Business, Spoken

You’re inching home alongside four lanes of fellow commuters when a digital billboard blinks to a video ad for the latest model of the car you’re driving. Oh yeah, you think, my lease is up next month. Fifteen minutes later, you’re home. You grab your laptop and sink into your couch. You check Facebook and distractedly tune into a new Facebook Original Series. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Donald Trump is now president, and Americans are flooding Congress with pleas and protestations. They’re anxious about the fate Obamacare, the future of the environment, and the president’s cabinet nominations. How are they expressing their anger, fears, and hopes? Email. Lots of email. Take Pennsylvania Democratic senator Bob Casey. He reportedly received 50,000 letters and emails opposing the no...

It was 10:15 am on Inauguration Day, and John Paul Farmer was beginning to lose hope. The former Obama White House staffer had spent the last night at his sister’s apartment in Washington DC, working the phones and emailing any sentient being he’d met during his years in Washington. Farmer was trying to find someone, anyone, who could get the Tested Ability to Leverage Exceptional Talent Act—the T...

Jesse Richman used to be one of those researchers who only dreamed his work might someday capture national attention—maybe even inspire some sort of systemic change. On Ratemyprofessor.com, his students describe him as tough but fair, a “genius” who was liberal with extra credit projects and went out of his way to offer help. In 2014, Richman’s world changed when he co-authored a paper on voter fr...

Kim is a high-stakes poker player who specializes in no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. The 28-year-old Korean-American typically matches wits with other top players on high-stakes internet sites or at the big Las Vegas casinos. But this month, he’s in Pittsburgh, playing poker against an artificially intelligent machine designed by two computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon. Learn more about your ad choice...

Fake news isn’t just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus “think tanks” raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies’ pull quotes and flashy stats become the “evidence” driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump’s tweets. These organizations have always existed: they’re old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reac...

A rushing river of protesters flooded downtown Washington, DC, today, pink hats stretching as far as I could see. But it’s thesigns that stayed with me. “I’m With Her” and “Love Trumps Hate” posters from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Signs mocking President Trump: “Keep your tiny hands off my rights” and “Can’t build the wall. Hands too small. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democrats are lost. The Democratic National Committee has not elected a new leader. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters are still blaming each other for her loss. The party holds no branch of the federal government and fewer than half of state legislatures. What in mid-2016 looked like a fractured Republican party is increasingly uniting behind...

The trench running along the road linking Kodicherla and Penjarla in southern India is just 5 feet deep and about half as wide. Yet it carries the promise of a better life for the people of those villages, and all of Telangana. Within the ditch lie two pipes, a large black one carrying fresh water and smaller blue one containing a fiber optic broadband cable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

Microsoft is buying a deep learning startup based in Montreal, a global hub for deep learning research. But two years ago, this startup wasn’t based in Montreal, and it had nothing to do with deep learning. Which just goes to show: striking it big in the world of tech is all about being in the right place at the right time with the right idea. Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman founded Maluuba in 20...

On lengths of yarn stretched between chairs, sixth-grade math students were placing small yellow squares of paper, making number lines—including everything from fractions to negative decimals—in a classroom at Walsh Middle School. Working in teams one recent morning, they paper-clipped the squares along the yarn like little pieces of mathematical laundry. Their teacher, Michele O’Connor, had assig...

At least, that’s what Oscar Boykin says. He majored in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 2002 he finished a physics PhD at UCLA. But four years ago, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s. As Boykin points out, everyone expected it. The Higgs didn’t mess with the theoretical models of...

If you don’t follow the ins and outs of Silicon Valley personnel moves, you might have missed the news. Even if you saw it, it may not have made much sense. Chris Lattner is leaving Apple for Tesla? Chris who? Lattner doesn’t enjoythe name recognition of a Tim Cook or a Jony Ive. But he’s a rock star among software engineers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Quantum computing is real. But it’s also hard. So hard that only a few developers, usually trained in quantum physics, advanced mathematics, or most likely both, can actually work with the few quantum computers that exist. Now D-Wave, the Canadian company behind the quantum computer that Google and NASA have been testing since 2013, wants to make quantum computing a bit easier through the power of...

Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes describes Trello as a simple online application. But simple doesn’t have to mean cheap: His company just agreed to acquire the web-based project management app for $425 million—a ridiculous-sounding amount of money that may well be worth paying. “Simple products can be deceptive in their simplicity,” Cannon-Brookes says. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Cellular antennas often wear disguises. Chances are, your smartphone has at some point connected to an antenna that looks a lot like a pine tree, a palm tree, or even a cactus. But in typical fashion, serial Silicon Valley inventor Steve Perlman aims to push this idea much further. He and his company, Artemis Networks, just unveiled a cellular antenna disguised as a cable. Yes, it’s wireless techn...

The very first iPhone, announced ten years ago today, was not exactly a surprise. By early 2007, Apple fanboyism was rampant and rabid. In the run-up to Steve Jobs’ now famous Macworld keynote, blogs—remember those?—were all abuzz. Sites like Gizmodo and Engadget feverishly published rumors of the as-yet-unnamed phone’s specs and obsessed over every possible detail. Apple fans mocked up concept il...

The value of bitcoin surged past $1,000 this week, the first time it has reached such heights since late 2013. But don’t let that big number fool you: this strange and controversial technology is no closer to becoming a mainstream currency. Even Olaf Carlson-Wee, the first employee at Coinbase, the country’s most important bitcoin company, will tell you that bitcoin will never be a substitute for...

‘Tis the season to say goodbye. Next week, it will be President Barack Obama, who plans to deliver his presidential farewell address in Chicago on Tuesday. Today, it’s his science and technology team, which has just published an exit memo celebrating its accomplishments over the last eight years. The Office of Science and Technology Policy also lays out a checklist for the incoming Trump administr...

Don’t call it a comeback, but Microsoft’s database software may be seeing a resurgence. According to research conducted by the Austrian consulting company Solid IT, Microsoft SQL Server’s popularity grew faster than any other database product the company tracked on its DB-Engines site during 2016. That’s good news for Microsoft because, despite holding tight to the number three spot in the ranking...

Fourwords sum up the Silicon Valley hype machine at the end of 2016: “squirrels and sea monkeys.” That was the repeated responsefrom Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz when Reed Albergotti ofThe Informationasked about the technology behind the startup’s augmented-reality glasses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the center of Boston rises the small neighborhood of Fort Hill, on top of which sits Highland Park, designed in the 1700s by Frederick Olmsted. Patriots stored gunpowder here during the Revolutionary War, and a tower fit for Repunzel commemorates their efforts. The abolitionist writer William Lloyd Garrison fought against slavery from a house on this hill. And now the battle for urban housing a...

2016 was the year tech got “fangs.” Well, not literally. FANGs wasa term coined by CNBC business guru Jim Cramer in 2015 to describe the high-performing stocks of the massively successful tech companies Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (now called Alphabet). Today, it’s not these particular companies that are technically at the top of the Wall Street leaderboard—that distinction falls to Appl...

Streaming music and movies over the internet may seem more eco-friendly than stocking up on CDs and DVDs. After all, you’re saving the plastic needed to make the physical media, the trees needed to print the liner notes, and the gasoline needed to ship all those discs across the country. But there’s a hidden cost to online streaming: the coal needed to power the computer data centers that deliver...

Online retailer Overstock.com has became the first publicly traded company to issue stock over the internet, distributing more than 126,000 company shares via technology based on the bitcoin blockchain. Through a subsidiary called tØ, the Salt Lake City-based Overstock has spent the past two years building the technology that facilitates this new way of trading financial securities. Learn more abo...