At four o'clock on a recent Friday, Kevin McCullough found himself staring at a line of text on a poster in the Graham Avenue subway station, in Williamsburg. "Prompt: What comes first, the chicken or the egg?" The poster was an ad for the School of Visual Arts. Beneath the prompt was a crude painting--of an oval-shaped chick, or was it an egg with feet and a beak?--that seemed agnostic on the issue. Something of a literalist, he had always disliked the question, believing it unworthy of endless debate.

Why are patients not finding their doctors online?: Wendy Sue Swanson at TEDxNijmegen 2013.

For Adam Jasinski, a technology director for a school district outside of St Louis, Missouri, monitoring student emails used to be a time-consuming job. Jasinski used to do keyword searches of the official school email accounts for the district's 2,600 students, looking for words like "suicide" or "marijuana". Then he would have to read through every message that included one of the words. The process would occasionally catch some concerning behavior, but "it was cumbersome", Jasinski recalled. Last year Jasinski heard about a new option: following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the technology company Bark was offering schools free, automated, 24-hour-a-day surveillance of what students were writing in their school emails, shared documents and chat messages, and sending alerts to school officials any time the monitoring technology flagged concerning phrases.

USA TODAY consumer editor Michelle Maltais and Common Sense Media executive editor Sierra Filucci share ways to manage your household's attachment to media and electronic devices. How young is too young to let your kid play "Fortnite"? It's a question parents have been asking of themselves and their friends. Assuming they're cool in the first place with letting their kid participate in a third-person shooter game that's played by more than 200 million people globally, not all of them, of course, of school age. You certainly can't blame those parents who deem "Fornite" a menace.

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walk through the Florida state Capitol in Tallahassee. Schools are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence-backed solutions to stop tragic acts of student violence such as the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a year ago. Bark Technologies, Gaggle.Net, and Securly Inc. are three companies that employ AI and machine learning to scan student emails, texts, documents, and in some cases, social media activity. They look for warning signs of cyber bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol use, depression, and to flag students who may pose a violent risk not only to themselves, but classmates. When potential problems are found, and depending on the severity, school administrators, parents -- and under the most extreme cases -- law enforcement officials, are alerted.

Microsoft Word users from a previous generation are still recovering from the trauma of Clippy, the anthropomorphic paperclip that thrust itself into your writing projects with a cheery, yet unrelenting, insistence. "It looks like you're writing a letter," Clippy would ask, again and again. Clippy, introduced in 1996 and eradicated in 2001, was an early attempt by Microsoft to help guide its users, but it backfired because the software couldn't learn whether you needed help or not. All users were new users to Clippy, even if they were well-familiar with how to use Word. Users didn't only object to the clumsy-cutesy design of the feature, but also the attitude behind it.

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare continues to rise. According to a June 2018 ABI Research report, the number of patient monitoring devices, which also includes AI for home-based preventative healthcare, that use data to train AI models for predictive analytics will be 3.1 million in 2021, up from 53,000 in 2017. That connectivity is predicted to save hospitals around $52 billion in 2021. "We now have exponential increases in digital healthcare data due to the internet, electronic health records, personal health records, cellphones, wearable devices, digital medical devices, sensors and many other factors," said Drew Gantt. "This data will fuel algorithmic solutions, clinical decision support tools, and visual tools in the near term."

Mount Sinai Health System on Friday announced an exclusive multiyear license and partnership with RenalytixAI, an artificial-intelligence startup with offices in New York and the United Kingdom. The goal is to reduce the $98 billion in preventable kidney disease and dialysis costs by predicting which patients are at the greatest risk of advanced kidney disease and taking steps to treat them early on. The venture will draw from the more than 3 million electronic health records in Mount Sinai's system, plus an additional 43,000 patient records in Mount Sinai's BioMe BioBank, part of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine. The bank collects DNA and blood serum from a diverse patient base to identify biomarkers, substances that can indicate disease, infection or environmental exposure. All data will be de-identified to protect patient privacy "We can look at relationships that we could never look at before," said RenalytixAI CEO James McCullough.