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Education

Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161

Posted by timothy from the deep-springs-college dept.
An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
Input Devices

Computer Mouse Heading For Extinction 625

Posted by timothy from the how-much-would-you-like-to-bet dept.
slatterz writes "The computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years and will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition, analysts believe. Steven Prentice, vice president and Gartner Fellow, told the BBC that devices such as Nintendo's MotionPlus for the Wii and Apple's iPhone point the way to the future, offering greater accuracy in motion detection."

Comment Re:Why dwell on the past? (Score 1) 979

by NotoriousHood (#23544031) Attached to: What's the Solution To Intellectual Property?
On the one hand, your argument seems sensible: look to the present.

On the other hand, ownership in general is a little strange. This is my rock. This is my tree. This is my beach. This is my ocean. It doesn't really make sense to me when I look at property this way.

I see property rights as valuable in that they help create order (I'm still thinking about whether this is true or not--flashback to "The Gods Must be Crazy").

If I take my argument to its logical extreme, I find myself asking whether my body, my life, my soul (if one exists) belongs to me.
Biotech

Team Builds Viruses To Combat Harmful "Biofilms" 108

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the who-eats-the-eaters dept.
Scientists from MIT and Boston University are creating viruses that will wipe out "biofilms" that contain harmful bacteria on surfaces of the human body and industrial or medical devices. "Bacterial biofilms can form almost anywhere, even on your teeth if you don't brush for a day or two. When they accumulate in hard to reach places such as the insides of food processing machines or medical catheters, however, they become persistent sources of infection. These bacteria excrete a variety of proteins, polysaccharides, and nucleic acids that together with other accumulating materials form an extracellular matrix, or in Lu's words, a "slimy layer," that encases the bacteria. Traditional remedies such as antibiotics are not as effective on these bacterial biofilms as they are on free-floating bacteria. In some cases, antibiotics even encourage bacterial biofilms to form."
Education

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year 245

Posted by Zonk from the the-more-you-know dept.
gollum123 writes "The BBC news magazine is running a compilation of the interesting and sometimes downright unexpected facts that we did not know last year, but now know. some examples — There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts. Urban birds have developed a short, fast 'rap style' of singing, different from their rural counterparts. The lion costume in the film 'Wizard of Oz' was made from real lions. Online shoppers will only wait an average of four seconds for an internet page to load before giving up. Just one cow gives off enough harmful methane gas in a single day to fill around 400 litre bottles. For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality. Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs is the term for people who fear the number 666. The egg came first."
Power

The Insatiable Power Hunger of Home Electronics 340

Posted by timothy from the led-xmas-lights-are-the-answer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Wall Street Journal columnist recently got his hand on a power meter and decided to write about his findings, the resulting article being discussed here on Slashdot. That author concluded that gadgets are getting a bad rap, and are relatively insignificant power consumers in the grand scheme of things. A rebuttal has appeared, arguing that not only are modern electronics significant power consumers already, while everything else is becoming more efficient, home electronics seem to be getting worse. This echoes the Department of Energy's assertion that 'Electricity consumption for home electronics, particularly for color TVs and computer equipment, is also forecast to grow significantly over the next two decades.' Are gadgets unfairly maligned, or getting an unearned pardon?"

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