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+-   Crumb-y Bible Tops the Bestseller Lists on Saturday November 07, @02:01AM theodp

Submitted by theodp on Saturday November 07, @02:01AM
books
theodp writes "Few Biblical scholars would have made counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb their first choice for reinterpreting the Bible. And Crumb's cult following probably never imagined the creator of Fritz the Cat would spend four of his creative years on such an endeavor. But the weird, obsessive, oversexed artist's pictorial interpretation of Genesis has climbed to the no. 1 spot on both the NYT graphic novel and Amazon.com Christian bestseller lists. In true Crumb fashion, the cover of The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb sports a picture of a grim Adam and a buxom Eve plus a Charlton Heston-y God. 'The First Book of the Bible Graphically Depicted!' it proclaims. 'Nothing Left Out!' Which no doubt should help Crumb and The Good Book find a new audience. 'I have a feeling,' quipped Crumb's editor, 'this book could do a lot for Bible literacy among teenage boys.'"
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+-   Comic Books Improve Early Childhood Literacy on Friday November 06, @06:28PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Friday November 06, @06:28PM
education
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading. "A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words," says Tilley. "But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words." Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format. "There has been an increase in the number of comic book-type elements in books for younger children," Tilley says. "If you really consider how the pictures and words work together in consonance to tell a story, you can make the case that comics are just as complex as any other kind of literature.""
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+-   Information Theory says US CEO's Overpaid 129 to 1 on Wednesday November 04, @10:00PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Wednesday November 04, @10:00PM
business
Hugh Pickens writes "Purdue University reports that CEO's of the top 35 Fortune 500 companies were overpaid by about 129 times their "ideal salaries" in 2008, according to theoretical analysis proposed to determine fair CEO compensation. "You might ask why a chemical engineer is concerned with economics and CEO salaries," says researcher Venkat Venkatasubramanian. "Well, it turns out that the same concepts and mathematics used to solve problems in statistical thermodynamics and information theory also can be applied to economic issues, such as the determination of fair CEO salaries." Under the new theory, the ideal pay distribution is determined to be "lognormal," (PDF) a particular way of characterizing data patterns in probability and statistics. "This is the economic equivalent of the Boltzmann distribution for ideal gases, which describes how the gas molecules are distributed at various energy levels," says Venkatasubramanian who identified entropy as a measure of "fairness" in economic systems, revealing a connection between statistical thermodynamics, information theory and economics. "One may view our result as an 'economic law' in the statistical thermodynamics sense. The free market will 'discover' and obey this economic law if allowed to function freely and efficiently without collusion-like practices or other unfair interferences." Fair pay for an average S&P 500 CEO should ideally be in the range of 8 to 16 times the lowest employee salary, Venkatasubramanian adds. As a contrast to the United States where the ratio has gone up from about 40-to-1 in the 1970s to as high as 344-to-1 in recent years, average CEO pay ratios were about 11-to-1 in Japan, 15-to-1 in France, 20-to-1 in Canada, and 22-to-1 in Britain in 2006."
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+-   Review: Learning jQuery 1.3[->] on Tuesday November 03, @08:02AM artisteeternite

Submitted by artisteeternite on Tuesday November 03, @08:02AM
books
artisteeternite writes "Jonathan Brinley at x+3 has a brief review about Learning jQuery 1.3: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques, by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. At under 500 words, you'll know quickly whether this book is for you. And it's broken up into nice sections, "Who Should Read this Book," "What to Skip," "Make Sure to Read," and "Summary.""
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+-   Negroponte Hints at Paper-Like Design for XO-3[->] on Monday November 02, @10:59PM waderoush

Submitted by waderoush on Monday November 02, @10:59PM
education
waderoush writes "In May 2008, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, unveiled e-book like design for the second-generation XO Laptop, consisting of a pair of facing touchscreens. In a new e-mail interview, Negroponte says that design has been thrown out, and that instead the foundation is working on version '1.75' of the existing green-and-white laptop with a more powerful processor, as well as a '3.0' version that would look 'more like a sheet of paper.' Negroponte also addressed a range of other questions about the OLPC project, including the significance of the project to make 1.6 million e-books readable on the XO laptop and the organization's push to reach more children in Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."
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+-   Giant Rift in Africa Will Create a New Ocean on Monday November 02, @08:45PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Monday November 02, @08:45PM
earth
Hugh Pickens writes "The University of Rochester reports that a 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean in a million years or so connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa. Using newly gathered seismic data, researchers have reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions. "We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester. The results show that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory previously held and the sudden large-scale events pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events. "This work is a breakthrough in our understanding of continental rifting leading to the creation of new ocean basins," says Ken Macdonald, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara"
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+-   MS Leverages Open Source to Compete with AdSense[->] on Monday November 02, @07:38PM

Submitted by on Monday November 02, @07:38PM
gnu
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters reports that Microsoft has entered a deal with OpenX to share publishers in an effort to grow Microsoft's contextual ad reach. OpenX is an open-source advertising server licensed under the GNU General Public License and which uses PHP and MySQL. The deal offers Microsoft an open platform for ad serving, in contrast to Google's hosted AdSense platform."
Link To Original Source
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+-   DVR Helps Some TV Shows Become Hits[->] on Monday November 02, @11:39AM ubermiester

Submitted by ubermiester on Monday November 02, @11:39AM
media
ubermiester writes "After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget:

"Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year." The article offers one very plausible explanation for why viewers do not take advantage of the fastforward button on their DVR while watching their favorite shows: "It's still a passive activity".

Long live the couch potato!"
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Comments: 3 +-   Veteran Journalist Quits Newsday Over Paywall on Monday November 02, @10:01AM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Monday November 02, @10:01AM
themedia
Hugh Pickens writes "With news organizations struggling and newsroom jobs disappearing, each week brings new calls from writers and editors who believe their employers should save themselves by charging for Internet access but in an intresting turnabout, the NY Times reports that columnist Saul Friedman, a journalist for more than 50 years and a columnist for Newsday since 1996, announced last week he was quitting after Newsday announced that non-subscribers to Newsday's print edition will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge. “My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it," says Friedman. Friedman, who is 80, said he would continue to write about older people for the site "As Time Goes By". "One of the reasons why the NY Times eventually did away with its old "paywall" was that its big name columnists started complaining that fewer and fewer people were reading them," writes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. "Newspapers who decide to put up a paywall may find that their best reporters decide to go elsewhere, knowing that locking up their own content isn't a good thing in terms of career advancement.""
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Comments: 1 +-   Sourceforge fixes news, breaks links on Monday November 02, @09:47AM zvrk

Submitted by zvrk on Monday November 02, @09:47AM
news
zvrk writes "After approximately 9 days they fixed the issue. Issue was originally reported on Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/submission/1101317/To-Sourceforgenet---is-there-anybody-out-there

Now, news submitting works and I successfully submitted news
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=6756818

But now, link to original story is broken:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1035012

Issue has been reported to Sourceforge:
https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/ticket/6204

How long it will take to fix this?"
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+-   Peace Corps Alumni Crowdsource Development Ideas on Sunday November 01, @11:47AM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Sunday November 01, @11:47AM
earth
Hugh Pickens writes "An online community hosted by the National Peace Corps Association have awarded prizes consisting of seed money to implement development projects crowdsourced by returned Peace Corps volunteers to improve agriculture in Sub-Sahara Africa. The site, Africa Rural Connect, connects over 200,000 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, African Diaspora, non-profit leaders, technology buffs and anyone else who has a solution for Africa's development challenges using software called Wegora, designed to encourage a global exchange of ideas. The first prize winner will take $3,000 project seed money and will spend it on "Electronic Agriculture in Kenya's Arid and Semi-Arid lands Schools," the second prize winner will have $2,000 project seed money and will spend it on "Dehydration of Vegetable Products while the third prize winner takes $1,000 project seed money on "Irrigation is key for Africa to take on Drought." "It's inspiring to see how many new ideas we received from Kenya in such a short period of time," says Molly Mattessich, manager of Africa Rural Connect and a former Mali Peace Corps volunteer. "We think there is a lot of untapped potential in other African countries, and we hope to see those ideas in the next round.""
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+-   NSW high school laptops used for games and chat[->] on Sunday November 01, @03:58AM davidmwilliams

Submitted by davidmwilliams on Sunday November 01, @03:58AM
education
davidmwilliams writes "Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd came to power on top of a raft of election promises, one of which included laptops for high school students. While the deployment was not without controversy thousands upon thousands have now been distributed in NSW. Yet, forum postings reveal students are using them for game playing and online chat right in front of oblivious teachers."
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+-   EPA to Buy Small Town in Kansas on Friday October 30, @11:11AM Ponca City, We love you

Submitted by Ponca City, We love you on Friday October 30, @11:11AM
earth
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Wichita Eagle reports that Congress has approved funds to relocate the population of the southeast Kansas town of Treece, which is plagued with lead, zinc and other chemical contamination left by a century of mining. Estimates say it will cost about $3 million to $3.5 million to buy out the town, which is surrounded by huge piles of mining waste called chat and dotted with uncapped shafts and cave-ins filled with brackish, polluted water. "It's been a long, dusty, chat-covered road, but for the citizens of Treece, finally, help will be on the way," said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas who has been pushing for a buyout of Treece for two years. The population of Treece has dwindled to about 100 people, almost all of whom want to move but say they can't because the pollution and an ongoing EPA cleanup project makes it impossible to sell a house. The EPA has already bought out the neighboring town of Picher, Oklahoma, stripping Treece of quick access to jobs, shopping, recreation and services, including fire protection and cable TV. Both cities were once prosperous mining communities but the ore ran out and the mines were abandoned by the early 1970s. Of 16 children tested for lead levels in Treece, two had levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood and one had a level of more than 10, the threshold for lead poisoning. "It is our hope that this will give them the opportunity to raise their children, run their businesses, and get on with their lives free of the burdens of pollution and environmental degradation," says EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson."
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+-   Asimov estate authorises new I, Robot books[->] on Friday October 30, @06:06AM daria42

Submitted by daria42 on Friday October 30, @06:06AM
money
daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, The estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorised a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. "Isaac Asimoc died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author’s intentions need to be respected here," writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."
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+-   Decline in US Newspaper Readership Accelerates on Wednesday October 28, @04:04PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Wednesday October 28, @04:04PM
themedia
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. "Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination," says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. "Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die," writes Mutter. "The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it’s not already too late." Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets."
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+-   Newsday Adds Paywall, SurfShare Demos Alternative [->] on Wednesday October 28, @02:50PM reifman

Submitted by reifman on Wednesday October 28, @02:50PM
money
reifman writes "New York's Newsday launched its paywall and The Times may soon follow while SurfShare takes a more consumer friendly tact experimenting with ideas discussed last month on Slashdot. Readers can mark favorites, search their browsing history, leave tips and are given social cues to activate micropayments. 'Our approach is to give the reader complete control i.e. observe TicketMaster and do the opposite'. It also offers a headlines view of your Twitter feed stripped of idle chatter. See the WordPress plugin in action at Steve Outing's and Mathew Ingram's blogs. Next steps may include user interaction studies as part of a university research project to improve the experience and optimize response rates."
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+-   Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words on Tuesday October 27, @11:04PM theodp

Submitted by theodp on Tuesday October 27, @11:04PM
books
theodp writes "To exist or not to exist: that is the query. That's what the famous Hamlet soliloquy might look like if subjected to Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description of the 'invention,' Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.' After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
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+-   New UK Wireless Network Tax Raises Concern[->] on Monday October 26, @03:08AM Mark.JUK

Submitted by Mark.JUK on Monday October 26, @03:08AM
internet
Mark.JUK writes "The Valuation Office Agency (VOA), which compiles and maintains business rating and council tax valuation lists for England and Wales, is reportedly getting ready to impose business rates (tax) upon UK wireless networks regardless of their status. The move has raised concern because many community driven wireless broadband ( Wi-Fi , WiMAX ) ISPs, which often exist in locations where the big players have failed to deliver adequate services (remote and rural areas), operate off some already very thin margins. Such a move could damage the UK government’s plan to deliver a universal minimum broadband speed of 2Mbps to the whole country by 2012."
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Comments: 1 +-   Internet Archive Puts 1.6M E-Books on OLPC Laptops[->] on Saturday October 24, @02:16PM waderoush

Submitted by waderoush on Saturday October 24, @02:16PM
books
waderoush writes "Brewster Kahle of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive announced today that all 1.6 million books scanned and digitized by the Archive will be available for reading on XO laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The announcement came during a session on electronic books and electronic publishing at the Boston Book Festival. Kahle said the Archive has been collaborating with OLPC for a year to format the e-books for display on the XO laptops, some 750,000 of which are in use by children in developing countries."
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Comments: 1 +-   Should I care if my credit gets ruined? on Saturday October 24, @01:54AM 100k-in-the-hole

Submitted by 100k-in-the-hole on Saturday October 24, @01:54AM
money
100k-in-the-hole writes "I have been having some financial trouble lately, and have for the first time stopped paying some of my bills (mostly credit cards). I already have a fixed rate mortgage, and have no intention of using a credit card ever again. Has anyone else here stopped paying their bills? What kind of experience can I expect? I sort of feel like a low credit score will help me to avoid this problem in the future."
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