Most people read VERY slowly, because they were taught to do so (at school)!
That's something that makes me angry, because reading fast is a HUGE advantage in every setting (even taking into account the speed variability, depending on the topic).
I'm a very fast reader. To give you an example, I can (easily) read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in english during during the weekend (2 days), and english is not my first language. In comparison, my brother, who has a LOT in common with me (including education level, and going to the same school as a child), reads pretty slowly and would never be able to do that. My dad and others members of the family are also very fast. BUT, we all learnt by ourselves: basically, we -somehow- managed to NOT learn the WRONG way that the teachers were teaching us (mostly: by "talking in our head when reading"). My mom told me that as soon as I started reading I was very fast.
To me, french lessons (middle-school, early 80s) were _torture_ because of that: the teacher assumed that we read slowly, and we would spend hours while a student was reading out loud; myself I was already 3 chapters later (because I was reading silent during his/her loud reading, I simply COULD NOT read that slow!). When we were assigned a new book (usually a couple hundred of pages), I read it in an hour. But the teacher did NOT understand that there were such huge differences between students. It was painful! In the end, my conclusion is that (because of stupidity) reading fast was de facto discouraged. :-((
I forgot to mention that I'm NOT talking about skimming (reading in diagonal with a severe -and acceptable- loss of understanding), when I skim I'm up to 10 times faster. I'm talking reading with almost total comprehension (barring remembering unimportant details like "the color of the cape of Frodo when he left the Shire", or whatnot).
Of course, it must be said that reading speed is a _meaningless_ concept by itself.
Your speed will (obviously) vary A LOT depending on the _context_: are your studying? Trying to memorize? Reading for leisure? Reading in a foreign language? Tired? What is the text's complexity/level? What is your education level? Etc.
Average speed does NOT exist without context. And most articles on the subject fail to put that context into account, it's even worse in the comments...
=> Of course, this article (and the study) detail the importance of that context.
So, every time I read an article about "reading speed", I know that it's going to be painful in the comments, because people who comment -almost- NEVER take the context into account.
BTW, one of the most infuriating things EVER is that in comments, you ALWAYS have a few people with an elitist attitude who raise the "but you are not appreciating the text if you read too fast", they fail to understand that I don't read poetry like a technical book like a children book, etc. Then you have the "you CANNOT understand if you read fast" crowd, because they don't know what is possible, they assume that their speed is "normal", when it's NOT, they cannot understand that they have been taught to read slowly...
Assuming the LotR audio book is 45 hours you must be reading twice as fast to finish it in two long days at the weekend. Sure, I could read it that fast - meaning that mechanically I could probably decode the text as if the tape was double speed - but it would be a miserable experience because I would have no time to contemplate what was going on, to visualize events, to think back to previous passages, and so forth. It would be like watching a movie at double speed - we can all do it, and legitimately say we "watched" the movie, but it wouldn't give most of us pleasure.
I think this is exactly the point of people having different reading speeds, though. What is uncomfortably fast for one person is normal speed for someone else, including considering all of the implications of each sentence they're reading. I don't know that I could read the LoTR in two days, but I do know that the pace of audio books is painfully slow for me. My natural speed would be substantially faster than the audio book and I wouldn't be racing through at an unpleasant pace.
And I believe what the parent was trying to say was that we've been conditioned to believe that a certain speed is normal, when perhaps most of us are capable of reading (and fully comprehending) at a much higher speed, though I don't know enough to have an opinion on that.
As an independent data point, consider the pace that someone might tell you a story that they know by heart (ie, which they aren't reading from text). Perhaps a storyteller or a actors monologue. In my experience that speed would be much the same speed as if they were reading the book to you, or reading it to themselves. That suggests to me that there is a natural speed to fully absorb a narrative.
Non fiction may be different. Most times I read that to absorb the content rather then for pleasure, and often it doesn't require deep introspection during the process. It is limited only by the physical process and the intellectual decoding speed. In those cases I read very fast. I typically am continually and quickly scrolling a newspaper story on my phone, reading at least twice as fast as fiction.
Yeah I can definitely see that. I may just be weird. A lot of people in the comments here are talking about not subvocalizing to read faster, and I have never really worked on doing that, but according to the couple possibly unreliable reading speed tests I’ve taken, I read really fast, despite subvocalizing. So perhaps as long as I subvocalize, I can fully absorb the narrative? I also know that I can read slightly faster when I try not to subvocalize, but I’m not very good at it and I would never try to read a novel that way because I feel like THAT would destroy the narrative, at least for me.
> it is highly unlikely that a "senior colleague" can't understand simple logic.
I've met plenty of people like that. To tell you the truth, it was SO BAD that had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would have difficulties believing that people can be so incredibly incompetent.
I've also met "experienced" people, coming from the best "elite" schools in France (I'm french), that were unable to code their way out a paper bag, but were somehow working in programming or technical team roles. It's always stunning when you meet people who come from high studies, that involve quite a lot of programming, but who know NOTHING, how can they pass the exams is a real question, that puts in resious doubt the value of those schools. Two such people (technical managers) were fired for gross incompetence (after having us lose plenty of time & money). Unfortunately, many others (at various levels) managed to stick around and made things HARD for everybody else.
But the worst is when those people are also JERKS (or worse), as in the OP example. I've suffered A LOT because of that, as have my coworkers. And working as a contractor makes it super hard to get rid of them (though I managed it in one case).
In France, there is only (AFAIK) _one_ love hotel (inspired by the japanese ones).
It's pretty small and the rooms are not big at all, but okayish (I only visited once).
What's interesting is the history of its creation: from what I've read, it was pretty hard to get the authorizations (which explains why there are not any others). Basically, this is the old B.S. about prostitution. Which is total hogwash because they check your ID when you go in, so it would be impossible for an escort to use it with more than a couple customers (and regular hotels are frequently used for escorting anyway so what's the difference?).
Personally, I think that love hotels are a great thing, much better than a regular hotel, and MANY people would benefit from those. Especially people in alternative sexualities (like myself) for whom finding a place to have sex is often a serious problem: going to one partner's home is often seen as a risk for security & anonymity.
BTW, there has also been recently (one year ago), the opening of a "sex doll brothel" in Paris, and they were also checked by the police... Seriously, a freaking SEX DOLL hotel! It's crazy how anything related to sex in any way creates so much problems.
Sadly, I don't think love hotels would work in America. Too many people disrespect and trash public spaces. It's the same reason they don't have net cafes like they do in Japan (where you can informally crash and use the internet).
I don't know how prevalent they are nation-wide, but Miami had quite a few hotels that billed by the hour. Some even had private attached garages so nobody would see you and your date enter the room. The room quality varied depending on the hotel, along with the price, but even the cheaper rooms were passable.
I don't know exactly how common they were, but I've definitely been to an internet café in the US (in a very small town FWIW). AFAICT they're gone because they just don't make economic sense anymore with everyone having a WiFi device already.
There are by-the-hour day spas in LA that often serve this purpose. They seem to be used as meet spots for paid hookups, although they serve other uses as well.
If a stay in a love hotel is $75, isn't that around the price of a cheap hotel room anyway for a night? Pay "a night", have a fuck, check out. I am sure most hotels in France would not bat an eye, would they?
French living in Japan here btw. One of my friends who "goes out" far more than I do did not recommend love hotels, he would just go to regular ones. What you need is a bed and a bathroom. If you want toys, lubricants, condoms, bring your own, really, what more services does a love hotel really offer?
Unless you are into heavy bdsm a regular hotel has all you need.
Faux, I am pretty sure I remember seeing a "love hotel" in Strasbourg too, which billed by the hour (not a big fan of hotel in general, so don't know more about that)
I find this story disturbing & the implications are frightening (many are addressed in the article).
But one thing strikes me as REALLY worrying: they call it the "MAGIC" box.
IMO, if there is ONE thing that you DO NOT WANT in serious such matters, it is the propagation of the -common- belief that science/technology == MAGIC.
This is already a problem with computers, as people accept plenty of nonsense "because the computer said so", and to be fair technologies like computers have become so complex, it's difficult to NOT have a "magic" feeling to some extent (let's not get into sciences which are IMO even worse).
Relying blindly on something that you don't really understand (its limits, its strengths & weaknesses, the context in which it should be used), is a RECIPE FOR DISASTER.
I have a tongue-in-cheek joke about this: "Data doesn't lie."
The problem with most people is that they agree with that notion and never second-guess it. ...but anyone who's ever modified anything in code or a database or the like will know that to not be the case.
Considering it "magic" also proves the following posit: The result of the use of that technology is potentially as faulty as the operator whom doesn't understand it.
Case in point: "Tides go in, tides go out. You can't explain that."
> So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.
Interesting research, I'll be curious to know if it gets confirmed.
Anyway, I can offer a REAL, striking example of how people can change once power "goes to their head".
This is a real story, I was there when it happened, I saw & heard all, I was sitting about one meter away...
This took place in the early 2000s, I was working, as a contractor, in a BIG company. In the room we were several contractors, working for several teams (with different bosses). One of my coworkers was a political refugee in France, he was a political activist at home (an african country under a dictature) and had to flee, so he went to France. I knew he was into politics because during pauses he would talk on his phone and take appointments & the like (I was sitting in front of him, so I heard part of it).
One morning, as I arrived (he was usually the first in the room), he told me that something bad had happened... His teenage daughter was supposed to come and visit him in France (his family was still living in Africa), but at the airport she had been arrested by the police and had _disappeared_ with no news...
I don't think I need to insist on the seriousness of the situation & the fears that he must have had. Police in dictatorships are not know for being nice... You can easily imagine what could have happened to her.
Of course, this had been done in order to put pressure on him.
Then his boss entered the room, to talk about their project.
(Now, I swear that everything is 100% true and not exaggerated.)
My coworked started, again, to explain the abduction of his daughter to his boss.
His -loud- boss's reaction, with half a chuckle: "Ha! you're a man who brings trouble!". Then he left the room.
I was speechless. To be perfectly clear, this was NOT a "defensive laugh", the type of laugh that you do when things are bad and you don't know how to react, no he REALLY did not care.
My coworker, dismayed, turned to me and said "You know, that guy and me, we used to be like fingers of the same hand. Since he became a manager, he's gone crazy".
I could tell a lot of other horror stories about that manager. A few years later he even cost me my job (I refused a contract that would have put me in his team, this got me fired).
For those of you who may be wondering what happened to the daughter: her family "bought" her back. Corruption goes both ways...
A sad example of how power can kill someone heart...
It means that the corrupt police who were willing to kidnap his daughter on orders from bad people were also willing to release her in exchange for money from the victim's family. At least, that's how I read it.
I went from being an individual contributor to a manager, and I would interpret that situation differently. When you are the boss, you are getting bombarded constantly. From above, below, peers, you name it. Your cognitive load goes up so much that you actively avoid bringing even more onto your plate. I definitely found myself trying on-the-fly to keep interactions superficial, especially in a group setting, just to avoid taking on yet another burden onto my already full plate.
Perhaps that would mean I suck as a manager. Though honestly I've seen the same effect on pretty much everyone I've seen go up the manager career path. I don't take any of it personally.
There are two sizes of problems -- mine, and yours, and mine will always be much more important to me.
>When you are the boss, you are getting bombarded constantly. From above, below, peers, you name it. Your cognitive load goes up so much that you actively avoid bringing even more onto your plate.
Yes, I can see how saying some words of empathy or showing understanding about someone whose DAUGHTER HAD JUST BEEN KINGNAPPED might be too much on one's plate.
Perhaps the hardest part about managing people is a non trivial percentage of them will dump their personal problems on you and it can be overwhelming. It's hard to generate instant empathy on demand when everything that comes at you is someone's crisis.
Maybe the boss in this site could have been more diplomatic but I see it from his perspective and I can appreciate the need to try and push it away.
Sometimes I wonder if tech folks in particular are prone to being snowflakes.
> There are two sizes of problems -- mine, and yours
So if you drop a penny and I break my arm, you'd care more about the dropped penny, and when I say "ouch" you say "not now, can't you see I just dropped a penny"?
You contrive an example but miss the fundamental truth. People will always focus more on their own problems than someone else's. I'm amused that this seems controversial. OP certainly doesn't care about the boss's problems. Which totally makes sense, except the boss, by virtue of his position, is not allowed the same privilege. A bit hipocratic but... Ok.
I fail to see how "we" are forgetting. I also fail to see how "something similar could strike again" is news, since it's a recurrent -scary- topic every flu season.
The 1918 flu outbreak is regularly in the news, especially when the flu season is about to start, and there have been some serious worries about a possible similar nasty flu version in the last past years.
Just last week, I read an article in a magazine about it. Among other things, it explained that the origin of the flu was probably not Spain, but they were "scapegoated" because nobody wanted to be held "responsible" for it.
That is not quite accurate. There was a war in progress at the time and news media was heavily censored. Spain was a neutral and did not censor their press. The Spanish press reported the early ravages of the illness while this news was censored in other countries; by the time it could no longer be hidden by the war powers it was already associated with Spain because that is where it was first reported. It was not about scapegoating or blame, just a consequence of how the public learned about the disease.
Somewhat off-topic: This reminds me of some compelling argument I've read about how the "Florida Man” meme is the result of Florida’s strong freedom of information laws. It’s interesting how the free flow of information/reporting can easily distort public perception when compared to places with more barriers.
Anytime a journalist writes "we," you should read that as "we journalists." That has the nice advantage of subverting the rhetorical intent, and keeping the blood pressure low.
I think we do forget it. More specifically, we forget the responses to disease which work, and as a result have dismantled our ability to respond. I read Laurie Garret's book "The Coming Plague" where she described the many things which were done to control the spread of disease. None of those things exist anymore, and would take a lot of time to re-create. No consideration is given to them in a "profit oriented" society, where return on investment is more important than people's lives.
This is a cliche designed to close the outrage loop in a quick and satisfying way. There's a problem with most people, with a nice progressive solution, which you are already implementing, because you're a better person. End of story. Or, if you actually had forgotten or never knew, tada, the article has rescued you from the potentially embarrassing state of embodying what's wrong with the world.
Ignoring the moral/ethics concerns, how would a potential buyer know that the data is legit (if it even exists at all?).
Give me a couple of days and I'll create a fake -but real looking- set of records with millions of false customers (it would be made real enough by using public information)...
If you tell me that they'll provide an extract as "proof", I'll answer: it's easy to cook-up a realistic small sample, just using and remixing former leaks/hacks for instance...
In summary: the money aspect makes the data MUCH more suspicious than a "bragging/4tehLULz" hack.
Reputation and repeat business. You might get away with selling fake information once, i highly doubt you would get away with it twice.
I imagine its a similar scenario to how other dodgy markets work such as drugs or cryptolocker decryption keys, reputation and customer service mean a lot.
For hackers good opsec would require them to use a new persona for each separate hack. Compartimentalization. Linking separate hacks together is a really bad idea.
Perhaps if you are a buyer of this data you have similar, if smaller, databases. You could then say, here's ten thousand hashed credit card numbers from my collection. Give me the full data for ~1,000 of them. If their data lines up with yours that's a good sign.
This wouldn't be a perfect method, but if the seller could do it then it would increase my confidence a lot.
For this particular example, the buyer can simply look himself up in the dataset. LOL. This dataset is the database of the largest hotel brand of China.
I am pretty sure there are entries about me in the database (I am Chinese). It's damn embarrassing, people know me can know who I slept with if he pay 8 bitcoin now. Now I hope the price of bitcoins goes up.
The article is about API documentation, but the points apply to every documentation.
I think however that a few things are missing in the articles:
1- an OVERVIEW/INTENT page/paragraph.
This is THE thing that is missing in almost every -if not all- documentation I've ever read.
An example that I always use to illustrate the point: the "File" API. In EVERY documentation I've ever seen, the usage of each function/method is detailled, but NOT why some function must be used before others (opening a file is NOT an obvious concept); the concepts (what is a file?), the workflow are NEVER explained.
And Files are basic stuff, what about GUIs? Ever used a big GUI toolset? It's miserable! They never include the high level stuff, you have to dig a lot and if you are lucky, maybe you'll find a blog womewhere that gives a few insights in the mind of the creators. IF you are lucky. So you end up using the wrong type of widget or function (because they look alike) until you crash & burn and realize that it was the wrong choice for your purpose, because NOTHING is explained, you have to discover everything at your cost.
2- graphics/workflow charts
This is related to my first point. When I write documentation I include -at least- one high level graphic that shows how the various parts of the system interact, sometimes a flowchart or a Finite-state diagram (when a FSM is used, obviously).
-----
When I give a module to my coworkers (be they testers or users of my API), I give them that additional documentation which makes it MUCH easier to understand and test/use. What I find stunning is that I'm always the ONLY ONE to do so! At most my coworkers will write _some_ documentation to explain a few difficult points, but it will mostly be comments, not documentation for an user of their API/module. And if you point it out, the reaction will range from "I've no interest in that" to "it's not necessary, the code talks for itself"... To them, the -automatically generated- JavaDoc comments are "enough", which is total B.S.
The most infuriating is that all this -undocumented- code is always the result of a HUGE amount of work and dedication. But it is invariably cruely hobbled by that missing step: helping the users use it properly. I see it everyday in Free/Open source tools, and I've seen it in every project in the companies I've worked with (except mine of course)...
So you spend lots of time trying to understand how the stupid thing is supposed to work instead of doing your real work.
There is a LONG way before the importance of documentation (and comments) is accepted as what it is: VITAL. Unfortunately, as for testing and security, management not only don't encourage the practice, but they often discourage it (poo-pooing -or worse- such concerns).
I agree with most of your ideas, and I usually apply them myself. But wanted to ask about graphics and charts, do you use any specific tool? They can be time-consuming to get right and update.
Also, I believe a problem here is that on large organizations and codebases many programmers don't really understand themselves the relationships/interactions between systems, or people setting the standards think overviews are hard to standardize, or they think other people think documentation is a pain to write so they try to minimize the work needed to get it "right".
EDIT: came up with a better way to put it: documentation should deal with what a system does, why and where, then how it achieves so in a broad sense, and finally deal with the implementation details (which is the only part we are kinda handling nowadays, as you explained).
> graphics and charts, do you use any specific tool?
Usually, I used Visio, not really by choice but because it was available and sometimes used by other coworkers (usually for the specs flowcharts). There was another tool available, that was used in one of those companies, it was better than Visio, but I don't remember the name, unfortunately, due to a insufficient number of licenses, I could not use it.
When I do such stuff on my Linux box, I use various flowchart/diagram tools like Dia (and another one whose name I forget). I've also experimented with various text-based solution (LaTeX-based & the like), but with mitigated satisfaction: those solutions where too heavy & cumbersome for my use case.
As you wrote, those ARE time consuming and have the usual update problem. But that cost is really offset by the benefit of clarity. When _I_ gave a module to the testers team, I gave them a brief (15 to 20 minutes max) presentation and my documents & usually never heard again from them (except when they found a bug of course), while with the other modules (made by my coworkers), I saw them asking for more information all the time...
> EDIT: came up with a better way to put it: documentation should deal with what a system does, why and where, then how it achieves so in a broad sense, and finally deal with the implementation details (which is the only part we are kinda handling nowadays, as you explained).
You describe _exactly_ the problem. And I've been fighting hard to make that simple idea enter in my coworkers -thick- skulls, but with not much success: they often do acknowledge the problem, but either don't care (disgruntled or not professional) or are too lazy or are overworked and take shortcuts, not realizing that medium and long-term they would in fact GAIN some time... As for the management, I've lost all hope, no amount of discussion can enlight them (they only see "THE CODE").
I wrote a little tool ([Rippledoc](http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/sw/rippledoc/index.html)) for processing a docs directory of markdown files into a navigable whole, and recently updated it to be able to use the project README.md (the presumed overview/intent doc) to encourage having that front page be overview/intent.
That's something that makes me angry, because reading fast is a HUGE advantage in every setting (even taking into account the speed variability, depending on the topic).
I'm a very fast reader. To give you an example, I can (easily) read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in english during during the weekend (2 days), and english is not my first language. In comparison, my brother, who has a LOT in common with me (including education level, and going to the same school as a child), reads pretty slowly and would never be able to do that. My dad and others members of the family are also very fast. BUT, we all learnt by ourselves: basically, we -somehow- managed to NOT learn the WRONG way that the teachers were teaching us (mostly: by "talking in our head when reading"). My mom told me that as soon as I started reading I was very fast.
To me, french lessons (middle-school, early 80s) were _torture_ because of that: the teacher assumed that we read slowly, and we would spend hours while a student was reading out loud; myself I was already 3 chapters later (because I was reading silent during his/her loud reading, I simply COULD NOT read that slow!). When we were assigned a new book (usually a couple hundred of pages), I read it in an hour. But the teacher did NOT understand that there were such huge differences between students. It was painful! In the end, my conclusion is that (because of stupidity) reading fast was de facto discouraged. :-((
I forgot to mention that I'm NOT talking about skimming (reading in diagonal with a severe -and acceptable- loss of understanding), when I skim I'm up to 10 times faster. I'm talking reading with almost total comprehension (barring remembering unimportant details like "the color of the cape of Frodo when he left the Shire", or whatnot).
Of course, it must be said that reading speed is a _meaningless_ concept by itself.
Your speed will (obviously) vary A LOT depending on the _context_: are your studying? Trying to memorize? Reading for leisure? Reading in a foreign language? Tired? What is the text's complexity/level? What is your education level? Etc.
Average speed does NOT exist without context. And most articles on the subject fail to put that context into account, it's even worse in the comments...
=> Of course, this article (and the study) detail the importance of that context.
So, every time I read an article about "reading speed", I know that it's going to be painful in the comments, because people who comment -almost- NEVER take the context into account.
BTW, one of the most infuriating things EVER is that in comments, you ALWAYS have a few people with an elitist attitude who raise the "but you are not appreciating the text if you read too fast", they fail to understand that I don't read poetry like a technical book like a children book, etc. Then you have the "you CANNOT understand if you read fast" crowd, because they don't know what is possible, they assume that their speed is "normal", when it's NOT, they cannot understand that they have been taught to read slowly...
Yep, that topic is one of my pet peeves ^^