Meet Bradley Ridlehoover.

Why is he important?

Because as of this summer, he has been working as a deferred associate at South Carolina Legal Services in Greenville in their Low Income Taxpayer Clinics area.

So how did he end up there?

Well, he started out in the Piedmont area, with an interest in law. Enter tax law. He went on to get his LLM (Master of Laws) in tax and was set to start work at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP. About that time, he was deferred and held some adjunct teaching positions, but then met up with some Greenville SCLS staff attorneys and before long, he was working in the office there.

When I spoke with Brad, he mentioned that he has enjoyed his work at SCLS. He is especially pleased that he was given such a broad exposure to the legal issues that so many people face. He has had client interaction from the start and has really enjoyed working with his SCLS colleagues.

His biggest eye-opener?

The fact that so many of his clients don’t know how to advocate for themselves. Many of the people coming in with tax problems don’t understand that they need to respond to the demand letters. They don’t know the next step. They can’t do this on their own and they can’t afford to hire anyone. Many times they’re victims of predatory lending and have a lot of personal debt with huge interest rates. They are stuck until they reach out to us for help. They are good hard-working people who are stuck and often we can help them resolve the issue quickly.

His Takeaway?

If you are an attorney just starting out and even if you’re not interested in working for legal services on a permanent basis, this is still a great place to get pro bono experience or to volunteer.

1. It is rewarding.
2. You get good practice drafting.
3. You have fabulous opportunities for trial experience.
4. And the clients are wonderful.

Plus it’s a great place to give back to the community.

What changes would he make to his experience at SCLS?

More time. More time to expand to other legal issues. He focused on tax because of the need, but legal services is a great place to learn so many areas of the law. It’s a great place to learn to be a generalist.

As we spoke it was obvious he had tremendous respect for the attorneys he worked with – “they are experts in so many areas but also practice in such a broad range.” They have to be – so much of what they do covers so much of the law – tax law, family law and benefits.

If he could change SCLS, what would he change?

I’d raise awareness about SCLS. It’s a great community resource. And the staff are motivated, interested individuals who want to be a part of this community. They do great work.

And his final words?

I’m a better lawyer because of this experience.

And we appreciate that. Thanks Brad!

-RFW

Like most people, I have a backlog of things that I want to read. One of the items on my list was an article by David Pogue in the New York Times in November called “Cleaning Up The Clutter Online.” Pogue highlights a free tool for the Web called Readability that reformats Web pages to makes them significantly easier to read. Here’s some of what Pogue said about Readability

With one click, it eliminates EVERYTHING from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else… The text is also changed to a beautiful font and size… It completely transforms the Web experience, turning your computer into an e-book reader. I think I’m in love.

My take: As a user-centric type of guy, Pogue’s description of Readability grabbed my attention. So I gave it a shot. Wow! The application does a phenomenal job of making sites easier to read. You configure it to meet your needs and voilà! Cluttered Web pages transform into easy-to-read pages.

To give you a sense of what this application can do, here are two screen shots of my previous blog post “7 Keys To Customer Experience In 2010” — before and after I applied the readability application.

The bottom line: Hopefully this is just the start to more usability-improving technologies.

The last lecture in Visual Language we talked about Typography.

A typeface is a complete alphabet (letters numbers & characters)

For example Arial is typeface family comprising standard Arial (Arial Std) and variants, including Arial Black, Bold, Extra Bold, Condensed, Italic, Light, Medium, Monospaced, Narrow, and Rounded

The Origins of Letters

Typography began in excavations and caves with pictures of animals, moons, suns and rocks. Pictures symbolised these images.

The Origins of Letters
First written language was based on an Alphabet called Phoenician, from the Middle east  1500BC, it contained no vowels.

The Greek alphabet is the source for all the modern scripts of Europe, this alphabet adapted vowels and was the first instance of reading left to right.

Roman Capitals
Was a development of the Greek Alphabet using Capital Letters

Letters painted on stone with broad brush,held at angle causing diagonal stress. The letters were carved and sculputured with a serif.

This helped legibility when combined with larger blocks of text.

Uncial Script
This script could be written easier with lower case letters. The Parchment (animal skin) was introduced. The Calamus (Reed Pen) replaced with finer Quill

Half-uncial Script
Certain letters gained increased descenders and ascenders

Carolingian Minuscule
Originated by Emperor Charlemagne  in Rome, it become dominant European script, letters had upper and lower case.

Humanist Script
Came from 15th century Renaissance Venice, shapes were taller, more slender, more open.2 cases used together

Gothic Script
Carolingian minuscule mixed with various national scripts – one variant known as textura

From the 13th century to the end of manuscript book production in the late 15th and 16th centuries, Gothic textura became, in a minor range of variants, a relatively standardised form of book hand.

Parchment was replaced by paper. Revolutionary birth of printing press.It consists of individual, movable characters, placed

together again and again to create new lines, set in to columns, inked, paper laid over and ran through a wine press.

Venetian Antiqua
This font is composed of elegant, soft lines and introduced italics.

Typefaces
There are 2 types of Typefaces, Serif and Sans-Serifs. Serifs have decorative curves at the end of the lettering.

Sans-Serifs
Sans-serifs are more modern and have no curves are decorations at the end. The lines are very clean and often used in web design.

Anatomy of a Letter

Readability -Saccadic Movement
Our eyes scan letters and send signals to our brain – The Designer has to make it easy for our eyes to move over the page

Times and Nimrod common in books, newspapers, these roman serifs are good for reading as theres a track for our eyes to read along to.

Line spacing (the distance between each line) is important, these should not be too close together or else. Line length is also important, lines should not be too long or else it becomes hard for the reader to keep track of reading on the page. Printed text should be no more than 60 characters per line and 45 characters on a web page. A lot of text can be made easier to read by breaking the paragraphs up into columns, either a 2 or 3 column setup. This makes reading large pages of text much easier.

Character spacing is called Kerning, its the adjusting of space between 2 characters.

Tracking
Tracking is adjusting the spacing across a word or a line.

That concluded our final lecture in Visual Language. In our labs today we started work on our Typography assignment sketching our face and our idea’s for the typography.

Good English writing is easy to read aloud.  Good prose keeps a nice pace, has plenty of breaks, and doesn’t contain accidental rhyming, tongue twisters, or alliteration.  But because non-native speakers experience pronunciation differently than native-speakers do, non-native speakers can unwittingly produce difficult-to-say phrases.

For example, I once edited an article by a Korean author who used the term pest species repeatedly.  (If you don’t see the problem with the phrase pest species, try saying it three times fast.)

Pest species is what’s known in English as a tongue twister (a phrase or poem that is amusingly hard to say.)  She sells sea shells by the seashore is one famous English tongue twister. Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers is another. Tongue twisters often contain alliteration (repeated sounds), rhyming, and the sounds s, p, th, and sh.

The easiest way to avoid accidental tongue twisters is to make sure that you don’t write strings of words that start with the same sound.  Another trick is to avoid redundancy.  Words with similar meanings in English often contain similar sounds.  Hence , the awkward phrase tending tender tendrils could be made better simply by dropping the word tender.  Since tendrils are generally tender, to say so is redundant.

It’s a good idea to read all your papers and emails out loud.  Imagine yourself presenting a speech, and watch out for phrases that make you stumble. If you stumble over a word or phrase, its likely that your readers will too.

I like it. Read about it here.

You can get it here.

Hey hey hey!

We are almost at the end of the road for this module.

In today’s lecture, we started by trying to get the projector to work but it wasn’t happening!

We got a handout on Typography. A question about this will come up on our tests.

The Origin of Letters

Excavations at various sites around the world have uncovered pictures of animals, suns and moons painted on to stone walls in caves and on rocks. The first written language to be based on an alphabet and sounds showed up in Phoenicia in the Middle East, around 1500 BC. The Greeks then developed the alphabet more, such as introducing vowels and the convention of writing and reading from left to right.

Developments

Roman Capitals

As the Greeks developed the alphabet, the Romans developed the Greek alphabet further, creating the Roman Capitals. The letters were first painted onto stone by using a broad brush, which was held at a slight angle. The letters were then carved with a hammer and a chisel. This is how the letters got their serifs.

Uncial Script

This saw the appearance of the first lower case letters. Designers decided to use rough papyrus in favour of parchment(animal skin). As well as replacing this, the calamus or reed pen was replaced the much finer quill.

Half-Uncial Script

Certain letters gained increasingly pronounced descenders and ascenders, sticking up and down, creating an alphabet along a more refined four-line system.

Examples of these are The Book of Kells and The Book of Durrow.

Carolingian minuscule

Charlemagne’s coronation as emporer in Rome in 800, Carolingian miniscule was partially developed under his patronage, naturally became the dominant script in western Europe. These letters had both upper and lower cases, but were rarely used together.

Humanist Script

Created in the 15th Century in Renaissance Venice. Shapes that were both taller, slender and more open than anything that had been seen before. The two cases were used together in the same script for the very first time.

Gothic Script

This arose where the path of Carolingian Minuscule crossed with those of various national scripts. One of the results was the evolution of a script known as Textura. Johannes Gutenberg is usually credited with the invention of printing in Mainz. The 42-line Bible was Gutenberg’s greatest masterpiece. He took the textura script that was in use by contemporary scribes and he then converted this into the first printing type. In today’s world, this type has made a reoccurrence in tattooing with celebrities favouring this text.

Venetian Antiqua

Developed by Nicholas Jenson and Aldus Manutius. They were book printers in Venice in the latter part of the 15th Century. They created the elegant and soft lines of Venetian antiqua which signalled the dawn of a new age in printing type. This also saw the introduction to italics.

Typefaces

this is a complete alphabet (letters, numbers and characters) in a single design. For example Times. There are two groups of typefaces. Sans-serif and Serif. Serifs would mainly be used for headings and sans-serif for body text. The most popular sans-serif is Arial.

Readability

When we read, the eye follows the letters from left to right repeatedly. A designer needs to use typography to ensure that the text can be read easily. The key element being that we read not letters, but word formations. The eyes scan the letters and send signals to the brain, which puts them together to form words. The eye progresses in what is known as saccadic movement over the lines of the text. This means that the eye will stop regularly, fixing on one word, and at the same time reading a few words around it. This can prove to be a slow procedure for an unpracticed reader. Reading will happen at a high speed habitual readers. When we read quickly, the brain gets stimulated, which increases the concentration, motivation and understanding. I we were to come across a word in the text that we did not recognize, the brains skips this word creating comprehension based on the context of the page. I f we were to read more slowly, the process is understimulated, which can create gaps in the flow of information.

The easier that the designer makes it for the reader to move their eyes over the page, the greater the level of readinility will be. The following are crucial to the readability of text:

• Typeface
• Lower case and upper case
• Type size
• Line Spacing
• Line Length
• Word spacing
• Character spacing

Line Spacing

Distance between the lines also affect readability. If the distance is too small, lines will merge into each other. If the distance is too large, the eye will have difficulty keeping the text together. The measurement 8.5/11 expresses a type size 8.5pt and a body size of 11pt. This means that there are 2.5pt of empty space between the lines.

Line Length

Also referred to as column width or measure. The line length affects readability. A line should not be longer than around 60 characters including spaces. For the web, it would be shorter.

Column Set-up

The designer may choose various column set-ups. This has a major impact on readability.

Flush Left Text

The text is set up with an even left-hand edge and a ragged right-hand edge. The right-hand edge allows for consistent word spacing and minimizes the number of hyphenations, which makes reading easier.

Flush Right Text

The left-hand edge of the column is ragged and the right-hand edge is even. This makes for poor reading. The eye would have difficulty finding its way back to the correct line alonf the uneven side.

Centered Text

This is distributed evenly either side of a middle axis making the whole text symmetrical.

Justified Text

This has each line the same length, making both the left and right-hand sides even.

Scrolling Problems

Web designers usually try to make pages short. The often use long lines to fill the screen, which results in terrible readability. There are several solutions:

1. Edit the text to within an inch of its life making it shorter.
2. Create two or more columns, or split a longer text over several pages.
3. Fill up the long columns that demand so much scrolling with attractive and exciting pictures.

Word Spacing

Spacing on each line has to be big enough for the individual words to be clear. It must never be greater than the line spacing. I f spacing is too small, the words will flow into each other making it difficult to read.

Character Spacing

Reduces the distance between the letters is called tracking, while kerning involves the designer reducing the distance between certain letter combinations, while increasing this distance for other combinatons.

In the lab we had to stand up in front of the class and talk about our Semiotic images. Here, we needed to say why we chose the celebrity and which topcs we were going to be portraying them in. We also needed to explain why we chose to represent the celebrity in that light. It was interesting to hear why people chose some of the topics and why they chose to have handbags or devil horns.

‘Till the next time!

I’ve received the following email 3 times. It’s time for me to share!

Following an article published yesterday, titled Kansas Ethics Opinion Requires Disclosure on Ghostwritten Pleadings, the ABA Journal has created a poll on ghostwriting.  Visit the site at www.abajournal.com to cast your vote in the poll “Is Ghostwriting Legal Documents Ethical?”.

Scroll down the screen to see the poll, which is located on the right side of the home page.  We’re not sure how long the poll will be open, so be sure to vote today.

This issue is particularly relevant for those of us interested in limited scope representation.

Limited scope representation varies state by state, but generally, it allows attorneys to provide a discrete service and is considered by many to increase access to justice – due to reduced costs for legal services.

A litigant or client may pay for someone to write a letter on their behalf or write their court documents, but complete their legal representation at that point.

Ghostwriting is when the attorney writes the documents for the client. In some states, the attorney does not have to sign their name; in others, it is mandatory.

What do you think? Case your vote at www.abajournal.com.

-RFW

Before

eXXX location(s) do not have XXX controller; therefore, no response from xxxcdoes not mean that controller does not work.

After

eXXX locations do not have a XXX Controller, so don’t try to ping it or test it.

Am dat întâmplător peste două aplicaţii care te ajută să cureţi pagina web de tot ce nu te interesează, se mişcă, tuşneşte şi te acaparează vizual (şi auditiv): readability şi quietube. Nu trebuie decât să adaugi link-urile în bookmarks şi să le foloseşti de câte ori ai chef să citeşti un text simplu pe un ecran curat şi mut. Cât priveşte treaba cu video, mi-e greu să cred că yutubiştii sătui de zgomotul şi certurile celorlalţi or să folosească aşa intens quietube. Important e că există o alternativă pentru cei care se simt violaţi fonic. Asta să fie direcţia? Economie de sunete, de advertising agresiv şi agitaţii obositoare pentru ochiul anonim caută un focus? Voi pentru ce pledaţi?

In the professional world, sometimes slide handouts are a fact of life. I’m not a fan of them, but they happen. Even Nancy Duarte feels they have a place in the universe. I generally try to avoid this practice by creating fairly comprehensive handouts to go with my presentations, but, occasionally, slides are a more desired format. They may even be required in some venues.

One common problem I’ve seen time and again, however, is what happens when you put those slides through a black & white copier. I saw one such example as I was clearing through some papers in my desk at work a few days ago. Last year, we underwent some equity training, and one of the slides looked something like this. (This is a recreation, I don’t have the original file.)

Now there are a few things I could critique on this slide, but I won’t right now. Instead, here’s roughly what the handout looks like:

Again, this the closest recreation I could make by manipulating the color settings on the slide. The real thing is actually harder to read than this – which brings up a necessary question. What good is running a printout through the copier if the result is nearly illegible? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of printing the slides to begin with?

I’m not advocating that we prepare all slides as if they are going to go through a copier, but, if you know ahead of time they definitely will, that should inform the choices you make – especially in using color on your slides. Which of these slides, for example, survive their transition best?

Things that may be perfectly clear in color can lose meaning or readability in black & white. I think the top two examples fare the best because of their high-contrast nature. The latter two examples, however, don’t transition as well. The Declaration of Independence slide becomes much harder to read, and the pie chart loses all meaning without color. In fact, looking at the grayscale image, my brain reverses the colors of the two larger segments.

All of this can be avoided if you start by creating two separate documents: your slides and a handout. However, sometimes you don’t have a choice. A panel, conference, committee, or other group may specifically want your slides. In those cases, take care with the slide composition and your use of color. Perhaps even take a moment to run a grayscale copy of your slides to see how well they survive. In the end, you want your audience to walk away with something meaningful and legible in their hands.

1.  You must make sure all entities of a proposed system can fit onto one diagram. It is not allowed to break up a data model into more than one diagram. True or False?
True
False (*)

2.  It is a good idea to group your entities in a diagram according to the expected volumes. By grouping high volume entities together, the diagrams could become easier to read. True or False?
True (*)
False

3.  Which of the following statements are true for ERD’s to enhance their readability. (Choose Two)
(Choose all correct answers)
There should be no crossing lines. (*)
All crows feet (Many-ends) of relationships should point the same way. (*)
There should be many crossing lines.
It does not matter which way the crows feet (many ends) point.

4.  There are no formal rules for how to draw ERD’s. The most important thing is to make sure all entities, attributes and relationships are documented on diagram. The layout is not significant. True or False?
True
False (*)

This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas. Readability is a web tool that removes all the clutter from web pages and presents you with the text and nothing but the text.

It’s not even a download. You just drag a link to your browser’s toolbar. I’ve tried it in Firefox and Chrome. I didn’t bother with Internet Explorer but it probably works there too.

You can get it from http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/.

Before you add it you can configure Readability’s

• Style: Newspaper, Novel, eBook or Terminal.
• Text size: S, M, L or XL.
• Margins: Narrow, Medium, Wide or Extra-Wide.

Unfortunately I didn’t see a way to change those parameters once the link is on your toolbar. I set mine up with Large text which is a bit too large for my eyes. I’m not that old yet! I guess I can delete it and re-load it.

The other issue I had was when reading this fast-changing blog it did not show the latest article. It showed one from a couple of days ago – presumably what it found in the browser’s cache. This was true on both Firefox and Chrome, Hitting “Refresh” brings yuou back to the original page.

Here’s a screenshot of this blog (in Chrome) as rendered by Readibility.

Readability Example

Much clearer!

Web advertisers won’t be keen on Readability. And content providers I read every day like the New York Times depend on me looking at ads to provide me with free content. Readability addresses this in that I have to invoke it for every page I wish to view. I can’t turn it on for all my web browsing.

So advertisers have a chance to catch my eye before I blank them out. I guess that is a fair compromise. The Bangkok Frugal Photographer likes free, but he doesn’t want to destroy the business model that gives him so much content at no direct cost.

From their website:

The E Pluribus Unum Prizes are a national awards program that provides four $50,000 prizes annually to exceptional initiatives that promote immigrant integration.

The awards are intended to recognize exceptional immigrant integration initiatives that help immigrants and their children adapt, thrive, and contribute to the United States or that bring immigrants and the native born together to build stronger, more cohesive communities.

This is exciting news for funding for some of our legal partners who work with immigrants, especially in this economy. Thank you MPI for offering us not only good empirical data on immigrants, but for offering this opportunity.

-RFW

A couple days ago I found a tech article that sang the praises of something called ‘Readability’. It’s a little bookmark button you place in your browser that makes a webpage look more like  the page of book. Gone are all of the advertisements, videos and distractions. What is left is just the text. The NY Times tech writer, David Pogue wrote about it first ➔here on the Bits Blog.

There are only a few settings to pick and then you simply drag the ‘Readability’ button to your bookmarks bar. Then next time you’re reading a website you click the button and you’re left with just the meat. It’s good for me because it gets rid of all of the interesting links to other articles. I tried it out the past few days and found I read articles faster and more fully. You can get, use and set up ➔’Readability’ here. Just select your settings and then drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar. Try it out.

I think you’ll really like it. There are a few disappointments though. It works great for a single entry webpage like a news article, but doesn’t work very well on a homepage with lots of short links. For example on this website ‘Down the Line’ it won’t work all that well when you’re looking at the full blog. But if you click on a single entry/post then use it you’ll see it cut out all the clutter. Here are two pictures one of this entry without Readability and the other with it.

Recently discovered some very interesting stuff from the folks at arc90.

I found both their products very interesting and pro-usability. Both products are browser bookmarklets.

From their website:

Readability: Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

I found this tool especially useful because I really hate the clutter in most Indian news sites.

TBuzz: TBUZZ is the easiest way to talk about the Web pages you visit on Twitter.

Worth a try. TBUZZ, especially, because these are the kind of features that Twitter-client makers aren’t thinking of (or are they?)

-In online entertainment news: 48% of consumers are watching TV shows on their computers, according to a Consumer Electronics Association survey. For those with longer attention spans, Wired compiled a list of where to watch movies online for free.

-The city of South San Francisco sustainably renovated a house to model for homeowners that it’s easy being green.

-Arc90 lab’s program Readability is good for the surfer, but is it bad for online advertisers? [Pogue's Posts]

-What’d you say? New app Soundbiter records the last 60 seconds of sound around to easily upload a hilariously quipped audio clip to Twitter or Facebook. Another tool for those who choose to document the moment.

-Photos of models have long displayed the fine line between aspiration and impossibility. Now, some doctors, psychiatrists and even members of the British government are calling for ads with retouched photos to come with disclaimers.

I subscribe to a lot of feeds that have long articles – like the Guardian Books, The Millions, etc. Google Reader’s default web view is great for short articles that are a screenful long. For long articles, the experience is far from satisfactory.

Readefine Desktop lays out articles from Google Reader in multiple columns, allows you to customize its text display settings and paginates them. Take a look at how this Guardian article appears:

Is that not beautiful? It reminds me of a book, and that is always a good thing. Reading is a far better experience with this. And there is also a web version to rely on while you are on the move.

What are your the tools that you use to make reading on the web better?

Issues in Bible Translation 2 of 10

During my first year in Dallas, I worked for a nationally known Christian bookstore. We sold all those different types of Bibles I mentioned at the beginning of my first post in this series. Many of our customers wanted to know “what’s the difference between all these Bibles?” I loved helping them find this answer.

Let’s begin with a simple line graph that includes the New American Standard Bible on the far left, the New International Version in the middle, and The Message on the far right:

Using a mental picture like this, I tried to explain to customers that the differences in translations amounted to the Bible’s degree of accuracy versus its degree of readability. I labeled it this way:

I simply explained to the customers: it’s a decision between accuracy and readability, with any Bible along the spectrum representing a trade-off between the two.

However, I realized much too late that this was a very poor way of thinking about translations! The issue is not that the NASB is more “accurate” and the NIV is more “readable.” (Although, the latter is usually true.) Both translations are accurate. To be “accurate” is to be “true or correct.” Therefore, all translations, no matter how different they may first appear, have the potential to be equally accurate.

So why do the translations differ? The answer lies in the translation philosophy. Perhaps the best way to articulate the distinction between translation philosophy is to think in terms of degree of literalness. Here is a better graph:

All translations have to balance how literal they want to be. Before continuing, remember this: no translation is 100% literal. The “best” translation does not mean it’s the most “literal.”

A great, often-used example is the simple Spanish phrase ¿como te llamas? If you were asked to translate this for a Spanish exam (bad memories of high school anyone?) you would translate the phrase as “what is your name?” However, literally, the phrase reads “how do you call yourself?” But this latter translation sounds clunky in English. The “best” translation is rarely ever the “most literal.”

How does this play out in Bible translation? That’s the topic of our next post.