Technology

Daniel Gross is a New York-based writer and columnist for Investment News and the author of “Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance” (PublicAffairs). He has worked as a reporter at the New Republic and Bloomberg Business News. Gross is the author of Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time (Wiley, 1996).

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg discusses the word hacker.

Retired U.S. Navy flight surgeon and NASA astronaut Capt. Jerry Linenger ("Linn-en-jer") In his new book, Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir" (McGraw-Hill) he chronicles his five months on board the Russian Space station "Mir" a ramshackle place he described as "six school buses all hooked together." During his five months there, they had numerous brushes with death, lacking adequate supplies, and battling constant system failures.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the word "virtual" as In virtual reality.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the dot com craze started by the Internet.

The creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. The World Wide Web has been compared to Bell's telephone and Marconi's radio in it's revolutionary impact on the world. Berners-Lee has long maintained that the Web is for the common good, despite efforts by others to make it otherwise. His new book is "Weaving the Web The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor." Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development. (Harpers)

Science writer James Gleick ("GLICK"). His new book "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" (Pantheon) is about the accelerating pace of modern life. He writes about how technology has created the feeling that life moves too fast, but that we have become "addicted" to the pace and might as well learn to enjoy it.

Fortune magazine Editor-at-Large, Joseph Nocera, talks about the industry and consumer implications from the on-going trial of Microsoft. The U.S. Justice Department alleges the Microsoft engaged in illegal predatory practices against its competitors. Nocera has been covering the trial for Fortune. Nocera is author of "A Piece of the Action; How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class" by Simon and Schuster. (This book is out of print) He also is a regular business commentator for Saturday Weekend Edition on NPR.

Lori B. Andrews is one of America's leading legal experts in the field of advanced reproductive technologies. These include cloning, surrogate motherhood, and harvesting human eggs and sperm. She is a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Her latest book is "The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology." (Holt Publishing) She has been a consultant on reproductive issues to The World Health Organization, U.S. Congress, and the National Institutes of Health. She lives in Chicago.

Tom Standage is author of "The Victorian Internet."(Walker) He explores the development of the telegraph and the parallels it has with today's internet. Standage is a science writer for The Economist in London. He lives in Greenwich, England.