To help tap financial donors and to get out the vote, we knew the Obama campaign was crunching big data. But, until now, it wasn’t very clear how big. Michael Scherer, White House correspondent for Time got an inside-look at the math wizards, behavioral scientists and other data specialists helping to drive the campaign. His access was given on condition: He not publish anything until it was all over. 

Microsoft has filed a patent for the Xbox gaming Kinect controller, and it has nothing to do with how well you dance Gangam style. It appears to be designed for figuring out if too many people are watching something on Xbox — a DVD, a Blue Ray disc, etc. If it detects a couple of people watching, fine. But what if it’s a dozen? That might constitute a real audience, and you’d have to pay more for a lisence to show it like you’re a theater.

It is Obama 2.0. The current president of the United States is set to stay in the job until January 20th, 2017. In “tech-years” that is an enormous amount of time, so forecasts are tough. But what are the technology issues that will dominate over the next four years of the new Obama Administration?

On this election day, we’ll be looking at a map — not of swing states that could go red or blue, but a map measuring states’ voting technology, and which have the best and the worst chances of messing up the count. For instance, Wisconsin: Good. Georgia: Not so good at making sure votes are recorded in a way that can be audited or recounted if needed. It’s a lot easier to modify electronic records than to modify paper records which is why banking and a lot of other critical activities still rely on paper when there’s an ultimate disaster and electronic records are lost or corrupted.

Brian Eno, one of the most influential musicians of the last forty years, thinks music can be too one way: Usually, artists create it and your job is to listen to it, over and over. So Eno has released an iPad app called Scape, full of the building blocks of his music that the listener assembles into their own custom compositions. It’s part of something he’s been calling “generative music.”

One of the most common images of this week’s hurricane is power-sharing: People huddling with their phones and laptops plugged into power strips set up in bank foyers, coffee shops, or dangled helpfully out windows. But the storm hasn’t just shaken up the East. We got a note from a listener a thousand miles from the flooding in New York and New Jersey. Katryn Conlin designs websites in Minnesota, but she and her clients were using Squarespace — a web company with its bank of computers in power-starved Lower Manhattan. Squarespace employees have kept a blog of their valiant efforts to stay online, including a bucket brigade to get diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs to a generator.

There is nothing like a superstorm to make two cellphone competitors play nice-nice. AT&T and T-Mobile say they have temporarily jury-rigged their network in parts of the Northeast so that customers who can’t reach their normal cellphone connection can use the rival’s tower without extra charge. It is a response to the hurricane, with the FCC’s latest assessment showing more than one in four cell sites remain offline from Virginia through Massachusetts.

With the city’s mayor warning it could be days before subway trains are restored, a key question is what are other options for the 5.3 million people that use New York’s system on a typical day? Turns out, the Los Alamos National Laboratory has transportation simulation software that can help cities get the planning down to a science. And, how a shakeup at the top of Apple might affect the electronic device in your pocket. The senior executive deemed responsible for the company’s clumsy mapping software is out.  after reportedly refusing to sign a letter of apology for the maps.

In the teeth of a not-so-perfect storm savaging the East Coast, the freer the flow of digital news, the better. So concludes the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Both papers have temporarily taken down their paywalls so that anyone with an internet connection — not just subscribers with a password — can use their sites. When the power goes out, computers and internet go out, but many people can still browse news sites with their smart phones, at least until the battery goes.