A new survey has proved once and for all that children are indeed homunculi, a theory first posited by Haley Joel Osment’s early films.

Well, nearly homunculi.

The survey, done by Symantec security and reported on CNET, reveals the top internet search terms used by tiny adults aged 8-13, between February and July of this year. Here they are:

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. MySpace
6. Porn
7. Yahoo
8. Michael Jackson
9. Fred
10. eBay

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Last week, Ignite Social Media published a fat social network demographics report which covers more than 40 of the top sites (PDF).

Ignite’s numbers were culled from search data, so they have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do highlight some popular conceptions that might have to be reexamined, especially in regards to the idea of Twitter’s population being considerably older and more male than Facebook’s.

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The convergence continues, as dumb phones and desktops cede passage to smartphones and notebooks, two devices that in a few years’ time will likely become one.

Mobile phone shipments fell 10.8 percent year-over-year in Q2 2009, dropping from 302.2 million unit shipments in Q2 2008 to 269.6 million in Q2 2009, according to IDC.

“The challenges from the previous nine months – aggressive channel destocking, foreign exchange volatility, and uncertain demand – continued to plague the mobile phone market in the second quarter, but were not as severe as before,” says IDC’s Ramon Llamas.

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In a story that evokes the narrative of the classic Rupert Holmes song “Escape” (better known to music lovers as “The Piña Colada Song”), a Virginia man was surprised to see his wife’s photo advertising a site for “hot singles.”

She wasn’t advertising and he wasn’t looking. Her photo was used because she hadn’t opted out of a Facebook setting that allows advertisers to use your image in their ads.

In a more serious but also hilarious case, UK police stormed a man’s 30th birthday barbecue because he had advertised the party on Facebook as an “all-nighter.”

“What effectively the police did was come in and stop 15 people eating burgers,” said Andrew Poole, who had advertised the party as an all-nighter in case some of his family and friends wanted to crash at his place.

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During this recession, 52 percent of Americans have suffered major economic loss, 35 percent have seen their personal investments halved, 27 percent have had pay or benefits cut and 14 percent have lost their jobs.

And they are turning to the internet for help.

More than 69 percent of Americans — 88 percent of U.S. adult internet users — have gone online for help. 18 percent of online adults search for recession-related material at least once a day.

Pew’s new study, “Recession Dot Net,” released today, examines the role the internet is playing in recession.

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One of the oft-forgotten components of Web 2.0 is online gaming, which continues to grow at faster rates than many other Web categories.

Online gaming grew 22 percent year-over-year, growth that comScore attributes in part to the economic climate. That’s pretty dramatic, especially considering that the total number internet users grew by only 2 percent in that time.

There were 87 million U.S. visitors to gaming sites in May 2009, up from 72 million the same date in 2008.

“Online gaming continues to be one of the top gaining categories over the past year,” comScore’s Edward Hunter said.

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Today Apple pulled an application from its iPhone App store that was reported to include a nude photo of a fifteen year old girl. Prohibited content is feared to be a major weakness in Apple’s App Store, and this incident has effectively placed that fear in the spotlight.

The app is BeautyMeter from Braun Software, and users upload images of themselves and rate images of others with a five-star system in the categories of face, body and clothes. The screenshot in question has not been verified to have been taken by an underage girl, but the listing shows just such a caption, with nearly five thousand ratings, under a picture of a topless iPhone user partially nude below the waist.

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After a brief respite after the March court trial on The Pirate Bay sentencing the founders to a year-long prison sentence, the site is back in the news. The next chapter began on Tuesday with the announcement that the owners were selling the most well-known torrent file tracker site to a corporation - Global Gaming Factory.

Though both companies are based in Sweden, the effects on Americans has begun already. With the business model that GGM will introduce, a suggested partnership between The Pirate Bay, site members and internet service providers will create a new file-sharing system, they hope.

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All Maine students in grades 7 through 12 will receive free MacBooks for the academic year.

The measure is intended to bridge the digital divide, allowing all students access to new technology no matter their socioeconomic position. It is part of the state’s expanding Maine Technology Learning Initiative (MTLI), established in 2002, which provides all middle school students with free computers.

Today’s announced expansion brings computers to high-school students.

“We have seen incredible success, with our middle schools showing increased student engagement and achievement with (MLTI) in place, and we want to bring this same opportunity to our high schools,” Maine Educational Commissioner Sue Gendron said.

“This is not just about technology–it’s about using the technology to support education,” Gendron said.

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The trend of the Free and Open Source Software movement had many supporters talking today. ZDNet ran multiple perspectives on the blossoming popularizing of Linux this morning, and OStatic published an in-depth article on Open Source Resources as well.

Various events have pointed to this moment in the evolution of Operating System software, a two-party system if there ever was one. Jason Perlow claims the economic slowdown has pushed consumers to consider the low- or no-cost options available in this category. Netbooks are a hot commodity, and many come installed with their personalized version of Linux favorite, Ubuntu.

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