...for those cold days in the office.

...via Shiny Shiny

Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio conference via iTunes. Content includes lectures, music, sports, etc. There are also plans to include a restricted area where students can get lecture notes, etc.

...via BoingBoing

Really:

Such are the difficulties caused by the over-abundance of passwords and codes to those with poor memories that a psychologist in Australia has found it is leading to mental health problems.

Michael Saling, head of neuropsychology at Melbourne University, calls it "busy-line syndrome" and has reported that a growing number of those who can't keep up are seeking medical help.

He said: "It's a condition people develop when they have too much on their plate. They begin to forget details about their life.

"Passwords and PINs are prime candidates for being forgotten, when they are just arbitrary numbers and people can't relate them to anything."

Google Maps has taken off like a storm since it was introduced.

And while it's useful for finding your way home or locating a particular business, it's also being used for all sorts of interesting things:

--Free wireless coffee shops in Seattle
--Dublin, Ireland recycling centers
--Who's reopened for business in New Orleans
--Autumn leaves in the UK

Via the Toronto Star (registration required) a discussion of the encroachment of private spaces on public spaces and the way social networks are changing:

"The big change has been this shift from groups to networks," he says. "They're less formally structured, they're more amorphous."
Those in anyone's network don't have to be physically close, just a cell call away, and it's easier to opt in or opt out of a network than it is a group.
"People can switch around and manoeuvre around. What that does is leave them with some uncertainty in their lives but it also leaves them with some autonomy. It's a switch from public sociability to private sociability."
Your cellphone network becomes, in a sense, an extension of yourself, what some sociologists have begun calling "a third skin."
"The notion is that you should be connected at all times," says Wellman.

...via Smart Mobs

BBC News reports that Yahoo is including blog entries with its news seaches:

The Yahoo search system is not about blurring the lines between professionally edited news and that from blogs.

Readers will initially be given links to the top 10 stories from mainstream news organisations, alongside links to relevant blog entries.

"We do try to demarcate what is mainstream media and what is user-generated content," said Mr Redfern.

Leading web firms are beginning to sit up and take notice of blogs. In September search engine Google unveiled its own blog search engine.

At the beginning of October, AOL agreed to buy leading web journal firm Weblogs Inc.

According to blog search and indexing site Technorati, there are more than 17 million weblogs currently available online.

...via Smart Mobs

From a survey of Japanese middle school students:

• Nearly half of Japanese 8th graders own cell phones
• Significantly more girls (58.8 percent) own cell phones than boys (41.1 percent)
• While over 85 percent of cell-phone owners say they have a large or relatively large number of friends who own cell phones, only 62 percent of non cell-phone owners can say the same thing
• When using cell phones to talk, they generally call family members, typically only a few times a week, but when sending text messages, they usually send them to friends nearby
• 54 percent of cell phone owners send more than 10 messages a day

...via Cognitive Daily

You can catalog the books you've read and see what everyone else is reading with LibraryThing

...via Smart Mobs