Recent quotes:
Companies That Read More Perform Better Financially - ScienceBlog.com
Size Matters in Information Consumption “The way companies consume information is reminiscent of biological organisms,” says co-author Eddie Lee. “As with organisms, there are important size differences. Larger firms tend to consume information more efficiently but face significant challenges in coordination.” The study reveals that larger companies tend to read more broadly rather than specialize, challenging traditional ideas about labor specialization. However, this broader reading often comes with increased redundancy, as larger organizations face greater coordination challenges. Reading and Financial Success Perhaps most significantly, the research found that companies consuming more information than typical for their size tend to show better financial performance. These information-hungry firms demonstrated higher future returns and valuations compared to their peers. The study also uncovered links between reading patterns and company innovation, suggesting that how organizations manage information could provide valuable insights into their operational dynamics and financial health.Strange Loops: Reading a Book on How to Read a Book • Zettelkasten Method
Problem-solving skills, in particular decision-making skills. By far, the best paper I read on this issue is “Detailed Characterization of the Expert Problem-Solving Process in Science and Engineering: Guidance for Teaching and Assessment”[^argenta] Each book should be treated as a problem to be solved: How to attack it? How much time to invest in it, and how to spread this time over the chapters (evenly or weighted)? How can I re-construct it, so I learn the most? Is this a book that should be treated as inspiration, or should I really make an effort to re-create the content in my own words?Breaking Up (and Making Up) With Stanley Cavell | The New Republic
“Most texts, like most lives, are underread,” he contends. Writing in the early 1980s, Cavell was addressing a film culture in which most people did not—because they could not easily—watch a film more than once. Video rental stores were just taking off, and many early Hollywood movies remained difficult to track down. But it’s often hard to know what one really thinks about something after experiencing it just once. For Cavell, to give a reading of a film, then, is always to reread it. “A reading of a film,” he explains, “sets up a continuous appeal to the experience of the film.” As with remarriage, the second time’s the charm.Unnecessarily difficult: Physical activity resources for adults are loaded with jargon -- ScienceDaily
They found that more than 50 percent of the materials, which included a range of topics such as physical activity and exercise ideas, technical instruction and management of specific health conditions, were written above an eighth-grade reading level, the maximum recommended for accessibility. Only 2.5 percent were written for optimal reading levels, which is fifth-grade or lower. In the second paper, Thomas, Flay and Cardinal examined 14 studies published between 1992 and the present, which when combined, had reviewed more than 800 written health educational resources on topics such as physical activity, physical fitness or sports medicine. The average reading level across the studies was greater than 10th-grade, more than two full levels above the maximum recommended eighth-grade reading level. There was no difference in the reading level of resources produced by the government and those by non-government agencies.Reading on electronic devices may interfere with science reading comprehension -- ScienceDaily
"The more time the participants reported on using e-devices per day -- for instance, reading texts on their iPhone, watching TV, playing internet games, texting, or reading an eBook -- the less well they did when they tried to understand scientific texts," said Li. "There are a lot of positive uses for electronic devices and I'm an advocate of digital learning, but when it comes to understanding of science concepts through reading, our take is that it's not helpful." Li said the way people read on electronic devices may encourage them to pick up only bits and pieces of information from the material, while the comprehension of scientific information requires a more holistic approach to reading where the reader incorporates the information in a relational and structured way. "This is sort of speculation, because, so far, this is only a correlation -- When you are writing a text on a smartphone, for example, you use very short sentences and you abbreviate a lot, so it's fragmented," said Li. "When you're reading such a text, you're getting bits of information here and there and not always trying to connect the material. And I think that might be the main difference, when you're reading expository scientific texts you need to be connecting and integrating the information."8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year
A good friend once told me a story that really stuck with me. He said Stephen King had advised people to read something like five hours a day. My friend said, “You know, that’s baloney. Who can do that?” But then, years later, he found himself in Maine on vacation. He was waiting in line outside a movie theater with his girlfriend, and who should be waiting in front of him? Stephen King! His nose was in a book the whole time in line. When they got into the theater, Stephen King was still reading as the lights dimmed. When the lights came up, he pulled his book open right away. He even read as he was leaving. Now, I have not confirmed this story with Stephen King. But I think the message this story imparts is an important one. Basically, you can read a lot more. There are minutes hidden in all the corners of the day, and they add up to a lot of minutes.Can Reading Make You Happier? - The New Yorker
Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.” Berthoud and Elderkin are now working on a children’s-literature version, “A Spoonful of Stories,” due out in 2016.Overcoming screen inferiority in learning and calibration
The present study examined two methods for overcoming screen inferiority in these respects. First, practicing the study-test task allowed overcoming screen inferiority, but only among those who preferred reading from screens. Second, in-depth processing was encouraged by having participants generate keywords at a delay, before monitoring their knowledge and taking the test. This method eliminated screen inferiority even for the first-studied texts, but after practicing it, screen inferiority was re-exposed among those who preferred studying on paper.2010, A Year in Marginalia: Sam Anderson
The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain. Here are some snapshots, month by month, of my marginalia from 2010.To read a book is to write in it...
a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane. […]Texts that really grabbed me got full-blown essays (sideways, upside-down, diagonal) in the margins. […] Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. […]marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.Edgar Allan Poe on annotation
“In getting my books,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, “I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”[…]Such readers feel that they aren’t really giving a book their full attention unless they’re hovering over it with a pencil, poised to underline or annotate at the slightest provocation.
Schools and universities ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite. There is a very widespread topsyturviness of values whereby the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say, and, indeed, can say only if left to speak for itself without intermediaries who claim to know more than the text does.
Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino
In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty—all things that continue to operate even if the book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten.Web readers like it short?
We're active participants on the Web, looking for information and diversion. It's natural that people prefer short articles. As Nielsen states, motivated readers who want to know everything about a subject (i.e., parents trying to get their kid into a New York preschool) will read long treatises with semicolons, but the rest of us are snacking. His advice: Embrace hypertext. Keep things short for the masses, but offer links for the Type A's.Online reading is shallow
A long train of studies suggests that people read the Internet differently than they read print. We skim and scan for the information we want, rather than starting at the beginning and plowing through to the end. Our eyes jump around, magnetized to links—they imply authority and importance—and short lines cocooned in white space. We’ll scroll if we have to, but we’d prefer not to. (Does the weightless descent invite a momentary disorientation, a lightheadedness? Or are we just lazy?) We read faster. “People tend not to read online in the traditional sense but rather to skim read, hop from one source to another, and ‘power browse,’ ” wrote psychologists Val Hooper and Channa Herath in June.
Wolf is optimistic that we can learn to navigate online reading just as deeply as we once did print—if we go about it with the necessary thoughtfulness. In a new study, the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped improve comprehension and reading strategy use in a group of fifth graders. It turns out that they could read deeply. They just had to be taught how. Wolf is now working on digital apps to train students in the tools of deep reading, to use the digital world to teach the sorts of skills we tend to associate with quiet contemplation and physical volumes. “The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment,” she says. “We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.”
Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith found that students fared equally well on a post-reading multiple-choice test when they were given a fixed amount of time to read, but that their digital performance plummeted when they had to regulate their time themselves. The digital deficit, they suggest, isn’t a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.
er hunch is that the physicality of a printed page may matter for those reading experiences when you need a firmer grounding in the material. The text you read on a Kindle or computer simply doesn’t have the same tangibility. […]When Mangen tested the readers’ comprehension, she found that the medium mattered a lot. When readers were asked to place a series of events from the story in chronological order—a simple plot-reconstruction task, not requiring any deep analysis or critical thinking—those who had read the story in print fared significantly better, making fewer mistakes and recreating an over-all more accurate version of the story. The words looked identical—Kindle e-ink is designed to mimic the printed page—but their physical materiality mattered for basic comprehension.
Mary Dyson, a psychologist at the University of Reading who studies how we perceive and interact with typography and design online and in print, has found that the layout of a text can have a significant effect on the reading experience. We read more quickly when lines are longer, but only to a point. When lines are too long, it becomes taxing to move your eyes from the end of one to the start of the next. We read more efficiently when text is arranged in a single column rather than multiple columns or sections. The font, color, and size of text can all act in tandem to make our reading experience easier or more difficult. And while these variables surely exist on paper just as they do on-screen, the range of formats and layouts online is far greater than it is in print. Online, you can find yourself transitioning to entirely new layouts from moment to moment, and, each time you do so, your eyes and your reading approach need to adjust. Each adjustment, in turn, takes mental and physical energy.
On screen, people tended to browse and scan, to look for keywords, and to read in a less linear, more selective fashion. On the page, they tended to concentrate more on following the text. Skimming, Liu concluded, had become the new reading: the more we read online, the more likely we were to move quickly, without stopping to ponder any one thought.
In 2003, a psychiatrist in Wales became convinced that he had. Dr. Neil Frude noticed that some patients, frustrated by year-long waits for treatment, were reading up on depression in the meantime. […] This June, a program was launched that’s allowing National Health Service doctors across England to act upon Frude’s insight. […]If your primary care physician diagnoses you with “mild to moderate” depression, one of her options is now to scribble a title on a prescription pad. You take the torn-off sheet not to the pharmacy but to your local library, where it can be exchanged for a copy of “Overcoming Depression,” “Mind Over Mood,” or “The Feeling Good Handbook.” […]Other titles endorsed by the program include “Break Free from OCD,” “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway,” “Getting Better Bit(e) by Bit(e),” and “How to Stop Worrying.” The NHS’s Books on Prescription program is only the highest-profile example of a broader boom in “bibliotherapy.” […]In London, a painter, a poet, and a former bookstore manager have teamed up to offer over-the-counter “bibliotherapy consultations”: after being quizzed about their literary tastes and personal problems, the worried well-heeled pay 80 pounds for a customized reading list. At the Reading Agency[…] a second program called Mood-Boosting Books recommends fiction and poetry. The NHS’s public health and mental health budgets also fund nonprofits such as The Reader Organization, which gathers people who are unemployed, imprisoned, old, or just lonely to read poems and fiction aloud to one another.
If a reader waiting for my latest release (who was willing to pay $4.99) suddenly gets it for 99c, they now have $4 more to spend on books. So maybe they’ll end up buying two or three instead of one. Also, while I might leave money on the table this week, the strategy is to maximize sales by getting more of my disparate list/platform to try my historical fiction. If it works, I’ll have expanded my readership and made money. If it doesn’t… the worst that will happen is I’ll make a little less money, but still expand my readership somewhat and make existing readers happy. But however it works out for me personally I don’t see it having much effect on anyone else, other than somewhat increasing the amount of books my readers can afford.
Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions. Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said. We’d know a protagonist died on the page with the two long paragraphs after the page with all that dialogue.The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
At one point in our conversation, he laid it on the line. "You need to decide whether you'll be satisfied with writing for an audience of two or maybe three hundred people."
Clearly, the correct answer to this was "yes." And as Wood said it, then and now I have the sense he thought posing it in this way would get me back on track with a focus on the scholarly community we were a part of. But hearing it so starkly, in my mind my response was something more like, "Holy Crap, no way! That's definitely nowhere near enough people. And worse yet, I know some of those people. And I definitely don't want to write for them."
a closer examination of what people are sharing via Twitter reveals that the platform often serves as a flag alerting followers to longer form content. Rather than replacing articles and other long-form features, Twitter is often used to promote them – providing a 140-character tip of the iceberg that points to the rich content experience lurking below the surface.
“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”
The neural changes were not just immediate reactions, Berns says, since they persisted the morning after the readings, and for the five days after the participants completed the novel.