Readability Metrics

Last update : July 17, 2013

Readability metrics are used to evaluate the ease in which text can be read and understood. Legibility is a measure of how easily individual letters or characters can be distinguished from each other.

Easy reading helps learning and enjoyment. There are different ways to test the readability of texts : text leveling, vocabulary frequency lists, affixes, readability metrics. In 1948, Rudolf Flesch published his Reading Ease formula which became one of the most widely used. In 1975, in a project sponsored by the U.S. Navy, the Reading Ease formula was recalculated to give a grade-level score and is now called the Flesch–Kincaid Grade-Level formula.

Readability Metrics

Fry Graph Readability Metrics

There are other readability metrics : Dale–Chall, Gunning Fog Index, Coleman-Liau Index, McLaughlin’s SMOG Index, Fry metrics, FORCAST, …

Clear, succinct writing designed to ensure the reader understands as quickly and completely as possible is called plain language. Using excess of words is called verbosity. A list of plain English words and phrases which have been recommended in United States guides to writing is available at Wikipedia.

Readability tests are often integrated in word processing applications and blog editors. A few links to online readability calculators are listed below :

PAL : personalized assistant that learns

cognitive assistant

DARPA PAL program

The DARPA PAL (the Personalized Assistant that Learns) program focused on improving the way that computers support humans through the use of cognitive systems. These are systems that reason, learn from experience and accept guidance in order to provide effective, personalized assistance. DARPA’s five-year contract (2003 – 2008) brought together over 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of building a new generation of a cognitive personalized assistant that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise. Among the contributors were the Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Rochester, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Oregon State University, the University of Southern California, and Stanford University, as well as from SRI.

SRI International has led the PAL Framework effort to make available many of the successful machine learning and reasoning technologies developed on the PAL program for use by the broader DARPA, research, and military communities. SRI was founded as Stanford Research Institute in 1946 and is a nonprofit research institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The institute formally separated from Stanford University in 1970 and is now one of the largest contract research institutes in the world.

One of the components of PAL was CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), an artificial intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive personalized assistant. The CALO effort has had many major spin-offs :

  • the Siri intelligent software assistant that is now part of the Apple iOS
  • the news aggregation service Trapit
  • the artificial intelligence-enhanced calendar application for iOS, Tempo AI
  • the travel guide app Desti

D’Post huet sech een neit Gesiicht ginn

RTL – 16.06.2013
Aus P&T gëtt ganz einfach “Post Luxembourg“. Deen neien Numm, d’Strategie an een neie Logo goufen e Samschdeg an der Rockhal virgestallt.

post1
Aus P&T, also Post et Télécommunications, ass also elo ganz einfach “Post Luxembourg” ginn. Deen neien Numm ass an der Suite vun der Strategie vun der Post, déi schonn am Abrëll virgestallt gouf, huet de Generaldirekter Claude Strasser erënnert.

post2
Et geet also drëm eng eenheetlech Mark fir de Grupp ze hunn, dofir einfach Post Luxembourg, esou de Claude Strasser.

D’Post ass ee vun de gréissten Employeuren am Land, mat haut 4.000 Beschäftegten.

WordPress taxonomies

In WordPress, a taxonomy is a grouping mechanism for posts. WordPress has three built in taxonomies : categories, tags and links. WordPress allows to create your own custom taxonomies which are an extremely powerful way to group various items in all sorts of ways.

I created the custom taxonomy Family for my family blog. The WordPress plugin Custom Post Type UI, developed by Brad Williams and Michael Beckwith, is a useful tool to manage custom taxonomies.

Additional informations about WordPress taxonomies are available at the following links :

WPtouch 3 Pro WordPress Taxonomy Support

Last update : July 20, 2013
I use the WPtouch 3 Pro plugin for my WordPress Family Blog, together with the User Access Manager (UAM) plugin, created by Alexander Schneider. I noticed that the taxonomy support of WPtouch 3 Pro does not work as expected. All categories and tags are displayed on the mobile without respecting the restrictions defined by the UAM plugin. The reason is that WPtouch retrieves the taxonomy informations directly from the database with an SQL request, instead of using the wordpress functions get_categories() and get_tags(). For categories WordPress even offers the function wp_list_categories() with formatting support.

Usually I don’t like to modify the core code of WordPress themes and plugins, but in this case the only feasible solution to solve this problem was to change the two functions wptouch_fdn_ordered_cat_list() and wptouch_fdn_ordered_tag_list() in the WPtouch 3 Pro theme foundation file plugins/wptouch-pro-3/themes/foundation/root-functions.php.

function wptouch_fdn_ordered_tag_list( $num, $include_count = true )

I changed the following code :

echo '<ul>';
$sql = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy INNER JOIN {$wpdb->prefix}terms ON {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id = {$wpdb->prefix}terms.term_id WHERE taxonomy = 'category' AND {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($excluded_cats) AND count >= 1 ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 0, $num");
if ( $sql ) {
foreach ( $sql as $result ) {
if ( $result ) {
echo "<li><a href=\"" . get_category_link( $result->term_id ) . "\">" . $result->name;
if ( $include_count ) {
echo " <span>(" . $result->count . ")</span></a>";
}
echo '</a>';
echo '</li>';
}
}
}
echo '</ul>';

by the new code :

$args = array (
'orderby' => 'count',
'order' => 'DESC',
'exclude' => $excluded_cats,
'number' => $num );
$categories = get_categories($args);
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($categories as $category) {
echo '<li><a href="' .get_category_link($category -> term_id). '">' .$category -> name. '';
if ($include_count) {
echo '<span> (' .$category -> count. ')</span>';}
echo '</a></li>';}
echo '</ul>';

function wptouch_fdn_ordered_cat_list( $num )

I changed the following code :

echo '<ul>';
$sql = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy INNER JOIN {$wpdb->prefix}terms ON {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id = {$wpdb->prefix}terms.term_id WHERE taxonomy = 'post_tag' AND {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($excluded_tags) AND count >= 1 ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 0, $num");
if ( $sql ) {
foreach ( $sql as $result ) {
if ( $result ) {
echo "<li><a href=\"" . get_tag_link( $result->term_id ) . "\">" . $result->name . " <span>(" . $result->count . ")</span></a></li>";
}
}
}
echo '</ul>';

by the new code :

$args = array (
'orderby' => 'count',
'order' => 'DESC',
'exclude' => $excluded_tags,
'number' => $num );
$tags = get_tags($args);
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
echo '<li><a href="' .get_tag_link($tag -> term_id). '">' .$tag -> name. '<span> (' .$tag -> count. ')</span></a></li>';}
echo '</ul>';

The new code provides the same WPtouch features and functionalities as the old one and is fully compatible with the UAM plugin.

One disadvantage of core changes in a plugin is the need to replace the modified files when an automatic update of the plugin is done. This was the case in July  2013 when the new versions 3.0.5 and 3.0.6 were loaded.

oEmbed

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

An oEmbed exchange occurs between a consumer and a provider. A consumer wishes to show an embedded representation of a third party resource on their own web site, such as a photo or an embedded video. A provider implements the oEmbed API to allow consumers to fetch that representation. The response returned by the provider can be in either JSON or XML.

The following types are defined :

  • photo
  • video
  • link
  • rich

The authors of oEmbed are Cal Henderson, Mike Malone, Leah Culver and Richard Crowley. Among the providers of oEmbed are Youtube, Flickr, Vimeo, WordPress and Slideshare.

Hall of Shame

Last update : June 10, 2013
Here is the list of users who tried to hack my private server :

IP addresses Countries
61.178.107.21 China
114.80.202.30 China
123.233.247.119 China
88.150.128.27 UK
200.136.247.111 Brazil
210.107.122.210 Korea
219.144.17.74 China
117.189.241.74 China
125.46.13.163 China
46.21.161.37 Netherlands
183.221.125.10 China
219.239.26.9 China
198.46.149.4 USA
85.25.150.88 Germany
61.142.106.34 China
61.155.150.217 China
202.164.33.205 India
58.215.82.148 China
216.254.200.117 Canada
218.54.23.118 Korea
223.82.244.19 China
223.5.3.200 China
189.26.255.11 Brazil
79.143.83.6 UK
60.255.71.68 China
61.156.238.56 China
166.111.27.43 China

Here is the list of users who tried to publish spam comments to my blogs :

IP addresses Countries
91.232.96.xxx Germany
188.143.234.127 Russian Federation
188.143.232.31 Russian Federation
91.121.170.197 France

The Whois Lookup shows that these IP addresses belong to Internet Service Providers (ISP). The individual users are anonymous. Nevertheless I will update regularly this Hall of Shame list to track all abuse trials.

The world of Robots by IEEE Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum, the award-winning technology magazine, published in October 2012 an interactive iPad app featuring the world’s most amazing robots.

robot_ieee1

IEEE Spectrum iPad App main page

robot_ieee2

IEEE Spectrum iPad App webpages

The most advanced robots on the planet (more than 120 are presented with 360° views, interactive images, detailed specs, exclusive articles, and hundreds of photos and videos.

IEEE Spectrum presents on its website more resources about robots :