Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today?Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't conduct its own interviews. You can imagine giving it information so it could answer [impromptu] questions, but it would still be responding only from content it's been given and analyzed. What about aspirational questions? Could Watson respond if it was asked, "What do you want to be doing in five years?"It would have to be ...

Zach Galifianakis walks up to the driver's side of a FedEx truck and, pretending it's his, pulls out a key. Then he leads me to a beat-up 1997 Subaru station wagon. This is not a joke. It's his car. I don't know exactly how much he got paid for The Hangover Part II, the new sequel to the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time. But if it was more than $500, he can afford a better car. ...

They have arrived like a new immigrant wave in male America. They may be cops, judges, military officers, telephone linemen, cab drivers, pipefitters, editors, business executives—or mothers and housewives, but not quite the same subordinate creatures they were before. Across the broad range of American life, from suburban tract houses to state legislatures, from church pulpits to Army barracks, women's lives are profoundly changing, and with them, the traditional relationships between the sexes. Few women are unaffected, few are thinking ...

Bullets and rocks fly as truckers try to block new taxes It started out as a nationwide protest against higher fuel taxes and highway-user fees for trucks. But within hours, violence eclipsed the issues. Shortly after 11 p.m. on the first day of the Independent Truckers Association strike, George Franklin Capps, 34, a Teamster driver, lay slumped in the cab of his 18-wheeler on Route 701, north of tiny Newton Grove, N.C., fatally shot in the neck by a ...

The New Republic recently asked an intriguing question about the U.S. intervention in Libya: Why isn't Obama getting credit for preventing an atrocity? The answer is obvious when you think about it: because he prevented the atrocity. It's hard to get credit for avoiding a disaster when it's impossible to prove the disaster would have happened without you. Social scientists call this the counterfactual problem. There's no double-blind study to show what would happen in an alternative ...

For President Obama, the era of big Government is not over. "It is true, we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or generate long-term growth," he proclaimed in his first budget to Congress. But "at this particular moment, government must lead the way." A partial Obama to-do list, only some of it done, includes a remake of the health care and energy sectors; a $787 billion stimulus bill aimed, so far, mostly at public employment; takeovers of ...

When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office. That tacit policy has now ...

The uproar in the medical community was immediate. In a reversal of standard practice that bewildered physicians and patients around the nation, an independent government panel this week abandoned its long-standing recommendation that healthy women over age 40 get a breast-cancer screen once every year or two years. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force began advising women instead to delay regular screening until age 50, and even then, to get tested only every other year. The American Cancer Society ...

The economic recession may be ending but the independent film industry's shakeout continues to roll, as we were recently reminded by Disney's October decision to gut its Miramax division, cutting staff by more than 70%. It won't be the last to fall under the knife, industry insiders predict, pointing to Universal's Focus Features as the next likely victim. "Very few people think Focus is going to survive," says one industry executive who asked not to be named. It's ...

Mexican soldiers have captured the second in command of one of the nation's most ruthless drug cartels, the military said. "We must have a second round," said Hamid Karzai, speaking in a taped and exclusive interview for the Fareed Zakaria GPS show that airs Sunday on CNN. "If we don't do that, we would be insulting democracy. And I pledge to respect the vote of the people." In the first interview since a runoff was announced, Karzai said there ...