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A lot of us stare at a computer monitor for the bulk of our day and reading long articles or books is rarely a comfortable experience. With that in mind, here's a few steps you can take to make you reading experience less terrible.

After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.

"Academia.edu, a social network for scholars, is unveiling a new feature today that its founder Richard Price hopes will help address part of the "credit gap" for research. Academia.edu allows users to upload and share their research papers, and the site is launching its Analytics Dashboard for Scientists today that Price says will let scholars see the "real-time impact" of their work. Academic publishing has long been a black-box in terms of both who's reading and who's citing. Publishing in journals may be expected (required, even), but the delays in the publishing process can make it challenging to ascertain how much influence work has. "It typically takes about 3 to 5 years for citations to actually appear back in the process," argues Price, pointing to the lengthy time between researching, writing, peer-reviewing, and publishing."

So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience. This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E's submission procedures and was reminded that (like most journals) they want me to assign the copyright of my submission to the publisher. My instant reaction was this: Fuck. That. Noise. I'm certainly willing to cede publication rights when I want to be published, but copyright assignment ain't going to happen. Ever. Nobody gets to own my work but me. (Yes, I insist on this with my book publishers too.) I have a message to all you technical journal publishers out there…

Several years ago, I read Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree -- his "true history of science fiction" from Mary Shelley to the early 1970s. I found Aldiss's account of the genre's development entertaining and informative... but something bothered me, long after I'd finished reading it. So much so that I've since spent hundreds of dollars on forgotten, out-of-print books; I've written dozens of long, scholarly posts about the thing that bothered me so much, for io9 and my own blog, HiLobrow; and this year I've even launched a money-losing publishing imprint in a quixotic effort to set the record straight.

""In a case decided on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone's online e-mail without their permission doesn't violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA). Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute."

"Would you like to send a confidential note to a friend that self-destructs after it has been read so that no one else (including your friend) can ever see that secret note again? Maybe it has a password that shouldn't be stored anywhere. Or you are worried that the private note can get leaked online. "

"In the Harry Potter world, Ravenclaws are known for being the smart ones. That's their thing. In fact, that was really all they were known for. In the books, each house could be boiled down to one or two words: Gryffindors are brave, Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are evil and/or racist, and Hufflepuffs are pathetic loyal. (Giving rise to this hilarious Second City mockery.)"

Only Lanier would attribute Nie­tzschean longings to Violentacrez. "And he's not that different from any of us. The difference is that he's scared and possibly hurt a lot of people." Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html#ixzz2GMBQC2He  Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

"Learning methods have come a long way from students just sitting in class and writing down notes while a lecturer reads off his/her notes. It has come to the point where students can learn from their lecturers via the internet, such as accessing course materials on "Blackboard" websites, and even online classes (heck, there are even online degrees for those interested!), but conducting a class through Minecraft? Well that admittedly takes the cake as far as interactive learning is concerned! This was made possible thanks to a lecturer at the Bond University in Australia who decided to conduct his class through Minecraft as the university was closed due to the recent bout of floods experienced in Australia's east coast. Professor Jeffrey Brand launched the MinecraftUni project after hearing about how the game was used as part of the United Nation's Block by Block program."

"We thought ten people would care; instead a million people read our Storage Pod 1.0 blog post where we open sourced the Backblaze Storage Pod design and introduced the world's most cost-efficient way to store big data. The interest grew when we published our Petabytes on a Budget: Revealing More Secrets blog post that announced Storage Pod 2.0, which doubled the amount of storage and reduced the price. Since then several companies have built businesses selling Storage Pods inspired by Backblaze to hundreds of organizations around the world who are storing hundreds of petabytes of data on their own Storage Pods. Today we introduce Backblaze Storage Pod 3.0 which stores more data, costs less, is more reliable, and is easier to service."

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture. In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications. Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024987/management-accenture#ixzz1rlnYqkgY  Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

As a child I used to read my grandfather's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. The constant promise and inevitable disappointment of amazing technologies that mostly never materialized (a problem likely exacerbated by my focus on the amazing and outlandish ones) made me skeptical of futurist predictions. It is somewhat strange then, that I now commonly find myself a proponent of futurist visions equally as grand as those that once made me a cynic. But I'm not alone in seeing the near future as a quickly changing technological landscape. In their recent book Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee* offer a similarly sweeping view of how technology is, and will be, shaping our future

If you're taking a break from work to read this article, I've got one question for you: Are you crazy? I know you think no one will notice, and I know that everyone else does it. Perhaps your boss even approves of your Web surfing; maybe she's one of those new-age managers who believes the studies showing that short breaks improve workers' focus. But those studies shouldn't make you feel good about yourself. The fact that you need regular breaks only highlights how flawed you are as a worker. I don't mean to offend. It's just that I've seen your competition. Let me tell you: You are in peril.

Note-I am going to try this for our blog. If you've ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you've written), you've been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

Why Facebook Is Never Safe By Adam Brereton Tags: wikileaks tor the internet technology jacob appelbaum anonymous adam brereton Want to know what a hacker, developer, activist and former Wikileaks wonk thinks about Facebook, the internet, and the future of computing? Read Adam Brereton's interview with Jacob Appelbaum

Did you know that vital parts of the US law are secret, and you're only allowed to read them if you pay a standards body thousands of dollars for the right to find out what the law of the land is?

" It is, Julio Vildosola concedes, a very big bet. Enlarge This Image Warrick Page for The New York Times Julio and Eva Vildosola and one of their two children. Mr. Vildosola will join a small software company in Cambridge. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (269) » After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks."

A debate that has gone on for millennia has flared up again in recent years Is the fact you are reading this story a decision you arrived at it by your own free choice, or was your interest programmed into the universe from the moment of the big bang? What makes free will such a fun topic is not only that it dives deep into physics, neuroscience, and philosophy, but also that we all feel we have a direct stake in the answers.