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Comment Notion Ink Adam (Score 1) 254

by pEBDr (#37143368) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Ebook Reader for Scientific Papers?
I have recently bought a Notion Ink Adam for exactly the same reason. The nice thing with it is that it has a Pixel Qi screen, which makes it possible to read outdoors/in direct sunlight, but also a normal back-light mode, to read indoors. I find it absolutely wonderful to read papers/scientific books on. I previously used the Kindle, but I found the refresh time of the screen to be really annoying, as I like to skim large numbers of papers. And that it isn't possible to take notes on a Kindle in a reasonable way really made it rather useless for my purposes. (And then I sat down on it and broke it, making it even more useless.) The Adam is great to skim-read on. I have also bought a small portable USB-keyboard, so I can write longer comments on papers I read, or even write on articles when outdoors. Plus, I can read/write emails, surf and so on. But I must mention that the Adam has a lots of downsides: you pretty much need to have a geekish vain, since the original OS is complete crap (tabletroms.com has a nice pretty stable Honeycomb for Adam, which is great). Moreover, the reflective mode of the Adam really sucks compared to e.g. Kindle, you pretty much have to be in sunlight to see anything. It's quite similar to a Game Boy from 1990. Moreover, Notion Ink REALLY don't want you to buy things from them. Expect ordering time of at least a couple of months, and lots of issues. But I'm really happy with reading scientific literature on mine. Now I only need to buy a waterproof case for it, so I can read while in the bathtub. :-)
Image

Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed 1352

Posted by samzenpus from the fair-balanced-and-simple dept.
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!
Government

Submission + - Can open source save democracy?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Political discussions frequently conclude that democracy is at best a symbol. It is widely understood that lawmakers and politicians generally serve special interests more than they serve the people. This is no secret: everyone knows about lobbyists, campaign contributions, kickbacks, pork, earmarks, and the classic "smoke filled room" where political deals are made in secret. All of these problems can be summed up in the simple phrase, "power corrupts," and empowered individuals are a necessary component of representation-style democracy. We have never had another means of instituting democracy as a broad and general system of governance because it has simply been impractical. But social internet tools change everything. There are now scores of projects building creative and diverse systems meant to apply the principles of open source to the procedures of lawmaking. Can we eventually create real democracy, instead of the cheap imitations we have had to date? Or will we forever be reliant on empowered leaders to guide and protect us?

Comment There are a couple of misunderstandings here (Score 5, Informative) 529

by pEBDr (#33435354) Attached to: Assange Rape Case Reopened
1) Molestation ("ofredande") is NOT a sexual offense, but "sexual molestation" ("sexuell ofredande") is. These are two separate things and there is a big difference in punishment: sexual molestation often puts you in jail, molestation will usually only result in a small fine (but theoretically up to a year in prison, but that never happens). The legal distinction between the two is that in sexual molestation, the person committing the crime has to be sexually motivated, which is of course often very difficult to judge. Also note that in Sweden, neither sexual molestation or molestation has anything to do with the age of the victim.

2) The charges on molestation was never completely dropped. The attorney was still arguing for the charge to be rape of two persons, while the case was still classified as "molestation" (note: not sexual molestation). The judge was to decide whether to re-open the rape charges, as requested by the attorney. This was to be decided yesterday, but since new information came up, it was delayed until today. And obviously it was decided that the rape charges should be reopened. The submitter claims that "case has been reopened to investigate 'molestation charges'", this is therefore only partially true, since the charge now is:
rape ("våldtäkt"), sexual forcing ("sexuellt tvång") and sexual molestation ("sexuellt ofredande"). This is A LOT worse for mr Assange than only "molestation".
It is probable that Assange will be taken into custody (to prevent him from attacking more swedes)... (Google translate with more on this.)

3) Yes, Sweden has less macho culture than most other countries. Yes, women in Sweden more often dare to report rapes/sexual offences to the police. Yes, the police usually actually listens to them. And no, this is not a bad thing.
Crime

Submission + - Assange still suspected on lesser charges (www.dn.se)

Submitted by pEBDr
pEBDr writes: A preliminary investigation has been initiated in Sweden against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over molestation. The initial suspicion regarding rape was written off last Saturday and the charge of sexual molestation a few days later. Now only a charge over molestation remains. In Sweden, there are namely two types of molestation: molestation and sexual molestation. The alderman Nils Petter Ekdahl explains that the difference between these two is often not obvious, but that the punishment for molestation is usually fine but maximally a year in prison, while sexual molestation is punished significantly harder. The legal distinction between the two is whether the assailant is assumed to be sexually motivated or or not.
Here's a Google translate version of the Swedish article.

I'm having a hard time seeing Pentagons involvement in this and an easier time seeing a pattern of males in powerful positions preferring strange sex.

Comment Why not allow the public to participate? (Score 1) 1

by pEBDr (#32798922) Attached to: First full-sky image from Planck
From the article: "The CMB is certainly visible but the image itself is colour-enhanced so you couldn't do any science with that.[...] We have also reduced the resolution of the image to something which is more manageable for people to look at. Otherwise it would just be too big." I wonder why they don't put up a zoomable un-"enhanced" full-resolution image on the web. Especially when inviting the public to participate with scientific work is so big in science right now (at least where I'm doing research). Sure, most people wouldn't contribute with anything useful - but the same thing can be said of slashdot users...
Books

Submission + - Ebooks Slower to Read than Paper

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "PC World reports that a study shows that reading from a printed book—versus an e-book on any of the three tested devices, an iPad, Kindle 2, and PC, was a faster experience to a significant degree. Readers measured on the iPad reported reading speeds, on average, of 6.2 percent slower than their print counterparts while the Kindle 2 clocked in at 10.7 percent slower. Jacob Nielsen had each participant read a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Each participant was timed, then quizzed to determine their comprehension and understanding of what they just read. Nielsen also surveyed users' satisfaction levels after operating each device (or page). For user satisfaction, the iPad, Kindle, and book all scored relatively equally at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6 on a one-to-seven ranking scale (seven representing the best experience). The PC, however, did not fare so well with its usability score of 3.6. "Most of the users' free-form comments were predictable," writes Nielsen. "For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter." Neilsen concludes that the study is promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers. "Even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics — and actually scores slightly higher in user satisfaction.""
Space

Submission + - First full-sky image from Planck (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Six months of work has produced a remarkable full-sky map from Planck.

It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths — much longer than what we can sense with our eyes. Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now. "It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News. ... Of particular note are the huge streamers of cold dust that reach thousands of light-years above and below the galactic plane. "What you see is the structure of our galaxy in gas and dust, which tells us an awful lot about what is going on in the neighbourhood of the Sun; and it tells us a lot about the way galaxies form when we compare this to other galaxies," observed Professor Andrew Jaffe, a Planck team member from Imperial College London, UK.

The ESA have more news here, with a higher-res JPG available.

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