HealthyEating
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IBM wins diet monitoring and reward patent, celebrates with sip of Spirulina
Does your employer offer a "wellness rebate program?" No? Then you can't be working for IBM, which has been bribing its staff to eat healthier since 2004. It's a Watson-worthy idea, because what the company pays out in incentives it recoups in lower healthcare costs. Now, after a decade of toing and froing with the USPTO, IBM has finally patented a web-based system that makes the whole process automatic. For it to work, a person must use a micro-payment network to buy food, which allows their purchases to be monitored and compared against their health records. If they've made the right choices, the system then communicates with their employer's payroll server to issue a reward. Completing the Orwellian circle, the proposed system also interacts with servers in the FDA and health insurance companies to gain information about specific food products or policy changes. You can duck the radar, of course, and buy a Double Whopper with cash, but it'll bring you no reward except swollen ankles. This is IBM we're talking about; they've thought of everything. [Photo via Shutterstock]
Buff(ing) for BlizzCon: Dog days
Buff(ing) for BlizzCon is a bi-weekly fitness series written by ShrinkGeek authors Rafe Brox and Michael McGreevy. Join the WoW.com team in getting in shape for the ultimate WoW geek event: BlizzCon 2010. No, it's not another worgen post. I'd roll a goblin, anyway, and not merely because of factional preference. I spent too many hours as a n00b getting repeatedly pwnt in Silverpine Forest, which has made me as bitter as powdered aspirin towards those furry bastards; I'd gank myself. No, this is the midsummer swoon, when folks tend to go through the motions in the long, hot stretch (at least in the Northern hemisphere), twiddling their thumbs between increasingly monotonous dungeon runs, idly considering rolling yet another alt or take a hiatus altogether to go hit some conventions and interact in the big blue room. In our case, it's also just past the midpoint of our six-month journey towards BlizzCon, when motivation may flag and adhering to healthier eating and exercise habits can begin to wane. Maybe you've hit a plateau. Maybe you're bored with your program. This point in time is, to quote everyone's favorite Mon Calimaran, a trap. OK, maybe it's more of a pothole, or yet another slog through Desolace/Stranglethorn Vale/[insert your least-loved zone of mid-game grind leveling here]. So what is there to be done about it?
