Is I-Voting I-Llegal?

The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent racial discrimination in all voting booths. Does the existence of a racial digital divide make Internet elections for public office merely a computer geek\u27s pipe dream? Or can i-voting withstand scrutiny under the current state of the law? This i-Brief will consider the current state of the law, and whether disproportionate benefits will be enough to stop this extension of technology dead in its tracks

Construction of MnO2 Nanowire for a High-Performance Lithium Ion Supercapacitor

Developing lithium ion capacitors possessing both brilliant energy and power density is still significant for numerous re-searchers. In this paper, we synthesized MnO2 nanowires via a simple hydrothermal process. The nanostructure MnO2 can expose more electrochemical sites and thus optimize the kinetics of Li+. Moreover, we used MnO2 nanowires (MnO2 NWs) as anode and a N-doped porous carbon (NPC) as cathode to assemble lithium ion capacitors (MnO2 NWs//NPC LIC). Compared to the traditional supercapacitor with aqueous electrolyte, the MnO2 NWs//NPC LIC exhibits a wider voltage of 0-4.2 V, which is helpful to enhance its energy and power density. Furthermore, MnO2 NWs//NPC LIC can deliver an excellent capacity of 150 mAh g-1 with an excellent energy density of 82.7 Wh kg-1 and power density of 1.05 kW kg-1. Meanwhile, a good cyclic stability of LICs with a 20% retention after 1000 times charge and discharge process proves its practical potential, indicating a good promising for the application in storage devices

Unreliable quantitation of species abundance based on high-throughput sequencing data of zooplankton communities

High-throughput sequencing (HTS) is rapidly becoming a popular and robust tool to characterize biodiversity of complex communities, especially for those dominated by microscopic species such as zooplankton. The popular use of HTS-based methods has prompted a possible method of inferring relative species abundance from sequencing data. However, these methods remain largely untested in many communities as to whether sequence data can reliably quantify relative species abundance. Here we tested the relationship between species abundance and sequence abundance in zooplankton using 2 methods: (1) spiking known amounts of indicator species into existing zooplankton communities, and (2) comparing results obtained from parallel replicates for the same natural zooplankton communities. Although we detected a general trend that low-abundance species usually corresponded to low-abundance sequence reads, further statistical analyses revealed that sequencing data could not reliably quantify relative species abundance, even for the same indicator species spiked into different zooplankton communities. The distribution of sequence reads statistically varied even between parallel replicates of the same natural zooplankton communities. Our study reveals that sequence abundance may generally qualitatively reflect species abundance as the general trend between these 2 variables exists; however, extra caution is required when using HTS-based approaches to make quantitative inferences regarding zooplankton communities