Well-known awesome person Bill sent me this link a week or so ago. I ignored it at first out of a general hatred of any of the media coming out over Levy’s book. But there is just too much goodness in this article to pass it by.
Technosexual

Nomophobia is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact - and it’s the plague of our 24/7 age
Millions apparently suffer from “no mobile phobia” which has been given the name nomophobia.
Experts say nomophobia could affect up to 53 per cent of mobile phone users, with 48 per cent of women and 58 per [...]

Avid reader and well-known giant Chas sent me the following link:
Killer robot shoots man dead on driveway
AN 81-year-old man has shot himself dead with an elaborate suicide robot built using plans downloaded from the internet.
He spent hours searching the internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex [...]

Blogging’s Good For Your Health
Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.
All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.
thanks jg

New to the blogroll is the terrifically awesome robot blog BotJunkie. Here’s a survey of the kinds of awesome vids they post:
I love automatic sorters: Its hard for us to really appreciate the kind of sophistication required to get a machine to do this kind of complicated sorting with arbitrarily sized, randomly distributed objects. Its [...]

People prefer robots that do small talk
To find out how quickly domestic robots should respond to their owners’ requests, Toshiyuki Shiwa and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 students to give orders such as “take out the trash” to a robot, which took between zero and 5 seconds to respond.
The students [...]

Big Dog is back with a new video. This is almost two years since we last saw him, and in that time its developed better ice legs than me.

Thanks Bil!l

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling [...]

thx Steve

Information Searches That Solve Problems (Pew Internet & American Life Project))
There are several major findings in this report. One is this: For help with a variety of common problems, more people turn to the internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources.
In a national phone survey, respondents were asked whether they [...]