This week on Spark - We look at the digital layer, between us and the world around us. The internet is always there, informing the world around us. What was once strictly research or weird art projects, are now practical businesses and lifestyle trends. We present the good, the bad, and the questionable fashion of that digital layer.

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Do you think you're good at making decisions? Are you able to come up with a goal, and make the choices to realize that goal? It's tricky. We have a goal - getting fit, completing a work project, building those new shelves - and yet so often we get derailed along the way. Our plans fall flat, we make the wrong decisions.

Francesca Gino is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, who specializes in decision-making and judgment. In her new book, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick to the Plan, she lays out principles we need to keep in mind when making decisions. She argues that although we think of ourselves as oh-so-rational and competent, we really need to be aware of our weaknesses and emotional foibles.

We have two copies of Francesca's book to give away. For your chance to win, tell us your top tip for sticking to the plan and making good decisions. Is it all about lists and planning? Having a solid adviser? Let us know!

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This week, a repeat of one of our favourite episodes from last March - Spark 177: Humans Hurting Robots, Loveable User Interfaces, and the Robot Social Network.

Click here for the original show notes, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).

This Friday, a brand new episode of Spark will be ready for your ears... featuring an interview with Francesca Gino about how to be a better decision-maker, and an in-depth look at collaborative consumption and the reputation economy.

We've all had this experience on websites with lots of community content: witnessing - or being the victim of - bad behaviour. Whether it's trolling, ad hominem attacks, or good ol' comment spam, online conversation can sometimes be downright hostile. Lots of us wring our hands about how nasty people can be, but what if you could fix the problem...with software? What if it's not simply an ethical issue, but a technical one?

Jeff Atwood is something of a rock star in designing great places for the exchange of information online. He founded and built the Q&A site Stack Overflow, and the Stack Exchange group of sites: an elegant platform for effective communication. Now he's turning his skills to reinventing ye olde online forum, with Discourse. He thinks forum software can actually teach people how to be effective, civil communicators on web forums.

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This week on Spark - My Cyborg My Self. As implanted medical devices become more commonplace, they're bringing up lots of issues, especially around security. We ask: who will control the devices in our bodies? Also, should we just accept long, limiting cellphone contracts as just a part of life? Or is there another, very Canadian answer to the problem?

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This week on Spark - We take a look at the changing nature of dating, courtship, and love today. Confounding texts, crafting perfect online profiles, "shopping" online for the right person, the increase of hook-up culture, what its like for seniors on the scene, and an historical look at the intersection of dating and tech.

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Michelle here. Still working on our Dating In the 21st C show for next week. Besides the fact that we're thinking about it, there's been a lot of discussion lately about the end of courtship and the changing face of dating and communication in the digital age. But most of the research and discussion has been focused on people in their 20s, a generation brought up on asynchronous communication, and who are often accused of not even knowing how to have a face-to- face conversation anymore.

But what if you aren't in your 20s and single? What if you're in your 30s or 40s, and you are single again after a long, long time. You were married once, and maybe you even have a kid, or two. You thought you were partnered forever. And now you find yourself single again. The world is a lot different than the last time you dated, if you ever dated at all. And yes, I'm talking about me.

I invited two other people like me to come down to the Spark studio and talk about what that experience is like. Full disclosure - we are all creative media professionals in our late 30s/early 40s, heterosexual and living in Toronto. We were all married once. The other thing we have in common? We're all roller-coaster users of online dating service OKCupid. These are our stories.

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This week on Spark - Digging Deeper. A closer look at stories that had a lot of buzz when they hit the news - but we haven't really explored them in any great depth. So we'll dig deeper to get a better handle on two major trends in education and crowdsourcing.

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As part of our look at dating in a digital age, we wanted to look back at the history of dating and new technology. Is our era particularly confusing when it comes to rules around dating, or is this something that's long been a feature of courtship?

Beth Bailey is a history professor at Temple University in Pittsburgh. She has done extensive research into gender, sexuality and courtship in 20th century America. She unpacks a fascinating history of changing social roles and romance.

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This week on Spark, we're going to look at a big trend that's been bubbling up for the last while: crisis mapping. Getting regular people like you and me to generate data about what's going on around us. One of the biggest success stories has been Ushahidi, a platform that allows users to create web-based maps displaying a location where a crisis is occurring.

Ushahidi began in response to violence after the last Kenyan elections, in late 2007 and early 2008. Kenya is now on the verge of elections again, in early March. And the folks behind Ushahidi are working on what may be the next generation of bottom up mapping. To find out more, host Nora Young spoke to Daudi Were, director of projects at Ushahidi.

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