If you?re in a position where you need knowledge or information, speed reading is a skill that could help you out a great deal. The faster you can read, the more information you can get through, meaning it will take a lot less time for you to master new skills. What follows are some proven strategies that will allow you to become a faster reader in a short time.
Speed reading is something that is founded upon understanding the purpose of the reading selection you have chosen. When you speed read, you will probably want to stick to nonemotional documentation a.k.a. not something from a person that you love. You would not speed read something from someone you care about. In regard to coursework that you may be doing, where a textbook must be read, you need to learn how to assess what the key points in each chapter of the book are, absorbing it in small chunks, thus allowing you to read faster; it is recommended that you use a pencil to keep track of your position. If you understand what is expected of you prior to reading, you will be able to read at phenomenally fast speeds.
You need to learn to see the action the words represent rather than the words themselves. This is imperative, since your mind will then comprehend the notion that you don?t have to read each and every word on the page, and this will have a major effect on how quickly you read. Once you comprehend this, rather than picking apart every single letter on the page, you will start to visualize the story in your mind?s eye. It is almost as if you are making a movie in your head and it won?t take long to find yourself reading more speedily and absorbing the information a lot better than before. Try humblebroker.com for clear facts.
Getting quicker at reading just doesn?t cut it. In addition, you need to get better at comprehension and retention levels.
The simplest strategy for doing this is to make notes next to or draw attention somehow to the main points of the text you are reading. This does not mean that you should transform your book into a neon sign by highlighting each and every paragraph. It is necessary for you to concentrate on the main issues. After you are done with the text, you can go back and reread the parts that you underlined. Next, you should step away from the book and do something else, if possible something that doesn?t have to do with your studies. This permits your subconscious to grasp the information you read and then you?re able to leave the materials and come back an hour later. You?ll see that if you use this strategy, your reading speed and comprehension levels will increase quite a bit.
Improving your reading speed is not necessarily a matter of learning new skills. What you are really doing is unlearning how you have been reading all of these years, like a form of regressive therapy, and then replacing what you used to know with reading habits that are far more efficient. And remember, your index finger is your friend as it can force you to read faster. So, the faster you follow the advice in this article, the sooner you?ll be able to read at a faster than average rate and the more time you will save.
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Hallucinations of musical notation: New paper for neurology journal Brain by Oliver SacksPublic release date: 4-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kirsty Doole kirsty.doole@oup.com 44-186-535-5439 Oxford University Press
Professor of neurology, physician, and author Oliver Sacks M.D. has outlined case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations, in a new paper for the neurology journal Brain.
In this paper, Dr Sacks is building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000 [i], which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations). While ffytche believes that hallucinations of musical notation are rarer than some other types of visual hallucination, Sacks says that his own experience is different.
"Perhaps because I have investigated various musical syndromes," writes Dr Sacks, "and people often write to me about these I have seen or corresponded with a dozen or more people whose hallucinations include and sometimes consist exclusively of musical notation."
Sacks goes on to detail eight fascinating case studies of people who have reported experiencing hallucinations of musical notation, including:
A 77 year old woman with glaucoma who wrote of her "musical eyes". She saw "music, lines, spaces, notes, clefs in fact written music on everything [she] looked at."
A surgeon and pianist suffering from macular degeneration, who saw unreadable and unplayable music on a white background.
A Sanskrit scholar who developed Parkinson's disease in his 60s and later reported hallucinating ornately-written music, occurring with a Sanskrit script. "Despite the exotic nature of the script the result is still western music," he said.
A woman who reported seeing musical notation on her ceiling upon waking in the morning.
A woman who said she wasn't a musician, but would hallucinate when she had high fevers as a child. She said that the notes were "angry, and [she] felt unease. The lines and notes were out of control and at times in a ball."
It is striking that, of Dr Sacks' eight case studies, seven were gifted musicians. Sacks comments, "This is perhaps a coincidence, but it makes one wonder whether there is something about musical scores that is radically different from verbal texts." Musical scores are far more visually complex than standard (English) text, with not just a variety of notes, but also many symbols that indicate how the notes should be played.
Dr Sacks also says that he has a mild form of Charles Bonnet syndrome himself, in which he sees a variety of simple forms whenever he gazes at a blank surface. "When I recently returned to playing the piano and to studying scores minutely, I began to 'see' showers of flat signs along with the letters and runes on blank surfaces."
Another striking feature of these hallucinations is that like text hallucinations they are generally unreadable. They can seem playable at first, but on closer inspection it transpires that the music is often nonsensical or impossible to play, such as an example reported in one of the case studies: a melody line three or more octaves above middle C, and so may have half a dozen or more ledger lines above the treble staff.
Usually, the early visual system analyses forms and sends the information it has extracted to higher areas, where it gains coherence and meaning. Normally, in the act of perception, the entire visual system is engaged. Paradoxically, according to Sacks, "one may have to study disorders of the visual system to see how complex perceptual and cognitive processes are analysed and delegated to different levels and hallucinations of musical notation can provide a very rich field of study here."
###
Oliver Sacks is Professor of Neurology at the NYU School of Medicine and Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick. For more information, visit his website: http://www.oliversacks.com
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Hallucinations of musical notation: New paper for neurology journal Brain by Oliver SacksPublic release date: 4-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kirsty Doole kirsty.doole@oup.com 44-186-535-5439 Oxford University Press
Professor of neurology, physician, and author Oliver Sacks M.D. has outlined case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations, in a new paper for the neurology journal Brain.
In this paper, Dr Sacks is building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000 [i], which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations). While ffytche believes that hallucinations of musical notation are rarer than some other types of visual hallucination, Sacks says that his own experience is different.
"Perhaps because I have investigated various musical syndromes," writes Dr Sacks, "and people often write to me about these I have seen or corresponded with a dozen or more people whose hallucinations include and sometimes consist exclusively of musical notation."
Sacks goes on to detail eight fascinating case studies of people who have reported experiencing hallucinations of musical notation, including:
A 77 year old woman with glaucoma who wrote of her "musical eyes". She saw "music, lines, spaces, notes, clefs in fact written music on everything [she] looked at."
A surgeon and pianist suffering from macular degeneration, who saw unreadable and unplayable music on a white background.
A Sanskrit scholar who developed Parkinson's disease in his 60s and later reported hallucinating ornately-written music, occurring with a Sanskrit script. "Despite the exotic nature of the script the result is still western music," he said.
A woman who reported seeing musical notation on her ceiling upon waking in the morning.
A woman who said she wasn't a musician, but would hallucinate when she had high fevers as a child. She said that the notes were "angry, and [she] felt unease. The lines and notes were out of control and at times in a ball."
It is striking that, of Dr Sacks' eight case studies, seven were gifted musicians. Sacks comments, "This is perhaps a coincidence, but it makes one wonder whether there is something about musical scores that is radically different from verbal texts." Musical scores are far more visually complex than standard (English) text, with not just a variety of notes, but also many symbols that indicate how the notes should be played.
Dr Sacks also says that he has a mild form of Charles Bonnet syndrome himself, in which he sees a variety of simple forms whenever he gazes at a blank surface. "When I recently returned to playing the piano and to studying scores minutely, I began to 'see' showers of flat signs along with the letters and runes on blank surfaces."
Another striking feature of these hallucinations is that like text hallucinations they are generally unreadable. They can seem playable at first, but on closer inspection it transpires that the music is often nonsensical or impossible to play, such as an example reported in one of the case studies: a melody line three or more octaves above middle C, and so may have half a dozen or more ledger lines above the treble staff.
Usually, the early visual system analyses forms and sends the information it has extracted to higher areas, where it gains coherence and meaning. Normally, in the act of perception, the entire visual system is engaged. Paradoxically, according to Sacks, "one may have to study disorders of the visual system to see how complex perceptual and cognitive processes are analysed and delegated to different levels and hallucinations of musical notation can provide a very rich field of study here."
###
Oliver Sacks is Professor of Neurology at the NYU School of Medicine and Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick. For more information, visit his website: http://www.oliversacks.com
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who four months ago broke the news to shocked parents that their children had been slaughtered in a Connecticut elementary school, signed into law Thursday sweeping new restrictions on weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines similar to the ones used by the man who gunned down 20 child and six educators in the massacre.
Alongside family members of some of the victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Malloy signed the bill hours after the General Assembly approved the measure to give the state some of the toughest gun laws in the country.
"This is a profoundly emotional day for everyone in this room," Malloy said. "We have come together in a way that few places in the nation have demonstrated the ability to do."
In the hours after the shooting Dec. 14, as anxious family members gathered inside a firehouse and waited for news, Malloy told them their loved ones were not coming home. He said later that he didn't think it was right for the families to wait for the victims to be formally identified.
Now, Connecticut joins states including California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts in having the country's strongest gun control laws, said Brian Malte, director of mobilization for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington.
"This would put Connecticut right at the top or near the top of the states with the strongest gun laws," Malte said.
The legislation adds more than 100 firearms to the state's assault weapons ban and creates what officials have called the nation's first dangerous weapon offender registry as well as eligibility rules for buying ammunition. Some parts of the bill would take effect immediately after Malloy's signature, including background checks for all firearms sales.
Following a total of more than 13 hours of respectful and at times somber debate, the House of Representatives and the Senate voted in favor of the 139-page bill crafted by leaders from both major parties in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. Both were bipartisan votes.
"I pray today's bill ? the most far-reaching gun safety legislation in the country ? will prevent other families from ever experiencing the dreadful loss that the 26 Sandy Hook families have felt," said House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz.
Colorado and New York also passed new gun control requirements in the wake of the Newtown shooting, in which a 20-year-old gunman used a military-style semi-automatic rifle.
Compared with Connecticut's legislation, which, for example, bans the sale or purchase of ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds, New York restricted magazines to seven bullets and gave owners of higher-capacity magazines a year to sell them elsewhere. Colorado banned ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds.
But some lawmakers said they felt the legislation did not do enough to address mental health issues.
Rep. Mitch Bolinsky, a freshman Republican lawmaker from Newtown, acknowledged the legislation "is not perfect" and he hoped would be "a beginning in addressing critical mental health needs."
Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, whose district includes Newtown, said he felt he was representing the interests of the Sandy Hook victims as he cast his vote.
"I stand here as their voice, as their elected representative," he said, reciting the names of the 26 victims.
Lawmakers appeared to still be stunned by the enormity of the massacre.
"When a child is sent to school, their parents expect them to be safe. The Sandy Hook shooting rampage was a parent's, a school system's, a community's and the nation's worst nightmare," said Republican state Sen. Toni Boucher of Wilton.
Gun rights advocates who greatly outnumbered gun control supporters in demonstrations held earlier in the day at the Capitol railed against the proposals as misguided and unconstitutional, occasionally chanting "No! No! No!" and "Read the bill!"
"We want them to write laws that are sensible," said Ron Pariseau, of Pomfret, who was angry he'll be made a felon if he doesn't register his weapons that will no longer be sold in Connecticut. "What they're proposing will not stop anything."
By the time the Senate voted around 6:30 p.m., many of the gun rights advocates had gone home, leaving behind proponents of the bill who applauded when the tally in the Senate was read. The halls were mostly empty by the time the House voted at about 2:30 a.m. Thursday.
In the legislature, leaders waited to unveil gun legislation until they struck a bipartisan deal that they say shows how the parties can work together in Connecticut and elsewhere. They touted the package as a comprehensive response to Newtown that also addresses mental health and school security measures, including the creation of a new council to establish school safety standards and the expansion of circumstances when someone's mental history disqualifies him or her from obtaining a gun permit or other gun credentials.
"We did our job. We did it together," said House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero Jr. "We did the best we could and I think we did a good thing."
Among the gun control advocates who turned out to witness the vote were Dan and Lauren Garrett, of Hamden, wearing green shirts in honor of the Sandy Hook victims. The Garretts traveled to Hartford with their 10-month-old son, Robert, to watch the bill's passage. They said they hope lawmakers will build on the proposal.
"It's just the beginning of this bill. In six months from now, it's going to get stronger and stronger," Dan Garrett said. "I think they're watching us all over the country."
___
Associated Press writers Stephen Kalin and Michael Melia in Hartford and John Christoffersen in New Haven contributed to this report.
We've already seen leaked images of the HTC First smartphone purported to be launching at tomorrow's Facebook event, as well as what appears to be its APK, and we now have our best look yet at the Facebook-infused UI you can expect on the device. As you can see above in the image from @evleaks (and others at the source link below), the apparent Facebook Home hub doesn't exactly scream Facebook, although there unsurprisingly appears to be deep Facebook integration throughout. There are only a handful of images though, so there's still a fair bit that remains unknown. We'd say to check back tomorrow for more, but at the rate these leaks have been turning up we may well get yet another look at what's in store before then.
Apr. 3, 2013 ? In their latest experiment, Prof. Andrea Cavalleri from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter at the Hamburg-based Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) and Dr. Michael Gensch from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) investigated together with other colleagues from the HZDR, the United Kingdom, and Japan if and how superconductivity can be systematically controlled. The objective of their research is to improve the usability of superconducting materials for such new technologies as, for example, the processing of information.
For this purpose, and for a better understanding of the underlying phenomena, it is essential to increase the critical temperature -- critical temperature means that materials below this value are superconducting. Today, most superconductors only function at very low temperatures.
Typically, modern high temperature superconductors are solids which consist of a stack of thin layers, similar to the pages in a book. These layers are conductive and transport electricity. However, no electricity can flow from layer to layer at room temperature since those electrons which are responsible for the current flow can only move freely in the respective layer. If, however, such a layer stack is cooled to the right temperature, then superconductivity occurs along all directions. But there is one difference: While the electrons flow inside a layer without any resistance, these electrons can now also move from layer to layer by "tunneling" through the insulating areas located between these layers. Dr. Gensch explains: "Already the geometry suggests that the mechanisms of superconductivity are different inside and between the layers. We were interested in how the electrons transport this property vertically from layer to layer and/or whether we would be able to control this transport without disrupting the superconductivity in the horizontal layers."
For their experiments, the researchers used one of the HZDR's two free electron lasers (FELBE) which generates laser flashes of a specific, freely adjustable wavelength between the infrared and the microwave range. If such a short terahertz flash penetrates the material layers of the superconductor at the right frequency, then it deactivates the superconductivity very selectively and locally by directly changing the tunneling properties of the electrons found between the superconducting layers. More precisely, the light generates a pair of normal-conducting vortex currents which rotate in opposite directions. These vortices then move through the superconductor with the light. A so-called soliton wave is formed. What's so special about these waves: They always retain their shape irrespective of any faults in the superconductor. This resembles the behavior of such known soliton waves as, for example, tsunamis; the shape of which is also not influenced by any ground dislocations or irregularities.
The vortices moving through the superconductor also alter the optical properties of the material -- it becomes slightly transparent. While not for visible light, this is the case for wavelengths in the terahertz regime. The laser flashes last only for a few picoseconds, i.e. the billionth part of a second, so the scientists are able to observe all processes -- such as the emergence of the vortices and their soliton movement -- directly along this very fast time scale. The team headed by Prof. Cavalleri had successfully achieved something similar already once before. But back then, the scientists had only been able to quickly and consecutively switch the entire superconductivity off and on again between the layers. For the first time ever, the experiment in Dresden successfully managed to switch off the superconductivity very precisely and, above all, also locally -- and to stabilize this state almost ten times longer than has been the case before.
In particular, the physicists expect a number of new applications from these light generated vortices inside superconductors. Since they move through the crystal just like a tsunami irrespective of any faults or irregularities, these vortices are perfectly suited to store and transport information inside them. Information is transported within DNA like soliton waves. The experiment, which furnished proof and demonstrated that the vortices can be controlled by laser light, has the physicists in Prof. Cavalleri's team already dreaming about new opportunities for information processing in superconductors.
Superconductors under Constant Bombardment
For a number of years now, intense pulses in the invisible terahertz range (0.1 THz -- 10 THz) have been sparking enormous interest among scientists who investigate such so-called complex materials as high temperature superconductors. This is due to the specific properties of this long-wave radiation which has wavelengths between 0.03 and three millimeters. The energy per light particle is so low that the radiation doesn't really interact anymore directly with the electrons in a material, but instead, for example, with the atomic lattice. Sufficiently strong sources have been available for this purpose only for a couple of years now. The strongest terahertz pulses are generated by devices which are powered by electron accelerators.
The HZDR is specialized in a particularly important type of source for material sciences at the Center for High-Performance Radiation Sources called ELBE. While other devices have to take a break after a small series of ultrashort laser flashes, the ELBE sources are able to maintain a constant bombardment. It is actually this continuous sequence of pulses which permits the accuracy that researchers like Dr. Gensch and their guest researchers, such as Prof. Cavalleri, need for their analyses. In order to cover the entire spectral range down to 0.1 terahertz and three millimeter wavelengths, respectively, with even more intense pulses in the future, the HZDR is establishing a new, superradiant terahertz source called TELBE under the supervision of Dr. Gensch. Superradiance means here that extremely intense light is produced in a novel avalanche-like, short process without needing any mirrors as resonators -- unlike, for example, free electron lasers. This allows generating even higher terahertz fields at much more flexible repetition rates. Over the next three years, the new TELBE facility will be put into operation and commissioned with the assistance of selected pilot users. The researchers hope to utilize TELBE to unravel new phenomena in the field of materials research as well as life sciences.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
A. Dienst, E. Casandruc, D. Fausti, L. Zhang, M. Eckstein, M. Hoffmann, V. Khanna, N. Dean, M. Gensch, S. Winnerl, W. Seidel, S. Pyon, T. Takayama, H. Takagi, A. Cavalleri. Optical excitation of Josephson plasma solitons in a cuprate superconductor. Nature Materials, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nmat3580
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
When Samsung revealed its new Galaxy S4 flagship smartphone, it literally did a lot of song and dance about its own unique software features, with nary a peep on the built-in Google Android improvements and features brought by the use Jelly Bean 4.2 on board. I argued that it could be a signal that Samsung is looking to move towards an Amazon-style approach to building its own version of Android, but a new investor note from Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu suggests Samsung's platform bluster might be more useful to the South Korean company as a bargaining chip.
GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists said on Wednesday they may be close to tracking down the mysterious "dark matter", a substance that makes up more than a quarter of the universe but has never been seen.
A final identification of what makes up the enigmatic material would open up whole new areas of research including the possibility of multiple universes and other dimensions, said physicists.
An international team at Geneva's CERN research center said it had picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on board the International Space Station over the past 18 months.
They had found a surge of positron particles which may have been created by decaying dark matter - a substance so central to the universe it sets the position of planets and stars.
Samuel Ting, chief of the project that built CERN's giant AMS particle detector, told a crowded seminar at the center more data was needed to be sure that dark matter had been sighted.
"Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or if they have some other origin," he said.
Ting said it was also possible the surges came from pulsars - rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation.
But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon told Reuters after hearing Ting that the precision of the AMS could make it possible "to get a first hold on dark matter really soon".
"That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent. It would really open the door to a whole new world," said Gagnon.
Dark matter, which surrounds galaxies across the universe, is invisible because it does not reflect light. Its presence has been established by the gravitational pull it exerts on planets and stars.
Last week, the European Space Agency's Planck telescope revealed data from just after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago showing the mysterious substance made up 26.8 percent of the density of the universe, more than previously thought.
Normal matter, the galaxies and planets that can be seen by astronomers with ever-increasing powerful telescopes, makes up only 4.9 per cent. The rest is an even more enigmatic "dark energy" believed to be driving the expansion of the universe.
Ting has described dark matter as "one of the most important mysteries of physics today". Its traces are being sought not only through the AMS, or Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but in laboratories on earth and deep below ground.
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Public release date: 4-Apr-2013
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When Samsung revealed its new Galaxy S4 flagship smartphone, it literally did a lot of song and dance about its own unique software features, with nary a peep on the built-in Google Android improvements and features brought by the use Jelly Bean 4.2 on board. I argued that it could be a signal that Samsung is looking to move towards an Amazon-style approach to building its own version of Android, but a new investor note from Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu suggests Samsung's platform bluster might be more useful to the South Korean company as a bargaining chip.