Monday, Feb. 11, kicks off the week with amazing deals on popular products. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. Every day, we comb through hundreds of sales on Amazon to find the ones that are actually worth your time. We look beyond price, which can often be deceptive in making things that aren't actually on sale look like amazing deals, and consider everything from consumer reviews to price histories to our own test results to determine which deals you should care about.

Devices like Amazon's Alexa (pictured), Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri are becoming crucial health tools Smart speakers are set to be used as'virtual medical coaches' to monitor patients in their own homes, a major report says. Devices like Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri are becoming crucial health tools, according to an official report on the'digital future' of the NHS. The 100-page document, written by US geneticist Eric Topol, said robots and artificial intelligence will make medical diagnoses more accurate and unburden doctors to give them more time with patients. And it said within 20 years virtual medical coaches, operating through voice recognition speakers in people's homes, would help manage chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, depression and high blood pressure. These programmes will use artificial intelligence and'deep learning' about someone's illness and normal behaviour to'pre-empt hospitalisation' by spotting when something is wrong.

Tinder and Grindr are about to face close scrutiny over their age policies. The UK's Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Wright, plans to ask the dating app giants about their age verification and safety systems after a Sunday Times report revealed dozens of incidents of sexual assault and exploitation against children who managed to sign up for the app, including over 30 instances of rape. He wanted to know what tools Tinder and Grindr had in place to "keep children safe from harm," and vowed "further action" if the dating services didn't provide adequate answers. The two companies said they already use a mix of automated and human oversight to keep underage people off their apps. Grindr in particular was "constantly working to improve" its screening process, according to a spokesperson.

One trivial difference that I can think of, is that market basket (MB) analysis considers each basket separately. So if you buy the same stuff together once a month, each time it constitutes a different basket, and it likely also contains different items each time. However collaborative filtering (CF) considers baskets aggregated per user. So no matter how many times you buy beer and diapers together, it still counts as one vote for beer and one vote for diapers. The other differences are more technical, such as what it is that you measure for each.

The digital secretary has said he will question Grindr and Tinder about how they protect children after an investigation claimed they are put at risk of sexual exploitation. More than 30 cases of child rape have been investigated by police since 2015 after victims evaded age checks on such apps, the Sunday Times found. Jeremy Wright described it as "truly shocking". Grindr and Tinder said they have measures to prevent minors using them. A Freedom of Information request by the Sunday Times also showed 60 further instances of child sex offences - including grooming, kidnapping and violent assault - through online dating services.

The culture secretary Jeremy Wright is to question Tinder and Grindr about measures used to protect children after police records showed they are at risk of grooming and sexual exploitation on the dating apps. The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said he was "truly shocked" to discover the perpetrators of child sex offences had used online dating services. Mr Wright said: "I will be writing to these companies asking what measures they have in place to keep children safe from harm, including verifying their age. "If I'm not satisfied with their response, I reserve the right to take further action." Police have investigated more than 30 incidents of child rape since 2015 where victims were sexually exploited after evading age checks on dating apps, according to The Sunday Times. Dwain Chambers made his sprint comeback in the 60m event at the British Indoor Championships. The 40-year-old came in second during his heat with a time of 6.78 however after a ...

Alexa was filed as a patent by four Amazon engineers on August 31, 2012, an artificial intelligence framework intended to draw in with one of the world's biggest and most tangled data sets – human speech. The developers required only 11 words and a basic graph to depict how it would function. A male user in a tranquil room says: "Please play'Let It Be,' by the Beatles." A little tabletop machine answers: "No issue, John," and starts playing the requested tune. From that reasonable start, voice-based AI for the home has turned into a major business for Amazon and, progressively, a key battleground with its technology rivals.

The rise of voice assistants has put a new customer-facing channel on the map for marketers. The promise is clear: voice-enabled devices operate as a fine blend of digital and physical realities, which makes room for truly contextual interactions with users. But with voice technology so young, it's still unclear if it can add up meaningfully to the marketing toolkit. In 2016, Gartner predicted 75 percent penetration of voice-activated devices in US households by 2020. We're now two years short of this deadline and the penetration rate is a humble 13 percent (though expected to rise to 55 percent by 2022).

Photo Tim Bounds used under CC BY-NC 2.0 licence Remember when there was much media coverage, analyst commentary and corporate angst around bring your own device (BYOD): employees wanting to use their own smartphones, laptops, notepads into the corporate IT environment? There was much debate about the pros, cons and risks of doing so, and widespread opposition. In September 2011 I reported "A new study today revealed most employers, in Australia and New Zealand, did not accept BYOD (bring-your-own-device) practices and still preferred to provide their employees with corporate's mobile devices when needed." Security was the big concern and a number of startups such as AirWatch, Good Technology, Zenprise and Sybase emerged to address a market that went under the umbrella term of mobile device management. Bring your own'thing' History has a habit of repeating itself and the concerns levelled at smartphones, laptops and notepads are now being levelled at devices that could be equally dangerous to corporate IT security: personal assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple.

Victims of romance scams - the majority of whom are women - lost an average of £11,145 each last year, according to new figures. The data, from police reporting centre Action Fraud, showed that £50m was lost in these scams in 2018 when fraudsters pretend to be romantically attached. Fraudsters trick victims into sending money or gather enough personal information to steal their identities. These scams of the heart are being highlighted ahead of Valentine's Day. Police say that victims are targeted via online dating websites, apps, or through social media.