Productive U Podcast

Gossip

I remember a game one of my early grade school teachers had the entire class play. She had us all line up and then whispered a sentence into the ear of the first in line who in turn whispered it into the ear of the next and so on until the last in line would walk up to the chalk board and write down what they heard. The results were always hilarious and meant to be a lesson in passing along gossip (I think); but oddly enough, I think it is also an apt metaphor for what happens to data in today’s digital world as it gets passed from one program to another, one platform to another, over the World Wide Web, through security and encryption systems, and finally to your desktop, usually into Microsoft Excel, probably the most ubiquitous data cruncher out there today.

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