The Daily Fix

There’s something to be said for titles that sound dirty.  It makes them catchy…memorable.  Today I happened upon an interesting little project that caught my eye mostly because of the name…but after trying it out I was pretty impressed at how much faster it actually made me come………to a closer understanding of what I was reading (and much faster) than reading it straight off the normally laid-out page.  To explain Spreed a little further…founded in 2006, Spreed is determined to prove that digital reading can be and is more efficient that traditional forms of paper and ink based content consumption.

Their first commercial product, Spreed News is a new online user interface for desktops and mobile phones (think iPhone) for optimizing screen-based reading. Their algorithm parses text based on semantic and syntactic content to maximize contextual inference, and then renders the text in a way that virtually eliminates speed deterring eye movements. One can try out the interface for reading news, sports, gossip or blogs from various outlets.

For paper-based text, the average reading speed is about 210-250 words per minute (wpm). Eye movement research has established that reading a single page of text involves approximately 400-500 eye movements called ‘saccades’. It has also been established that there is no information perceived during the eye movement, only in the brief fixation on a word or group of words. Saccades therefore slow down reading speed. Other studies have shown that this speed degrades by approximately 28% when reading directly from a PC screen. The Spreed application claims to allow the reading of text from screens comfortably, and with no loss of comprehension, at 350 wpm.  Shit, I turned the sucker up to 480 WPM and I could still grasp what was flying by…it was amazing!  A must read/see, people.

via jayparksinsonmd