Word of Mouth

A sheriff’s office employee in Hampton Virginia alleges that in 2009 he was professionally de-friended after “liking” the Facebook page of his boss’s political opponent.  But in a wrongful termination suit that concluded earlier this year, a judge ruled the other way…saying that “merely ‘liking’ a Facebook is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection.”  Ken Paulson is President and CEO of the F

Part 1: Almost a Psychopath/Halden Prison

On Sunday, the Grammy award winning Muir String Quartet will perform at a benefit for Classical Music by the Sea in North Hampton. Proceeds will benefit The Classics for Kids Foundation, which helps to provide school music programs throughout the United States with quality stringed instruments. The benefit begins with an afternoon reception followed by the concert at 6.

Earlier this week, we talked to our go-to internet guy about a switch to be flipped on a whole new version of the internet. Yesterday was World IPV6 Day, and as tech decoder Rob Fleischman explained, converting to the new web protocol was designed to solve the impending problem of the internet running out of IP addresses…those are the numerical codes designating the addresses of websites, pages, computers and hardware on networks. Well, Wednesday passed…the conversion happened…and our computers are still working.

Produced with Emma Ruddock

The worst line of defense… in times of war, military strategists will toy with any hair-brained scheme that could help win the day – just the sort of desperate thinking that has led to some of the most bizarre and dysfunctional weaponry in the history of battle. Mental Floss contributor Judy Dutton compiled a list of ridiculous martial blunders in her article “9 Weapons that Failed Spectacularly, and One that Possibly Didn’t”.

Prolonged protests over student tuition hikes came to a head late last month in Quebec, when more than 500 demonstrators were arrested in a single night. Protestors have twice paralyzed Montreal’s subway system, and vandalized buildings. US coverage of the quebec protests has been scant.

If If fiction writers can learn from police reports, true crime writers have the tricky task of transforming those reports into prose. Word of Mouth Senior Producer Rebecca Lavoie is also a true crime author. She and her husband Kevin Flynn have written and published two books, in the genre.

However much he saw of the world, Ernest Hemingway’s economical style of writing is often referred to as the iceberg theory…meaning that only one-eighth of the story behind a narrative needs to be above water.  We were reminded of this when we found the article "The Art of the Police Report" last year in the Writer’s Chronicle. The article drew lessons for crafting powerful prose from police reports filed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In the words of author Stephen Amidon, “no other figure is the focus of so much passion, controversy, expectation, and disappointment…” regardless of whether it is football or soccer, figure-skating or hockey, watching the world’s top athletes borders on hypnotic… and sometimes stands as proof of our ability to exceed physical human limitations and become something like the gods.

Dr. Daniel Palanker is associate professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University, a member of the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, and senior author on a paper published last month in Nature Photonics describing his work on photovoltaic retinal prosthetics.

Rising costs and concerns about safety have many people re-evaluating what they eat and where it comes from. A huge portion of Americans consume fatty, sugary and cheap industrial food. Some Americans have started their own crops in community and backyard gardens, and many others would like to start gardening, but don’t know where to begin.  Brett Markhamis an engineer and third generation farmer in New Ipswich, New Hampshire.

As though extra vacation time isn’t a good enough excuse for a modern monarchy, scholars this week will gather to contemplate how the English Crown has remained relevant when so many others have faded away.  The New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler wrote about a revival in academic scholarship regarding the modern royals.

Tomorrow will bring a long-awaiting moment for the internet…it’s IPV6 Day, when a whole new version of the web will officially go live. But don’t worry, says our next guest, there should be no change in the way most of us use the internet…as long as everything goes as planned. Here to explain IPV6 and a few other tech stories bubbling up is Rob Fleischman. He’s a web developer and entrepreneur, CTO of Xerocole, and Word of Mouth’s explainer of all things wired. 

Rob explains some challenges for developers when IPV6 goes live:

An increasingly common anxiety for freshly-minted undergraduates is finding a job in their field with a decent enough salary to pay off their student loans. For those with new advanced degrees, the stakes are even higher...  2008 figures from The Center for College Affordability and Productivity estimate that 16% of those qualified to be college professors, lawyers, and doctors are working jobs at the high school graduate level. Helping wayward professionals put their highly-trained brains to work, is Jon F.