They're also hammering out details with a book partner, hoping to give end users the ability to customize memory albums and buy all manners of unique covers.

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Apply all that new technology to an ancient lexicon of good manners that precluded not only the preparation but the cutting of food at Chinese tables, rich or poor, and you have no need for any tableware beyond your chopsticks, a couple of serving pieces, and a slippery porcelain spoon for soup.

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For all her manners, she can be as persistent as the best of them: she lobbied America's National Football League for a decade before it at last agreed to stage the Superbowl in the cold wastes of Minnesota.

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Professor Shuji Hashimoto, director of the humanoid robotics centre at Waseda University in Tokyo, has a theory: robots need a solid dose of those Japanese manners (don't we all?) encompassed in the Japanese word kansei, which includes feelings, mood, intuitiveness and sensibility.

ENGADGET: Japanese prof thinks robots need emotional sensibilities

The sentimental strain is both unconvincing and ungrounded, but in the all-too-rare moments when Murphy, who invests with psychodrama the role of a misfit learning manners, lets himself go the movie comes brilliantly to life.

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