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.”