An Armchair Activist is a person who couldn’t have existed in any real way before Facebook or other social media sites. It’s given those of us who are too lazy to go out and physically get involved a way to make ourselves and our beliefs known to a wide range of people as we share with our “friends” who then share with theirs.

It’s also a way to have a voice without having to argue with those on the other side. You can agree, you can disagree, but we don’t have to have an oral argument. I like reading posts from people who disagree with me, but when they start calling me names, I also like that I can just delete it. Were we face to face, it could deteriorate into yelling and such which I don’t really enjoy. Good discourse is very interesting to me. Yelling and name calling, not so much.

So stay tuned for a blog post once a week or maybe more if I’ve got something particular on my mind.

This week has been fun because Ann Coulter is writing about how much she doesn’t like Rick Santorum and when Ann Coulter doesn’t like you when you’re on the same side, man, you are in trouble.

This is also the week that Davey Jones died of a heart attack at 66 and I watched a documentary about Ron Stone called Heart of Stone, only to find out at the end that he had died of a heart attack at 57, five months after the documentary was finished. Both men were active and physically fit. From what we know, they took care of themselves and yet they died young. My take on this is that they would have died younger had they not been so health conscious. If you haven’t seen Heart of Stone, I recommend it highly. It explores an inner city high school in New Jersey and what Ron Stone did there as principal for over three years.

This blog will always have something about animals. I’m a big animal rescue person. If you’re a breeder or buy your dogs, you probably won’t like the statistics I intend to share or my take on what need to happen for us to be a No Kill Nation.

For now though, I will just say, Welcome. I hope we’ll have a great ride every week and please feel free to email me at lois@loislevy.com with any comments, topic suggestions, etc. And you can call me names if you must. And please listen to my show every Thursday at 1 pm Eastern here on www.weinetwork.com where we talk about anything and everything in the name of health.

Invention is driven by man’s imagination and inherently inquisitive nature for solving problems. This manifests itself in the development of windmills for pumping water up out of the ground on cattle ranches, devices for injecting insulin, or a solar powered fan affixed to a cap which helps to keep you cool. Some might say “necessity is the mother of all invention”.

Commercialization is the process by which invention is transformed into products, goods and services. For example, for many years Romans pressed grapes and produced Vino. The Romans enjoyed the darker berries while the Northern Germanic Tribes enjoyed the delightful Gewürztraminer. This delicious substance was kept in clay jars which were exquisitely decorated. Plato and Aristophanes wrote of temperance while enjoying this elixir however, great Roman orgies were still held despite their forebodings. As time progressed incremental improvements were made to the jars but it wasn’t until the industrial revolution that major radical innovations were made to the carafes as Venetian glass artisans developed blown glass bottles for holding the nectar of the Gods.  

Market Penetration is the adoption of the product, goods or services by the masses. Technical criteria are used to determine the success of invention whereas commercial criteria are used to determine the success of the innovation. This distinction I believe to be very important and I will elaborate on further in the final section of my essay however I mention it now as it ties in well with the Roman Orgy evoking Vino preserved in the Venetian Carafe example.

With the revolutionary development of the carafe Italians and Japanese alike were able to consume much Vino. So many modern day carafes were being produced utilizing the new innovative mass production methods that a “bottleneck” was created in the Vino production and the orgies were coming to a halt all over the place. Something had to be done so Venetian industrial engineers were brought in to analyze and study the problem. The “bottleneck” problem turned out to be the cork. You see cork is actually the bark of trees and there weren’t enough trees to supply the carafe makers so a solution needed to be found. The engineers being resourceful and bright fellows came up with an excellent solution. They invented screw-on caps and voilà they pronounced that the orgies could resume. No worries! Or so they thought.

As mentioned previously commercial success is not always guaranteed even if the product is the hand delivered elixir of the Gods. As it turned out the consumer did not like screw on caps on their Murano glass Carafes. And to make matters worse the engineers in their innovative fervor optimized the delivery method of the Vino even further with their incremental innovative solutions and came up with square cardboard boxes with plastic liners and keg taps that could easily hold 5 liters (enough for a proper orgy) and fit snuggly in lorries for trans-continental shipment. The consumer refused to purchase the hideous items because the engineers had forgotten to take into account the “snob effect” that goes along with the consumption of the lovely Italian grapes.

This was a valuable and costly lesson for the carafe makers because it brought about a decline in an otherwise market penetration growth rate that would have even given stoic Donald Trump reason to stand up and shout “GEEZUS” or “You’re Fired!” for half an hour. Because not only did the producer lose market share to the Germanic Gewürztraminer bottlers but they also incurred enormous re-tooling costs at the bottling plant.

There are many methods for avoiding the types of disastrous problems mentioned in my short narrative but what it all basically boils down to is that the firm or entrepreneur who in however which way (innovation incubators) comes up with an idea needs to follow a few basic steps in order to effectively execute innovation to generate better returns for the company.

Innovative firms such as P&G and 3M typically have a structured procedure for their product pipelines. This ensures the highest returns possible for the firm. The process begins with an idea bank. Ideas arrive through different channels such as from suppliers, salespeople and internal staff. The ideas are then ranked and selected for further evaluation. A technical and commercial review is conducted. The preliminary design and unit production cost is calculated by technical staff and the commercial department estimates the market size and pricing. If the numbers look promising the design project may be approved for further development.  This process needs to be deliberate because the cost of bringing products to market can cost billions of dollars as is the case for pharmaceutical companies. If the preliminary development steps are promising then test/focus groups can be called upon for market feedback and test mock-ups may be developed as well using CAD modeling techniques. For example, automobile manufactures and jet engine manufactures use wind tunnels for testing aerodynamic designs. 0-production series are run later in the design process and the marketing department is called in to assist in the development of packaging requirements and for product roll-out campaign preparations. Generally a “Champion” within the organization is needed to deliver a product to market as it’s easier to sell a product externally then internally in an organization. There are many review sessions and the project is continually changed and “tweaked” both commercially and technically. For example various sub-assembly parts are spec’d, priced and compared to the commercial price points along with tooling costs or perhaps safety factors (o-ring failure was attributed to the NASA Challenger disaster that cost the agency the lives of 7 of its astronauts and set the program back years). If the new product passes all the internal reviews then it is “rolled-out” by the sales department. Training of sales force is carried out, manuals and sales brochures are printed, patents are filed, new product introduction tours are planned, trade show appearances are booked, distribution channel agreements are negotiated and signed, sales are tracked, feedback is gathered and incremental improvements can begin to be laid for future product development. This last detail is important because with every new product that the “first mover” delivers imitation- innovators (second movers) quickly re-engineer the firm’s product and almost literally overnight imitation products mushroom. By continually improving the product the market leader can sustain their competitive advantage. For example, people used to scrape snow off their windshields using their credit cards, then an innovator came up with a cheap plastic scraper, then the imitation innovator came up with a scraper with a glove to keep the user’s hand warm, next the competing firm came up with the scraper with the glove and brush.

The innovation “war” is continual and because of this the consumer sometimes ends up with something useful say other than a dashboard bubblehead.

By Randolph Scott Bell- CEO BeacCorp

Rhode Island researcher Dr. Dale S. Bond, at the Brown University in Providence, and colleagues found that people who used to work out to get rid of unwanted fat had to make an extra effort to keep their weight in check, as opposed to those who got a gastric bypass, who simply felt no need to eat, and could not gain weight altogether. On the other hand, exercising all the time also promotes the well-being of the cardiovascular system and that of the lungs, so the benefits outweigh minor inconveniences.

The research also found that those who had a surgery tended to eat a more fatty diet, with a lot of fast food, even if that was the cause of their obesity in the first place. Also, they spent a negligible amount of time practicing sports, although their doctors advised them to engage in a more active lifestyle.

On the other hand, those who lost weight by non-surgical means took better care of them, in that they adopted a more balanced diet and engaged in a healthier lifestyle, because they were constantly under the threat that their extra pounds would return, and they were determined to keep them away. The results of the study were published following a 5.5-year long trace of 315 individuals who lost weight through one of the two methods

If you suffer from obesity I would recommend first seeking out the help of a Fitness Specialist first with a proper diet and exercise patient and an understanding coach, you can lose weight and develop life style changes that will help you maintain healthier way of living. Contact: Science of Fitness Inc. to schedule an appointment with a certified weight loss specialist. You can also visit our website to find out more about the program offered www.scienceoffitnesspt.com.

Reginald Stewart

Exercise Therapist

If I hear another client complain to me about not having enough time in their "busy" schedule to prepare proper meals or take 30 minutes out of their day to exercise, I swear I'm going to scream from the top of my lungs! Let’s face it, it’s easy to sit back and make promises to ourselves that we are going to finally make positive changes in our lives but it’s also the hardest promise to keep. How many times have you walked into a gym or met with a personal trainer with one of those promises in mind. Silently, promising yourself that you’re going to stick with it this time, promising yourself that you’re going to start making a conscious effort to improve your eating habits. As the old saying goes "Promises are made to be broken." But there is also the saying that states that "A man is only as good as his word". So, the next time you make a promise to yourself, stick to it. I promise you will feel so much better about yourself, physically, emotionally and psychologically. I PROMISE.  

Bees

I remember the moment it happened. The moment my brain went into overthink and never shifted back. It was in the early weeks of third grade at Saint Something-or-Other Elementary School. I was a soft-spoken doe-eyed girl of eight when the barely tattered spine of a pumpkin-hued book caught my eye. Its paradoxical title perplexed me: Bees Can’t Fly *But They Do. Wait…what? I was immediately intrigued. I slid the book from its shelf and read the title again. Bees Can’t Fly the giant red font screamed from the top of the front cover. Hmm… *But They Do argued the smaller red font down below. I winced. I wondered. I pondered. How can this be? Why can’t bees fly? I had to know. And if they can’t fly, then why do they? How do they? And what’s with the asterisk in front of the But They Do? If it was designed to torment me, it was doing its job, for it marked a phrase that stated the obvious (I’d seen bees fly a million times), yet it ignited in me a sense of wonder I’d never experienced before. Could I trust my own sensory perception? I had seen bees fly…hadn’t I?

I’d been planning to read a different type of book all together – Sixty Saints for Girls, a sort of MTV-behind-the-music-style collection of stories that chronicled the rise and fall, the magic and the miracles, the bumpy road to martyrdom, of some of heaven’s best-loved female celebrities. I’d read the saints book before and, while it certainly had enough glitz and appeal to garner a second or third read, the book of bees had my mind buzzing. It called to me with a humble hum that effectively drowned out the songs of the saints. It both mocked me and lured me with its dichotomous title and its tiny swarm of aerodynamically impossible flyers pictured on the cover. I flipped through its pages and began drinking in the information as if stealing the nectar of the gods. And then a funny thing happened. The book I had opened began to open my mind…in a way even Curious George (though he identified as curious) could never do. With all due respect to the man in the yellow hat, this was not monkey business. And with equally due respect to our saintly sisters, this was nothing miraculous…THIS was science. This was a world of theories to consider, of answers to be discovered and mysteries to be explored. Unwilling to leap so quickly from mystery to miracle (like the one performed by St. Elizabeth of Portugal who turned bread into roses…in the middle of winter no less), the author of the bee book suggested that the intriguing flight of honeybees was one of several inexplicable phenomena that scientists were one day expected to solve.

It would be many years before a group of scientists from Caltech and the University of Nevada would crack the code on the great bee mystery. As expected, there were no miraculous forces guiding the flight of the honeybees…just a complex biological process that hadn’t yet been identified. Sometimes it takes a while to come up with the explanation – even if you’re a scientist – but the explanation usually does exist. In the case of the bees, the answer turned out to be an exotic flight mechanism involving “a combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, and a very fast wing-beat frequency.”

Turns out that pumpkin-colored book may not have had all the answers back in the day, but it opened my eight-year-old mind to the idea that that nothing is impossible, everything is questionable, and very little is unexplainable. I slid the book back on the shelf and wedged it back into narrow space in the stacks before lining up to exit the library with a mind that was newly opened to a universe of unlimited possibility. Let the thinking begin…