“Prosecutors know that death-qualifying a jury is a great way to help ensure a conviction. That, say experts, is one reason why many of them — particularly in jurisdictions with high death-penalty rates like Texas, Florida, Illinois, Virginia, California and Pennsylvania — deliberately overcharge in murder cases even where they know the death penalty is not appropriate or likely.

In other words, the process can lead to higher conviction rates — and most likely to more wrongful convictions — not just in capital cases, but in other murder cases, too.”

“What we’re trying to say is that we’re low on funds, which has kept us from making the hardware investments needed to keep the Blogger service snappy and fun. So, we’re turning to you, our loyal users, for help. With a small donation to the Blogger Server Fund, you can show your support for Blogger helping people publish on the web for a year and a half (absolutely free and without ads!). And, most importantly, you will help bring Blogger back up to speed, so it’ll be more enjoyable for everyone. (And if we get enough, we’ll even be able to add some groovy new features that are waiting in the wings, which also take extra processing power.) ”

“We propose a model for stochastic formation of opinion clusters, modeled by an evolving network, and herd behavior to account for the observed fat-tail distribution in returns of financial-price data. The only parameter of the model is h, the rate of information dispersion per trade, which is a measure of herding behavior. For h below a critical h^* the system displays a power-law distribution of the returns with exponential cutoff. However, for h>h^* an increase in the probability of large returns is found and may be associated with the occurrence of large crashes. ©2000 The American Physical Society ”

“Whiteboarding document sharing inside of a Web browser—collaborative browsing, they call it. A lot of applications already do this. But what we’re building is one generic architecture that can really handle the back end for all sorts of those applications. Say you’re in Palm Pilot and you want to sync your address book. If you had your address book defined in XML—working with SyncML synching it up to your server—these applications might be using Jabber to send or receive these things on the fly. When you update your address book in one application, it’s automatically pushed out to the server The server announces the change to all the other applications listening to that XML, and they receive those updates. ”

“Using XML to describe parts of a Web app user interface can make it easy to convert the UI for multiple devices via XSL style sheets. The article describes using XML data and XSL style sheets to build the user interface of complex Web applications. A Web calendar sample application demonstrates the basic techniques and concepts. The article also includes more than two dozen code samples that you can
easily extend for your specific requirements.”

” If you are a Windows user who really wants to migrate to Linux, but you think you’ll feel disenfranchised without your Windows productivity applications, Win4Lin is a must-have. If, on the other hand, you want to run Linux without breaking company rules about which Windows applications you must use for work, then Win4Lin is an absolute necessity.”