Information Overload and the "Last Foot" Problem

Presented at The Eleventh HOPE (2016), July 23, 2016, 10 p.m. (60 minutes)

There's so much to read and so little time. Unlike past generations who awoke to find a single newspaper on their doorstep, we open our smartphones and computers to find thousands of newspapers, websites, and blogs beckoning our attention. With this deluge of reading material, we're left with a "last foot" problem: how do we get all this information from our screens into our brains? This talk will give a brief history of the written word, describe neurological aspects of the reading process, and explore some of the new innovations that aim to let us read more quickly and efficiently on-screen.


Presenters:

  • Nick Lum
    Nick Lum is a jack of a few trades and master of none. After spending several years in corporate America, Nick launched BeeLine Reader (somewhat by accident) on Hacker News. Since dedicating himself full-time to this startup, it has won social entrepreneurship awards from Stanford University and The Tech Museum of Innovation.
  • Andrew Cantino
    Andrew Cantino is a software engineer who has worked at Google, Pivotal, and Mavenlink. In addition to cofounding BeeLine Reader, Andrew is also the creator of Huginn, an open-source workflow and integration engine that has more than 100 contributors and more than 13,000 stars on GitHub.

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