Word: scans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...According to USA Today, the 3,141 counties in the United States use six different methods to record and tally votes: 40 percent use optical scan devices (think of No. 2 pencils and the SATs); 18 percent use punch cards (think Palm Beach and Votomatics); 15 percent use '50s-era lever machines (flip the switches and pull the lever); 12 percent use paper ballots (drop them in a box or mail them in); 9 percent use electronic touch-screens; 2 percent use Data Vote, which is punch-card voting without the Votomatics...
...Something can go wrong with all of them. In New York, voters complained that some switches on their lever machines were stuck, or broken off. On the optical-scan device, some voters make an X or something instead of filling in the circle, and their vote isn't picked up by the machine. As we know, absentee ballots can be confusing...
Faced with what once seemed an unlimited number of e-tail sites, Web surfers have shifted the task of locating the stuff they want to shopping robots--a.k.a. bots--which are software tools that instantly scan hundreds of retail sites to find the lowest price for a given product. Some 4 million shoppers used these bots in October, double the number a year ago. "Shop bots offer a real value to consumers," says Barry Parr, a director with IDC, an online research firm. "They're here to stay...
...many of these cases, says Dr. Carolyn Cidis Meltzer, who with Townsend is a co-director of the University of Pittsburgh pet facility, the use of the PET/CT machine has resulted in decisions to modify or change treatment. In one case a standard CT scan had detected a tumor on the left side of a patient's neck but none elsewhere. "When CTs are read and you look for a spread of tumor to the lymph nodes," Meltzer explains, "all you're able to look at is the size of the lymph node...
This isn't science fiction. The National Cancer Institute and NASA plan to spend $12 million a year for the next three years to develop nanosensors--devices less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair--that will scan the body for the molecular signatures of cancer--the aberrant proteins found on malignant cells, for instance--and map the locations and shapes of tumors. If engineered to carry drugs or genes, the sensors could treat cancers one cell at a time, attacking malignant cells but leaving healthy ones unharmed. The result: an end to the pharmaceutical carpet bombing...