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2 weeks ago | 
kvpr.org | Meghan McCarty Carino |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado
This story originally aired on “Marketplace Tech” on May 22. This is the third installment in a three part series. Listen to Marketplace each weekday at 3pm on KVPR. This week, we hit the road to check out California’s Central Valley, where the future of agricultural innovation is taking shape. We visited a farm that’s piloting next-gen tools and a university research center that’s helping develop that tech. Today, we’re at a graduation.
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2 weeks ago | 
kvpr.org | Meghan McCarty Carino |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado
This story originally aired on “Marketplace Tech” on May 21. Find part one of the series here. Listen to Marketplace each weekday at 3pm on KVPR. This week, we’re heading to California’s Central Valley to see how technology is transforming this agricultural region. Yesterday, we visited a farm to see the latest gadgets in action. And today, we’re going straight to the innovation source: the University of California, Merced.
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2 weeks ago | 
kvpr.org | Meghan McCarty Carino |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado
This story originally aired on “Marketplace Tech” on May 20. Listen to Marketplace each weekday morning at 4:45 am on KVPR. California is known for being home to Hollywood and, of course, the center of global tech, Silicon Valley.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
We are in the midst of the first major U.S. election of the generative AI era. The people who want to win your vote have easy access to tools that can create images, video or audio of real people doing or saying things they never did — and slap on weird appendages or other make-believe effects along with targeted slogans. But the potential for deception has led about two dozen states to enact some form of regulation requiring political ads that use artificial intelligence to include a label.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. And the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as the owner of X, does have a record of wringing efficiencies out of his businesses. But the move raises many questions, like should someone whose companies benefit from federal dollars have a hand in making budget decisions?
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Mar 28, 2025Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino for “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”AI company Anthropic recently added web search to its chatbot Claude. It joins other artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT in delivering one clear answer to a web search query instead of pages and pages of links.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
There’s a movement to make it possible to repair our gadgets ourselves instead of having to send them back to the company that makes them or, you know, just get a new one. The “right to repair” movement in consumer electronics has made real gains in recent years. Several states, like California, New York and Oregon, have passed legislation requiring it. And it looks like Apple’s newest iPhone — the 16 — has made strides in that department.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
After another polarizing presidential election, Americans with widely ranging views are getting ready to sit across the Thanksgiving table from one another. And we’re anticipating some potentially tense conversations with friends and family about politics, beliefs and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
All those fancy artificial intelligence systems need a lot of data centers to run, and those data centers need a lot of energy. One estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute suggests that U.S. data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, making up about 9% of all energy use. But the AI sector is coming up against the energy-hungry tech innovation of yesteryear — crypto mining.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
In this tense election year, polling is top of mind. But collecting polling data is harder than it used to be. First, it often relies on people actually answering the phone and then speaking frankly to a pollster, both of which are becoming less common. The result has been data that is less predictive, such as the significant underestimates of support for former President Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. And those repeated misses have made the public much more skeptical.
