smiley face news stories on Newser

Down With Emoticons

Evann Gastaldo — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:08:41 CST

Since its inception in 1982, the "smiley" has been used in a number of ways, all of which make Mary Elizabeth Williams "want to smack the half circle off its stupid face." Even though bright people use emoticons, "when I see a smiley, my first thought is, 'What are you,...

Emoticons Invade Academia

Nick McMaster — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:44:42 CDT

College professors have lamented the state of student writing for centuries. But today’s Internet-obsessed culture brings new, infuriating errors to Writing 101 as students brazenly use colloquialisms like “:-)” and “LOL” in essays. “Occasionally, I've seen someone using the number 4 for the word 'for,'” a Cal State San...

Robot Learns to Smile

Rob Quinn — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:45:01 CDT

It's a milestone for robots: One has learned to smile and make realistic facial expressions on its own for the first time, Wired reports. University of California researchers put their Einstein robot in front of a video camera attached to facial recognition software, which gave it feedback as it randomly...

Happy 25th Anniversary! :-)

Peter Fearon — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:18:50 CDT

They didn't seem significant at the time, but three keystrokes typed exactly 25 years ago tomorrow marked a groundbreaking change in the way we communicate. The keystrokes— a colon, hyphen and a right parenthesis—formed the first smiley-face emoticon. The were created on a computer bulletin board by artificial intelligence...