Tylerlindell’s Weblog
Just another WordPress.com webloghow to read 200% faster in 10 minutes
These are the steps I followed to increase my reading and they proved to be extremely helpful and effective. I also increased my retention with these steps in all my reading. I previously read at about 150 wpm but just the other day cought myself fly through about 500 pages in just two hours!!! I was really blown away! That is and increase of about 766% burning through about 1300 wmp! I am now in the top 1% of the worlds fastest readers!
1. Two min: use your finger to trace under each line while reading as fast as possible. Reading is a series of snapshots (called Saccades), using a visual guide prevents going back to reread.
2. Three mins: Begin every line focused on the third word in from the first, and end every line focused on the third word from the last. This makes use of your peripheral vision. For example, even when the highlighted words in the next line are your beginning and ending focal points, the entire sentence is “read,” just with less eye movement:
”once upon a time, a duck walked into a bar.”
Move in from both sides further and further as it gets easier.
3. Two min: When you are comfortable indenting three or four words in on both sides, attempt to take only two snapshots – also known as fixations – per line on the first and last indented words.
4. Three min: practice reading too fast for comprehension but with good technique (the above three techniques) for five pages prior to reading at a comfortable speed. This will heighten perception and reset your speed limit, much like how 50 mph normally feels fast but seems like slow motion if you drop down from 70 mph on the freeway.
To calculate reading speed in words per minute (wpm) – and then progress – in a given book, add up the number of words in ten lines and divide by ten to get the average words per line. Multiply this by the number of lines per page and you have the average words per page. Now it’s simple. If you initially read 1.25 pages in one minute at 330 average words per page, that’s 412.5 words per minute. If you the read 3.5 pages after training, it’s 1,155 words per minute and you’re in the top 1% of the world’s fastest readers.
French recording may be world’s first
SAN FRANCISCO – At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn’t sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.
The 10-second clip of a woman singing “Au Clair de la Lune,” taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison’s “Mary had a little lamb” — previously credited as the oldest recorded voice — by 17 years.
The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.
Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.
Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott’s — from 1857 and 1859 — in France’s patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.
“What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea,” Giovannoni said. “He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work.”
“We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott’s) technique wasn’t very developed,” Giovannoni said. “There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound.”
So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott’s papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.
“When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair,” Giovannoni said. “We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them.”
While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.
Creating sound from lines scrawled on sooty paper was a job for Berkeley lab scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. Haber and Cornell had previously created sound from phonautograms that Edison had created in 1878 of trains.
The scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” to read Scott’s sooty paper. They immediately got sound, but because phonautograph was hand-cranked its speed varied and that changed the recording’s pitch.
“If someone’s singing at middle C and the crank speeds up and slows down, the waves change shape and are shifting,” said Cornell. “We had a tuning fork side by side with the recording, so you can correct the sound and speed variations.”
On March 3, Haber and Cornell sent audio back to Giovannoni, and another engineer further fine-tuned the recording to bring the voice out more from the static.
“When I first heard the recording as you hear it … it was magical, so ethereal,” said Giovannoni. “The fact is it’s recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”
Scott never intended for anyone to listen to his phonautograms, but the result of this work will be played in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University.
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On the Net:
Audio of the “Au Clair de la Lune” recording: http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/
