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Personality tests – also known as behavioral assessments and predictive tests -- have come a long way since "Miracle on 34th Street." That's the film where a nice old man who maintains he's Santa Claus is fired from Macy's after flunking a dubious applicant quiz given by a self-styled shrink. Good tests today are about more than qualifying a candidate for a slot, says Dr. Todd Harris, director of research at PI Worldwide , Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, which has furnished testing to organizations of all sizes around the globe since 1955.

About to get coffee with someone, but can't remember who this "Jake" guy on your calendar is? A new web-based service mines your calendar, email, and LinkedIn contacts to build a quick cheatsheet before your meeting.

Twitter allows users to lock in use of HTTPS--meaning not just any amateur sitting next to you in a cafe can hack your account. Twitter recently became the latest major site to bow to pressure to make itself more secure. It added the option for users to permanently run the site via HTTPS, a more secure protocol that foils simple hacking strategies that have gained major press of late.

Yep, the next generation of mechanical heroes comes in all shapes and sizes. Robots of mostly academic interest may suddenly be getting a real-world baptism by fire, reports the Chronicle for Higher Education.

Humorist and TED speaker Ze Frank tells FastCompany how his new startup can help save us from living our entire online lives in blue and white. Ze Frank, the performer and humorist who once won a Webby for his personal website, is a guy who is plainly awed at the oddity of human beings on the Internet. He says the blue-and-white sterility of our popular social networks--Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare--is threatening to choke out the messy, weird home-made kitsch once typified by MySpace pages and message boards