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get funding
if I start writing
Everything like this
too?
who knows
You might as well
get sued for patent infringement
or copyright claims
"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.
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....
gg nbs
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?
e. e. cummings
already has
the patent
Since they have a commercial interest, they might not release their research.
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
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.
Ŝainas esti ja nia sorto kaj malmulte fareblas.
Everyone crack open your dictionaries and thesauri.
they are patenting
the annoying
way that
some
people send
IM's?
While it's great this will be applied in other mediums, it's not exactly new. At least, not to a computer dork.
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.
I've been writing email
this way
for at least two years
have been writing for years!
I claim PRIOR ART!
(Seriously!)
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.
expect the
Firefox Plugin?
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
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
that
free-form beat
poetry
was
easy to
read
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...
of NOTHING so MUCH
as Doctor SEUSS
But I really see this being useful on mobile technology more than anything.
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.
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
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.
Reduce all complex thought to bullet points. Content doesn't matter, does it?
Incidentally, this is nothing new. Three words come to mind:
"See Spot run."
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.
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.
http://www.amazon.com/As-Future-Catches-You-Gen...
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.
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.
http://book-bot.com
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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....
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
I notice I only read
the ones
broken into short lines.
Interesting.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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
The fact that poets have used it as an effect for quite a long time is a bit ironic too ;)
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
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 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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
(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?
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.