speed reading activity?

[Urko Fernandez]

On Sat, 2008-06-07 at 08:16 -0700, david at lang.hm wrote:

> the approach that I used was over 30 years ago, so if there is a patent on 
> it it's either expired or invalid due to prior art.
> 

They say in this blog that the oldest patent describing this technique
expired in 2006:
http://blog.willbenton.com/2004/03/rapid-serial-visual-presentation-software-patents/
The developer of a software called FastReader points out the technology
is public domain and that his software is still available.


> yes, it will prevent the system from going to sleet, but the current 
> versions of the software can't put the system to sleep while keeping the 
> screen running anyway, so it's not a short-term problem
> 
> it will eat up a little cpu to scroll the screen, but it should't be that 
> bad (and in any case can be deemed an accdeptable trade-off for the 
> capability.
> 

I was going to test my own activity on a real XO next week, so I can
test how much battery time  is available when displaying text using
speed reading techniques.
> 
> what I'm envisioning is the ability to define a window size (which would 
> be much smaller then the XO screen size in most cases), the scroll rate, 
> and the font size. it would then smoothly scroll the text through the 
> window and then quiz the student for comprehention and calculate a wpm 
> score (raw speed - penalties for missing comprehention questions)
> 
There is an similar application for PDAs:
http://www.pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=reviews&id=333
They do also display a portion of the current read text and they use a
color bar that shows where in the sentence you are. I bet all those
additions are patented, if we design something different (albeit
similar), would it be safe? Should we discuss this ideas publicly before
publishing any working code? What's the modus operandi in this
situation?

> this seems such a trivial (but useful) that I'm having trouble beliving 
> that nobody has one already written.

That doesn't mean there's nobody willing to do it ;)
There is a software called flash written in python, we could port it or use it to do an activity:
http://toykeeper.net/programs/flash/files/
It's GPLv2, and it seems designed for PDAs.

Urko