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IT'S been true for a while that if you need to transcribe an audio recording, find contact information for a company, summarize an article, or perform any number of routine [...]

HERE'S a fraught encounter: one police officer, one civilian and anger felt by one or both. Afterward, it may be hard to sort out who did what to whom. Now, [...]

THE two and a half miserable hours that Michelle Lam spent in a fitting room, trying on bras, one fine summer day in 2011 would turn out to be, in [...]

SOME decades ago, a grocery store's aisles were often filled with ''chunk-a-chunk-a'' sounds, as clerks stamped prices to the tops of cans and boxes before putting them on shelves. It [...]

AN Android smartphone with unlimited calls, unlimited texting, unlimited data and no contract, all for $19 a month? Really? When I first saw this offer from Republic Wireless, I rubbed [...]

STEP into a casino and chances are good that slot machines are filling much of the space, as far as the eye can see. That dominant presence reflects the preference [...]

PLACE ''smart'' in front of a noun and you immediately have something that somehow sounds improved. In its current state, however, ''smart parking'' is in some ways little different from [...]

IN policy circles, problems that are mind-bogglingly difficult or impossible to solve, like global warming, are formally termed ''wicked.'' For the United States Air Force, installing a new software system [...]

LAST week, under my car's dashboard, I installed a small wireless gadget that would monitor my driving. I wanted to see how it felt to have my driving behavior captured, [...]

CORRECTION APPENDEDIN the exhilarating, anything-is-possible days of 1998 to 2001, Kozmo.com offered an online store with a quick delivery service in a number of American cities. ''Free delivery in under [...]

BANK A.T.M.'s embody decades-old technology. A four-digit PIN? What a seemingly crude security system. Where are the uppercase and lowercase letters and the random punctuation that we are continually told [...]

TRAVEL search sites have made it easy to find the lowest available fares ever since the Web's early Jurassic period, when pioneers like Expedia and Travelocity opened shop. Many others, [...]

AT two inches wide and one-third of an inch tall, a display ad shown on a smartphone isn't much of a canvas for a creative marketer seeking to promote a [...]

The turn-by-turn instructions of GPS-based navigation systems, ingeniously designed though they may be, can't always save us from ourselves. Consider the experience of a man from San Diego who flew [...]

THE world doesn't necessarily need the gazillion-and-one games that seem available on smartphones. But it could use more apps and services that address the needs of business people with specialized [...]

WHY is it fairly easy to open some smartphones and tablets, while others seem designed to thwart a user's effort to repair them -- or even replace the battery? Some [...]

GO back far enough in the history of the Big Screen, back to the 1890s, and you'll find no screen at all. The earliest motion-picture viewing was a solitary experience. [...]

GETTING our sedentary, overweight children off the couch is a challenge. That's why the Nintendo Wii game console, which arrived in the United States six years ago, was such an [...]

AS a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of [...]

IF you own a Windows-based PC, you may like the operating system well enough. Or you may merely tolerate it, if you give it much thought at all. But whatever [...]

I DON'T know many of my neighbors. I blame genetics: I'm hard-wired for shyness. Or so I thought until I signed up with Nextdoor.com, a neighborhood-based social network. There I [...]

AS e-mail and texting have become our favored means of written communication, handwriting has almost disappeared. Penmanship is becoming a modern form of hieroglyphics, intelligible only to literary scholars. But [...]

FACEBOOK makes sharing easy -- too easy, some would say. Because one's social network often consists not only of actual friends but also relatives and sort-of friends, along with sort-of [...]

READING, writing and -- refactoring code? Many professors of computer science say college graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals. They don't argue that everyone needs to be a [...]

IMAGINE sitting down at your work keyboard, typing in your user name and starting work right away -- no password needed. That's a vision that the Defense Advanced Research Projects [...]

DO two screens create television-watching heaven? Do viewers want television content on their laps as well as on the main screen? The Nielsen Company has some survey data confirming what [...]