Technology

 You can’t drive your electric car if you can’t plug in and recharge, and the build-out on electric car chargers is behind schedule. Ross Reynolds talks with WSDOT's Jeff Doyle about the gaps in the grid for electric car charging. 

 Microsoft's new Xbox is being unveiled today at a live event in Redmond. With features like video streaming, this Xbox’s got more than games. But what does it mean for the future of the company? Ross Reynolds talks to Ian Sherr, reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

  Self-described digital heretic Evgeny Morozov is the author of "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism." Evgeny says not only are the promises of technology oversold, but Silicon Valley is trying to fix things that don’t need fixing. Ross Reynolds chats with Evgeny about technology’s empty promises. 

 An estimated 1 in 6 Washingtonians don’t use the Internet. Ross Reynolds speaks with Zach Leverenz of Connect2Compete, which offers free digital literacy training. 

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced a new start-up business initiative Thursday May 9  to support and boost technology business start-ups in Seattle. Technology reporter and GeekWire co-founder John Cook was part of the advisory group that aided the city’s process.

Nearly half of all US undergraduates show up to their first day of class unprepared for the rigors of college life. Many of these students require extra education to ready them for their college courses.

These extra classes cost time and money, leading students to drop out or pile on additional debt. To solve this, some colleges are turning to the fast-growing supply of online courses to help prepare their freshmen for college.

Texting has become an incredibly common way of communicating in the 21st century. Back in 2011, the Pew Research Center reported that young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 sent around 110 text messages per day. The texting craze has also given rise to an entirely new vocabulary — texters of all ages abbreviate, punctuate and accentuate in ways that are totally unique to the cell phone age.

So one question arises: Is texting killing our language? Ross Reynolds LOLs with professor John McWhorter and discusses the possible impact of txting and the feared f8 of language.

Monica Guzman is a columnist for The Seattle Times and Northwest tech news site GeekWire. I caught up with her in the KUOW green room before her interview with Ross Reynolds to talk about the latest tech goodies on her radar and in her smartphone, her new vlog, and what she does to get away from it all.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans engaged in political activity on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter in the 2012 campaign.  That’s a dramatic increase from 2008 when only 26 percent of the population even used a social networking site, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.  KUOW’s Ross Reynolds takes a closer look at the new study with Pew researcher Aaron Smith.

Regulation exits for television marketing aimed at children that mixes entertainment with advertising. That regulation does not exist for advergaming, a form of online entertainment that integrates advertising into a video game format.

These advergames are often targeted to children who at their age, have difficulty differentiating between advertising and other content.