I wonder how much of a role wetting/capillary effects play in this? The liquid interface will distort as it approaches the object, and will try to meet at a certain contact angle (based on surface tensions etc). Correcting for this might help improve the resolution of the scans?
This is speculation, but perhaps there's a game-theory issue here. If IEEE loses money by people pirating (and you can apply the usual counter-arguments about whether the pirateer would have gone on to purchase it anyway) rather than paying then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future if they want to publish in the journal again.
A better situation is where the preprint or open access version is available.
> then publishing costs increase to cover that loss, and therefore hurting the authors who must cover that increase in future
WHAT?! Does that mean it's the authors who pay publishers to get their work published? Is that really true? And then publishers also charge readers for what they were paid to publish in the first place?
I think the university insulates the author from the costs you mention. This also assumes that the market for articles is fair and rational, when it's anything but.
Interestingly, these look very similar in design to so-called bacterial ratchets (see Fig 7 of [1]) which allow swimming bacteria to be sorted by size or swimming speed etc. People have even used these ideas to create tiny bacteria-powered motors [2].
I've tried a variety of RSS readers recently for keeping track of academic publications (arxiv and journal feeds etc). I've settled on inoreader [1] as this: (i) includes a search feature in the free tier, (ii) has keyword highlighting (useful for trawling through long lists of papers), (iii) has a reliable Android app.
I also use Inoreader and after using it for quite a while, I decided to pay for it to support the developers.
My preference is to use the mobile web interface [1] in a web browser for most of my RSS reading on a tablet or phone, rather than use the app. I find it gives me greater control over my reading experience.
For example, I've disabled image loading in feeds. And since I'm still in a web browser, I can open multiple tab views (each one displaying a separate category of RSS feeds) at once, letting me rapidly scan feed headings without the need to go back and forth between categories in the app; they just load in the background while I reading the headings in one tab.
Another happy paid customer of Inoreader here. The chrome is small and out of the way, keyboard shortcuts work well, it syncs read/unread status well between the website and the mobile app, and I like using the Star feature as a way of marking items I'd like to revisit later.
Here's a reference I found for one way to do it: http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/~matsr/ProbII/Lec6.pdf (Theorem 2.1). You define the Green's function G(x, y) = \sum_n Pr_x(S_n=y), where x and y are 3-vectors and Pr_x(S_n=y) is the probability that an n-step random walk starting at x ends up at y. If you have an infinite random walk starting at 0, then G(0, 0) is the expected number of times that the walk returns to 0. That's what the mathworld link calls u(3). You can use Fourier inversion to compute G(0, 0) -- the link gives the gnarly details. It's pretty cool.
It's interestingly that the Gibbs phenomenon appears visually as a whiplash effect. You can see how it would only get worse as higher order terms are included.
This reminds me of the aesthetic in Her [1], which was summarised nicely here [2] by the production designer:
"You could say that Her is, in fact, a counterpoint to that prevailing vision of the future–the anti-Minority Report. Imagining its world wasn’t about heaping new technology on society as we know it today. It was looking at those places where technology could fade into the background, integrate more seamlessly. It was about envisioning a future, perhaps, that looked more like the past. “In a way,” says Barrett, “my job was to undesign the design.”
Do you work with your screen laying flat, such that you're looking down on it?
I'm not being argumentative; there is a history of the "desktop" metaphor, where it did seem sort of like the user was looking down on it from above. That particular approach to the metaphor seems to have faded deep into history. Not saying it's wrong, just that we seem to have moved somewhere else with UI, and I feel like a corkboard with pieces of paper tacked to it is a more fitting analogy for the way many of our current desktops work. The way shadows are used in most current desktops match that metaphor more closely than objects on a horizontal "desk" surface. And, given that we never use screens sitting flat on a horizontal surface (even the Microsoft Surface evolved to go vertical). The ergonomics of staring straight down is pretty awful. Our heads get really heavy at that angle, causing back pain.
Edit: Some "desktop" metaphor UIs where a "top-down" light source might logically lead to OPs shadow design:
Even the modern take (Bumptop for Mac) seems needlessly cluttered and cumbersome to manage. Then again, I prefer tiled interfaces, so I lean toward the extreme on the other end of the spectrum.
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/81429