What kinds of news stories stir up liberals? What kind thrill the conservatives?

Those questions likely won't be definitively answered soon, at least not by humans. But a team of Microsoft researchers, specialists in natural language processing and machine learning, has been trying to resolve them using the Web.

The research group, based at the company's Redmond, Wash. headquarters, is developing a program that classifies news stories according to whether liberal or conservative bloggers are linking to them.

Then, to see which stories really excite the partisans, the program further aims to measure the "emotional intensity" of the blog posts that a news story has inspired. The intensity measure is based on the frequency of key words, such as "criminal" and "lying," in the blog posts. Check it out here.

For example, an item this week about Geraldine Ferraro's remarks on Sen. Barack Obama attracted links from 16 liberal bloggers and four conservative ones. The conservatives comments, however, were more heated.

"We were all a little frustrated reading the news," said Sumit Basu, one of the researchers. "It is a solitary experience and you wonder what articles other people are reading and what they're thinking about them. You can use the bloggers as a proxy for those other people."

While YouTube.com has garnered millions of users around the world, not everyone has been thrilled about the picture quality. Sometimes it's grainy, or dark, or blurry. Some advertisers have shied away. And some film-makers have protested.

But the quality is changing. Quietly this week, the company began experimenting - on more than a thousand videos - with much higher quality video streams. Company officials said they expect to soon broaden the move.

On the improved videos, users may press a button to "Watch this video in higher quality." If the user's Internet connection is a good one, what comes across is two to three times as many bits per second - and a sharper, clearer picture.

You can see how it works here:

"Film makers put their heart and labor into their works and they want their audience to see it as intended," said Hunter Walk, a product manager at the company. "We have an audience with voracious appetite for great video and we're going to continue to grow."

Company officials are expected to post a blog announcement about their plans later this week.

The phrase that stays with me is "strategic dismemberment." It was meant in a good way.

We're talking about a video game here, not human rights violations, and Alex Charlow, a youngish marketer for mega game-maker Electronic Arts, was describing a feature of a yet-to-be-released game known as "Dead Space". The term refers to the kind of tactics a player must use to figure out how to fend off attackers in a nightmarish space scenario.

"Just shooting them in the head won't kill them," he said. A visitor to the company's Redwood City campus is also urged to make sure to see how the game renders "viscera in zero gravity."

So it's gory. But what might be just as striking in Dead Space may be the success the creators have had in borrowing techniques from decades of horror films. In order to create atmosphere, and scare the bejeebers out of players, the games scenery makes exacting use of shadow and light in a way that at times seemed to approach the quality of the movies.

It might not be Caravaggio - that Italian guy who was way before the Internet - or even Hitchcock, but it was striking, all the more so because it is generated by the computers as the player moves through the setting.

The game will not be released until October.

Watch this video to see for yourself.