The Apple Seed

Guest: Cyrus Farivar, Senior Tech Policy Reporter, Ars Technica, Author of “Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech” Amid several rulings being made by the Supreme Court right now, there's a major privacy ruling on the case of a man named Tim Carpenter, who was convicted of robbing Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores. Police were able to arrest him because they got four months of his cell phone location data from his wireless provider, but got that info without a warrant, which Carpenter says was a violation of his fourth amendment rights. The Supreme Court agreed. Listen to our conversation with Cyrus Farivar about his book Habeas Data

Guest: Jeff Welser, PhD, Vice President and Lab Director, IBM Research - Almaden It’s fun to fantasize about what kind of technology we may all be using in 20 or 100 years, but at the rate things are going there will be new technologies reshaping business and society even five years from now. The folks at IBM make regular predictions along those lines: 5 technologies coming out of its global network of science labs that that will be changing our lives in 5 years.

Guest: Luis Ceze, PhD, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington As a human race, we've used cave walls, tablets, scrolls, flash drives, and the "cloud" to store information. But even digital information, thousands of years from now, will be lost. Nature, on the other hand, has perfected a data storage system that can withstand all kinds of conditions for millennia: DNA.

Guest: Brenda Harwick, Manager of On Campus and Laboratory Gemology Instruction, GIA World Headquarters Diamonds are expensive, not just for their beauty but for their rarity. The diamond industry is having a bit of an existential crisis right now because scientists have figured out how to make diamonds in a laboratory identical to those found in nature but sell for a 10th of the price.

Guest: Douglas Farr, President of Farr Associates, Author of Sustainable Nation Urbanization is the technical term for what’s happening in countries all over the world – but especially here in the US: more and more people live in cities. Not just cities, but big ones, with traffic, pollution, wealthy neighborhoods and desperately poor ones. Urban design architect Douglas Farr argues cities can become more equitable, sustainable, walkable, and liveable one well-designed building and public space at a time.