Clearsurance, the insurance industry's first unbiased peer review marketplace for insurance consumers, today announced its Recommendation Engine, a new solution driven by consumer data to help consumers view personalized, conflict-free insurance recommendations for the first time. By filtering and sorting based on their unique risk profile, consumers shopping for homeowners, rental or auto insurance can now view the top insurance policies for them without having to worry about financial conflicts of interest or their data surreptitiously being sold to third parties. "Many insurance consumers are eligible for discounts as a result of an affinity to specific groups and unique personal attributes that qualify them to save money on their personal insurance policies," said Michael Crowe, CEO and founder at Clearsurance. "Clearsurance's recommendation engine enables the consumer to identify discount attributes and get recommendations from insurance companies that offer such discounts." In addition to providing an easy-to-use interface designed to simplify an ordinarily complex process, the recommendation engine addresses critical data privacy concerns.

USA TODAY Tech columnist Kim Komando explains how to keep your devices from listening to what you say. This Monday, June 19, 2017, photo shows Facebook launched on an iPhone, in North Andover, Mass. Yes, voice technology is amazing. You can ask your phone a question. You can talk to your speaker system and even book an Uber.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves--constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made. This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it's been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Virginia AT&T's Merrimack Valley Works The US Army Laboratory Command's (Richmond, VA) has developed an (North Andover, MA) has developed Human Engineering Laboratory expert system to classify, evaluate the Expert Capacity and Material (Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD) has and process medical claims. The system, System (XCAM), an expert system awarded a $2.4 million contract to called MedScreen, reportedly which simplifies forecast evaluations Carnegie Group (Pittsburgh, PA) to can process up to 500 claims in 45 for a manufacturing operation The continue work on a knowledge-based minutes, an operation that used to system automates the analysis of logistics planning system. The system take several days to complete. The IBM (Armonk, NY) and Dragon Systems NRM has been successfully deployed ICL (Birmingham, England) has completed (Newton, MA) have jointly in a number of Australian banks, as a pilot test of an intelligent developed VoiceType, a speech recognition well as a food storage and distribution system for field service diagnosing system based on elements of center. ICL used a laptop-based allows hands-free typing.