Reading on Paper is Faster than Reading on iPad or Kindle.

Though done with a small sample, this study seems to say reading on paper is faster than on Kindle 2 or on iPad with iBook application. PC World has an article about it here. the 24 people rated the reading experience about the same and the comprehension was similar through any of  the medium. The PC monitor was uniformly hated. probably because, as was pointed out by some, it reminded of the workspace.

It will be really interesting to find out why reading on paper is faster. of course, you would need a bigger study to establish that this is really so. the speed difference recorded was quite significant at 10% or thereabouts. There was a speed difference between reading Kindle 2 and the iPad. Kindle 2 came out to be slower even though the reading experience on it is closest to reading on paper.

Can the whole thing be due to the fact that reading a printed book is associated with relaxation, absence of stress, that makes the difference! This experiment was about reading short stories of Hemingway. Would reading text book, self development books and other such serious books give us a different result because of that association! Reading any of these books, may not be as relaxing an experience even on paper.

Super Quick Charger for Electric Cars

Biggest issue about electric cars is that when you run low on battery charge, you just cannot get into a station and fill up in a few minutes. Even the so called "quick chargers" take up to 30 minutes to charge batteries to 80%  capacity.

News comes of a charger development by a Japanese company JFE Engineering that have developed a charger that can charge car batteries to 50% capacity in 3 minutes and 70% capacity in 5 minutes. This was used to

actually run the Mitshubishi Electric car i-MiEV 80 kms continuously after a 5 minute charge. The car has a range of 160 kms after a full charge! We are going somewhere looks like! Whether out electrical grids be able to manage a significant number of cars charging at this rate is another issue that'll need a solution, of course.

In Love With a machine Voice!

There was a time, quite some time back, when machines talking back to you used to cause irritation! Looks like things are reversed now. People are falling in love with specific machine voices. Here is an interesting article on the same. The article talks about the voices people have come to depend on, the GPS voices that giving you direction for driving safely.

I wonder if that is the difference. You resent the elevator talking to you or the washing machine talking back. But, when you have started depending on something, it is easy to get attached. It will be really interesting to find why this is happening!

How Effective can CBTs be!

The computer based training or CBTs have been talked about practically since the advent of the multi-media  age in personal computing. the potential is obviously very high. But, not too many examples exist that really fully exploit the media. to my mind, nothing can explain concepts better than the multi media tools of animation, sound and video etc. However, the multimedia show can very easily degenerate into gimmickry unless done thoroughly.

We have included quite a few CBT projects this year. We need to push it to the levels of effectiveness where they can be tools we could use for teaching the corresponding subject. I really do need to push for the typical project management style we used to adopt for the software development industry.