ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar says of the device: It’ll be “bigger than Facebook.” It grows: No real animals were hurt during the filming! When I’m an old codger I expect a relational robot will watch over me; he’ll be my friend, bring me my pills, take my blood pressure and call 911 in an emergency. Pishevar’s TechCrunch visit was in reaction to being dissed by Michael Arrington for not dreaming big enough: In my humble opinion (which was shared by one of the...

Max Cleland’s new book, Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed, and Karl Rove, has an October 6 publication date. The AJC’s Political Insider, Jim Galloway, has been paging through it: Cleland rose in Georgia politics in large part because of that irrepressible grin and a persona that beamed indefatigable optimism. No little grenade was going to stop him. “Heart of a Patriot” (Simon & Schuster, $26) has much of the dark stuff that “Strong at...

David Hume Kennerly sees fakery: The Sept. 14th Newsweek cover line — “Is Your Baby Racist?” — should have included a sub-head, “Is Dick Cheney a Butcher?” Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, stand-alone picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board. Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about C.I.A. interrogators. By linking that photo with Mr. Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, they implied something...

Over at The Corner, Abigail Thernstrom has about had it with the white racist chorus: It’s a sad and dangerous moment in American politics. As Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford has written, “self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political hacks use accusations of racism . . . to advance their own ends.” Those accusations provoke “resentment rather than thoughtful reaction.” Is that what Democrats want? The American public did not and would not have elected...

I’m surprised to read that Pew finds the Internet has actually shifted more power to the educated, well-to-do citizens already engaged in the political process: In a survey conducted in late August 2008, Pew found that only 8 percent of people with a household income of less than $20,000 had participated in two or more online political activities—emailing their representatives, donating money through a political campaign or group’s Website, or signing an online petition—in the past year,...

NOTE: “Kenya” in original title has been changed to “Kanye”. – TS Last night, for his bad manners at the VMA. Terry Moran let it slip in a tweet… Now, an ABC spokesperson explains to POLITICO what happened: “In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before...

Dr. Jim Yong Kim will become the 17th president of Dartmouth College next week. A guest on Bill Moyers’ Journal last Week, Kim is an internationally recognized physician and humanitarian. His goal at Dartmouth is to tell young people that “a few committed souls can change the world.” Yong says that in his 25 years working in global health what he’s learned is that the fundamental challenge the American health care system faces is not about finding new drugs or new treatments....

Announced today at the TechCrunch50, a new visual way to display Google News: The name “Fast Flip” comes from the idea that with this visual look, you can easily flip through the news. If you find an article you like that looks interesting, you click through to read it, if not, just flip left or right to go to another. And it is fast. Really fast. If you do like an article, there is a “like” button, similar to that functionality on FriendFeed and Facebook (the smiley face is built into the...

Jake Tapper: This afternoon at his house on the Eastern Shore in Maryland, Powell had an apparent heart attack, a family friend said. The former press secretary for President Jimmy Carter was the CEO of the PR firm Powell Tate. He was 65.

Jeralyn on last night’s MTV Music Video Awards: The MTV-VH1 Music Video Awards were tonight. They sure have changed. Madonna, looking relaxed, calm and very pretty, opened the show with a quiet and actually quite moving speech in tribute to Michael Jackson [link]. After noting they were born the same year, she mentioned she lost her mother when she was a young girl. But she says Michael he got the short end of the stick: She lost a mother, he lost a childhood. She also talked about how “we”...

No transcript yet: “The video shows a still of bin Laden while the audio statement plays. There is no video footage of bin Laden or of anything else, aside from the graphics surrounding his still. There is no media footage or footage from other groups,” IntelCenter said. The group described the release as “an address to the American public” and said bin Laden typically releases such a statement annually around September or October. While we wait for more… Tony Karon...

Tyrone notwithstanding, like Stephen Colbert, I don’t see race.

Andrew Sullivan points to Ron Brownstein on the Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in 2008 to find that on every major measurement… …the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during...

Just back from kayaking on the Oconee River, sitting on the launch-ramp waiting for my ride, I perused the NYTimes on my iphone. There I found this massive investigation of water pollution: Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily...

How I use RSS. RSS is too slow. RSS is dead. No it’s not. Rest in peace. RSS is alive and well. We’re seeing the rise of the real-time web. I’m reminded that back in the day I had a small spat with Fred Wilson when he said Email is dead. And I said no it’s not. I felt vindicated this week when Wilson implored, Don’t forget about email. Indeed, everything old is new again and many of us are saying, as danah boyd so eloquently rants today: For my own sanity, I need one...

Andrew Sullivan: [Alan Turing] was one of the greatest minds of modern time, a founding father of computer science, and his legendary breaking of the Enigma Code may have been a tipping point in the struggle against Nazism. Few men have contributed so much to human learning or to his country’s survival. But Turing was persecuted into suicide by the homophobia of his time and barred from entering the US because he was a homosexual (now America reserves that distinction to homosexuals with HIV)....

The upside of the Kindle’s tether could be that when lost or stolen, Amazon would use its technology to help you get it back. Don’t count on it. The NYTimes: Samuel Borgese, for instance, is still irate about the response from Amazon when he recently lost his Kindle. After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his account so that nobody could charge books to his credit card. Then he asked Amazon to put the serial number of his wayward device on a kind of do-not-register list that would render...

Ostensibly because of this…. Keith Olbermann is going after Glenn Beck. Via James Joyner, “Somehow, this reminds me of Mad’s long-running Spy vs. Spy series.” [Link mine] KatRose calls it A Truly Worthy Cause. She goes on to use her academic access to quote local media accounts of Beck’s career as a morning zoo schlock jock. She finds “no smoking guns.” I find all of it a bit depressing. Sunstein’s an equal opportunity target. Here my defense of him...

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (08-205), the Supreme Court case that will decide whether the government has the right to restrict corporate political advocacy or whether such regulation is a violation of the First Amendment, is set for re-argument on Wednesday. The case originated in the past term. SCOTUS blog has a full argument preview. In a segment entitled Is McCain-Feingold Censorship? Bill Moyers Journal had Trevor Potter, president and general counsel of The Campaign Legal...

Does anyone still believe that the Republicans entered into negotiations on health care with a good faith belief that compromise could be achieved? Rudy Giuliani certainly does. On Meet the Press this morning, Giuliani explained why he believes it was President Obama who never made a good faith effort to bring Republicans on board. This clip shows Giuliani was given his due to explain his side of the debate. But when Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, got turn...

Inside Higher Ed wonders, What’s that saying about glass houses? The chief lawyer for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has sent letters to Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina asking about their use of state-owned or leased aircraft, and who travels on such flights, The Greenville News reported. The article noted that the governor’s new interest in such issues comes as the governor is facing a barrage of criticism over his use...

Ezra Klein has a column today in the WaPo’s Food section. In it he ponders, Is Technology a Friend or Foe to Food? A 2003 study [link to abstract or purchase] by economists David Cutler, Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro found that the rise in obesity over the past few decades could not be explained simply by food becoming cheaper or people consuming more meals in restaurants. It was the result of technological achievement. The major differences in caloric intake aren’t due to larger meals....

This one’s made its way around my office today. Technically Incorrect: [C]onsider the plight of Vicki Walker, an accountant with ProCare Health in Auckland, New Zealand. According to the trusty New Zealand Herald, ProCare, in dismissing Walker, told her that her e-mail style had caused ripples of disturbance in the serene landscape of her fellow workers’ minds. Her sins, for there were reportedly several, were that she used capital letters, bold typefaces and, perish the mere concept,...

I am a long-time critic of sex-offender registries (see, most recently, here). Part of the problem is we’re too quick to use the sex-offender label — an estimated 674,000 people appear on registries across the country — diluting its efficacy. Another is that even with registries we are too often too trusting to recognize the wolf at the door. But the bottom line is sex-offender registries don’t work. And the Phillip Garrido case clearly demonstrates the limits of sex offender...

You might remember that last week I pointed to Jonah Lehrer on Mirror Neutrons and porn. This week he’s guest posting for Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. His debut post yesterday was instigated by this LA Times story on the normalization of pot. Jonah says pot may one day be the new Prozac: I recently moved to Los Angeles and I'm still adjusting to all the medical marijuana stores – there are two within a mile of my apartment. And it's not just the dispensaries, with their...