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Comment Industry group bullies (Score 2) 196

I find it sad that this is the state of scientific community. I wonder how many scientific studies are left unpublished because it's in someone's best interest to prevent their publication? I know there are methods to detect publication bias through various means, such as funnel plotting, and would imagine medical technology is a field where the practice of selective publication is fairly common. For an interesting read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Effect_on_meta-analysis

Comment Power, more power and signals (Score 2) 129

What I'd be very interested in finding out, is how do they intend to power those things? Magnetic induction coils? Also an interesting problem, how to get the display signal in there? Is it going to be a general purpose display, or are the first versions things that have pre-defined fields? The latter seems easier from a bandwidth point of view, as even a relatively low resolution general purpose screen will need quite a lot of data to be transferred.

Comment Re:Oh cool! (Score 1) 123

So now instead of not finding what I want, I can not find what a celebrity wants. Awesome!

In a way, on an abstract level it is sort of cool. That's basically enabling to run searches as someone else, enabling you to see things through another person's eyes. As for myself, I'd consider it interesting to see statistics based customized searches. We already know google uses records form past searches and clicks to determine what to show us in subsequent searches. What if you could, run the search and see results that an average Finn would? Or an average Ethiopian? Or an average Ethiopian woman, who's interested in technology and cats? I could see some, especially marketing related applications to this. How to optimize my website, so that people in my target group will see it as her first search result, for examle.

Idle

Submission + - Yelling At Telemarketers Is A "Terroristic Thr (stltoday.com)

BotScout writes: "An Ohio man, fed up with deceptive junk mail, made the mistake of losing his temper while on the phone with a St. Louis company pitching an extended auto-service contract. Now he finds himself behind bars, where he is charged with making a terrorist threat and is being held on $45,000 bond. According to court documents, Charles W. Papenfus, 43, allegedly told a sales representative during a May 18 telephone call that he would burn down the building and kill the employees and their families. He was indicted for making a terrorist threat, a Class D felony; and he could be sentenced to up to four years in prison if convicted. I get a lot of this kind of junk mail too, but I usually just call their 800 number and waste as much of their time as possible."

Comment Re:2% were lost... (Score 1) 114

The system required the user to insert an electronic ID card, input the candidate number and select OK. After this the system would display candidate information again, and to confirm the vote, the user would have to hit OK again. Apparently what happened was, some users instead removed the ID card prematurely, thus causing their votes not to be cast. So I disagree on your point about the system potentially casting the vote to the wrong candidate, but of course we can't be quite sure, as the internal workings of the system were declared a "trade secret".
Government

Submission + - Finnish court dismisses e-voting result (mbnet.fi)

wizzor writes: "The Supreme Administrative Court of Finland rejected a (previously discussed) municipal election result. Previously, The Helsinki Administrative Court found the result acceptable, even though 2% of votes where lost due to a fault in the voting system.

Here is a Google translation of the news item.

Apparently 98% of the votes isn't enough to determine how the remaining 2% voted after all."

Comment Creativity+math? (Score 1) 564

Upon reading the original post there was a one strong association in my mind: Architecture. In the design of structures sciences and math is of extremely high importance (so the buildings won't collapse) but it's also a creative field that involves much more than just hard science.

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