Spotlights: New scrolling technique accelerates skim reading

The amount of data that we take in from screens each day through documents, email chains, web pages and social media flows is enormous. The continuous scrolling technique we typically use to browse this data is, however, far from perfect. 

"In conventional scrolling a number of objects are moving in the viewer window, which is problematic for visual attention. First, motion blur makes it impossible to focus on an object. Second, the user is not able to direct attention for long enough to comprehend the content before it scrolls out of the window," explains Postdoctoral Researcher Byungjoo Lee. 

Together with Olli Savisaari and Antti Oulasvirta they have developed a new scrolling technique which better supports data processing in three different ways. 

"Browsing of long texts speeds up by 60% and less than half as much time is spent locating the desired locations in the text. In addition, the probability of noticing points of interest in the text is increased by 210% compared to normal scrolling technique ", Dr. Lee explains. 

Important elements to the fore

 

The new technique has been given the name Spotlights and is based on the spotlight metaphor of human visual attention. According to existing research, visual attention needs about half a second to focus, which is clearly longer than the average amount of time that a sentence or picture remains on the screen when using the normal scrolling technique. 

"The new technique locates on each web page, whether it is a pdf document, video or web document, the visually important elements and presents them using a transparent layer than appears on top of the text. The elements can be, for example, pictures, tables or headlines. It chooses what you should focus and allows you enough time to do that," Dr. Lee tells.

"Our empirical evaluation showed that benefits are significant. In this way people can scroll through as many as 20 pages per second and still retain information. The technique improves recollection of browsed information", Prof. Oulasvirta explains. 

"Our technique is the first to try to maximise the amount of the information on the screen for human visual attention. To see such strong results is very encouraging", Oulasvirta summarizes.

"Spotlights is still a prototype. We seek possibilities to put this in practice in browsers, PDF viewers etc.." 

Source | http://www.eurekalert.org/

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Librarian

Khaitan & Co

Upcoming Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.

Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.

Short of time? Need to earn? Check out these 6 high paying part time jobs @ Library Assistant

Short of time? Need to earn? Check out these 6 high paying part time jobs 

You have been eyeing your favourite things for so long but you cannot buy anything, thanks to your empty wallet. Why deal with such issues when part time jobs are feasible ways to earn extra money?

However, finding a good part time job is not that easy in India. From working as a freelance writer to being a library assistant, here is the list of part time jobs that can add some good penny to your pockets: 

Social Media Assistant: Social media is a good platform to earn a good amount of money in a few hours. This profile allows people to generate, share or exchange content, pictures/videos in specific communities and networks. In new media field, you need too take care of the social media account of your company as well as manage the content.

Freelance Writer/Editor:  Nowadays, freelancing has become a new trend for earning. There are a thousands of websites available online which are recruiting people around the world. But for this, one must have a good command on language.

Online Researcher: Many publications are moving from print to digital format. Most of the people thinks that working as an online researcher is a monotonous or tedious task. But, If you have an interest in research, then this is the perfect job for you. Besides, you will get lots of job openings in media houses or business houses. By doing this, you can earn a hefty amount and this will definitely enhance your communication skills as well as the source of income.

Guest Service Coordinator: This particular job is to guide tourists for sight seeing purposes as well as for event management. This job will entail accommodating to your client in terms of all respects.

Library Assistant: The job of this person is to execute the day-to-day functions of a library, and assist the librarian in finding information. Communication skills is a prime requirement for this job. The library assistant runs the departments and supervises library clerks, records, departmental statistics; maintains the record collection by placing orders as necessary; and compiles and maintains the other data as well.

Online Communication Assistant: With the rise of social media, everything is moving to the digital world. From updating the web contents to social media assignments, one has to prepare a good report on content writing. You can earn from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 per hour in this job, which itself is a good amount for a living.

Source | Click Here

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Librarian

Khaitan & Co

Upcoming Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.

Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.

Streamlining Citations

New MLA Handbook seeks to make citing sources from a variety of media easier and more commonsensical.

In fairness to the Modern Language Association and other makers of popular academic style guides, citing sources -- if always tedious -- was once relatively straightforward: journal articles like this, books like that. But the proliferation of media sources -- especially electronic ones -- in recent years has made writing citations confusing at best (and purgatorial at worst).

So this week’s release of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook will be welcome news to any humanist who’s ever tried to cite a YouTube video. The book, which will soon be accompanied by a digital style center that answers questions and offers sample papers and teaching resources, seeks to streamline citations by taking more of a logic-based approach, rather than rules based. That mean less feverish page flipping to locate a style and more critical thinking about scholarly attribution.

“Rather than beginning with a source’s publication format -- book, article, website, television show -- and then explaining the rules for that particular format, we now focus on the elements that are common to nearly all sources, explaining how to find those elements and put them together into a works-cited entry,” said Kathleen Fitzgerald, associate executive director and director of scholarly communication for the MLA, who oversaw the changes.

The new handbook “really focuses on principles -- not just on how to create a citation that is correct, but on the purposes of citation practice, as well as on strategies for evaluating sources,” she added.

MLA’s new, slimmer guide also includes some specific changes to style, in support of the bigger aim. It has eliminated the use of many abbreviations and city of publication for books, and dropped the medium of publication in most cases. It regularizes punctuation and encourages the inclusion of full web addresses (URLs). There’s also a new “container” concept, which Fitzgerald described as reflecting the “mobility of sources today.” If an article is contained in a journal but downloaded from JSTOR, for example, the citation should reflect both facts.

Here’s a comparative book citation, using rules from the seventh and eighth editions of the MLA Handbook. The differences are subtle, but most citations -- regardless of medium or source -- would now be much more similar to the second than the first.

Seventh edition: Copeland, Edward. “Money.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 131-48. Print.

Eighth Edition: Copeland, Edward. “Money.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 131-48.

Fitzpatrick recently wrote about the significance of scholarly citations and MLA’s new approach in the L.A. Review of Books, saying writers “need to know how to cite an ebook, how to cite a tweet, how to cite an Instagram image, how to cite -- no, seriously, my office actually received this inquiry -- a book that a player reads within the action of a video game.” But at some point, she continued, “the process of developing and disseminating all of these citation formats runs the risk of creating a map that is larger and more complex than the terrain through which it attempts to guide writers and readers. And this is the point at which academic writers understandably begin to grumble about citations being outdated and unnecessary anyhow.”

Disagreeing with some assertions that citations are obsolete in the Google age, Fitzpatrick wrote that citations are needed to connect disparate works and that she was “convinced that it is possible to get rid of the murky bathwater without disposing of the baby. Citation practices can instead be future-proofed, both so that the markers authors leave behind today continue to point in the proper directions tomorrow and so that style manuals needn’t grow endlessly complex.”

Michael Greer, a lecturer in rhetoric and writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a content developer for higher education publishers, is an early fan of the handbook (which he previewed for MLA to assess its impact on teachers and publishers). He called it “streamlined and flexible,” and, notably, half the length of the previous handbook.

Greer said there’s no one right way to cite a single source and that students are “encouraged to think critically about sources instead of going on a scavenger hunt for the one example citation that matches what they are working on.” Now students are encouraged to look for a key elements -- author, title and container -- and “build” a citation around them.

From an instructor’s perspective, he said, the new handbook is more teachable, and includes a template that students can use for citing any source. “The new style is better aligned with instructors' focus on process and critical thinking when teaching students the basics of writing with sources,” he added.

Greer said the handbook amounted to a “big change.” He guessed that “not everyone will love it at first,” but that it “will come as a breath of fresh air to most writing teachers.”

Source | https://www.insidehighered.com

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Librarian

Khaitan & Co

Upcoming Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.

Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.