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Do you really want your interfaces cute?

Writing on io9,  Esther Inglis-Arkill asks what it would take to make robots lovable.   The answer she came up with is not to make the robots realistic or lifelike,  but rather to make them "cute" A couple of the examples she uses include "Boxie", an experiment of the MIT media lab shown in the video above,  and Paro, a robotic baby seal being used to successfully treat Alzheimer's patients. Inglis-Arkill concludes

The difference between Paro and a real pet isn't just that a real pet may inadvertently hurt its owner. The difference is no.

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Can Hardware Development be Agile?

Joe_Justice_at_lockheedLast week I had the opportunity to participate in an "Extreme Manufacturing" event at Lockheed.   The event was run by Joe Justice of WikiSpeed, and organized by Scrum Inc.  The plan was that by using agile methodologies, we would build a street legal car capable of getting 100 mpg in six half hour "sprints". Agile has been high on my radar recently.

At #BBCcon  a couple of weeks ago, I attended a number of sessions focused on more