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...if WellPoint is the provider of your government-mandated health insurance and, as the nations largest such entity, it likely is. Here's the press release as it appeared in something called "Business and Health": ...WellPoint said it plans to use Watson's data-crunching to help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors, which is part of a general trend for incorporating computer-influenced supervision into care. Insurers say the procedure would ensure that doctors and hospitals who adopt electronic medical records and other digital tools will be capable of recording, tracking and checking their work. The company added that they hope the technology...

Researchers have found a weakness in the AES algorithm. They managed to come up with a clever new attack that can recover the secret key four times easier than anticipated by experts. In the last decade, many researchers have tested the security of the AES algorithm, but no flaws were found so far. In 2009, some weaknesses were identified when AES was used to encrypt data under four keys that are related in a way controlled by an attacker; while this attack was interesting from a mathematical point of view, the attack is not relevant in any application scenario. The...

Introduction The story first hit in last week on the Slovakian tech site DSL.sk.  Since I am not linguistically equipped to follow the Slovakian tech scene, I didn’t hear about the story until it was brought up in English on TechCrunch.  The gist of these reports is this: DSL.sk did a test of the “ballot” screen at www.browserchoice.eu, used in Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to install a browser.  It was a Microsoft concession to the EU, to provide a randomized ballot screen for users to select a browser.  However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the ordering of...

U.S. Department of Energy scientists say they've created a computer algorithm that allows a substantially enhanced view of nuclear fission. The Argonne National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core. "The code could prove crucial in the development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly," laboratory officials said in a statement. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core currently requires billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles and thousands of energy groups -- all...

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...

When I asked Google Maps to "Get directions" from New York to London, step #23 advised me to "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi," get out of the water on the shores of northern France, drive 200 miles up the coast, and then cross the Channel to the UK. The map even shows me at which pier in NYC I should jump off to start my epic Leif Ericsson quest. Does Google Maps' geo algorithm have a slight bug, or has some programmer hidden a virtual Easter egg in the company's code? The world of complex software applications is...

Search engine giant Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student. Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science. Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that "Ori Alon works at Google's Mountain View, California offices." The University acknowledged that Yahoo and Microsoft had conducted negotiations with its business development company. Alon told TheMarker in an interview six months ago that the university had registered a patent on the invention....

Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences. The development -- which has a patent pending -- has implications for speech recognition and for other applications in natural language engineering, as well as for genomics and proteomics. It also offers new...