Some Jobs More than Others

Let's face facts: Robots are the future. For real this time. Beyond automated assembly lines, we are going to see robots in more and more human-facing roles (and people are looking especially closely at Japan on this one, since they have an older population that vastly outnumbers the working-age population, and someonething is going to have to care for them.)

So, the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study on how effective these robots are going to be in interacting with people. Sounds reasonable. After all, there's no point in blowing an entire R&D budget on Robot Guidance Counselors (that's robots doing the job of guidance counselors, not guidance counselors for robots, by the way) when it turns out that people would rather get life advice from a rolled-up newspaper.

It turns out that robots may have a future in the nursing industry. Grief counselors, not so much. Interestingly enough, subjects responded differently to the exact same robot contact depending on what they thought was happening. People who thought that the robot was cleaning their arm responded much more favorably than people who thought that the robot was trying to "comfort" them.

What does this mean for the sex robots of the future? too early to tell, but there may still be hope for them in certain specialized fetish niches.

(And I demand some recognition for the fact that I made it all the way through this post without changing their "Touched by a Robot" press release title into a "Touched by an Angel" joke!)

Who Knew The Wait Would Be Worth It?

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of LG. All opinions are 100% mine.

I still haven't gotten around to getting a new cell phone, but that may have turned out for the best.

LG has come out with a smartphone that runs on Windows, the LG Optimus 7. It's their first Windows Phone 7 device, but they have come out of the gate strong, cramming in a lot of features. I've been reading up on it, and I can see three reasons why I want one.

• Voice-to-text feature that can be used for updating Facebook and Twitter statuses. You know how all those Favstar titans always tweet about texting and driving? I am going to join their ranks with a vengeance! I'll still be a terrible driver, but at least I won't have to take my eyes off the road.
   
• A 3.8-inch display, which (in my opinion), is about as big as you can get if you still want to be able to put it in your pocket. Let's face it, anything much larger starts to resemble a mini laptop, and the WVGA LCD display's 800x480 pixels give great resolution without making you feel like you're missing out on anything.
   
• Gaming and music through Zune and Xbox LIVE. I'm not much of a Zune user, but I'm an avid gamer. With that 3.8-inch display, I'm going to bring the thunder with me wherever I go!

ATTN: SANTA - I have found this year's Christmas gift. Please dispatch it from the north pole with all due haste. I'll forgive you if my gift comes early this year.

Forced Out?

A study from the University of Haifa has asked whether early retirement is as optional as it appears. According to their data, most people take early retirement options because of workplace pressure. However, their data set was taken from men who had taken early retirement from government companies that became privatized, which makes me wonder how applicable it is across the entire workforce.

I'm not saying government employees are lazy and terrible at their jobs (because plenty of other people are saying it), I'm saying that I can see where a profit-motivated corporation would look to trim its workforce as much as possible. That's probably the source of the pressure cited in the study. Is this kind of thing really happening in companies that aren't making a dramatic shift in managment and objectives?

The ideal put forth by Sigal Naim, who carried out the study, is that "everyone would be able to continue working based on his or her abilities and desires." He goes on to suggest a removal of mandatory retirement ages. That's all well and good in theory, but what happens in reality, when elderly workers who are well past their prime insist on bitterly clinging to jobs that could be used to lower the nation's unemployment rate?

We All Have Hobbies

And by "hobbies," I mean "things we do on the internet when we need a quick break to restore our sanity." When my job gets too rough, I take a minute to check in on one or two favorite sites and pull myself together. Lately I've been thinking about travel. I won't be able to get there myself anytime soon, but I like to look up what the weather is like in my dream travel destinations.

I've been looking at Rome, Paris, and some of the traditional European destinations, but I've also been looking west. I've always wanted to visit Australia. The Melbourne weather forecast doesn't look so great today (thunderstorms), but it's their springtime down there, which means it would be a great place to visit this winter. I've looked at Sydney, Cairns, and Perth, as well, but for some reason I keep going back to check the Melbourne weather. I've heard good things about Victoria, and their National Gallery is supposed to be worth seeing.

Is it weird that I'm going to check the weather in other countries? It's cheaper and easier than traveling, and it's nice to know that things are at least nice somewhere in the world when they suck here. What odd stuff do you look up on the internet?

Can't BEET it!

Ha ha ha. Sorry for the pun, I just couldn't help myself. I'll try not to go too nuts with this story (because that would be BEET-ing a dead horse!)

Apparently, beet juice is kind of a big deal. They've been looking into it over at Wake Forest University, and it has some pretty beneficial health effects. It's all about the nitrates, which I thought were supposed to be harmful compounds found in processed meat like hot dogs, but then I'm not a university biologist so my knowledge is crap.

The body turns nitrates into nitrites, and nitrites improve blood flow. The Wake Forest researchers divided up their test subjects into a group that ate a lot of nitrates, provided by beet juice, and a group that didn't. Then they switched diets halfway through for the participants to make sure that it really was the food that was having the effect. And in all cases, the research supported the theory that increased nitrate consumption leads to improved blood flow.

From there, they are saying that this improves brain activity, and think it's going to be helpful for older adults.

What I want to know is how nasty it was to have to drink 16 ounces of straight beet juice. That's a full pint glass, and when dealing with glasses of that size, I'd rather have the beer. Does beer help increase the blood flow to the brain? If they're interested in studying that, I want to volunteer to be one of the test subjects!

Do they have oil in Iowa?

Iowa's the corn state, right? I think it's the flat state where Napoleon Dynamite was set, but I'm not too strong on the geography in that region. I know Idaho is potatoes, but when I think of U.S. oil reserves, I know the big players are Texas and Alaska, and I don't think that Iowa contributes much.

It figures that the non-oil-rich states would be the ones working hardest on oil alternatives. After all, there's no incentive to come up with a scientific development that might undermine one of your state's big industries. Anyway, the point is that Iowa State University has come up with an organic asphalt that doesn't require petroleum to produce. They're testing it on one of their bike paths.

I'm happy about the idea, because even if I don't completely embrace all the "peak oil" hysteria, I still think it's important to use renewable resources. Non-renewable resources, by definition, have to run out sometime, after all. An Iowa bike path is a small start, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it catches on.

But what if you're allergic to mice?

Remember a few years back when there was a news story about a lethal "peanut butter kiss"? A girl had died, and the rumor that was circulating was that her boyfriend had just eaten a peanut butter sandwich and kissed her, and she was so fatally allergic to peanuts that she had a reaction and died. It turned out to be a load of crap--the coroner released an official report after her autopsy stating that she did not have an allergic reaction to kissing her boyfriend--but the urban legend was just too juicy for people to let go. I still hear coworkers talking about it.

I haven't seen anyone die from a food allergy, but I have seen some pretty bad reactions. Allergies to things like wheat, peanuts, and milk can be serious business. I can only imagine how heartbreaking it must be for allergy sufferers since those items end up in so many of the food products available in stores and items on restaurant menus these days.

Given all that, I think it's kind of a big deal that Johns Hopkins prevented mice from having fatal allergic reactions. I think that's good news. Granted, it usually takes a long time for something to get from the "tested in mice" stage to the "making life better for everyone" stage, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.