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Election Day 2012 is just around the corner, and many Americans will be casting their ballots on electronic voting machines. But how reliable are these devices? Michael Alvarez, professor of political science at Caltech, discusses the technologies at your polling station.

This interview was originally broadcast on Fresh Air on July 18, 2008.

A new revival of the hit musical Annie is now in previews on Broadway, scheduled to open Thursday. In the new production, the canine co-star Sandy is played by "Sunny," who has an understudy named "Casey." Bill Berloni trained them both — and, like the original Sandy in the original Broadway show, those dogs, too, were rescue dogs, found in animal shelters.

This interview originally aired on Fresh Air on Jan. 9, 2012. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend is now out in paperback.

Note: This post was updated to reflect the October jobs report, which was released this morning.

The U.S. added 171,000 jobs in October, according to this morning's big jobs report. That's a solid gain. Job gains for the previous few months were also larger than initial estimates suggested. But the U.S. labor market is still digging out of a deep hole.

Update at 5:17 p.m. ET. Marathon Cancelled:

After receiving withering criticism, officials have decided to cancel the New York City Marathon, the largest 26.2 mile road race in the world.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had insisted on allowing the marathon to continue, issued a statement saying he did not want to taint the event.

If you need an MRI of your knee in Colorado, the price varies — a lot.

You can pay anywhere from $350 to $2,336. It's a huge range, but the truly remarkable thing about the prices is that we know them at all.

Prices for health care aren't public in most places, making shopping for the best deal nearly impossible. And patients pay different amounts for the same procedure based on their insurance coverage, too.

Superstorm Sandy, the October Surprise no one anticipated, throws a monkey wrench into the final days of the campaign. NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving spend the final pre-election podcast scouting the key presidential battleground states and have a forecast for control of the House and Senate in advance of Tuesday's voting.

Join NPR's Ron Elving and Ken Rudin for their pre-Election Day political roundup.

Transcript

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

Up next, a look at what current research tells us about what causes inflammatory bowel disease and the potentially simple way to treat it.

Communities along the East Coast are reeling from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, dealing with electric outages, flooded streets, damaged sewage plants and fractured transportation lines. Can cities rebuild stronger, more resilient infrastructure to weather the storms of the future?

What does satellite imagery reveal about Hurricane Sandy? Owen Kelley at NASA is using satellite data to visualize the internal structure of the storm and Marshall Shepherd, president-elect of the American Meteorological Society and the director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, discusses what made this storm so unusual.