The tech industry loves catchy phrases, but the truth is that most of them either don’t mean anything or they’re just complicated ways to phrase simple ideas. With that in mind, let’s dig into what sayings like "the internet of things" or "disruption" means to us normal people.
I love Wikipedia, but too often the articles are just not that easy to read. It’s not that my English isn’t good enough. My English good. There is Simple English Wikipedia, but it doesn’t cover as many topics and it’s not as thorough.
Hey, let’s all take a quick minute right now to acknowledge those brilliant beacons of books—free books, for goodness sake!—that dot towns across the country. The Public Library, a new hardback by photographer Robert Dawson, offers a poignant look at the incredible architectural range of these community hubs.
Most ebook sellers try to lock you into a particular ecosystem. If you don’t mind buying from the same company every time, this isn’t too bad, but you lose the ability to comparison shop, as well as making it difficult to switch apps. Fortunately, there’s a way around this problem.
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Who knew reading one word at a time could help you read at a faster rate? That’s what you’ll be able to do with the Spritz app. On average, a person reads 220 words a minute. With Spritz, you can double that number or at least increase it by a considerable amount.
The app essentially flashes one word at a time on the screen, just long enough for you to process and read it before moving on to the next word. The app’s developer even claims that it can help some folks read up to a thousand words in sixty seconds! You can find more information on Spritz on their website, and you can even try to practice reading text at up to 600wpm.
However, for obvious reasons, you won’t be able to do this with paperback books (imagine how wasteful it’s going to be if publishers printed a mere word on each page).
[via Dvice]
Congrats, America, we’re all illiterate assholes. Or at least, according to this map, we read a hell of a lot less than the rest of the world.
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No braille? No problem! This FingerReader by the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab is a high-tech way to help visually impaired people read; it actually scans printed text and narrates it aloud.
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Clearly, the future is (possibly) all about reading
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One fateful Thursday morning, a kindergarten teacher and reading specialist—known only as M.P. for the sake of anonymity—found that the same attendance sheet she’d been using for years suddenly appeared to be covered in hieroglyphs. Not only that, she quickly realized that everything she logically knew to be covered in writing was entirely incomprehensible to her. Though she wouldn’t find out til later, M.P. has been the victim of a stroke that left her with an incredibly rare neurological disorder—one more commonly known as "word blindness."
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We’ve all done it: stood in a library, looking around, we’ve been confronted by the fact that there are way, way too many books in existence for us to ever read. But when in history did that happen?
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
