Daily Archives: February 7, 2017

Thagomizer and Four Other Invented Words – Big Shiny Robot!

Posted: February 7, 2017 at 8:15 am

There are entire fields of study involving the investigation and understanding of language. Linguistics and philology suss out the origin, evolution, and usage of words in both historical and modern contexts. In most cases it is possible to take any given word, commonly accepted or newly adopted slang, and trace it back, sometimes thousands of years or more.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 suggests a set of 23 words believed to date back in more or less their current form at least 15,000 years. However, sometimes words come out of nowhere, either necessitated by the emergence of some new thing in need of naming, the mashing up of existing words, or the brilliantly nonsensical minds of artists, writers, and entertainers.

It's fairly common knowledge that Shakespeare was responsible for the coining of many words in common use today. In fact, Shakespeare is credited with creating more than 1700 words through myriad techniques, mostly by modifying existing words in some way or mashing words together into a portmanteau (fun fact, 'portmanteau' in this context is itself an invented word, first used by Lewis Carroll inThrough the Looking-Glass).

Well, slithymeans lithe and slimy. Lithe is the same as active. You see it's like a portmanteau, there are two meanings packed up into one word. -Humpty Dumpty, explaining Jabberwocky

It might be a reasonable supposition that in the world of language there is nothing new under the sun. If a word is needed, surely it has been coined by now, right? Not so. This business of inventing new words is still going strong and we're not just talking about the constantly evolving slang of modern youth. So buckle up fam cause this sh*t is lit(erary).

Thagomizer

Raise your hand if you like dinosaurs. Now, raise your other hand and give yourself a high-five because dinosaurs rule. Any branch of scientific inquiry that causes toddlers the world over to learn the official taxonomic names of things is objectively rad. If you're like me, it's been at least twenty years (maybe more, but don't ask, it's rude) since you learned the names of all your favorite dinos but you still remember them, don't you? You've got your T-Rex, Raptors, Triceratops, Stegosaurus... but answer me this, what do you call the group of spikes at the end of a Stego's tail? If you don't know, then bask in the awesomeness of my superior intellect you ignorant toddler. If you do know, congratulations on reading the heading of this paragraph. You've mastered the art of foreshadowing and reading comprehension.

While evolution has brought us 'endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful' (and at least a few most horrible and most why-do-you-exist-ible, seriously check out this nasty bugger) it isn't great at breaking the mold. Most things, human beings included, are just remixes of familiar old biological tunes. As such, there aren't many opportunities for paleontologists to name new stuff. Which makes it all the more shocking that nobody thought to give that bunch of spikes at the end of a Stego's tail a cool name. That is, until 1982 when Gary Larsen came along and slapped his name on those bad boys.

One year later, the term was picked up by Paleontologist Ken Carpenter who used it to describe a fossil at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and the rest, as they say, is pre-history. While the term is informal, it has been adopted by a little museum called the Smithsonian (among others). You may have heard of it. And thus, Gary Larsen entered the hallowed halls of taxonomic legend, just like the late-great Thag Simmons.

Nerd

If you're a regular visitor to Big Shiny Robot you're already familiar with this word, you probably hear it in your dreams before you wake in a cold sweat and thank whatever god keeps you from existential terror that high school is over. You may also be familiar with this word if you're a human being living in the twenty-first century. What you may not know is where the word originated.

It wasn't always a slur thrown at all the most interesting people I know or the the name of a criminally underrated crunchy candy. Once upon a time it was just some nonsense thrust from the magical mind of one Theodore Geisel, you may know him by his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss.

In his bookIf I Ran the Zoo,Seuss invented a slew of characters and creatures as he was wont to do. Among them, was the noble nerd, clad in a black t-shirt, hair disheveled, and red in the face. It's not difficult to understand why the term took root, what is a mystery is why none of the other invented words that share the page with the noble nerd enjoyed similar legacies.

Perhaps it's one of those bizarre cultural memes we'll never fully understand. Speaking of memes...

Meme

Memes are like pop songs. First you don't get what all the commotion is about, then you jump on the train, then they get beaten into you until you feel irrational anger whenever you encounter it. Seriously, the next person I hear say 'Howbow Dah' is going to have to Cash me Ousside.

But before they were image macros crowding up your social media feeds, 'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins as a way to describe ideas or behaviors that spread from person to person within a culture. You probably know Dawkins for his outspoken and unabashed atheism, he shows up anytime Ken Ham or Kirk Cameron badly photoshop a duck's head on a crocodile or build a creation museum. But Dawkins is actually a renowned evolutionary biologist, before he was the poster boy for the non-religious he wrote a book calledThe Selfish Genewhich explores the propagation of genes, expanding on natural selection.

In the book, Dawkins explains how ideas and behaviors can spread through a society in the same way that genetic mutations can spread through a species. This idea wasn't new to Dawkins, it was discussed during Darwin's time. T.H. Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin's described this phenomenon thusly:'The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.'

Dawkins based the term on a shortened version of the word mimeme, Greek for 'imitated thing.' While memes in their current form have existed as long as the internet, and the term and study (memetics) of them has existed since shortly after Dawkin's writing, memes themselves have existed probably as long as human beings have been sharing ideas.

Those of you who remember a time before the internet, probably remember seeing 'Frodo Lives' emblazoned on buttons, stickers, and bathroom walls next to phone numbers promising good times. There was also that pointy S that every kid has drawn in school since no one knows when. Perhaps the oldest known meme is the Sator Square, a two dimensional palendrome that can be read from any side and translates roughly to 'the farmer works a plow.' It's good to know that modern culture doesn't have a monopoly on nonsense memes. Howbow dah.

Robot (Robotnik)

I would be remiss if this invented word list didn't include the word that makes the crux of our namesake. While we're still waiting impatiently for robot butlers, robot best friends, and robot uprisings, robots have cemented themselves as a part of our world. You can get a robot alarm clock, a robot vacuum, even a robot that will fold your laundry (finally).

Robots are so ubiquitous it's surprising that the concept of a robot is so new, relatively speaking. The term first appeared in a play by Czech playwriteKarel apek titledR.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots)about a factory that makes artificial people void of emotion but capable of doing all of the work human beings didn't want to do.

In the play, the robots eventually rise up and overthrow the human beings who have become so lazy they can no longer sustain themselves without the help of their artificial slaves.apek needed to invent a name for his creations, originally opting for Labori but later abandoning it. It was his brother Josef who suggested using robot (or robotnik in Czech) which means 'forced worker.'

Given the landscape of the time with the rise of communism and fascism,apek's play can easily be seen for what it most certainly was, a thinly veiled allegory about the greed of the upper class at the expense of the lower. The end of the play, with their masters overthrown and the world built anew by the robots, is a clear message to the world leaders of the time. Which is probably whyapek was on Hitler's short list, right up until 1938 when he died of the flu.

Later Isaac Asimov coined the term 'robotics,' a derivation ofapek's creation with his Three Laws of Robotics. These laws define the limitations of a robot in preserving its own existence as well as the safety of the human beings around it. Though, anyone who has read Asimov's work knows those laws rarely hold as steady as one would hope.

So you might want to think twice the next time you kick your Roomba across the room for smearing dog crap across the carpet.

Gremlin

The concept of mythical creatures causing trouble and making mischief for their human counterparts is nothing new to folklore. Stories of trolls and gnomes date back to antiquity and have roots in various mythologies the world over. However, Gremlins are relatively new to the scene. The word is thought to be a mashup of 'goblin' and the Old English 'gremman' which means to anger or vex.

Gremlins date back to Royal Air Force pilots circa World War I, who blamed small, nefarious creatures for the failures of aircraft. While in some circles these stories may have been thinly veiled attempts to blame aircraft failures on something mystical rather than on fellow soldiers, there were pilots who maintained they had in fact seen creatures chewing on wires and otherwise sabotaging planes on the ground and in the air.

Gremlins first appeared in printin a poem published in the journalAeroplaneon 10 April 1929. Author Roald Dahl is credited with popularizing Gremlins and introducing them to the world at large. Dahl himself was an RAF pilot, so he would have been familiar with the stories. He experienced his own accidental crash landing, however this was due to an inability to see the landing strip before running out of fuel, not the machinations of ill-tempered sprites.

Dah's first children's book was titledThe Gremlinswhich he wrote for Walt Disney Productions. The story was meant to be made into an animated feature. Characters were designed but the project was scrapped before completion. While the Disney film never saw the light of day, Dahl's creatures did eventually make it to the big and small screens.

TheTwilight ZoneepisodeNightmare at 20,000 Feetspecifically tells the tale of a gremlin sabotaging an aircraft, a direct reference to the stories of wartime RAF pilots. Steven Spielberg's 1984 filmGremlinsbears the name of the creatures, while the production publicly distanced itself from the previous, abandoned iteration, there's no arguing that the movie never would have happened without Dahl's earlier publication.

It turns out, even after all this time, language is still evolving. Maybe don't give the kids in your life too much hassle when they say things that sound ridiculous, they may just be ahead of their time.

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Thagomizer and Four Other Invented Words - Big Shiny Robot!

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Eating Toward Immortality – The Atlantic

Posted: at 8:14 am

Knowing a thing means you dont need to believe in it. Whatever can be known, or proven by logic or evidence, doesnt need to be taken on faith. Certain details of nutrition and the physiology of eating are known and knowable: the fact that humans require certain nutrients; the fact that our bodies convert food into energy and then into new flesh (and back to energy again when needed). But there are bigger questions that dont have definitive answers, like what is the best diet for all people? For me?

Nutrition is a young science that lies at the intersection of several complex disciplineschemistry, biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, psychologyand though we are far from having figured it all out, we still have to eat to survive. When there are no guarantees or easy answers, every act of eating is something like a leap of faith.

Eating is the first magic ritual, an act that transmits life energy from one object to another, according to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his posthumously published book Escape from Evil. All animals must feed on other life to sustain themselves, whether in the form of breastmilk, plants, or the corpses of other animals. The act of incorporation, of taking a once-living thing into your own body, is necessary for all animals existence. It is also disturbing and unsavory to think about, since it draws a direct connection between eating and death.

Human self-awareness means that, from a relatively early age, we are also aware of death. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Becker hypothesized that the fear of deathand the need to suppress that fearis what drives much of human behavior. This idea went on, in social psychology, to the form the basis of Terror Management Theory.

Ancient humans must have decided, once their bellies were full, that there was more to life than mere survival and staring mortality in the face. They went on to build things in which they could find distraction, comfort, recreation, and meaning. They built cultures in which death became another rite of passage, not the end of everything. They made structures to live in, wrote songs to sing to each other, and added spices to their food, which they cooked in different styles. Humans are supported by a self-created system of meanings, symbols, rituals, and etiquette. Food and eating are part of this.

The act of ingestion is embroidered with so much cultural meaning that, for most people, its roots in spare, brutal survival are entirely hidden. Even for people in extreme poverty, for whom survival is a more immediate concern, the cultural meanings of food remain critical. Wealthy or poor, we eat to celebrate, we eat to mourn, we eat because its mealtime, we eat as a way to bond with others, we eat for entertainment and pleasure. It is not a coincidence that the survival function of food is buried beneath all of thiswho wants to think about staving off death each time they tuck into a bowl of cereal? Forgetting about death is the entire point of food culture.

When it comes to food, Becker said that humans quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment, and that the desire for more lifenot just delaying death today, but clearing the bar of mortality entirelygrew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object that might achieve a sort of immorality. Diet culture and its variations, such as clean eating, are cultural structures we have built to attempt to transcend our animality.

By creating and following diets, humans not only eat to stay alive, but they fit themselves into a cultural edifice that is larger, and more permanent, than their bodies. It is a sort of immortality ritual, and rituals must be performed socially. Clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret. If you havent evangelized about it, joined a movement around it, or been praised publicly for it, have you truly cleansed?

As humans, we are possibly the most promiscuous omnivores ever to wander the earth. We dine on animals, insects, plants, marine life, and occasionally non-food: dirt, clay, chalk, even once, famously, bicycles and airplanes

We are not pandas, chastely satisfied with munching through a square mile of bamboo. We seek variety and novelty, and at the same time, we carry an innate fear of food. This is described by the famous omnivores paradox, which (Michael Pollan notwithstanding) is not mere confusion about choosing what to eat in a cluttered food marketplace. The omnivores paradox was originally defined by psychological researcher Paul Rozin as the anxiety that arises from our desire to try new foods (neophilia) paired with our inherited fear of unknown foods (neophobia) that could turn out to be toxic. All omnivores feel these twin pressures, but none more acutely than humans. If it werent for the small chance of death lurking behind every food choice and every dietary ideology, choosing what to eat from a crowded marketplace wouldnt be considered a dilemma. Instead, we would call it the omnivores fun time at the supermarket, and people wouldnt repost so many Facebook memes about the necessity of drinking a gallon of water daily, or the magical properties of apple cider vinegar and coconut oil. Everyone would be just a little bit calmer about food.

Humans do not have a single, definitive rulebook to direct our eating, despite the many attempts nutrition scientists, dietitians, chefs, and celebrities have made to write one. Each of us has to negotiate the desire for food and fear of the unknown when we are still too young to read, calculate calories, or understand abstract ideas about nutrition. Almost all children go through a phase of pickiness with eating. It seems to be an evolved survival mechanism that prevents usonce we are mobile enough to put things in our mouths, but not experienced enough to know the difference between safe and dangerous foodsfrom eating something toxic. We have all been children trying to shove the world in our mouths, even while we spit out our strained peas.

Our omnivorousness gives us an exhilarating and terrifying amount of freedom. As social creatures, we seek safety from that freedom in our culture, and in a certain amount of conformity. We prefer to follow leaders weve invested with authority to blaze a path to safety.

The heroes of contemporary diet culture are wellness gurus who claim to have cured themselves of fatness, disease, and meaninglessness through the unimpeachable purity of cold-pressed vegetable juice. Many traditional heroes earn their status by confronting and defeating death, like Hercules, who was granted immortality after a lifetime of capturing or killing a menagerie of dangerous beasts, including the three-headed dog of Hades himself. Wellness gurus are the glamorously clean eaters whose triumph over sad, dirty animality is evidenced by fresh, thoughtfully-lit photographs of green smoothies in wholesome Mason jars, and by their own bodies, beautifully rendered.

There are no such heroes to be found in a peer-reviewed paper with a large, anonymous sample, and small effect sizes, written in impenetrable statistician-ese, and hedged with disclosures about limitations. But the image of a person you can relate to on a human level, smiling out at you from the screen, standing in a before-and-after, shoulder-to-shoulder with their former, lesser, processed-food-eating self, is something else altogether. Their creation myth and redemptionhow they were lost but now are foundis undeniably compelling.

There are twin motives underlying human behavior, according to Beckerthe urge for heroism and the desire for atonement. At a fundamental level, people may feel a twinge of guilty for having a body, taking up space, and having appetites that devour the living things around us. They may crave expiation of this guilt, and culture provides not only the means to achieve plentiful material comfort, but also ways to sacrifice part of that comfort to achieve redemption. It is not enough for wellness gurus to simply amass the riches of health, beauty, and statusthey must also deny themselves sugar, grains, and flesh. They must pay.

Only those with status and resources to spare can afford the most impressive gestures of renunciation. Look at all they have! The steel-and-granite kitchen! The Le Creuset collection! The Vitamix! The otherworldly glow! They could afford to eat cake, should the bread run out, but they quit sugar. Theyre only eating twigs and moss now. What more glamorous way to triumph over dirt and animality and death? And you can, too. That is, if you have the time and money to spend juicing all that moss and boiling the twigs until theyre soft enough to eat.

This is how the omnivores paradox breeds diet culture: Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety. People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, that forces them to rely on the unfamiliar, unpalatable, or inaccessible, all for the promise of relief from choice and the attendant responsibility. If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, agingin short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.

Humans are the only animals aware of our mortality, and we all want to be the person whose death comes as a surprise rather than a pathetic inevitability. We want to be the one of whom people say, But she did everything right. If we cannot escape death, maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.

But diet culture is constantly shifting. Todays token foods of health may seem tainted or pass tomorrow, and within diet culture, there are contradictory ideologies: what is safe and clean to one is filth and decadence to another. Legumes and grains are wholesome, life-giving staples to many vegan eaters, while they represent the corrupting influences of agriculture on the state of nature to those who prefer a meat-heavy, grain-free Paleo diet.

Nutrition science itself is a self-correcting series of refutations. There is no certain path to purity and blamelessness through food. The only common thread between competing dietary ideologies is the belief that by adhering to them, one can escape the human condition, and become a purer, less animal, kind of being.

This is why arguments about diet get so vicious, so quickly. You are not merely disputing facts, you are pitting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone elses. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hopes they will be saved. That if theyre good enough, pure enough in their eating, they can keep illness and mortality at bay. And the pursuit of life everlasting always requires a leap of faith.

To eat without restriction, on the other hand, is to risk being unclean, and to beat your own uncertain path. It is admitting your mortality, your limitations and messiness as a biological creature, while accepting the freedoms and pleasures of eating, and taking responsibility for choosing them.

Unclean, agnostic eating means taking your best stab in the dark, accepting that there is much we dont know. But we do know that there is no One True Diet. There may be as many right ways to eat as there are peoplenone of whom can live forever, all of whom must make of eating and their lives some personal, temporary meaning.

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Eating Toward Immortality - The Atlantic

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Marijuana tension between clinical, alternative medicine … – Washington Times

Posted: at 8:13 am

Marijuana tension between clinical, alternative medicine ...
Washington Times
Now, Charles, CEO of PA Cannabis LLC, hopes to bring medical marijuana to Main Street via a dispensary that offers patients a holistic approach to health, ...

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Perricone MD Introduces New Supplement Collection Powered By Whole Food Nutrients – PR Newswire (press release)

Posted: at 8:12 am

Committed to offering a holistic approach to beauty and wellness, and built on the foundation of a 3-Tier Solution, Perricone MD promotes healthy aging and beautiful skin through an anti-inflammatory diet, consumption of targeted nutritional supplements and the use of premium, highly efficacious skincare.

"Many of our consumers were looking for an accessible way to incorporate healthy lifestyle-solutions into their routine, but found navigating more traditional supplements confusing," said Jessica Hanson Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer. "We developed each supplement in our new line to simplify the experience."

The dynamic supplement collection was designed to allow consumers to choose based on their specific skin and health concerns. Perricone MD has selected the ingredients derived from whole foods in each of the supplements to deliver maximum benefits in line with the Perricone MD anti-inflammatory diet. Each of the six supplements may be taken alone or combined to create a personalized regimen based on each individual's needs.

"Even with the healthiest of diets, optimal health can't always be achieved by food alone. Targeted nutritional supplements serve an important role in anti-inflammation and healthy aging," said Perricone MD Chief Innovation Officer Christopher Caires. "We developed all of the supplements in the line based on the principles of bio-availability. All ingredient forms and combinations are easily and effectively absorbed by the human body and have been proven to show results."

An ideal addition to any 2017 resolution, Perricone MD Whole Food Supplements range from $25 to $55 per bottle and are available at PerriconeMD.com.

About Perricone MD

Celebrating 20 Years Younger

For two decades, Dr. Nicholas Perricone and Perricone MD have built a legacy on delivering cutting-edge skincare solutions that push the scientific envelope. The Perricone MD philosophy espouses a holistic lifestyle where beauty begins from the inside out. Established on the foundation of a 3-Tier Solution, Perricone MD promotes an anti-inflammatory diet, the consumption of targeted nutritional supplements and the use of premium anti-inflammatory skincare solutions.

Renowned for delivering dramatic clinically tested results, Perricone MD products feature the following award-winning patented sciences: Nrf2 Antioxidant Support Complex, DMAE, Alpha Lipoic Acid, Vitamin C Ester and Neuropeptides. Perricone MD products are available onperriconemd.comand a flagship store in Berkeley, CA, as well as at Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom,Neimanmarcus.comand other leading specialty stores in the US. Perricone MD products are also available in more than 21 countries around the world in prestige venues.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/perricone-md-introduces-new-supplement-collection-powered-by-whole-food-nutrients-300403109.html

SOURCE Perricone MD

http://perriconemd.com

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Perricone MD Introduces New Supplement Collection Powered By Whole Food Nutrients - PR Newswire (press release)

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Experts reveal hidden dangers behind supplements – Science Daily

Posted: at 8:12 am


UPI.com
Experts reveal hidden dangers behind supplements
Science Daily
Professor Burns from Queen's University, who is working to advance knowledge in this area, explained: "Our review looked at research from right across the globe and questioned the purity of herbal food supplements. We have found that these supplements ...
New study shows hidden dangers in supplements - UPI.comUPI.com

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Are the supplements you take killing you? – Valley News Live

Posted: at 8:12 am

Fargo, N.D. (Valley News Live): Products you think are helping you live a healthier life could be killing you. Herbal and dietary supplements are used across the U.S. but a new study finds these supplements are causing increased liver injuries. According to the study, liver injuries from dietary and herbal supplements are more than 20% of cases in the U.S.

Heidi Larson of Mentor, Minnesota, continues to count her blessings while still healing after suffering a severe liver injury. The injury was caused from a diet pill in the fall of 2015. Larson says she followed the directions on the bottle for the supplement.

"Within six weeks I was very ill and I didn't think much of that product," said Heidi Larson.

She began to have stomach pains, dark urine and her skin and eyes became yellow. Her doctors ran tests and found her numbers for her liver were up and her gallbladder was enlarged.

"My mom had called and said did you tell them you are on this nutritional product?" explained Larson. "I said well no because it's all natural and I didn't even think of it."

Larson stopped taking the product six weeks in but her symptoms continued to worsen. She was sent to a liver specialist in Fargo and they did an array of testing. Weeks later she found out it was from the Green Tea Extract in the supplement.

"It pretty much destroyed my liver," stated Larson. "Good thing the liver regenerates and I stopped taking it in time so I didn't totally destroy it."

"2014, it was roughly 10,000 cases since then the number of herbal and dietary injury has increased by 10 folds," explained Sanford Hepatologist Dr. Sajid Jalil.

The liver plays an important role in the body by filtering out toxins.

"People tend to believe that these supplements are natural and by extension harmless, that is not the case," said Jalil.

The study found most liver injuries tend to come from supplements that include green tea extract, anabolic steroids like bodybuilding and sport supplements, multi-ingredient nutritional supplements such as products mixed with vitamins, amino acids, proteins and botanical extracts.

"Most of these supplements are safe," explained Jalil. "I am not going to say that all of them are unsafe but with increasing use you will see increased risk of liver injury and they can range from no symptoms at all, just minor elevation of liver tests versus severe injury liver failure."

Dr. Jalil says products like Hydrocut have been taken out of the market but reformulated and introduced with a different name.

H&I Nutrition is a Fargo supplement store. The store manager says they educate their customers on what they are taking and advise them to follow the directions.

"Everyone thinks the more the better, that is not the case," said H&I Nutrition Manager Thomas Hastad. "A lot of times you take the recommend doses of the product, keep your water intake high and a healthy diet and you will be completely fine."

Hastad says he does ask his customers what their goals are and if they do have a plan. We asked if he ever tells his customers to tell their doctor the products they are taking.

"I don't stress that fact,that they need to tell, that is more their decision," explained Hastad. "That is kind of common knowledge you should be open with your doctor."

"Have you ever disclosed these things that you take? These supplements to your Doctor?" asked reporter Ashley Bishop.

"I guess not specifically, which I probably should because I am on some medications," said Justine Millar.

"You need to disclose pretty much everything," explained Jalil. "These supplements get ignored but when you're taking other medication there are a lot of drug to drug interactions. We have to know what you are taking so you make sure you are getting proper medication without drug interaction."

Dr. Jalil says everyone should remember that anything you ingest could cause liver problems and recommends not mixing supplements. Many people forget or are unaware that supplement manufactures are not required to prove to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) their products are safe or even effective. The study referenced earlier suggests more regulation is needed to provide safer products to the public. If you are looking for a way to keep your liver in good health, drink coffee or take Vitamin E.

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Are the supplements you take killing you? - Valley News Live

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Why herbal and dietary supplements cause some doctors concern – Knowridge Science Report

Posted: at 8:12 am

On the surface, the product seemed appealing: a natural herbal supplement marketed to boost energy and facilitate weight loss.

For some consumers, though, the fat-burning pill known as OxyELITE Pro bore a nasty side effect: unexplained acute hepatitis.

You think youre taking something to give you a little more energy and then, lo and behold, youve got a bad liver problem that lands you in the hospital, says Robert J. Fontana, M.D., a hepatologist and medical director of the Liver Transplant Program at the University of Michigan Health System.

In a recent paper, Fontana detailed seven cases of injury attributed to OxyELITE Pro from various U.S. medical centers participating in the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network (DILIN).

Of those incidents, six patients were hospitalized, three developed acute liver failure and two required emergency liver transplants.

Although the affected group generally healthy, middle-aged adults who followed the manufacturers recommended dosage was small, their maladies underscore the risks of such products.

Nor do they mark the first time an herbal dietary supplement has caused harm.

Consumers might recall the controversy surrounding Hydroxycut, whose manufacturer voluntarily recalled 14 variations of the product line in 2009 after the Food and Drug Administration logged nearly two dozen reports of serious liver injuries.

Unlike standard pharmaceuticals, herbal supplements arent regulated by the FDA.

And a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year found that dietary supplements account for 20,000 emergency room visits annually with many admissions involving young people.

Which is why Fontana urges extreme caution, if not abstinence.

I dont advise my patients to take any over-the-counter product willy-nilly, he says. These products are medically unproven and carry potential risk since the manufacturers are not required to demonstrate efficacy or safety in patients prior to marketing them.

He spoke more about the issue:

Are herbal supplements proven to help people lose weight?

Fontana: What is known to facilitate weight loss is, as you know, the traditional regimen of watching what you eat and exercise and calorie restriction. And theres also the medical route of meeting with a dietitian.

Other, newer approaches include endoscopic devices to change ones sense of stomach fullness as well as stomach surgery for severely overweight patients.

In terms of prescription drugs for weight loss, only one or two total are actually approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Theres not a whole lot of great options out there. A holistic physician might give herbs to patients, but thats not a traditional M.D. type of doctor, and thats not what I would do.

Most people in the survey taking OxyELITE Pro already had a normal body mass index but said they were using it to lose weight. Why?

Fontana: Theres an obsession in our culture with taking over-the-counter things to stay well, be well, feel well. Every condition or symptom has a pill. Theres huge marketing that goes on around this.

People want these things, and theyre buying them out of their own free will.

Whats the difference in how prescription drugs and herbal supplements are regulated?

Fontana: The FDA is very much involved with food regulation and drug development. Every patient exposed to a prescription medication during clinical trials (receives) data (analysis), blood and kidney tests.

There are very meticulous and high standards to get a drug approved.

But theres essentially no parallel regulation of herbal products. The regulatory process is quite expensive and cumbersome.

So people take these things over-the-counter herbal products from the health food store with touted health benefits and bad things can happen.

How did OxyELITE Pro make people sick? Was action taken?

Fontana: We dont know. No one really knows. The product had been around for many years before 2013 and is still available now in a newer formulation. Why, all of a sudden, did we get reports of this? What was it that was toxic?

We speculate that there may be a liver-toxic ingredient in the implicated formulation, but thus far nobody has been able to identify the responsible ingredient.

The FDA did take regulatory actions against the company because they had included an ingredient (aegeline, a dietary ingredient) that was not grandfathered in something that was not previously identified.

Its the only way the FDA can investigate these companies and how they got them to pull it from the market.

At the public health level, theres enough evidence accruing that there should be some changes in federal legislation to provide the FDA with the authority and resources to more closely regulate the manufacturing and promotion of these widely used products marketed as being safe since they frequently contain herbs, botanicals and other components derived from natural plants and foods. However, changes like this literally require an act of Congress.

How, meanwhile, could supplements be taken safely?

Fontana: Consult with your doctor before taking any such products to have them review them and provide input. You could call in to discuss your medical history.

A patient might say, I have liver disease, which is very important to know if youre considering taking these things since most ingested products are processed or eliminated either through the liver or the kidney.

Patients come in, they might be tired or have abdominal pain, and they dont think to tell us: Oh, I went to the health food store at the mall and Ive been taking something. People forget, or theyre a little bit embarrassed to tell you.

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News source:Michigan Health. The content is edited for length and style purposes. Figure legend: This Knowridge.com image is credited to Michigan Health.

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It’s Getting Harder to Believe in Silicon Valley – The Atlantic

Posted: at 8:12 am

In late 2010, during a fireside chat at the tech-industry conference TechCrunch Disrupt, the venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel disclosed that he would award 20 enterprising teenagers $100,000 apiece over two years to bypass college in favor of entrepreneurship. Stopping out, Thiel called it. Having decried student debt (not to mention universities inculcation of political correctness), he endeavored to make the case that college was a limiting and outdated model. The Thiel Fellowship, as it came to be known, was representative of a particular strain of anti-establishmentarianism in tech-industry culture. Who needs higher education?

In Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story, Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, zooms in on a handful of Thiel fellows from the 2011 inaugural class. Among them are John Burnham, an antsy teen who has his sights set on asteroid-mining robots; Laura Deming, a prodigy working on life extension; and James Proud, who founded GigLocator, an app for locating tickets to live concerts, and sold the company in 2012. As the fellows adjust to their new environs in the Bay Area, Wolfe follows them into a constellation of mentors and affiliates, subcultures and institutionsSilicon Valleys elite and underbelly. Her goal is a portrait of the tech industry as a new social order, one with an anti-society aesthetic that has taken on a singular style.

Wolfe is an entertaining writer, if not an outstanding prose stylist, and she largely lets her subjects speak for themselves, skimping on broader context. Her subjects, mostly entrepreneurs, founders, and figureheads, are indisputably more elite than underbelly, but no matter. From the futurist and author Ray Kurzweil to Todd Huffmana biologist, an early participant in the now-defunct San Francisco intentional community Langton Labs, and an aspiring cryogenically preserved corpseWolfe lands on characters who are vibrant and open-minded, each deserving of more inquiry than a 250-page book allows.

Through visits to start-up incubators, communal-living groups in mansions, and polyamorous households on Paleo diets, Wolfe constructs an argument that in Silicon Valley, institutions and routines such as raises, rents, mortgagesmarriagewere as inconsequential, breakable, and flexible as the industries technology disrupted. She deploys her anecdotes to serve her vision of the culture as a reaction to the East Coasts hierarchy, as well as its foil. She pokes fun at the tech industrys own self-aggrandizing fetishes while also affirming them. Incubators are a sort of West Coast Ivy League, a fast track to access and social capital. Millennials prefer the freedom of Silicon Valley to the old world of the East Coast. Gone is Wall Streets uniform of Thomas Pink and Tiffany; in its stead, the only outward signs of tech success are laptops and ideas. Pitting East against West even gets ontological. Using New York City hedge-fund managers as an example, Wolfe writes that the retrowealth of the East Coast is a harkening back to what it was to be human last century. Silicon Valley, by contrast, has trained its sights on how to disrupt, transgress, and reengineer humanity as a whole.

Wolfes book spans five years, but the bulk of her reporting appears to be from 2011 and 2012. And a lot happened in the years between the cocky-nerd drama of 2010s The Social Network and the first quarter of 2016, which brought zero initial public offerings from tech companies. In 2012, new start-ups were flush with money and the tech sphere was overwhelmed by ardent media coverage; the verb disrupt was elbowing its way into vernacular prominence and had not yet become a clich. Facebooks IPO was not only record-setting but a flag in the ground, and the West Coast seemed a hopeful counternarrative in an otherwise flailing economy. Stories about Silicon Valley were imbued with a certain awe that, today, is starting to fade.

Since the genres takeoff in the late 1990s, during the first dot-com boom, writing about the tech industry has traditionally fallen into a few limited camps: buzzy and breathless blog posts pegged to product announcements, suspiciously redolent of press releases; technophobic and scolding accounts heralding the downfall of society via smartphone; dry business reporting; and lifestyle coverage zeroing in on the trappings, trends, and celebrities of the tech scene. In different ways, each neglects to examine the industrys cultural clout and political economy. This tendency is shifting, as the line between tech company and regular company continues to blur (even Walmart has an innovation lab in the Bay Area). Founders and their publicists would have you believe that this is a world of pioneers and utopians, cowboy coders and hero programmers. But as tech becomes more pervasive, coverage that unquestioningly echoes the mythologizing impulse is falling out of fashion.

The backlash is unsurprising. Accelerated, venture-capital-fueled success is bound to inspire more than just wonder. In the past year alone, three Silicon Valley darlingsHampton Creek, Theranos, and Zenefitshave been subject to painful debunking by the media. Thiels own reputation, always controversial, has come into question since his financing of a lawsuit that shuttered Gawker and his emergence as an avid Donald Trump supporter. Valley of the Gods, which opens with a tribute to Thiel and the counterintuitive idealism he aimed to encourage, feels like a time capsule from a previous iteration of tech media, a reminder of the sort of narratives that have contributed to growing impatience with the mythos.

Valley of the Gods is fine as an artifact hurtled from a more innocent time, as far as scene-driven reportage is concerned. But what feels like a throwback perspective takes a toll on the larger argument of Wolfes book. She relies at every turn on stereotypes such as Aspergers Chic and engineering geeks [who]barely knew how to make friends or navigate a cocktail party, let alone be politically manipulative. Statements like Only the young and ambitious who grew up with the computer saw it for what it might become arent just vaguely ageist, but also ahistorical. (What the computer has thus far become is only one version of many potential outcomes and visions.) Peter Thiels friends, in her summation, are part of a whole new world of often-wacky people and ideas that didnt seem to subscribe to any set principles or social awareness. Leaning on Silicon Valley tropes, Wolfe fails to take her subjectsand their economic and political influence, which has only increased over the past five yearsseriously.

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She also undercuts her own point about the disruptive ethos of the place. Todays uber-nerds are like the robber barons of the industrial revolution whose steel and automobile manufacturing capabilities changed entire industries, she writes. But instead of massive factories and mills, theyre doing it with little buttons. Portraying Silicon Valleys powerful as uber-nerds who struck it rich is as reductive and unhelpful as referring to technology that integrates personal payment information and location tracking as little buttons. The effect is not only to protect them behind the shield of presumed harmlessness, but also to exempt them from the scrutiny that their economic and political power should invite.

The sort of mythology that celebrates a small handful of visionaries and co-founders blurs important social realities. Technology has always been a collective project. The industry is also cyclical. Many failed ideas have been resuscitated and rebranded as successful products and services, owned and managed by people other than their originators. Behind almost every popular app or website today lie numerous shadow versions that have been sloughed away by time. Yet recognition of the group nature of the enterprise would undermine a myth that legitimizes the consolidation of profit, for the most part, among a small group of people.

If technology belongs to the people only insofar as the people are consumers, we beneficiaries had better believe that luminaries and pioneers did something so outrageously, so individually innovative that the concentration of capital at the top is deserved. When founders pitch their companies, or inscribe their origin stories into the annals of TechCrunch, they neglect to mention some of the most important variables of success: luck, timing, connections, and those who set the foundation for them. The industry isnt terribly in touch with its own history. It clings tight to a faith in meritocracy: This is a spaceship, and we built it by ourselves.

After four years of working in tech, almost all of which were spent at start-ups in San Francisco, Ill happily acknowledge that the industry contains multitudes: biohackers and anti-aging advocates, high-flying techno-utopians and high-strung co-founders, polyamorous couples and M.B.A.s. But theyre just people, and their lifestyle choices are usually in the minority. Theyre not a new social order. Even if they were, plenty of people just like them live in New York City, too.

Valley of the Gods is journalism, not ethnography. As with any caricature, the world depicted in its pages is largely an exaggerationeven, in some cases, a fantasybut certain dimensions ring true, and loudly. Its important to note what Wolfe gets right. This is a culture that champions acceleration, optimization, and efficiency. From communication to attire, some things are more casual than they are on the East Coast, and people seem to be happier for it. Irreverence is often rewarded. This is far from punk rock (the irreverence is often in the name of building financially successful corporations), but experimentation is encouraged. Silicon Valley is hardly a meritocracydiversity metrics make that clear, and old-school credentials and pedigree still have clout out westbut its more meritocratic than other, older industries like consulting or finance. Few women figure in Wolfes book, which also feels accurate, especially at the higher levels.

The trouble with telling a Silicon Valley story is that the real stories are not just more nuanced and moderate but also relatively boring. Many people working in technology are legitimately inspiring, but they dont necessarily gravitate toward flashy projects, and wont be found strolling across a ted stage. If they fail, they may not fail up, and they certainly wont write a Medium post afterward in an attempt to micromanage their personal brand or reconfigure the narrative.

The other, less flattering truth is that the difference between the East and West Coasts is not fundamentally all that great. The tech industry owes a huge debt to the financial sector. Wolfe is eager to depict Silicon Valley as the new New York, but much of the money that funds venture-capital firms comes from investors who made their fortunes on Wall Street. (The tech industry also owes a great debt to Main Street: Private-equity funds regularly include allocations from public pension plans and universities.) Cultural differences abound, but theyre not a function of the tech industry. Theyre a function of history, of the deeply entrenched cultural and social circumstances that slowly come to define a place. As the mythology gets worn away, the contours of the Valley become easier to see. The view, though less glamorous, still offers plenty to behold.

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Super Bowl Ads Capture Zeitgeist and Commodify Diversity – The Wesleyan Argus

Posted: at 8:12 am

c/o AMC

The nations chicken wing-stained hands, trembling by their beating hearts, did not dare reach for the remote during Super Bowl LIs commercials Sunday, for the very decency of American democracy was on sale alongsidelight beer and mid-size sedans. With the nations wealthiest companies paying more than $165,000 for each second of their ads, who couldresist the temptation to temporarily escape from the game, and maybe even be sold something along the way?

Perhaps some were drawn to the television out of hope that Lady Gaga would make a political statement during halftimewhich came onlyinsofar as the in-character Gaga performance itself was politicalyet they didnt need to wait for the halftime show to encounter highly contrivedpolitical theater.

EachAmerican mega-brand, whether as current asAirBnB or as timeless as Coca-Cola, that had a memorable ad in last nights lineup addressed the rise of Trump in some manner.Though Proctor & Gambles Mr. Clean shook his CGI booty in a bold yet poor apolitical ad, the brands that came out of Super Bowl Sunday with a press boost costing$5 million per 30 seconds had to take hold of the current political movement to strike an oppositional tone towardthe Trump administration and the alt-right.

Normally, touching on anything remotely political in advertising is a cardinal sin that narrows the market (just ask Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner 87). However, all good advertising has an aspirational core that, at its veryessence, is political it just cant initially appear that way. (Again, ask Matthew Weiner).

For some brands, this was easy. Coca-Cola, for example, recycled a 2014 America the Beautiful ad that features a diverse choir of childrensinging the titular song in several different languages interwoven with the English. Thebeverage magnate was able to strategically tap into the anti-Trump zeitgeist while appearing as if that was not its central intention. Any act of curation, however, is as inherently deliberate as making a new ad altogether, but credit for a deft touch is due when necessary.

Budweiser, on the other hand, went for a daringapproach in their primetime ad by running with a loosely historically accurate immigration narrative following its founder through his journey from Germany to the States, facing discrimination and ill will from nationalists along the way.In a country like the United States, there would normally be nothing overtly political about an immigration story. Domestic goods take this approach in advertising all of the time. Yet featuring anti-immigration sentiment toward the hero of the ad a week after Trumps travel ban indicates a clear political choice taken by Budweiser and its corresponding ad agency, Momentum Worldwide. By most accounts, Budweiser seems to have rolled the dice in its own favor here despite a premature #BoycottBudweiser campaign that sprouted up in circles of the internet normally dominated by headlines from Breitbart and InfoWars.

In the realm of gender equality, Audi stuck the landing on the launch of its powerful voiceover ad which centered ona daughter whose father ponders whether or not to tell her about the limits and inherent societal inequality that comes with being a woman. The composition and narrative were balancedwell enough to make the ad an easy hit for the first half, and even wentviral before the start of the game.

Many brands splurged for celebrity shills, stickingto schtick if all else failed. From the gyrating Mr. Clean to the toned cross-fit models selling 95-calorie bottles of Michelob Ultra, plenty of companies with the resources to take a gamble on the political moment kept their chips at bay.

After 50 years, half a century, its all feeling a little formulaic,said Andrew Essex, the chief executive of Tribeca Enterprises and former C.E.O. of the independent ad agency Droga5 (whose clients range from Google andChase to Honey Maid, Trident, and Under Armour) in an interview with Sapna Maheshwari of The New York Times. I find myself, as someone whos not doing this anymore, wondering if this is the single greatest act of economic immolation on the planet.

Mr. Essex may be right. But for the bold few, Super Bowl Sunday wasnt just a time to over-invest in increased revenue, but a timeto get right with history. What is advertising if not the commodificationof our hopes and dreams? If we truly desire to be a diverse and inclusive nation, the proof is in the pudding when the demographic studies turn up, indicating that we should be sold those very same ideals. In a strange, uniquely American way, the best barometer of progress is the reification of our values in advertising, or perhaps merely our anxieties. Either way, Madison Avenue is watching, and itsselling the American Dream.

Jake Lahut can be reached at jlahut@wesleyan.edu and on Twitter @JakeLahut.

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QAD Automation Solutions is Honda Approved – Yahoo Finance

Posted: at 8:10 am

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

QAD Inc. (QADA) (QADB), a leading provider of enterprise software and services for global manufacturing companies, announced today that it has completed one of the most comprehensive and stringent software validation processes in the automotive industry by achieving Honda Approved Software status for QAD Automation Solutions. QAD was already recognized as a Honda Approved Software Provider for other QAD and partner solution combinations.

Honda North America, Inc., a global leader in automotive manufacturing, requires its original equipment manufactured parts suppliers to use an authorized integrated electronic data interchange (EDI), barcode and demand management solution. Software vendors must complete a rigorous testing and validation process to ensure the suite of applications complies with Hondas requirements for electronic data validation and barcode label conformance. While Honda does not recommend or endorse specific vendors, this designation recognizes that QAD has successfully completed Honda's testing criteria required to meet EDI and barcode specifications for Honda.

"We are excited to add QAD Automation Solutions to our existing set of Honda Approved Solutions, said QAD Automation Solutions Director Astrid Rommens. We have provided world class solutions to the automotive industry for over 35 years. This approval builds on our continued commitment to support and collaborate with the automotive industry.

About QAD The Effective Enterprise

QAD Inc. (QADA) (QADB) is a leading provider of enterprise software and services designed for global manufacturing companies. For more than 35 years, QAD has provided global manufacturing companies with QAD Enterprise Applications, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that supports operational requirements, including financials, manufacturing, demand and supply chain planning, customer management, business intelligence and business process management. QAD Enterprise Applications is offered in flexible deployment models in the cloud, on-premise or in a blended environment. With QAD, customers and partners in the automotive, consumer products, food and beverage, high technology, industrial products and life sciences industries can better align daily operations with their strategic goals to meet their vision of becoming more Effective Enterprises.

For more information about QAD, call +1 805-566-6000, visit http://www.qad.com.

QAD is a registered trademark of QAD Inc. All other products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Note to Investors: This press release contains certain forward-looking statements made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, but not limited to, statements regarding projections of revenue, income and loss, capital expenditures, plans and objectives of management regarding the Companys business, future economic performance or any of the assumptions underlying or relating to any of the foregoing. Forward-looking statements are based on the companys current expectations. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, could, will likely result, estimates, intends, may, projects, should, would, might, plan and variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. A number of risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to: risks associated with our cloud service offerings, such as defects and disruptions in our services, our ability to properly manage our cloud service offerings, our reliance on third-party hosting and other service providers, and our exposure to liability and loss from security breaches; demand for the company's products, including cloud service, licenses, services and maintenance; pressure to make concessions on our pricing and changes in our pricing models; protection of our intellectual property; dependence on third-party suppliers and other third-party relationships, such as sales, services and marketing channels; changes in our revenue, earnings, operating expenses and margins; the reliability of our financial forecasts and estimates of the costs and benefits of transactions; the ability to leverage changes in technology; defects in our software products and services; third-party opinions about the company; competition in our industry; the ability to recruit and retain key personnel; delays in sales; timely and effective integration of newly acquired businesses; economic conditions in our vertical markets and worldwide; exchange rate fluctuations; and the global political environment. For a more detailed description of the risk factors associated with the company and factors that may affect our forward-looking statements, please refer to the company's latest Annual Report on Form 10-K and, in particular, the section entitled Risk Factors therein, and in other periodic reports the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission thereafter. Management does not undertake to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law.

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