Monthly Archives: February 2017

Experts reveal hidden dangers behind supplements – Science Daily

Posted: February 7, 2017 at 8:12 am


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

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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

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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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DFLabs Launches the First Security Automation and Orchestration Platform based Upon Supervised Active Intelligence – Business Wire (press release)

Posted: at 8:10 am

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DFLabs, the leader in Security Automation and Orchestration Technology, announced today the launch of a landmark release of its flagship platform, IncMan 4.0. Based upon an innovative machine learning and incident correlation engine DFLabs offers a force multiplier solution that helps security operations and incident response teams quickly orchestrate the triage, containment, reporting, and remediation of data breaches and other cyber incidents while gradually guiding them on the maturity path to full automation.

The pace of cyber attacks combined with data breach and privacy regulations are making security operations platforms mandatory for organizations of all sizes. DFLabs has conducted months of discussions with dozens of Fortune 1000 CISOs showing that taking the human completely out of security automation may be dangerous. Significant concerns with making a sudden switch to fully unattended automation include complex issues such as Trust on Input, e.g. If the input data is incorrect, the output could cause even more damage to the business than the incident itself and Proof of Evidence, e.g. An unattended full automation response computer can not be a case for a compliance violation and can leave CISOs exposed to avoidable and excessive legal liability.

With IncMan 4.0, DFLabs delivers on its vision for Supervised Active Intelligence (SAI) driven by the industrys first Dual Mode Playbooks (Machine-to-Human and/or Machine-to-Machine). IncMan includes hundreds of playbooks - based on U.S. and UE international industry regulations (including GDPR), standards and best practices. These playbooks are automatically assigned and dynamically applied to an incident to provide the Security Operations Center (SOC) and Incident Response (IR) teams full control of the situation until they are ready for the next step, at which point the machine learning algorithm takes over the process and brings the organization to the next level of automation.

"Progress of enterprise security organizations towards orchestration spanning multiple functional teams is advanced in part by deep, console-based platforms, said Dan Cummins, Senior Analyst Security, 451 Research.SOC product buyers should focus not only on acquiring programmable, process-centric expertise of current practitioners, but also on establishing an agile foundation to meet future cyber security risks as well.

IncMan 4.0 is also the only solution available with an innovative Knowledge Base that reduces the amount of time spent on the lifecycle of an incident. The Knowledge Base is managed and updated by the DFlabs dedicated research team and includes threat catalogs, frameworks, standards, regulations and more. Incident response orchestration can be enhanced with actionable intelligence to provide effective direction in assisting the SOC and IR teams in creating and executing a response plan as well as for conducting risk analysis and demonstrating compliance with state, federal and international breach regulations.

A complete and thorough orchestrated incident response plan utilizing IncMan 4.0 has shown to save many organizations significant time in mitigating security issues, resulting in up to 80% reduction in reaction time.

CISOs are under heavy scrutiny and pressure to adopt the latest innovation in security automation, yet they are not ready to suddenly and irreversibly replace humans with technology. They must have the ability for their security teams to supervise the intelligent role of the machine - at least at the beginning of their journey, said Dario Forte, Founder and CEO, DFLabs and internationally recognized ISO standards expert. This is the basis behind the design and development of our Supervised Active Intelligence paradigm that we believe is the only effective path to full automation.

IncMan 4.0 offers a single, transparent pane of glass through which organizations can automate and orchestrate their entire security operations. It is an out-of-the-box platform featuring an intuitive interface and workflow combined with flexible use cases and reporting to meet the needs of any industry. Triage, Containment and Remediation operations can be navigated through the configurable, role-based dashboard. In addition to the Dual Mode Playbooks and Knowledge Base, other innovative features include:

"Automation and machine learning are in strong demand in InfoSec. On the other hand, we should not forget that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are still relatively new to get applied in businesses. Model design is crucial to consider social factors, human judgment on values, and sensitivity for possible bias. That's why a guided path to full automation could be advisable, especially for critical applications such as security operations," said Dr. Anastassia Lauterbach, Advisory Board Member, DFLabs.

Demo and trial of IncMan 4.0 are available immediately. DFLabs Professional Services Team is also available for Breach Readiness and IR Plans to help organizations achieve the appropriate plan, whether its guiding security teams through the process or augmenting their internal team.

About DFLabs

DFLabs is a recognized global leader in cyber incident response automation and orchestration. The company is led by a management team recognized for its experience in and contributions to the information security field including co-edited many industry standards such as ISO 27043 and ISO 30121. IncMan Cyber Incidents Under Control is the flagship product, adopted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations worldwide. DFLabs has operations in North America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia with US headquarters in Boston, MA and World headquarters in Milano, Italy. For more information visit: http://www.dflabs.com or connect with us on Twitter @DFLabs.

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DFLabs Launches the First Security Automation and Orchestration Platform based Upon Supervised Active Intelligence - Business Wire (press release)

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How Accountants Can Use Automation Their Advantage – Accountingweb.com (blog)

Posted: at 8:10 am

According to a recent report from Xero, it was found that accountants of today take technology very seriously. In fact, 83% of the accountants in a survey said that it was as important for them to understand technology as it was to understand accountancy.

This is a big change from how accountants were in the past. Accounting has always been a very traditional profession. Nothing much changed in accounting for over 50 years, but the advent of accounting technologies such as QuickBooks started making things happen in this highly traditional profession.

QuickBooks from Intuit was the earliest accounting software. It simplified a lot of things for accountants, allowing them to get more done in less time. But QuickBooks is so 1990s. There have already been new developments in accounting technology, such as cloud accounting.

The cloud-based technologies of today, such as Drake Tax Hosting, QuickBooks Hosting, Sage 50 Hosting, ProSeries Tax software Hosting, Lacerte Tax Software Hosting, Quicken Hosting, ATX Tax Software Hosting, etc. are more sophisticated than ever before.

They allow accountants to diversify their services and spend their time more productively, on things that are more important, such as strategizing on growing their business and reaching out to more clients.

Cloud accounting is the technology of the future, and it has automated a lot of things for accountants. In the survey that we spoke about at the start, 71 percent of accountants said that they considered knowledge of automation to be critical to their success.

That is true. By 2020, automation will be very common in accounting. A number of accounting and finance professionals will be dependent on a number of different analytical tools that would help them take their business to the next level.

Seeing how quickly things have been changing in accounting, it is so very important that accountants undertake relevant training on cloud accounting and automation. A number of accountants already are. In fact, a survey found that 48 percent of accountants were taking at least some course in different types of accounting technologies. Many were taking external courses in new technologies such as Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

BI is expected to be the next big thing in accounting. It helps accountants to harness data more effectively, especially in the financial context. BI can change how a business operates completely. It is one of the most revolutionary changes in accounting and finance saw recently.

In the UK, a number of accounting firms have been using BI to conduct skills risk analysis and management consulting. BI and other forms of automation are likely to be an integral part of accounting for years to come.

Over the next few years, accountants will look to expand their service offerings to include business intelligence and other forms of big data analytics. They are expected to grow their data warehousing capabilities. We expect cloud accounting to play a big role in that. The cloud is critical to accounting. The question is, are you on the cloud yet?

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How Accountants Can Use Automation Their Advantage - Accountingweb.com (blog)

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Voices Reinventing enterprise finance by overhauling AP automation – Accounting Today

Posted: at 8:10 am

Digital disruption is making way for new entrants and new models in the banking and financial services arena, a.k.a. fintech. While fintech is revolutionizing banking and finance for the business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer markets, enterprise finance departments can get the fintech bug too to innovate and streamline their workflows and supply chains for better, faster outcomes and to empower both customers and suppliers.

One area ripe for enterprise fintech innovation is accounts payable. Considering that the current market approach to invoice automation and the associated digitization and OCR technologies have been around for over 30 years, its no wonder that AP operations are in dire need of a major overhaul to meet todays modern-day requirements.

Aberdeen Groups survey report, Reap the Benefits of Invoice Excellence with AP Automation, highlights this need. Forty percent of respondents said the need for real-time availability of data is a key AP challenge, and 29 percent said difficulty locating/managing paper-based documents was a struggle. Given this state of the AP nation, its not surprising that most organizations, even after investing significantly in legacy AP Automation solutions, are only realizing 20 percent automation in their invoice processing.

The quest for improved automation is only half the journey for finance however. As initiatives such as dynamic discounting continue to grow in adoption, the nature of the accounts payable function has fundamentally changed from mere overhead to profit center at least for progressive, forward-thinking organizations that are adopting a strategic approach to AP and finance operations.

The struggle is real In the current technology age, how is it possible that AP is still experiencing such poor results?

Part of the answer revolves around the fact that when it comes to invoice automation, the devil is in the details. Industry statistics show that 82 percent of all invoices will have at least one exception. Exceptions are the bane of invoice automation solutions which were originally conceptualized to eliminate paper and manual data entry. When an exception rears its ugly head, no amount of digital imaging or optical character recognition technology will save the day.

To this end, the ideal AP automation solution isnt simply focused on straight-through processing because the path to payment isnt always straight-through. Its over/under, in and around various check points and decision trees. Moreover, it isnt exclusively focused on optimizing exception processing in the classic business process improvement sense, but rather the goal is to make invoice processing as exception-free as possible.

Therein lies the ultimate question: How do we make invoice processing exception-free?

Invoice exceptions are the governor of AP automation you should be cruising over 65 miles per hour in the HOV lane, but instead youre crawling along in rush-hour traffic. Exceptions are caused by legacy invoice automation systems inherent lack of deep and real-time integration with the Enterprise Resource Processing (ERP) system. The prevailing approach is to simply pass the buck over to the ERP system to identify and later resolve exceptions. Many vendors call this integration, which is where data is simply thrown over the fence to the ERP system, forcing manual exception processing work streams in the ERP system that are costly, time-consuming and error-prone. Some vendors go as far as requiring the periodic replication of AP master file information within their system in an attempt to get around the ERP integration gaponly to still encounter exceptions due to batch processing delays and worse, introduce new data synchronization challenges. Net-net, these loose integrations fail to deliver the degree of automation necessary to deliver optimal results.

In pursuit of AP innovation In the pursuit of AP innovation, organizations must pursue the new i.e., the truly better way that challenges conventional business-as-usual thinking. Implementing incremental improvements in the imaging or ERP system to make accounting more efficient is not innovation. It may produce some productivity gains, but for real change and innovation to occur, organizations must take a fundamentally new approach to invoice automation that breaks away from legacy technology and solutions that merely image paper, collect data and upload information to the ERP system.

The goal: Real improvements and real change. Not just to business processes, but through a whole new transformative approach a reimagining of invoice automation and finance operations as a whole. Given the pressure organizations are under today, they must take make bolder moves. Theres an old saying: Electricity wasnt invented by making incremental improvements to the candle.

This new reimagined approach starts with real-time integration and interaction with the ERP system designed to eliminate exceptions as much as possible and early as possible in the process, as opposed to sending over bad data for the ERP system to address. Resolving exceptions before invoices are vouchered in the ERP system eliminates unnecessary manual intervention, process latency, cost and complexity delivering maximum automation for optimal results.

Cloud, mobile and advanced analytics are key technologies that make this transformation not only possible, but much more accessible as well. These technologies allow next-gen AP solutions to deliver quicker results and more meaningful business insights than ever before.

Another essential ingredient to this transformation is breaking away from conventional siloed solution-think by combining invoice automation with supplier enablement and dynamic discounting to power the business to absolute peak performance. This approach is also ushering in another paradigm shift moving AP away from a focus purely on operational efficiency to one of value creation for greater strategic impact. These next-generation capabilities provide the force multiplier necessary to make this sea change possible and transforming AP into a force majeure within the organization.

Bringing suppliers directly into the process allows invoices to be created, validated and made exception-free from the get-go, eliminating paper and accelerating operational efficiency. However, there are even greater gains to be realized: By providing valuable and frictionless self-service experiences for suppliers, companies will see a tremendous boost in early-pay discounts driven by an equally impressive increase in supplier adoption. This can literally translate into savings of millions of dollars (up to 2 percent of corporate annual spend), generating a new, fast and compelling revenue stream for the organization. Companies that fail to seize this opportunity are simply leaving big money on the table not to mention the potential loss in competitive advantage.

As Aberdeen vice president and principal analyst Bryan Ball noted, [I]n the modern business, the finance function is no longer looked at as simply the cost of doing business, with behind-the-scenes employees performing functions that, which necessary, are not the core components of organizational success.

Rather, success favors the bold in todays forward-thinking finance organizations, where incremental thinking is being left behind in pursuit of real AP innovation and value creation.

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Voices Reinventing enterprise finance by overhauling AP automation - Accounting Today

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Lib Dems Should Embrace Automation of the Workforce – Liberal Democrat Voice

Posted: at 8:10 am

Whether we like it or not, an automated workforce is coming. The question is how do we approach it? Its predicted that by 2020 robots will replace 5 million jobs in the US alone. We cannot shy away from this issue. We need a clear position on this, and one which we shout about so the public know what it is. There seems to be only two options offered by the two other parties (universal basic income, that nightmare that wont die) and to erode workers rights so that only big businesses will benefit from it.

We need to offer a third option. We need to embrace change; after all, liberals are progressives. By adopting an approach that works for both workers and business we can be at the forefront of the convocation and ensure we strike a balance. I am not saying what these policies should be, I am merely saying that we should have some and be vocal about them.

I can see three advantages of why we should be at the forefront of the conversation. The first, like I said previously, we can lead the debate and ensure that there is a liberal and progressive view on the matter.

The second is voter perception. In a time of uncertainty and turmoil, people are worried about losing their jobs. If the Lib Dems can show that we have a plan and we can handle what the future hold, we can appeal to these very people, while also not resorting to protectionism. By having a clear plan of how we will deal with it, we can both appeal to the people who want the benefits that automation can bring and the people who are worried and want a clear plan on how a government will deal with it.

The third is we can plan. By discussing it now, we can ensure that in 20 years time we have a more automated society but also one where people are employed and prevent more people being pushed into poverty. We are lacking in IT skills at the moment, in some areas, meaning that jobs dont get filled or are moved overseas. But if we come up with a robust plan for education, we can make sure that the next generations will have the skills that they need. We could help drive the high tech jobs market, limit the damage of job loss and provide people with the skills that businesses will want. This way we will also create more jobs offsetting some of the jobs lost.

All these reason I believe will drive us towards a success with the electorate. In a time of Trump and Brexit, the next 20 year look uncertain. But automation is clear part of our future and it is up to the government to know how to deal with it. I think voters will respond well to a party that is looking forward and a party that has ideas and a plan in place for the future. This will also be better for society as a whole, automation will cause disruption to societys already fractured equilibrium, but by debating about how we will deal with it now, we can, keep any disruption to a minimum and reach a new equilibrium quicker. After all, we came back from the industrial revolution.

* Matthew Phillips is a member of the Islington Liberal Democrat exec.

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Lib Dems Should Embrace Automation of the Workforce - Liberal Democrat Voice

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