Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Some misc…

I cobbled together a  speed reading mode for xemacs based on my earlier post about dyslexia. There are certainly a lot of directions this thing could go in.

Since I released that publically I also released this little per script AIM2Growl that I run in the background. It signs onto AIM given the screen name and password given on the command line and any messages sent to that screen name are then passed onto Growl (a Mac OS X utility that posts transient alerts to the user). I have many IM persona, one of them has some bots (e.g. Cornell Corona as buddies and these bots post notices of interesting things. Some of the scripts that monitor the health of my machines also IM that persona.

Since the speed reading mode only works in emacs I wanted and i wanted to be able to read postscript files I went looking for the tools to do that. txutils.el enhances emac’s view-file command to automatically convert file formats into text or html. Then you’ll need pdftotext which is bundled with xpdf.

The easy way to install xpdf on the mac is sudo port install xpdf, presuming you have port installed.

Look (update: opps, we used up all his bandwidth) at this unbelievable photo from this set about the recent ice storm in the high plains. Those are individual stems of stray covered in ice thicker than your two fists!

Meanwhile here in Boston it’s 70 degrees and doubling amazing the sky is perfectly blue. In the winter warm usually comes with wet, very disconcerting.

I suspect my readers have figured out I suffer from dyslexia, well regarding that this work by Gadi Geiger, Jerry Lettvin, and others is thought provoking.

They found interesting visual test you can run to test for dyslexia. You have the subject stare at a dot a screen, and then you briefly flash a single letter in place of the dot. At the same time you also flash another letter a some distance away from the centered letter. You then ask the subject to enter the two letters. A series of these samples allows you to build a map of how the subject’s visual focus ranges across his visual field.

Not surprisingly people skill at catching that second letter varies with how far from the centered letter it appears. But dyslexics, apparently, tend to drop off more rapidly in near the center while they are better at catching the letters further off from the center. This matches up nicely with the experiance of dyslexia, i.e. that it’s difficult to see the individual words and one is often skittering about on the page noticing items that if you could manage your attention more successfully would be ignored. I also am amused by how this ties into some of the stuff I’ve been thinking recently about attention managment.

They also noticed that the focus of attention across the field of vision is shaped differently for people who read English v.s. Hebrew (which is read left to right).

They also noticed that dyslexics who have managed to learn to be effective readers, like me, will have one mode when they are attentive and another when they are fatigued. Boy I’m familiar with that syndrome.

Based on this test, and optimism about the plasticity of the brain, they invented a little therapy to try. They cut a hole in an index card so that only a dozen letters of text were visible and asked some kids with dyslexia to try reading through that window for a few weeks.  This turned out to be amazingly effective! Presumably it trains the visual system to attend more closely to the material near the point were your reading.

Update: Having attended a talk by Geiger it appears that description is missing a critical element; i.e. they also asked the kids to engage in an art/craft activity that involved fine motor and eye coordination.  Follow on studies have indicated this is a necessary component of the therapy.  Why exactly they included this complementary activity is unclear to me, but it helps explain why nobody stumbled on the therapy before.  Gadi suggested it was an intuitive move; possibly triggered by some studies done in the years before this.  Those studies showed that active hand/eye interaction made a substantial difference in people’s ability to compensate for the effects of silly goggles that did things like shit your vision six inches to the right.
I want to note that this approach doesn’t attempt to treat the cause of dyslexia. The visual field anomaly is a symptom and the therapy treats that symptom. Dyslexia has other symptoms, for example there are significant phonetic aspects which make it miserable to learn a foreign language, recall names, or repeat words you hear.

Reading thru a window also used in some speed reading schemes; see for example this demo of RSVP and if you like that try this this Firefox extension.

I wrote an emacs mode that simulates their index card.

One spectrum you can map governance failures onto is too-weak/too-strong.  For example publicly traded firms often fail by excessive aggregation of power into the hands of the senior executives.  Since there’s no meaningful oversight because the shareholders are highly fragmented, disinterested, and not particularly loyal.  So over time more and more governance decisions default to senior management; and thenbad things can happen.

I’ve been thinking about this through the example domain of condo associations; using the examples Evan Mckenzie posts on his blog.  The too-hot examples in that sphere are condo managers who become little dictators.  I don’t doubt there is a great comedy movie waiting to be made about them.

Much more common I suspect are the failures of governance the too-cool kind.   Since I first read Evan he has come to be concerned that these associations often (almost always) a financial time-bomb. That almost none of these associations are prepared to deal with the huge costs that will arise shortly when their infrastructure requires costly repairs.  There are millions of these, because for example on my house is a two unit condo.  Though of course some of them approach the size of small cities.

Our little garage roof is an example of a financial time bomb.  We should have fixed 20 years ago but now it’s rotten and the whole thing will need to come off before it collapses onto the cars.  This ain’t going to be cheap and nobody I know is interested in volunteering to project manage the job.  A lot of these places were built on the cheap and sold fast, and in some of the big cities they sold off portions of the public housing stock to their poor residents.  When those roof fails the residents won’t have my resources to deal with the problem.  It’s a failure of my imagination that I can’t see the comedy movie waiting to be made about too little governance.

The in the condo associations the worse case scenarios of weak governance failures often require that the state step in.   If the condo is forced to fix the roof and then can’t pay for it the courts will put them in receivership and the receiver will send the owners a bill that will bankrupt them.  Here’s another example: the timesharing association was so weak that they didn’t pay their taxes and so the state sold the property.  Apparently they are still disputing who ought to have been notified before the sale happened, the association board, or the horde of people who bought tiny time share slices?

Well actually more like chapter 11.  This problem has evolved into one of the problems that requires hours of focused attention and I don’t have those available.  I’ve turned it off.  Presumably this will some of the sites I host unusable slow for some people; for others it will make them usable again.