After letting the Internet slip away from them and watching electronic readers like the Kindle from Amazon develop without their input, publishers are trying again with Apple iPhones and, especially, tablet computers.

The meter is sort of making radio more homogenous, because the stations that do best are the mass appeal stations,” Ms. Albright said. That may be another explanation for why men are listening to soft rock.

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, said Tuesday that its customers could now watch thousands of television episodes online that were previously unavailable. It said the new service, “Fancast Xfinity TV,” was a major step toward what it calls “anytime, anywhere media.”

In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.