Cyber Porch--Oz with the Curtain Pulled Back & More News

Folks used to sit on the porch shootin’ the breeze. For many now, the porch is a cubicle and the breeze is digital. These are a few of the stories floating around our cyber porch today. 

UPDATE June 18-- Dr. Oz Gets Scolding from Sen. McCaskill

Under pressure from Congress, celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz on Tuesday offered to help "drain the swamp" of unscrupulous marketers using his name to peddle so-called miracle pills and cure-alls to millions of Americans desperate to lose weight. Oz appeared before the Senate's consumer protection panel and was scolded by Chairman Claire McCaskill for claims he made about weight-loss aids on his TV show, "The Dr. Oz Show."

Think Your Commute Is Tough? The collective noun for a lot of ducks can be flock, raft, team, paddling, and several others. This video shows a commuter in Asia caught in a tidal wave of ducks.


June 17 Cyber Porch News

*** Slimed No More?  Sales of a treated ground beef product that critics derisively dubbed "pink slime" have rebounded, according to two of its manufacturers. Lean Finely Textured Beef is still controversial--and a major lawsuit is looming. We continue to think Shakespeare had this issue sorted out--it's all in the name, as this blog explains: Would Finely Textured Beef by Any Other Name Taste the Same? 


*** Banana Benders:  A super-enriched banana genetically engineered to improve the lives of millions of people in Africa will soon have its first human trial, which will test its effect on vitamin A levels, Australian researchers say. 

***  How Do You Say "Hold the Anchovies" in App-Speak?  Domino’s Pizza launches a new voice ordering feature in its iPhone and Android apps that features a voice speech recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language understanding technology. The company says the feature will provide “a human-like, conversational customer service experience that allows users to speak an order and quickly add items to their cart.”  The food industry is changing rapidly from 3-D printing to new forms of delivery. But this blog explains that it has been evolving for a long time, and a pizza app back in 1975 might have needed to know the phrase "hold the embalming fluid." 

from dan gogerty (photos from ars/usda)