In his story “The Minority Report,” Philip K. Dick envisioned a future when police could arrest would-be perps before they struck. We don’t have cops armed with precogs quite yet, but law enforcement agencies throughout the country are adopting a statistical approach to policing that can help predict when and where crimes are likely to occur. Pulling together burgeoning public data sets on everything from school schedules to home foreclosures and correlating them with crime stats, analysts can spot surprising patterns that help departments anticipate problems and identify emerging hot spots. H...

The Toshiba Portege Z835 is a cheap but well-performing member of the ultrabook clan. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

It’s a scary time to be a PC manufacturer. Tablets and smartphones have changed consumer expectations of computing devices, and that includes notebook and desktop PCs, not just mobile products.

“When the CEO of the largest-market-cap technology firm in the US starts referring to its ‘post-PC’ product portfolio, alarm bells should sound for product strategists at all firms designing technology and content experiences,” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wrote in a May report.

Oh,...