Written by David , 15.12.2010, 16:40
Hi Forum,
Some time ago we had discussed here in the forum tools and methods for quick reading, for example, the " Zap Reader ", which can be considered as state of the art in the " Rapid Serial Visual Presentation " (RSVP).
The aim at the time was to support multivitizens or news collectors, who often need a quick overview of the content of long texts on the web. However, it was clear that the fast-paced word-by-word presentation of the RSVP technique can not be the wisdom of the final conclusion, in particular since one is deprived of any overview of the text during reading.
Surprisingly, however, there are currently no obvious approaches to the further development of "human reading", which go beyond the RapidSerial Visual Presentation.
This is why I have worked on the last few weeks and have thought about it. In the end, the following approach, together with two programmers, and the tool called "Top Words Highlighter" was created Evolutionary stage of reading on the web ".
The purpose and function of the tool is to immediately extract the most important keywords from any displayed text in the browser, and display them in different colors (together with the frequency of occurence). In this way one gets an idea at a glance, what the text is probably about, without having to read it at all or even to search for it.
In addition, different text marker colors are assigned to the found keywords, and the keywords are automatically marked accordingly throughout the text. In addition to the text, a graphical overview map is also displayed as an additional function, which can be used to estimate the extent of the text already at a glance, or with which one can focus directly on the contents, which are probably particularly "dense".
Top Words Highlighter Features:
The numerous text marker colors may seem confusing to some. However, I can assure you that after only a few days of using this tool, you will hardly be willing to accept or consume any longer text "raw" or "black-and-white" without consuming it automatically Processed.
The colorful text markers, on the other hand, are helpful if you only want to fly over a text, since they guide the eye and point to important text points by means of corresponding condensation. But also in the intensified study of a text lies a not to be underestimated utility of the text markers in that one already at the reading of a sentence or paragraph (consciously or unconsciously) perceives, whether the subsequent sentence resp. Paragraph still with the same keywords (= same Colors), or whether a new theme (= other colors) is expected. This makes the reading flow and the recording of the content easier, according to my experience so far.
In detail, the whole thing works as follows, here again the example of the above article by Chaostheorien.de:
Start: Original view of the article
First step: Using "readability", the article is stripped out of the page (see below - optional step)
Second step: "Top Words Highlighter" is automatically edited:
In three minutes to install :
At the moment, the "Top Words Highlighter" requires the use of Firefox because the method and tool are currently not compatible with other browsers. The Firefox extension " Greasemonkey " is also required. Optionally, but very recommendable, is the further Firefox extension " Readability ", whereby the article to be read (as shown in step 1) is first removed from the page and displayed in an easy-to-read manner.
Finally, the actual tool "Top Words Highlighter" has to be installed (just click on this link in Firefox after installing the "Greasemonkey" extension) and confirm the installation request. Finally, I recommend the following settings:
Recommended settings for the "Readability" extension:
(By right-clicking on the blue Readability "R" icon in the Firefox status bar)
Recommended settings for the "Top Words Highlighter" tool:
(By right-clicking the Greasemonkey icon
In the Firefox status bar and then selecting "User Script Commands")
Now everything is ready and ready to go.
To use simply on any web page first the blue Readability icon
In the Firefox status bar, then click anywhere in the page with the mouse (so that the page text has the input focus), and then press the key combination "Ctrl-Y" which triggers the extraction and removal of the keywords.
And then just read, read, until the pixels smoke.
Greetings David
--
PS : You can also highlight any keywords on a page (additionally or exclusively) manually. Just select the desired word and press Ctrl-Y. The selected word is then added to the current word list, and all occurrences of the corresponding word in the text are highlighted with a new color.
PPS : Credits go to Pierre (BE) of Yooper.be for the implementation of the keyword search, os0x (JP) for the basicscript, and hzhbest (CN) for the fine adjustment.
Below is a very basic example for an article with automatic keyword highlighting as applied by the Top Words Highlighter Addon:
If you thought the bank bailout was bad, wait until the mortgage defaults hit home
THE BIG PICTURE: Ireland is effectively insolvent – the next crisis will be mass home mortgage default, writes MORGAN KELLY
SAD NEWS just in from Our Lady of the Eurozone Hospital: After a sudden
worsening in her condition, the Irish Patient, formerly known as
the Irish Republic, has been moved into intensive care and put on artificial
ventilation. While a hospital spokesman, Jean-Claude Trichet, tried to sound
upbeat, there is no prospect that the Patient will recover.
It will be remembered that, after a lengthy period of poverty following her
acrimonious divorce from her English partner, in the 1990s Ireland succeeded
in turning her life around, educating herself, and holding down a steady
job. Although her increasingly riotous lifestyle over the last decade had
raised some concerns, the Irish Patient’s fate was sealed by a botched
emergency intervention on September 29th, 2008 followed by repeated
misdiagnoses of the ensuing complications.
With the Irish Patient now clinically dead, her grieving European relatives
face the melancholy task of deciding when to remove her from life support,
and how to deal with the extraordinary debts she ran up in the last months
of her life . . .
WHEN I wrote in The Irish Times last May showing how
the bank guarantee would lead to national insolvency, I did not expect the
financial collapse to be anywhere near as swift or as deep as has now
occurred. During September, the Irish Republic quietly ceased to exist as an
autonomous fiscal entity, and became a ward of the European Central Bank.
It is a testament to the cool and resolute handling of the crisis over
the last six months by the Government and
Central Bank that markets now put Irish sovereign debt in
the same risk group as Ukraine and
Pakistan, two notches above the junk level of Argentina, Greece and
Venezuela.
September marked Ireland’s point of
no return in the banking crisis.
During that month, €55 billion of bank bonds
(held mainly by UK, German, and French banks) matured and were repaid,
mostly by borrowing from the European Central Bank.
Until September, Ireland had the
legal option of terminating the bank guarantee on the grounds that three of
the guaranteed banks had withheld material information about their solvency,
in direct breach of the 1971 Central Bank Act. The way would then have been
open to pass legislation along the lines of the UK’s Bank Resolution Regime,
to turn the roughly €75 billion of
outstanding bank debt into
shares in those banks, and so end the banking crisis at
a stroke.
With the €55 billion repaid, the
possibility of resolving the bank crisis by
sharing costs with the bondholders is now water under the bridge. Instead of
the unpleasant showdown with the European Central Bank that
a bank resolution would have entailed, everyone is a winner. Or everyone who
matters, at least.
The German and French banks whose solvency is the overriding concern of the ECB get
their money back. Senior Irish policymakers get to roll over and have their
tummies tickled by their European overlords and be told what good sports
they have been. And best of all, apart from some token departures of
executives too old and rich to care less, the senior management of the banks
that caused this crisis continue to
enjoy their richly earned rewards. The only difficulty is that the Government’s
open-ended commitment to cover the bank losses far
exceeds the fiscal capacity of the Irish State.
The Government has admitted that Anglo
is going to cost the taxpayer €29
to €34 billion. It has also invested
€16 billion in the other banks, but
expects to get some or all of that investment back eventually.
So, the taxpayer cost
of the bailout is about €30 billion for
Anglo and some fraction of €16 billion for
the rest. Unfortunately, these numbers are not consistent with each other,
and it only takes a second to see why.
Between them, AIB and Bank of Ireland had
the same exposure to developers as
Anglo and, to the extent that they were scrambling to catch up with Anglo,
probably lent to even worse turkeys than it did. AIB and Bank of Ireland did
start with more capital to absorb losses than
Anglo, but also face substantial mortgage losses,
which it does not. It follows that AIB and Bank of Ireland together
will cost the taxpayer at
least as much as Anglo.
Once we accept, as the Government does,
that Anglo will cost the taxpayer about
€30 billion, we must accept that AIB and Bank of Ireland will
cost at least €30 billion extra.
In my article of last May, when I published my optimistic estimate of a €50 billion bailout
bill, I posted a spreadsheet on the irisheconomy.ie website, giving my
realistic estimates of taxpayer losses.
My realistic estimate for Anglo was €34 billion,
the same as the Government’s
current estimate.
When you apply the same assumptions
about lending losses to the
other banks, you end up with a likely taxpayer bill
of €16 billion for Bank of Ireland (deducting
the €3 billion they have since
received from investors) and €26 billion for AIB:
nearly as bad as Anglo.
Indeed, the true scandal in Irish banking is not what happened at Anglo and
Nationwide (which, as specialised development lenders, would have suffered
horrific losses even had they not
been run by crooks or morons) but the breakdown of governance at AIB that
allowed it to pursue the same suicidal
path.
Once again we are having to sit through the same dreary
and mendacious charade with AIB that
we endured with Anglo: “AIB only
needs €3.5 billion, sorry we meant to
say €6.5 billion, sorry . . .” and so
on until it is fully nationalised next year, and the true extent of its
folly revealed.
This €70 billion bill for the banks
dwarfs the €15 billion in spending
cuts now agonised over, and reduces the necessary cuts in Government spending
to an exercise in futility. What is the point of rearranging the spending
deckchairs, when the iceberg of bank losses is
going to sink us anyway?
What is driving our bond yields to record levels is not the Government deficit,
but the bank bailout. Without the banks, our national debt could
be stabilised in four years at a level not much worse than where France,
with its triple A rating in the bond markets, is now.
As a taxpayer,
what does a bailout bill of €70 billion mean?
It means that every cent of income tax that you pay for the next two to
three years will go to repay Anglo’s losses,
every cent for the following two years will go on AIB,
and every cent for the next year and a half on the others. In other words,
the Irish State is insolvent: its liabilities far exceed any realistic means
of repaying them.
For a country or company, insolvency is the equivalent of death for a
person, and is usually swiftly followed by the legal process of bankruptcy,
the equivalent of a funeral.
Two things have delayed Ireland’s
funeral. First, in anticipation of being booted out of bond markets, the Government built
up a large pile of cash a few months ago, so that it can keep going until
the New Year before it runs out of money. Although insolvent, Ireland is
still liquid, for now.
Secondly, not wanting another Greek-style mess, the ECB has
intervened to fund the Irish banks. Not only have Irish banks had to repay
their maturing bonds, but they have been haemorrhaging funds in the
inter-bank market, and the ECB has
quietly stepped in with emergency funding to keep them going until it can
make up its mind what to do.
Since September, a permanent team of ECB “observers”
has taken up residence in the Department of Finance. Although of many
nationalities, they are known there, dismayingly but inevitably, as “The
Germans”.
So, thanks to the discreet intervention of the ECB,
the first stage of the crisis has
closed with a whimper rather than a bang. Developer loans sank the banks
which, thanks to the bank guarantee, sank the Irish State, leaving it as a
ward of the ECB.
The next act of the crisis will
rehearse the same themes of bad loans
and foreign debt, only this time
as tragedy rather than farce. This time the bad loans will be mortgages,
and the foreign creditor who cannot be repaid is the ECB.
In consequence, the second act promises to be a good deal more traumatic
than the first.
Where the first round of the banking crisis centred
on a few dozen large developers, the next round will involve hundreds of
thousands of families with mortgages.
Between negotiated repayment reductions and defaults, at least 100,000 mortgages
(one in eight) are already under water, and things have barely started.
Banks have been relying on two dams to block the torrent of defaults
– house prices and social stigma –
but both have started to crumble alarmingly.
People are going to extraordinary lengths – not paying other bills and
borrowing heavily from their parents – to meet mortgage repayments,
both out of fear of losing their homes and to avoid the stigma of admitting
that they are broke. In a society like ours, where a person’s moral worth is
judged – by themselves as much as by others – by the car they drive and the house they
own, the idea of admitting that you cannot afford your mortgage is
unspeakably shameful.
That will change. The perception growing among borrowers is that while they
played by the rules, the banks certainly did not, cynically persuading them
into mortgages
that they had no hope of affording. Facing a choice between obligations to
the banks and to their families – mortgage or
food – growing numbers are choosing the latter.
In the last year, America has seen a rising number of “strategic defaults”.
People choose to stop repaying their mortgages,
realising they can live rent-free in their house for
several years before eviction, and then rent a better house for
less than the interest on
their current mortgage. The
prospect of being sued by banks is not credible – the State of Florida
allows banks full recourse to the assets of delinquent borrowers just like
here, but it has the highest default rate in the US – because there is no
point pursuing someone who has no assets.
If one family defaults on its mortgage,
they are pariahs: if 200,000 default they are a powerful political
constituency. There is no shame in admitting that you too were mauled by the
Celtic Tiger after being conned into taking out an unaffordable mortgage,
when everyone around you is admitting the same.
The gathering mortgage crisis puts Ireland on
the cusp of a social conflict on the scale of the Land War, but with one
crucial difference. Whereas the Land War faced tenant farmers against a
relative handful of mostly foreign landlords, the looming Mortgage War
will pit recent house buyers against
the majority of families who feel they worked hard and made sacrifices to
pay off their mortgages,
or else decided not to buy during the bubble, and who think those with mortgages
should be made to pay them off. Any relief to struggling mortgage-holders
will come not out of bank profits – there is no longer any such thing – but
from the pockets of other taxpayers.
The other crumbling dam against mass mortgage default
is house prices. House prices are
driven by the size of mortgages
that banks give out. That is why, even though Irish banks face long-run
funding costs of at least 8 per cent (if they could find anyone to lend to
them), they are still giving out mortgages
at 5 per cent, to maintain an artificial floor on house prices.
Without this trickle of new mortgages, prices would
collapse and mass defaults ensue.
However, once Irish banks pass under direct ECB control next year,
they will be forced to stop lending in order to shrink their balance sheets
back to a level that can be funded from customer deposits. With no new mortgage lending,
the housing market will be driven by cash transactions, and prices will
collapse accordingly.
While the current priority of Irish banks is to conceal their mortgage losses,
which requires them to go easy on borrowers, their new priority will be to
get the ECB’s money back by
whatever means necessary. The resulting wave of foreclosures will cause prices to
collapse further.
Along with mass mortgage defaults,
sorting out our bill with the ECB will
define the second stage of the banking crisis.
For now it is easier for the ECB to
drip feed funding to the Irish State and banks rather than admit publicly
that we are bankrupt, and trigger a crisis that
could engulf other euro-zone states. Our economy is tiny, and it is easiest,
for now, to kick the can up the road and see how things work out.
By next year Ireland will have run
out of cash, and the terms of a formal bailout will have to be agreed. Our
bill will be totted up and presented to us, along with terms for repayment.
On these terms hangs our future as a nation. We can only hope that, in
return for being such good sports about the whole bondholder business and
repaying European banks whose idea of a sound investment was lending billions
to Gleeson, Fitzpatrick and Fingleton, the Government can
negotiate a low rate of interest.
With a sufficiently low interest rate on
what we owe to Europe, a combination of economic growth and inflation will
eventually erode away the debt,
just as it did in the 1980s: we get to survive.
How low is sufficiently low? Economists have a simple rule to calculate
this. If the interest rate on
a country’s debt is lower than
the sum of its growth rate and inflation rate, the ratio of debt to
national income will shrink through time. After a massive credit bubble and
with a shaky international economy, our growth prospects for the next decade
are poor, and prices are likely to
be static or falling. An interest rate beyond
2 per cent is likely to sink us.
This means that if we are forced to repay the ECB at
the 5 per cent interest rate imposed
on Greece, our debt will rise
faster than our means of servicing it, and we will inevitably face a
State bankruptcy that will destroy what few shreds of our international
reputation still remain.
Why would the ECB impose such a
punitive interest rate on
us? The answer is that we are too small to matter: the ECB’s
real concerns lie with Spain and Italy. Making an example of Ireland is
an easy way to show that bailouts are not a soft option, and so frighten
them into keeping their deficits under control.
Given the risk of national bankruptcy it entailed, what led the Government into
this abject and unconditional surrender to the bank bondholders? I have been
told that the Government’s reasoning
runs as follows: “Europe will bail us out, just like they bailed out the
Greeks. And does anyone expect the Greeks to repay?”
The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious. Despite a decade of Anglo-Fáil
rule, with its mantra that there are no such things as duties, only
entitlements, few Irish institutions have collapsed to the third-world
levels of their Greek counterparts, least of all our tax system.
And unlike the Greeks, we lacked the tact and common sense to keep our
grubby dealing to ourselves. Europeans had to endure a decade
of Irish politicians strutting around and telling them how they needed to
emulate our crony capitalism if they wanted to be as rich as we are. As far
as other Europeans are concerned, the Irish Government is
aiming to add injury to insult by getting their taxpayers
to help the “Richest Nation in Europe” continue to enjoy its lavish
lifestyle.
My stating the simple fact that
the Government has driven Ireland over
the brink of insolvency should not be taken as a tacit endorsement of the
Opposition. The stark lesson of the last 30 years is that, while Fianna
Fáil’s record of economic management has been decidedly mixed, that of the
various Fine Gael coalitions has been uniformly dismal.
As ordinary people start to realise that this thing is not only happening,
it is happening to them, we can see anxiety giving way to the first
upwellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will
transform Irish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America. Within
five years, both Civil War parties are likely to have been brushed aside by
a hard right, anti-Europe, anti-Traveller party that, inconceivable as it
now seems, will leave us nostalgic for the, usually, harmless buffoonery of
Biffo, Inda, and their chums.
You have read enough articles by economists by now to know that it is
customary at this stage for me to propose, in 30 words or fewer, a simple
policy that will solve all our problems. Unfortunately, this is where I have
to hold up my hands and confess that I have no solutions, simple or
otherwise.
Ireland faced a painful choice between imposing a resolution on banks that
were too big to save or becoming insolvent, and, for whatever reason, chose
the latter. Sovereign nations get to make policy choices, and we are no
longer a sovereign nation in any meaningful sense of that term.
From here on, for better or worse, we can only rely on the kindness of strangers.
Morgan Kelly
is Professor of Economics at University College Dublin
© 2010 The Irish Times