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Education

How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence 928

Posted by timothy from the lake-woebegone-effect dept.
theodp writes "In investigating the question of whether men are smarter than women, British researcher Adrian Furnham came up with some startling results. His analysis of some 30 studies showed that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ, but women underestimate their own intelligence while men overestimate theirs. Surprisingly, both men and women perceived men being smarter across generations — both sexes believe that their fathers are smarter than their mothers and their grandfathers are more intelligent than their grandmothers. And if there are children, both men and women think their sons are brighter than their daughters."
GUI

Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing? 528

Posted by timothy from the oh-for-the-love-of-gimp dept.
kai_hiwatari writes "The recently released KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has introduced tabbed windows as a new feature. It is now possible to tab together windows from different applications. This looks like it will be a very good productivity tool. Like the tabbed browsers, this may well end up as a feature in all desktop environments in the years ahead."
Image

Low-Energy Laser Etching May Replace Fruit Labels Screenshot-sm 475

Posted by samzenpus from the tattooed-fruit dept.
MikeChino writes "How many times have you bit into a piece of fruit only to find that you're also chomping on a sticker label? The small sticky labels have long been the bane of waste-conscious fruit and vegetable eaters, but that might all change thanks to new technology that uses a low-energy carbon dioxide laser beam to etch information directly onto produce. No more peeling those annoying labels! So far the technology is being used on a number of fruits and vegetables in New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Rim countries, and it's currently going through the final stages of review by the FDA. Once the technology is approved in the US, researchers from the University of Florida and the USDA Agricultural Research Service hope that it will be used in Florida's massive grapefruit industry."
Power

Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor? 907

Posted by timothy from the have-seen-the-same dept.
Ganty writes "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life."
Social Networks

Where Does a Geek Find a Social Life? 1354

Posted by kdawson from the meet-space dept.
JustShootMe writes "I have a question for my fellow Slashdotters, and yes, I realize I am entering the lion's den covered in tasty meat-flavored sauce. I have never been a very social person, preferring to throw myself into technology; therefore, I've been spectacularly unsuccessful in developing any meaningful interpersonal relationships. Lately I have begun to feel that this situation is not tenable, and I would like to fix it. But I really don't know how and haven't the faintest idea where to start. I know that I am in the minority and that there are many different kinds of Slashdot readers, most of whom have more experience in this realm than I do. So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks — preferably including some of the opposite gender — in meatspace?"
Wii

Metroid Prime Trilogy Being Updated For the Wii, Due In August 50

Posted by Soulskill from the three-for-one dept.
On Friday, Nintendo revealed that the three Metroid Prime games will be re-released on a single disc this August for the Wii. The first two, originally developed for the Gamecube, will be updated so players can "use their Wii Remote to aim with precision." 1Up had this to say of their hands-on preview: "... The heads-up display and on-screen interface elements have been completely overhauled to work more effectively with the standard Wii control setup of remote and nunchuck; swapping visors is a quick point-and-click command, and toggling weapons is similarly easy. Although the control interface isn't perfect — pressing down on the D-pad to fire missiles still grates — it makes the GameCube titles feel much faster and more fluid overall."

Comment Re:No, it's okay. Urban living still rocks (Score 1) 348

by David Nabbit (#27910947) Attached to: Baby Monitors Killing Urban Wi-Fi

Reading personal attack into regular language is textbook paranoia.

And therefore it is right at home on Slashdot.

On a more serious note, I live in an urban high-rise apartment building and get terrible Wi-Fi reception. While baby monitors and other 2.4 GHz devices may share some of the blame, my hunch is it has more to do with the 30-or-so Wi-Fi networks my computer can see (and however many it can't). I just switched most of my home network to olde fashioned wires, and things are running much more smoothly.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 94

by David Nabbit (#27369867) Attached to: Wii System Menu 4.0 Released

On two trips, we paused the game for a moment and walked away to do something. A week later, I come home from my trip and find the game still paused. Whoops! This works great... until you try to use the system again. Nasty error code and a $100 fix from Nintendo to get the drive to work again.

Don't leave the disc on!

Or just lay off the 10,080 minute movies.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 94

by David Nabbit (#27369795) Attached to: Wii System Menu 4.0 Released

Some people don't like to have half a dozen devices connected to their TV's if one device is capable of performing most of those tasks.

Certainly no one on Slashdot! That's grounds for having your geek card revoked.

Comment Re:Not sure of the value of this. (Score 2, Insightful) 171

by David Nabbit (#27105409) Attached to: Targeted Advertising Coming To Cable TV

On a related subject, I've also wondered why they target ads to kids anyway. They can't drive, don't have much money and from my experience if I whined and pleaded with my dad to buy me something I saw on TV I generally got sent to my room.

Are you kidding? Child marketing is a huge industry. Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure Dante reserved one of the lower circles of Hell for child marketers.
Biotech

Designer Babies 902

Posted by samzenpus from the wings-and-a-nice-prehensile-tail dept.
Singularity Hub writes "The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life's savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back."

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