Families' Mornings Start with Tech Check

Companies go 'topless' to boost employees' attention

(NEWSER) - Tired of competing for attention with iPhones, BlackBerrys and laptops, some Silicon Valley companies are banning them from meetings. One exec calls it going "topless," short for laptopless, and the Los Angeles Times reports that it's boosting some companies' efficiency. "Aside from just being rude," an exec wrote, "partial attention generally leads to partial results." More»

(NEWSER) - Last Thursday, the Twitterverse flickered and temporarily went blank. And a writer sat there, staring. “It was funny, in a kind of pathetic, soul-crushing way,” Laurel Snyder writes on Salon. “I stared at the blank screen, hitting refresh over and over.” Her withdrawal worsened as she sat on a park bench, "twittering to no one. And that’s when I knew I had a problem.” It was time for her to face her addiction. More»

Racy pics, suicide threats get would-be cops dumped

(NEWSER) - Law enforcement agencies are probing potential recruits’ digital lives for information that might make them unfit for the job, USA Today reports. More than a third of police agencies look into applicants’ social media presence, says a new report conducted for police executives. Reviewing postings to sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, some agencies require applicants’ online passwords, or want to see their text-messaging and email records. More»

Like other new media, site beefs up brain if used wisely

(NEWSER) - It's fashionable to cry about how Twitter and other new forms of electronic media are making us intellectually lazy and downright stupid. In fact, the opposite is true, writes Harvard's Steven Pinker. "Don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google," he writes. "It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate." More»

Integration will boost traffic on both sites, they hope

(NEWSER) - Yahoo is finally getting seriously social in a new partnership that will integrate Facebook Connect into its many properties. Yahoo users will be able monitor their Facebook feed on Yahoo, and vice versa. The integration will be done “on a deep level,” a Yahoo exec tells Kara Swisher, who finds it ironic in light of the fact that Yahoo almost managed to acquire Facebook for just over $1 billion several years ago. More»