Back on the road, winding past cranberry bogs, I scanned the data stored in my own brain about America's founding by Europeans.

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Dr. David Palat, a pulmonologist who works on sleep disorders, told me that a technician had scanned the data I had generated that night nowadays, of course, sleep data are recorded by computer, rather than on a ream of paper and had analyzed the information so that it could be presented in a series of tables.

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In the body shop, vehicles begin to take shape as some of the plant's 850 robots, processing data scanned from each serial number, pluck large stamped pieces of steel from nearby conveyor belts and weld them together.

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The third and possible level would be if the forms had been scanned in say, and that was the data that was taken.

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Information is also gathered on the kinds of products individuals purchase together (i.e. a PSP and a UMD in the same trip), and strategically located "POP" machines conveniently give detailed descriptions about scanned items to customers, while sneakily collecting data of its own for those oh-so-clever marketers behind the scenes.

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Some of the original data for this, says Mr Bass, were gained from inviting groups of customers to have their bodies scanned.

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