, they are pushing their product on what appears to be quite solid research. Don’t dismiss extensive research with flippant claims of your own: “It sure looks dumb! So I dun think it makes kids more dumber.”

5. Yes, the formatting is different, and shame on LiveInk for allowing themselves to be criticized so easily by submitting that as their example. But shame on you commenters for immediate dismissal without more investigation because of those simple facts. I quickly retyped their example keeping all variables the same (font size, white space, color, etc). And the LiveInk IS easier to read.

As a language educator and enthusiastic online reader myself (I spend at least 3-4 hours reading material online every day), I think LiveInk is a very exciting development. I can't wait to see what comes of it both for education purposes, and for online reading and comprehension. I imagine that LiveInk, or similar methods, will quickly become the de facto standard for bloggers and others who spend most of their time reading online (like me) to quickly parse information. And maybe it’ll progress to be an online reading standard in the near future.

I forgot to add:

I also reformatted the plain text with improvement variables (larger font, wider kerning, line space, etc), and while it improved speed over the original text, LiveInk was still easier and quicker to read.

I have a degree in Digital Media Arts with a Graphic Design minor. LiveInk has incorporated these principles along with their sentence diagramming to make what I imagine to be the easiest and quickest text to read.

(Btw, there is still significant debate about whether serif or sans-serif fonts lend themselves better to easier/quicker reading. Don't claim authoritatively that one is better than the other).

Finally, I don't think LiveInk is advocating their product for any hardcopy text. That would be ridiculous; don't get hussied up about having to rebuild libraries. And as for online article length, finger scroll buttons were invented for just such ease of use.

Daniel Mick

I agree with Daniel. While the formatting of the text appears to a layman to go against standard text approaches, the research is built on sound previous research.

Many of the comments above seem to be rooted in centuries old methods of presenting information in text form. Even speed reading methodology is based in extracting phrases out of the block of text.

As an educator, I see the current generation of readers totally focused on electronic reading using online media sources like Facebook, IM, Drudge Report and MyWay.com, for example.

To be honest, I'm excited to see how what innovations will be a result of their addition to the body of knowledge regarding human cognitive behavior.

I find the broken sentences more difficult to read because the rhythm is uncomfortable, and the line break put emphases where they may or may not be appropriate. It makes me go back and re-read to see which emphasis I should coose, instead of allowing me to interpret as I read. I believe many English speakers gravitate to iambic pentameter...try that instead of short phrases or clauses...

John,
if you can document
your prior art
could you post this fact
in a few visible places
using good searchable phrases?
I hope that Walker Reading Technologies
succeeds and prospers
with their Live Ink product,
but based on their head start
in a sophisticated technology,
not based on their exclusion
of competitors.
If you do this,
it would serve a good cause,
and you'd likely be paid someday
to do the work
of assembling the evidence
by a legal team
challenging the patent.
BTW, a recent Supreme Court ruling
should make it much easier
to challenge patents
based on prior art.

In writing the above text
I found that
one complexly structured sentence
seemed almost necessary
and yet made me uncomfortable
regarding its readability.
That's what prompted me
to try this formatting.
And this is a reason to expect
that the spread
of this technology
could improve the quality
of discourse
by facilitating the expression
of more complex thoughts.

Oops. My work is undone by reformatting that destroyed the indentations. Oh, well.

I just installed the ClipRead client. I sure wish the legal agreement and large readme text during the install phase were written in live ink! That is the kind of text that would really benefit. I guess the lawyers nixed that idea...

The idea is really interesting and primitive to me. However, I find myself becoming disoriented and dyslexic after many attempts of reading broken sentences. This may only work for some struggling readers who exceptionally need such accommodations.

Enough with the PC crap. The guy is not insulting anyone but trying to improve reading skills through scientific methods and I give him kudos. The problem is real world (compactness) vs this world (ultra spaced out). What does this do to literary structure - paragraph, sections, chapters, etc? Does it lead to better reading in the "real world"?

Okay, so did you notice that the width of the columns of chunked text are very similar to the width of a column in a newspaper. We've known for a long time that that width is easier for people to read quickly. I'd be interested in a test that compared the chunk text to the same text in a newspaper column with the exact same font and leading.

It makes sense. My eye were drawn to the left-side
example at first, so I read it first, and it was much easier to read.

This isn't a huge breakthrough, but it does make understanding the content of a paragraph easier, the first time which I like...

Regarding the comment by Free Innovator, above: "Oops. My work is undone by reformatting that destroyed the indentations. Oh, well."

The "undoing" of Free Innovator's manual attempts to construct a Live Ink cascade in this VentureBeat comment area illustrates that the underlying technology required, not only to generate, through syntactic algorithms, but also to assure consistent display of the multi-dimensional sentences, is presently not supported by conventional text reflow protocols. In other words, the prior art "teaches away" from the representation of sentences as multidimensional spatial structures, and instead treats the formatting of sentences as mere linear structures.
To see how our technology makes it possible to dynamically alternate between block and Live Ink format, see our FAQ page at: http://www.liveink.com/FAQ.php

I am not convinced that testing this kind of layout with adults who have been trained since childhood to read text in blocks is indicative of its potential (or lack thereof). Ideally, it would be better, I think, to compare the reading performance (speed, understanding, recall) of adults taught, as children, to read one or the other form of text.

There are also other ways (than reformatting) to add syntactic and semantic reading clues to online text: the Trésor de la langue française (a dictionary) allows one to highlight selected parts of the text (definition, citations...) with colors which the reader can choose (see example at the bottom of http://mmdl.free.fr/blog-m/?p=404).

One should also keep in mind that different readers need/make use of different kinds of clues (and Live Ink seems to be geared to high school children who may have less reading skills that literate adults, for whom such clues might actually hamper and slow down the reading performance).

Lastly, the kind of clues may depend on the nature of the text - I wonder how their software would reformat already formatted poems - from Haikus to Ogden Nash's.

At first I though that this was a good idea. Then I read the comments made and thought that they had good points against this "LiveInk" software.

So I then tried to read the paragraph in "LiveInk" versus the original paragraph and found it to be easier for me to read the original paragraph. I liked how the "LiveInk" started, but then it started going all wavy and I didn't like that. I can read poetry just fine... but I prefer to read the original way, however, I would not be opposed to offer "LiveInk" to students if it woudl help them. More research is needed I feel.

Try stretching

a pink piece of saran wrap

over a round embroidery stretcher

put on top of reading mater

ial.

works for

me.

maybe I'm dyslexic?

Huh... am I the only one that found the LiveInk version distracting? It had way too many colors and despite what their claims say, I found the different formatting to detract from the content. All of my reading problems on a computer have been solved by using css that inverts black on white text to white on black. Guess my brain got used to reading computer console output.

re: danielmick 05.14.07 | 1:31 am
Maybe some of us get the point but have used similar techniques along with some not so widely held beliefs. Like tinted saran wrap. It works in some cases quite well. I guess the point is that there are no new, change the world saviors to address every reading problem.

Many years ago
(over 30)
I read some books
written in EXACTLY this style
by a couple named Leiber (iirc).
They were on scientific subjects
such as relativity
(special and general).
They were written for
"T.C.Mits"
which stood for
"The Common Man in the Street".

I enjoyed them very much.

So, how can this be patented?

I liked the program and the technique very much.

But, I don't understand why they needed $400M to
make a not so complicated program/algorithm.

The fact that it is patented, means that
I can't use this technique in, say,
my e-mails, a Power Point slide or even
a hand written letter?

I don't like, IMHO, their pricing scheme,
based on a subscription.
It is too expensive.

Why can't they just charge for the program
once?

Thanks.