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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“Ben / Met Anna / Made a hit / Neglected beard / Ben-Anna split / Burma-Shave”

What, you may ask, do charts have to do with some now defunct shaving cream?

When I was younger (much younger), a great era was just coming to a close. From 1925 until 1963 the Burma Vita company installed a series of small billboards along a roadside spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists, almost always ending with the name of their flagship product Burma-Shave. Over the years, more than 600 unique slogans were developed, but they were always delivered in the same format. (more…)