Speed demon

I recently passed the local library for the first time in a couple of years (just no time!) and picked up Tony Buzan’s Speed Reading book.  I’ve been working through the exercises and self tests and have jumped from 271 words per minute to 385 since Monday.  For someone who reads so much I was disappointed to find that my reading rate was only average!

The art of reading fast isn’t voodoo, Buzan reckons it goes back to the fact that most of us learned phonetically or by subvocalising, and then we never learned to increase this speed.  There’s a big correlation between education level and reading speed, and it’s not because they’re more intelligent necessarily, more that they’ve had to read more things in a limited amount of time.  Because of this, anyone can learn to read faster.

The basic principles are: our eyes and brain process words very quickly up to about 1/500 of a second per word.  They also take in information over wide area at once, meaning you can read more than one word at a time.  So as you improve, you learn to read along a line without stopping at each word, then take two lines at a time, then scan downwards through the page.

Although the next challenge is to make sure all your reading material is laid out optimally!  I found a web app, Spreeder, that takes a chunk of text and presents it to you word by word, in chunks at a speed and size you prefer.  So you can play with the settings and see what 220 wpm (average) looks like.  Then adjust the speed, size of text and size of the paragraphs to train.

What I’d like now is a Firefox plugin for this so I can take any page and Spreederfy it with my normal settings!  There’s a bookmarklet that just about works, I can live with that I suppose.

MyFC gets closer to Web2.0 expectations

MyFootballClub now have a WordPress blog integrated into the site so that the Society Board and the CEO and Chairman of the football club can communicate regularly to members in one place. Something I’ve been going on at them to do for ages. I’ve also got them to use twitter for updates, though people are still getting used to it (both the society board and the guys who maintain the site!).

I’m still trying to get them to be more open about their team selection process and getting members to think carefully about it. There’s a big friendly match against Charlton on the 12th July where we’ll be choosing the team, but I think the “system” they’re using is a severe mangling of Wisdom of Crowds principles.

This is very dangerous: if the process has the effect of sanctioning of the Coach’s selection, members will lose faith that their opinion counts for anything, not bother taking part, and thus Pick The Team gets dropped. This was one of the core principles of MyFC and though it’s not critical for every member, there are many that would that would not renew next February if it was dropped. If their mechanism doesn’t correctly aggregate the selections it risks fielding an unsuitable lineup, again suggesting it should be dropped.

Now if they opened up their mechanism, even if only to a select group of statistics geeks, they could check that it produced a “good” average lineup. The solution I proposed had some problems when you had a split verdict (unlikely scenarios but couldn’t be ignored), but in discussion with others I’ve found other ways that bring a diverse set of selections closer to an single “average” lineup. And from that, it’s really not hard to accept the Coach overiding some positions, as long as he tells us afterwards why this was done and therefore improve the information we have for next time.  And of course if he overrules us and gets it wrong, perhaps he’ll learn something.

It’s not that hard, is it?

More social media experiements

I seem to have collected some followers on Twitter (which my father-in-law thinks is a hilarious concept) which is nice.  I asked one why he followed me in particular (as I’d not met the guy as far as I knew) and he said he’d seen similar posts to what he was into.  Makes sense I suppose, just I hadn’t used it in that way before.  I may do from now, use it as a kind of ambient radar if there are particular issues I’m into.  Twhirl is really handy for that.

I’ve already integrated del.icio.us into facebook and here, also twitter into facebook, so now I think I’m going to try using twitterfeed to show new posts.

My previous attempt to trackback to Phillip’s blog seems to have failed (I think he has a lame blog host but can’t be sure).

Do you know, I’m not even sure if Social Media is the right term for all this malarkey…