If you use your mobile phone to store birthdays, appointments, and other simple information, or if you own a PDA or palmtop, chances are that you haven't memorized your home phone number.

A survey included in a Puzzler Brain Trainer magazine issue revealed that the younger generation - who grew up alongside the current boom of the mobile phone and PDA industry - had trouble memorizing their own landline numbers, or even birthdays of more than three people closest to them.

Researchers found out that the current generation need to remember more and more information due to their work and lifestyle, and turn to technology to store a great portion of day-to-day information. Ian Robertson, professor of psychology in Dublin's Trinity College concurred, "People have more to remember these days and they are relying on technology more for their memory."

About two-thirds of the 3,000 people who participated in the survey relied on their phone of electronic organizer to remember dates and phone numbers. Younger people aged 30 and below remembered less information than people aged 50 and above, who grew up without such luxuries.

Mads Haahr, a random number enthusiast, Dublin Trinity College lecturer, and keeper of website random.org, intends to answer the question: Does the shuffle function really play users' songs in random order?

Well first we'd have to talk about what really makes a string of numbers random. A definition of random if you will.

Let's say we have a group of songs numbered one to ten. A random sequence must contain each number in equal frequency, so that none of your songs plays much more than any other song in the long run. Obviously if follows that it should be impossible to predict which number (what song), comes next. Song number seven can't always follow song number four.

Plenty of sequences pass one test but not the other. For example the sequence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5... isn't considered random because it passes the first test, but not the second. Two always follows one, three always follows two and so on. If say you shuffle that sequence, and then add in a few threes at different intervals, well it passes the second test, but not the first test.

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A scientist, whose research on telephone telepathy is funded by the respected Trinity College in Cambridge, announced recently that he has now proofs based on his conducted experiments that the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them is true. Rupert Sheldrake, who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping, said that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

The experiment for the telephone telepathy was conducted by having each respondent name four relatives or friends and their numbers. The relatives or friends were called at random and asked to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone. "The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected. The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one," said Sheldrake during the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

The same result was also found with with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed. But the Sheldrake's sample - 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email - was too small, prompting skepticism about the accuracy of the findings. Still, Sheldrake is planning to test if the phenomenon also works for mobile phone text messages.