Word of Mouth

Bet you can’t eat just one. The Lays potato chip campaign plays on the idea of snacking out of control. From Oprah to "The Biggest Loser," people describe themselves like addicts, needing one more bite of fatty, salty, sugary foods, knowing full well that remorse will follow their mouthful of pleasure.

The average college graduate today will walk away tens of thousands in debt, fewer job opportunities and lower relative wages than previous generations.  While some students increase their post-college chances by majoring in trending fields like science and engineering – others follow less practical paths in the study of  philosophy, religion…and cartooning.  Yup, cartooning.  

We’ve heard the story over and over again in these hyperconnected digital times…boy meets girl, they fall in love, become blissfully partnered until one day, girl finds boy’s photo on a dating web site…

That’s just what happened to our next guest… but here’s the twist,  Reyhan Harmanci’s boyfriend had no idea his photo was on display for a universe of single women,  even though he had, in fact, given permission for it to be posted there…sort of.

Management consultants are often ridiculed for using words like “bandwidth,” “capacity,” and “low-hanging fruit.” When Word of Mouth noticed a consultant tweeting as @PeopleSense following our Twitter account, we thought…hmmmm…nice alternative to “out of the box thinking.

Last week, after we aired a segment on creative methods of discouraging teenage loitering, listener Jennifer Army sent us the following email:

Successful brands can cost millions of dollars to create, protect, and control. Despite those mammoth efforts, name brands can take on a life of their own. Take Skittles, the brand of candy Trayvon Martin bought shortly before being shot by George Zimmerman. Now, the candy is being used at protests and getting big play in the media, translating to a brand boost of sorts.

A branch of the military is taking a new tack in intelligence gathering…video games. The US Navy has contracted a private firm to buy up used gaming consoles  - mostly in foreign markets  to extract sensitive data on gamers. Jacob Aron wrote about the new strategy for New Scientist.  

Fast Company’s annual list of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies included many of the usual suspects: Apple, Facebook and Google all made the list.

Holyoke, Massachusetts has a rate of childhood obesity much higher than the national average, especially within its considerable Puerto Rican community.

Karen Brown reports on how a community center is enacting change for this population in a three part series. In this story, a 9 year-old finds herself in a house now full of healthy food and surrounded by adults encouraging her to ride her bike instead of watching TV. But with a lack of sidewalks, a high rate of neighborhood crime, and the odds seemingly stacked against her, can the balance truly be shifted in her favor?

Part 1:

Users, Unite!

This is the one union that will kick you out if you pass a drug test. Jesse McKinley wrote about the evolution and demands of the San Francisco drug users union for The New York Time.

New York Times Article  

Part 2:

The Cow Clause

Sometimes a family resemblance is so strong, you don’t even need eyes to see it.

Adam Cohen is the son of the famed Canadian musician, poet, and ladies’ man Leonard Cohen. After three solo albums, one release from his band Low Millions, and a four-year hiatus from music, Adam has returned with a new album, and a new appreciation for the family legacy.  The album Like a Man makes its U.S. release on April 3rd.

Forests cover 75% of the northeast, and the vast majority of that land is owned by families or individuals. In fact, about 1.5-million people live in rural areas, but they aren’t necessarily raised with rural knowledge, or skills for managing their woods.

The First Amendment protects the freedom to assemble peacefully – and incidentally, the freedom to loiter in front of downtown storefronts nationwide.  And yet, shopkeepers persist in employing any means possible to drive away teenage yobs (as the British call them) without sending away paying customers.

Obama’s war on Alzheimer’s, last year, the president signed the national Alzheimer’s project act – which set in motion a plan to combat the degenerative disease that currently affects more than 5 million Americans, and costs more than two-hundred billion dollars in health-care costs.  Going forward, the financial stakes are even higher: the Alzheimer’s association projects the disease will cost the US over one-trillion dollars by the year 2050.   Now, a final draft of the Alzheimer’s initiative aims to curb those costs with ambitious benchmarks, which is making waves in the medical communit

By now, you may have heard of Bombino, his album, Agadez was a hot seller on i-tunes and named one of NPR’s 50 favorite albums of 2011. Bombino, whose given name is Omara Moctar, is a guitarist from the Tuareg tribe, African nomads who have been persecuted by the government of Niger, especially, who reportedly fought for Gaddafi in Libya and are now considered rebels by the government of Mali, but their real fidelity is to eking out their lives in the desert