[From Discovery News] What Does Your Avatar Say About You?  Analysis by David Teeghman Thu Jul 29, 2010 The website Second Life lets users create a completely new identity in virtual reality. Tall people can become short and animals can pretend to be humans, because on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But even with the range of possibilities to completely change your online personality and become all you ever dreamed of, you won’t. Researchers at Concordia University in Canada report in the journal Psychology and Marketing that online avatars usually reflect the personality of their creators.…

[From The Montreal Gazette] Age now, save more for later By DOROTHY LIPOVENKO, Freelance Shortly before the Great Bull Market of the 1990s topped out, advance warning came of a most unusual birthday gift. A television makeup artist with a deft hand for special effects agreed to sit me in her chair, dip into her pots of magic, and “age” me. Turns out a sneak preview of version 70.0 is more prescient than anyone could have imagined. New research suggests that showing someone how they’ll look when they’re old (through digital tinkering of the face) can add up to extra…

[From CNN] The robot that visits your cubicle By John D. Sutter, CNN July 30, 2010 (CNN) — When Trevor Blackwell, CEO of a company called Anybots, wants to know what his employees are up to, he sends a robot to their cubicles. “I can see if people are busy on something — and then won’t interrupt them,” he said this week. “Or, you know, if they’re doing something that looks interesting, or if they look stuck, I’ll have a conversation with them.” This isn’t your standard “Office Space” conversation. Blackwell boots up a “telepresence robot” — which looks like…

[From Christopher Mims’ Mims’s Bits blog at MIT’s Technology Review] Wednesday, July 28, 2010 Adding Temperature to Human-Computer Interaction An experimental new game controller adds the sensation of hot and cold to users’ experience of a simulated environment Touch interfaces and haptic feedback are already a part of how we interact with computers, in the form of iPads, rumbling video game controllers and even three-dimensional joysticks. As the range of interactions with digital environments expands, it’s logical to ask what’s next: Smell-o-vision has been on the horizon for something like 50 years, but there’s a dark horse stalking this race: thermoelectrics.…