Employing artificial intelligent robots in Chinese restaurants – an idea that attracted national headlines – has not proved such a smart idea after all, mainland media reports. A number of restaurant owners have chosen to fire about 10 robots because they were just not clever or sophisticated enough to do their jobs properly, the Xiamen Daily reported. The plug has been pulled on a number of the robots – employed as chefs and waiters – only a few years after a catering business in the seaport city of Xiamen, in southern Fujian province, scrambled to employ them instead of people, the newspaper said on Tuesday. Workers are ready for the robot revolution, but are their managers? Another restaurant, which opened last October, made local headlines for using four automated waiters that were able to take orders and deliver food to customers' tables.

Roy Harold Scherer Jr worked as a truck driver on the long haul to the top of his chosen profession. He later found film stardom under the name of Rock Hudson. Michael Dell, founder of US company Dell Computers, washed plates and was a waiter in Chinese and Mexican restaurants before he landed on a career in technology. Such humdrum tasks once allowed ambitious people to earn cash en route to the top. For others, they were full-time jobs.

When we go grocery shopping, we often have a standard list of things to buy. Each shopper has a distinctive list, depending on one's needs and preferences. A housewife might buy healthy ingredients for a family dinner, while a bachelor might buy beer and chips. Understanding these buying patterns can help to increase sales in several ways. While we may know that certain items are frequently bought together, the question is, how do we uncover these associations?

Children play and learn through educational toys about anatomy, chemistry, physics, and biology. They improve their memory or explore their creativity. Happiness science is so new it has yet to break into manufacturing with full force like other science based games and toys for children or adults. Given the leading edge of happiness research and the advent of advanced mobile medical technology, we are able to merge software with hardware in a way that has never been done before giving us the opportunity for positive robotics. Making a programmable robotic teddy bear who is abreast in how to help your child feel better may seem like a no brainer.

Using machine-learning to forecast which accused perpetrators of domestic violence -- particularly those whose crimes result in injuries -- will be re-arrested on similar charges can cut such recidivism in half, according to a recent report. Machine learning used during the arraignment process prevented "well over" 1,000 domestic violence incidents annually in at least one large metropolitan area, according to authors Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School, and Susan B. Sorenson, director of the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center on Family Violence. For their study, "Forecasting Domestic Violence: A Machine Learning Approach to Help Inform Arraignment Decisions," Berk and Sorenson analyzed 28,646 domestic violence arraignments that led to official charges and the corresponding releases. "Under current practice, about 20 percent of the individuals released after arraignment are arrested for domestic violence within two years. If magistrates only released offenders our forecasts identified as good bets… [f]ailures could be cut in half."

I believe Richard Feynman was one of our greatest scientific minds. He had a very particular way of looking at the world thanks to his father, and it was to look at the world around him as if he were a Martian. Like a fish born into water, it's hard to actually see water as being water, because it's all a fish ever knows. And so as humans, it's a good idea to try and step outside of our usual frame of mind, to see what it is we as humans think and do, from the perspective of a mind totally alien to our everyday environment. With that in mind, here's what humans are doing right now, from the perspective of someone from far, far away... What an interesting place and an interesting time it is for a visit.

An actual-size model of a Warhammer robot stands just inside the door of the Rams' new temporary offices in Agoura Hills. The action figure was left behind by a video game company that occupied the space before the Rams officially opened for business in Southern California. On Monday, the character was adorned in a No. 3 Rams jersey. "It's exciting for the staff to finally be together for the first time in an office space, to be the Los Angeles Rams," Kevin Demoff, the team's chief operating officer, said during a brief interview in his office. "It's fantastic to have the group here and really laying the foundation for the 2016 season and beyond."

Ever since the launch of Siri in its fully-integrated form on the iPhone 4s in 2011, digital assistants have become standard features on most modern smartphones. With competition growing from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with their Cortana, Google Now, and Echo respectively, Apple continues providing updates to Siri in an attempt to find a semblance of functional advantage. As Google recently added changes to its digital assistant – Google Now – with smart intonation and expression to its speech patterns to sound less robotic, Apple has followed with their own updates looking to target Siri towards specific audiences; in this case, sports fans. Leading up to the opening days of this year's Major League baseball season, Apple has dramatically increased Siri's knowledge of and access to in-depth baseball knowledge and statistics. Though Apple added sports scores to Siri's functionality back with iOS6, previously, when asked specific baseball-related questions, Siri would typically respond with a simple search or Google queries.

Lloyd Alter ( @lloydalter) writes about smart (and dumb) tech with a side of design and a dash of boomer angst.

If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution. But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines. Haven't we heard all this before, though? From the luddites of the 19th century to print unions protesting in the 1980s about computers, there have always been people fearful about the march of mechanisation.