Word of Mouth

If you break a 30-second drug  commercial into parts, you’d hear about 7 seconds of why you should be taking a product, followed by a breathless lists of potential side effects and “ask your doctor today!” That list of potential side effects satisfy legal obligations, but doesn’t stop millions of people from making pharmaceuticals a multi-billion dollar business.  Still, the mind is a powerful thing – and new research shows that informing patients about possible side-effects makes them more likely to experience them.  It’s a phenomenon called “the nocebo effect”.  Chris Berdik is a

From apps for avoiding heavy traffic to the latest polling data in the presidential race  -- infographics are visual shorthand for data in the post-newspaper slash social media slash sound byte age.  Several sources credit the digital age for giving birth to infographics and others cite the publication of USA Today’s “Snapshots” beginning in 1982.  Susan Schulten begs to differ.

Part 1: The Bad Science of the Left/Tweeting Political Poems

Think the right has cornered the market on denying science? No way, says Alex Berezow. He has a Ph.D. in microbiology and is co-author of the book Science Left Behind: Feel Good Falacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left. 

and

West African singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara has a back story not unlike many of today’s cosmopolitan Africans. She was born in Ivory Coast to parents from Mali and now lives in Paris. She’s a stage and film actress, singer, and songwriter. There's a world of experience that shines through on her album ‘Fatou’ which plays to her roots, but retains an infectious western pop sensibility.  Fatoumata and her band are playing tonight at the Dana Center, St.

Football fans are rejoicing today at news that the National Football League finally reached a deal with referees… their lockout put replacement refs at the center of a pop culture firestorm.

Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher and a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work and author of several books. Her most recent book, Daring Greatly  expands on themes she discussed in two TED talks that have been viewed more than seven million of time.  In a nutshell, it is by fully owning our vulnerability and we forge strong connections to others.

Check out Dr. Brené Brown's TED talk:

Mitt Romney and President Obama frequently remind us, jobs and the economy are the issues of the 2012 presidential race. The loss of an estimated 3 million manufacturing since 2000 has carved a deep hole in the American economy. Many manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, taking a toll on the middle class wages that once anchored the American economy.

A replica of Bigfoot, a display case dedicated to lake monsters, and the “mystery cat corner” are a few of the sights to see at Portland, Maine’s International Cryptozoology Museum. A little bit oddity, a little bit kitsch, it’s the type of place you might find by walking down a random alley... lucky for us, our adventurous producer Zach Nugent took that walk, and brings us this audio field trip.

The famous Patterson-Gimlin film:

Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa is home to one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels and the heart of darkness in the nation’s drug war.  El Velador, The Night Watchman, is a deceptively quiet documentary film about a country devolving into chaos and violence and makes its debut on PBS POV series Thursday September 27th. Filmmaker Natalia Almada joins us from WCBE studios in Columbus, Ohio to talk about the film.

1) Replacement ref revolution! and Replacement ref Armageddon!

 2)Protests – How they play out in web culture:

·US Ambassador Susan Rice: Twitter crucial to her mission

New forensic evidence may confirm what many suspected behind-the-scenes: that the US and Israel conspired earlier this year to target Iran with the espionage malware “Flame”. Dan Goodin is Security Editor at Ars Technica and he's closely followed the unfolding story.     

Last month, Twitter launched its political index, a daily  measurement of twitter users' feelings towards the candidates drawn from nearly two million tweets each week. So far, the index is running parallel with Gallup Polls. A number of political junkies are way ahead of the index, they’ve been following  novelist Elinor Lipman’s daily political poems since April.  Lipman is author of nine novels and a new book of humor called Tweet Land of Liberty .

Last spring, we heard a series of stories of bizarre and violent crimes attributed to people high on the street drug “bath salts.” in Florida, police shot a man who was cannibalizing another man’s face – and a mother tore off her clothes and assaulted her three-year-old son.  Although neither crime has been definitively linked to the deceptively-named street drug, they ignited conversations about the production and complicated legal status of ‘bath salts'.