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Today on Word of Mouth, DJ Spooky and mashup artist Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) talk about sampling and the future of electronic music. We also find out how colleges are looking at student behavior to predict who might drop out. We hear about a scientist who’s creating a more eco-friendly pig, and we’ll hear about the comeback of fruit punch as a party drink.

Conceptual artist and composer Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, went to Antarctica last year to record the landscape. The result, "Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite," is an upcoming multimedia project that aims to document not just the gush of melting ice, he says, but to create the sound of ice, and all the layers of information frozen in the continent.

It's a very literal illustration of "Sound Unbound," which is also the title of a new collection of essays on sampling and digital culture. The book includes writers and musicians, such as novelist Jonathan Lethem, composers and progenitors Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and many others, looking at the intersection of sampling and civilization. Sound Unbound makes the case that layering songs and sound into mash-ups and re-mixes is not a novelty of dance club music, but is the very sound of an era - a time when bits of information circle the globe in milliseconds, and the lines between music, art, film, literature and technology have blurred - making everything fair game for communicating ideas.

Conceptual artist, writer and musician Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, joins Word of Mouth to talk about what "digital culture" means today. Also joining us is mash-up artist Greg Gillis, who performs under the name Girl Talk. His fourth LP "Feed the Animals" will be available for download this week. The album will take advantage of the so-called "Radiohead" model of making digital copies available as a download for whatever people choose to pay, and later releasing physical copies. He talks about the "hunter-gatherer" image of DJ culture, and sampling as a primal quest, and a route to reconnect us to our tribal roots.

UPDATE: You can download Girl Talk's new album Feed the Animals here.

In Steven Spielberg’s 2002 thriller Minority Report, based on the Phillip K. Dick story, Tom Cruise plays an officer in the District of Columbia Precrime Division. His job? To stop crimes from happening, with the aid of three PreCogs who can visualize murders before they occur. But the Attorney General’s office questions whether those predictions are always accurate.

It turns out that universities are implementing a similar program. No, they don’t have PreCogs. And they’re not trying to stop murders. Instead, they’re looking for indicators that predict whether students are at-risk of dropping out. That includes everything from SAT scores to financial-aid status, and even dining hall attendance. It’s an effort to increase retention, and reach out to faltering students before they themselves know they're in trouble. Catherine Rampell, technology reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, joins Word of Mouth to explain how these pre-emptive programs work.

(Photo by Ralph Nickens)

It’s true, punch doesn’t exactly have the classiest reputation. Although it enjoyed a brief renaissance in the '50s along with tiki bars and Yma Sumac records, it’s since fallen out of favor. Nowadays you’d expect to see it ladeled out with sherbet at a high school prom or a lame office get-together.

But maybe not. The old-fashioned big cocktail in a bowl, apparently, is returning to its bad-boy roots and making a comeback in the trendiest and most cosmopolitan bars in the U.S. and across the pond. Roxanne Webber, associate editor of the food website CHOW.com, joins Word of Mouth to tell us why punch deserves another shot.

(Photo by Glynnis Ritchie)