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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed Screenshot-sm 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!

Submission + - Neuralstem gets ok from FDA (spinalcordresources.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Neuralstem, a company that has a stem cell procedure to use on ALS has been given the green light for stage 1 testing on humans. The trial has 12 patients that will each get injections in the lumbar portion of their spine. This test is primarily to guarantee the safety of the drug over a known amount of time. Each patient will be watched for signs of problems or rejection of the genetic material. Depending on how the 12 subjects do on this first test 9 on human subjects will determine if the FDA moves ahead to stage 2 testing, which is a larger group that tries to verify that the drug actually performs as advertised. This testing bodes well for Neuralstem as they are the first out the gate with a stem cell treatment to a form of spinal cord injury. If it makes it through all stages of testing, we will see if doctors are willing to se it on subjects that have injuries coming from physical injuries like diving accidents.

Comment Automatic claiming? (Score 3, Interesting) 196

by no_opinion (#27765499) Attached to: Warner Music Forces Lessig Presentation Offline

There's a really good chance this resulted from automatic claiming tools that make use of things like acoustic fingerprints. YouTube or a filtering partner will have a catalog of Warner tracks that new uploads are checked against. Warner may not even have known about this until it blew up. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

Comment Re:Let me be the first one to say it ... (Score 1) 1870

by no_opinion (#27618743) Attached to: Pirate Bay Trial Ends In Jail Sentences

Explain this right to take someone else's work, which you have not paid for and have no rights to under the law, regardless of whether they want you to or not? Do you think that we can have a healthy society if the people bringing new creations into the world are forced to share their works at your whim and under your terms? Sure, some of us want to share what we do, because we know it will be reciprocated. But this has to be voluntary under the guidelines of the law.

Just because you can take something does not mean your are entitled to it.
The Media

Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News? 322

Posted by timothy from the according-to-his-need dept.
Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"

Comment How about spending some time on the education part (Score 3, Insightful) 286

by no_opinion (#23479200) Attached to: 2nd Generation "$100 Laptop" Will Be an E-Book Reader
New hardware is nice and all, but it's really of minor importance compared to the elements of the platform that should be there to help kids learn. I think there's a reason that the press never covers how fantastic and ground breaking the educational aspect is. The technology is interesting, but as far as I can tell, the educational aspect is an afterthought.
Biotech

Submission + - Crime Reduction linked to Lead Free Gasoline

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Even low levels of lead can cause brain damage increasing the likelihood of behavioral and cognitive traits such as impulsivity, aggressivity, and low IQ that are strongly linked with criminal behavior. The New York Times has a story on how the phase out of leaded gasoline starting with the Clean Air Act in 1973 may have led to a 56% drop in violent crime in the United States in the 1990s. Amherst Economics Professor Jessica Wolpaw Reyes discovered the connection and wrote a paper comparing the reduction of lead from gasoline between states (pdf file) and the reduction of violent crime by constructing a panel of state-year observations linking crime rates in every state to childhood lead exposure in that state 20 or 30 years earlier. If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn't switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years."
The Internet

Submission + - P2P Source Arrested, OiNK.cd Raided, Shut Down (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A British man was arrested who was allegedly the source of a distribution supply chain for leaking albums & movies to file sharers. He operated OiNK which was by invite only and would post files to be distributed which would then show up hours later further down the supply chain on other file sharing sites. This scheme stretched across many nations and is the result of a two year investigation by the IFPI. They hope that by infiltrating these layers of abstraction to the source, they can stop the early leaking of media."
Music

Submission + - Amazon DRM-Less Music Store goes Beta 2

Submitted by LowSNR
LowSNR writes: Amazon this morning moved their DRM-Free music store into open beta. According to the release, "Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM), iPhones(TM), RAZRs(TM), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(TM) and Windows Media Player(TM), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free." Not to mention Linux.
The Courts

Submission + - Pirate Bay 'kept child porn link for two weeks' 1

Submitted by paulraps
paulraps writes: The Pirate Bay's legal position has just become decidedly murkier after it emerged that the torrent site hosted links to child pornography for two weeks after being made aware of its existence. The Swedish police say that it is a clear child pornography case, but the prosecutor says the Pirate Bay are not suspects since they did not actually host the material. What's more questionable is the response, grammar aside, of the site's moderator when the child pornography torrent was highlighted: "I don't give a **** if you folks are upset. Me and the other moderators job are NOT to have an opinion about if it is imoral or not."
Security

Submission + - Download music, share bank account info (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
jcatcw
jcatcw writes: "According to Computerworld, a surprisingly high number of consumers who are sharing music and other files on peer-to-peer systems are also exposing all sorts of bank account and similar personal information to criminals lurking on the networks to harvest data. And not all of that is their own information. Evidence shows that bank employees and contractors are also exposing customer data."
Robotics

Submission + - Battlefield 'Bear' robot to rescue fallen soldiers

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: A Maryland firm is developing a remote-controlled robot to rescue injured or abducted soldiers, New Scientist reports. The Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (Bear) prototype is already capable of lifting more than 135 kilograms with one arm, and recently showed how it can climb up and down stairs with a human-size dummy in its arms. There are videos of it carrying a dummy while standing and kneeling.
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Apple embeds account info in DRM-free music

Submitted by Cardiff
Cardiff writes: Apple may have removed the DRM but they didn't remove tracking information from DRM-free music. With embedded account names and email information, which can be viewed only by searching the files for strings, Apple (or a record label) could easily determine the origin of a file shared on P2P. Ars speculates that Apple wants to keep an eye on casual file trading among friends.
Privacy

Submission + - Google Is Watching You

Submitted by
BLueRibbon
BLueRibbon writes: "The Independent is reporting that Google "is setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives."

Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying ""The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'.""

And you thought Big Brother was bad?"

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