Let’s face it – there’s a lot of bulls**t flying around on the Internet. But where is it all coming from? This week, we tackle fake news, propaganda, and misinformation from a few different angles. We talk to BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, who was

Technically Sweet

Nov 21st, 2019 27m 20s

Chocolate is beloved by...well, most humans, it would seem. But this sweet treat that, for many of us, brings instant happiness, has a nasty secret: most of the world’s cocoa comes from a place where child labor, and sometimes even enslavement,

Training Computers to See

Nov 14th, 2019 17m 56s

Over the past few decades, computer vision has held the promise of making the world a better place, from aiding the blind to helping doctors better analyze medical imagery. But as it turns out, teaching computers to see has some unintended cons

The Worst Cyber Attack (For now)

Nov 7th, 2019 19m 50s

In June 2017, something weird — and very alarming — started happening at a company in Copenhagen. It seemed that hackers had shut down the company’s network, and were demanding a ransom. But it turned out this was no ordinary cyberattack. What

How We Found Ourselves

Oct 31st, 2019 24m 47s

Get out your smartphone, and you can almost instantaneously know where you are — and find out how to get where you want to go. Which, when you think back on the history of human navigation is...pretty astounding. How did we come to hold such im

About Us, But Not For Us (Repost)

1 Oct 29th, 2019 29m 22s

Originally broadcast in April 2019. As we approach the end of 2019, the Financial Times recognizes Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" as one of the best business books of the year.Shoshana Zuboff doesn’t mince words when i

Prediction (BYTE)

Oct 24th, 2019 10m 35s

When humans predict something, it’s basically an educated guess, based on our experiences. When a machine makes a prediction, it uses data and math. And we are increasingly relying on machine prediction to help make decisions in everything from

The Digital Divide

Oct 17th, 2019 27m 46s

Imagine a life without the Internet. No email, no Instagram, no texting, no Google maps, no Netflix...what would you do? A “normal” life would be next to impossible. But huge numbers of Americans face this very problem. Access to high-speed Int

Hacking (BYTE)

Oct 10th, 2019 12m 59s

In the world of computer science, being a hacker means you know what’s up, and you have street cred. Outside of technology circles, though, hacking is more associated with things like data breaches, ransomware, and malware. So where does the te

Machine Learning (BYTE)

Oct 3rd, 2019 18m 24s

It’s 2019, and machine learning is everywhere. It might not be Skynet, but it can still sound a little scary. If the robot apocalypse isn’t around the corner, what is? We talk to Kantwon Rogers, a lecturer at Georgia Tech and frequent guest of

Memory (BYTE)

Sep 26th, 2019 12m 23s

What exactly is memory? And why is it so important to how our devices work today? Friend of the show and Georgia Tech computing lecturer Kantwon Rogers breaks it down into bits and bytes — and hints at what kinds of clouds the future may bring.

The Answer Machine

Sep 19th, 2019 27m 8s

Google has become our yellow pages, our atlas, our library, our medical consultant, our shopping guide. Which means it is, basically, a giant, virtual confession booth. It knows our most intimate secrets and our most mundane desires. Which has

Algorithms (BYTE)

Sep 12th, 2019 13m 9s

Simply put, we (humans) can’t possibly process all of the data in the world, which is why computers are so useful — and why algorithms have become so necessary.In this mini-episode, we go back to the basics. We talk to Georgia Tech computer p

Your Data Are Showing

Aug 29th, 2019 25m 43s

What could someone learn about you from your location? What about your Facebook likes? What about just...your face? You’re probably thinking — not much. But Stanford researcher Michal Kosinski says that even superficial data have the potential

Power from the People (Post Trump, Pre-2020)

Jul 18th, 2019 31m 30s

Originally broadcast in March 2019, this episode has a new introduction, with an update on the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. At the birth of the United States, the new nation faced a problem. Ho

Power Lines, Post SCOTUS

Jul 11th, 2019 30m 48s

Originally broadcast in May 2019, this episode has a new introduction, with an update on the implications of the recent Supreme Court decision on partisan gerrymandering.The United States is a pretty divided country; which may just feel like

Conspiracy Tyranny

Jul 4th, 2019 19m 57s

If the rise of despots around the world seems bewildering, especially given our unprecedented access to information in 2019 — therein might lie the very problem. A new kind of propaganda has taken hold, one that relies on too much information,

Kinetic Effects

Jun 27th, 2019 19m 23s

We know that Russia has been honing its tools of disinformation since the Cold War, but how did Soviet Era sabotage make the jump into the digital age? How have imposters on social media caused real-world tumult? In Part II of our miniseries on

Dezinformatsiya

Jun 20th, 2019 36m 46s

Russians posing as Americans. Wild conspiracy theories about political figures. Outright fabrications. All part of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections, certainly. But it turns out this kind of disinformation has been around for d

Climate and Behavior: Warmer Means Worse

Jun 6th, 2019 27m 25s

Climate change is already reshaping the natural world, but how does it affect human behavior? Economist Marshall Burke is part of a growing field of scientists uncovering interactions between global warming and humanity. The connections are vas

Power Lines

May 13th, 2019 27m 28s

The United States is a pretty divided country; which may just feel like an inevitable product of our times. But it turns out there’s one partisan tool, in particular, that bears at least some of the blame. It’s something that is used behind clo

Titan vs. Titan: A.I. & the Race for Global Supremacy

May 2nd, 2019 25m 31s

There’s an epic struggle under way: a challenge to lead the world in A.I. — artificial intelligence. But this space race for the 21st century doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention from at least one of the world’s superpowers — the United

Weaponized

Apr 25th, 2019 26m 49s

When we think of killer robots, images of the Terminator, Robocop, and other dystopian movies often spring to mind. These movies usually don’t end well (for the humans, at least). So it seems crazy that we would even consider building machines

About Us, But Not for Us

Apr 11th, 2019 28m 50s

Shoshana Zuboff doesn’t mince words when it comes to the data economy. According to Zuboff, author of the recent book *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, *our very souls are at stake. But the seeds of surveillance capitalism were planted rathe

Power from the People, Part II: A New Kind of Machine

Apr 4th, 2019 19m 51s

At the start of the 20th century, the United States Census Bureau was in a bit of a pickle. The electric tabulating machines that had saved the census in 1890 worked beautifully — but they were expensive. And there was only one source: Herman H