WPR: To the Best of our Knowledge - Technology

Science writer Sharon Begley on how anxiety drives modern day compulsions.

Why we must take care in eschewing analog imperfection in pursuit of more perfect digital sound.

For women with jobs that depend on being online, threats have a serious chilling effect on their daily existence.

There’s a serious financial cost to being a victim of online harassment.  So where’s the law when you need it?

When a computer program fixes a writer’s novel, or improvises a few bars of music, is that real creativity? Are they not just doing what they were programmed to do? Blaise Agüera y Arcas would wholeheartedly disagree.

Could a computer write the next West Side Story or Hamilton? That’s what composers Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor tried to figure out—the result is a musical called “Beyond the Fence.”

Doug Eck directs Google’s new “Magenta” project, an experiment in teaching machines to make art, leveraging advances in machine learning like neural networks to enable computers to do things like compose music.

If you've spent any time playing Tetris, you've probably spent a lot of time playing it. Tetris is simple yet addictive.  Your job is to fit falling geometric blocks together so that there are no spaces between them. Box Brown has spent alot of time playing and thinking about Tetris. He's written and illustrated a graphic history of the world's most popular video game.  It turns out that Tetris has a fascinating backstory. 

There's an entire sector of the economy run by people who are working diligently to get inside your head and harvest your attention? Does that creep you out?  They're called the Attention Merchants. And their business model consists of attracting your attention and then reselling it for profit. They're ad-based TV channels, clickbait producers and the big social media producers. Law professor Tim Wu is the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads." 

By now, it's almost commonplace to worry that the amount of time you spend on the Internet is actually rewiring your brain. But the first person to really put the issue on the cultural map was the writer Nicholas Carr -- in a book that's become a contemporary classic: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith teaches a class called "Wasting Time on the Internet" at the University of Pennsylvania. When he introduced the class, Goldsmith almost broke the Internet.  People expressed shock, dismay and curiosity. Now he's turned the book into a course called (what else) "Wasting Time on the Internet."

If you’re watching the Olympics, you have to marvel at the almost superhuman athleticism of it all. Simone Biles on the balance beam. Michael Phelps in the water. Usain Bolt on the track. Athletes just keep getting better and better. Or do they? Mark McClusky, the author of “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” tells Anne Strainchamps that it's not really the athletes who've gotten better. It's science and technology that have made the difference.

There's a nagging question at major sporting events: Are the athletes cheating? Steroids, human growth hormones and blood doping techniques are extending the outer limits of performance, and athletes can use them if they want -- unless they're professionals or Olympic athletes. But is doping really a problem? Australian philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a simple litmus test: What contribution is coming from the technology and what is coming from the athlete?

The 18th century was not only the Age of Enlightenment. It was also the age when many cities conquered darkness by installing public lighting. Dartmouth historian Darrin McMahon says it's no accident that cities lit up at the same time as the Enlightenment values of rationality and progress flourished.