'Certain facial features evoke feelings of warmth, trust and cooperation while minimizing feelings of threat and competition. People with babyish facial characteristics like large eyes, round chin and pudgy lips are perceived as kinder, more honest and more trustworthy than mature-faced people with small eyes, square jaws, and thin lips. Baby-faced people also produce more agreement with their positions. Prof. Maoz adds that there are situations in which a baby-face is not advantageous: "Although features of this type can lend politicians an aura of sincerity, openness and receptiveness, at the same time they can communicate a lack of assertiveness. So people tend to prefer baby-faced politicians as long they represent the opposing side, while on their own side they prefer representatives who look like they know how to stand their ground."'

'The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person's feelings to the people around him. ...fear helps respond to threat, and the squinched-up nose and mouth of disgust make it harder for you to inhale anything poisonous drifting on the breeze. The outthrust chest of pride increases both testosterone production and lung capacity so you're ready to take on anyone. Then, as social living became more important to the evolutionary success of certain species -- most notably humans -- the expressions evolved to serve a social role as well; so a happy face, for example, communicates a lack of threat and an ashamed face communicates your desire to appease.'

'...we all unconsciously, involuntarily reveal our emotions in subtle changes of expression and the flow of blood to our skin. We give our emotions away in our eye movements, dilated pupils, biting or pressing together our lips, wrinkling our noses, breathing heavily, swallowing, blinking and facial asymmetry. And these are just the visible signs seen by the camera. Even swelling blood vessels around our eyes betray us, and the thermal sensor spots them too. The researchers acknowledge, though, that these tests can never be 100% accurate. What they detect are emotions, such as distress, fear or distrust, and not the act of lying itself. Fear can sometimes be the fear of not being believed rather than the fear of being caught.'

'That shame is the result of faking it, of putting on an identity that isn't really you (I'm powerful) and having it exposed (rejected.) The solution is to not fake it. That doesn't mean not try, that means instead of sitting up straight before the presentation, sit up straight all the time. At least train your body to naturally adopt what your mind is too nervous/self-conscious to do. If this study is at all representative of the truth, it means that eventually you will physically change into the person your body is pretending to be.'

'Followers of Aristotle (384-322 BC), who founded the Lyceum in 335 BC, were known as peripatetics because they walked and underwent "restless practices" (Flew 1979:265) as they thought and shared ideas, rather than merely sitting in place. The two-point rhythm of walking's stride clears the mind for thinking. (N.B.: Perhaps, after telling the spinal circuits to "take a walk," the forebrain shifts to automatic pilot, so to speak, freeing the neocortex to ponder important issues of the day.) Many philosophers were lifetime walkers, who found that bipedal rhythms facilitated creative contemplation and thought. In his short life, e.g., Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles--ten times the circumference of earth.'

'Maintaining eye contact feels awkward, even creepy. At first. Then it just feels powerful. -- With my eyes, I calmed them, slowed them down, and did so without knocking them over or humiliating them. I used my eyes to upset the speed and indifference of their routines and simply register my presence by asking them to do a double take. It worked every time. They didn't know me, but then, suddenly, it seemed they did. I thought of it as a kind of dominance, holding them in the kind of invisible grip... It's the law of dominance, I think, that the more dominant you become, the more you want to stay dominant. I found I liked backing people down. I began to look at them long enough that I began to sense when they were about to look away. The truth is, instead of them seeing me, it ended up that I could really see them. They were just like I was, a little afraid of eye contact, a little leery of connection. I meant well, so I pressed on.'

Increasing emotional bandwidth.

On Facebook: "It’s a bit like being trapped at an elementary school talent show. People seem to be trying to hard, or are entirely unaware that they should be trying, or—like me—they have just frozen up there on the stage. -- Facebook seems to exist precisely to obviate awkward discourse. But awkwardness is inescapably necessary. It’s an almost physiological signal that something emotionally significant is taking place. If Facebook eradicates such feelings by giving us such granular privacy controls that we prevent the possibility of embarrassment, then our lives become poorer, emotionally. The people we connect with through the site seem less than real people; they seem like shadows of the real people we thought we knew—the reality of these “friends” remains offline and even more inaccessible. In the place of intimacy, we have the more convenient alternative of user friendliness, the triumph of a new, corporate-mediated politesse.'

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives: The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it. #2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either: The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. #4. Online company only makes us lonelier: When someone speaks to you face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? ... in Text World, all that is stripped away... absent a sense of the other person's mood, every line we read gets filtered through our own mood instead. #5. We don't get criticized enough. #7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less: There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you.'

"All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life." -- !!! Everyware must default to plausible deniability.