Voice-controlled interfaces are showing up in mobile phones, TVs, and automobiles. One company believes it can give just about everything a voice.

After tracking my walking, biking, drinking, and stress levels for weeks, I’ve learned I’m more a creature of habit than I thought.

A Cell Phone Upside the Head: EM Radiation and Health

Today we announced an extension of our machine-readable news offering to include a sentiment scoring service for social media. The new capability will mine the expansive wealth of social media and blog content to deliver digestible analytics on selected companies and market segments, to help trading and investment firms identify and capitalize on new opportunities.
via Thomson-Reuters

reuters:

This graphic shows the probability of a hurricane or tropical storm making landfall in the United States. Experts say they predict fewer storms than usual in 2012 due to the cooling of the Atlantic over the past several months. [REUTERS]

Chromosomal deletions in DNA often involve just one of two gene copies inherited from either parent. But scientists haven’t known how a deletion in one gene from one parent, called a “hemizygous” deletion, can contribute to cancer.

“It used to be that people used computers for computations where there was a single, hard, logical right answer,” says Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT. “Now, the landscape is changing.” When you do a Google search, for instance, the exact order of the first few results may not matter as much as getting an answer quickly. In the Internet age, when Web servers are performing computations for thousands of users at once, and sending the results across thousands of miles of optical fiber, programs that can efficiently find adequate solutions to a problem are often preferable to ones that inefficiently find the perfect solution.

One of the triumphs of the information age is the idea of error-correcting codes, which ensure that data carried by electromagnetic signals — traveling through the air, or through cables or optical fibers — can be reconstructed flawlessly at the receiving end, even when they’ve been corrupted by electrical interference or other sources of what engineers call “noise.”