Actually, something else. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has created an app called Procrastinator for the iPhone. It’s simple: You set a deadline for your tough decision and if you haven’t made a choice when the time it up, Procrastinator makes it for you.
The reason for the app, Ariely explains, is that:

when we are choosing between two or more very similar options, we tend NOT to take into account the consequences of not deciding. … a friend of mine spent three months choosing between two different cameras, only to miss countless photo opportunities that he will never get back. And given how similar the two cameras were, he might have been better off simply flipping a coin.

Ariely has also created the “At a boy!” app, which pays you a compliment every time you tap the screen. To help him figure out which comments make people feel best, he asks users to rate them using the thumbs up/thumbs down feature. You can also submit compliments that will be given to other people. According to Ariely, “not only are we sensitive to rude remarks from strangers, but we are also very excited when we get kind words, even if they are just random; they just make us feel much better, even if these strangers don’t know us very well.”

This is kind of cool: A team of researchers have created a video that shows a 24-hour mood cycle of the country based on our public tweets.
Before you watch, Sune Lehmann, who studies complex networks, explains how to read the mood map:

Green corresponds to a happy mood and red corresponds to a grumpier state of mind. The area of each state is scaled according to the number of tweets originating in that state. Note how the East Coast is consistently 3 hours ahead of the West Coast, so when we’re sleeping in Boston, the Californians are tweeting away. It’s also interesting that better weather seems to make you happier (or rather, that better weather is correlated with happier tweets): Florida and California seems to be consistently in a better mood than the remaining US. Also note how New Mexico and Delaware behave very differently from their neighbors.

Lehmann and his colleagues also found a few other interesting trends. We seem to be happiest on Sunday mornings and the least happy on Thursday evenings, and we’re happier on weekends than during the week (no surprise there). Our happiest times of day are early morning and late evening, and people on the West Coast appear to be significantly happier than people on the East Coast.

That’s what a group of researchers is hoping to figure out—and to do so, they’re using a pretty cute humanoid robot named Nexi.
Specifically, they wonder whether our judgments about trust are based on nonverbal gestures and cues, and which ones. So they’ve programmed Nexi to make certain subtle gestures while speaking to volunteers. As you can see, Nexi can create a range of facial expressions by moving her eyes, eyebrows, and mouth:

She can also move her lower arm, wrists, thumb, and fingers. The researchers can control Nexi’s every movement, allowing them to test and identify which signals might lead a person to trust her (or distrust her). As researcher David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, predicts:

People tend to mimic each other’s body language, which might help them develop intuitions about what other people are feeling—intuitions about whether they’ll treat them fairly.

After the volunteers chit chat with the robot for 10 minutes, they’re asked to play an economic game in which they have to predict how much money Nexi will give them at her own expense—and, at the same time, decide how much they will give the robot. How the volunteers ultimately decide to treat Nexi might not depend on one particular gesture, DeSteno says in an early description of the research, but more likely results from “a ‘dance’ that happens between the strangers, which leads them to trust or not trust the other.”

By now, most of us have seen the data that shows using a cell phone while driving is about as dangerous as driving drunk. We’re slower to hit the brakes and more likely to crash—whether we’re holding the phone or talking hands-free. It’s mainly the conversation that impairs our attention and distracts us from the road.
But what about the conversation itself? Does it suffer when our attention is divided and our reactions delayed? Paul Rosenblatt, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, and grad student Xiaohui Li think so. They say we take relationship risks when we talk to someone on the phone while driving. As they write in a new paper:

A driver talking on a cell phone might not hear some things, might misspeak, might misunderstand, and might cut the conversation short of what it should be for optimal communication and comfortable relationship. In general, cell phone usage while driving might lead to missed relationship stop lights, slow reactions to dangerous relationship circumstances, loss of control of one’s part of the interaction, and interaction mistakes that could lead to conflict, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and possibly even serious damage to the relationship.