The ads feature current and former NFL players like Eli Manning, John Lynch, Cris Carter, and Troy Vincent. They stare straight into the camera against a white background, saying "no more." "No more boys will be boys." "No more what's the big deal?" "No more we don't talk about that."
The subtext? No more domestic violence, and no more sexual assault.
No More brings together a number of advocacy groups and corporate partners to bring attention to these issues. And this past fall, the NFL's PR crisis became an opportunity for No More to reach a new audience.
Virginia Witt, the director of No More, says engaging men as well as women was always a goal for the organization.
"We see the sports community as absolutely crucial to this strategy," Witt says. "Football is central to American life and families. It's a great way to engage men in this conversation."
Traffic to No More's website has increased by nearly 300 percent since the PSAs began airing during NFL games. Witt says the response from the public on social media has been remarkable. But is the message really resonating with football fans?
"It's hard to tell," says Pablo Torre, a senior writer at ESPN. "What this campaign is trying to do is actively move and shift a culture. It's hard to tell whether fans are really internalizing this and processing it just yet."
But Torre says one set of ads might carry more weight than others with fans. The series is called "Speechless," and it was an unplanned byproduct of the filming of these ads.
While the football players were composing themselves to deliver their lines, the cameras were rolling. And while editing, the production team realized how powerful these quiet moments were to watch.
In addition to the scripted PSAs, the NFL put out a number of ads featuring unscripted moments. In this ad, former player Cris Carter collects himself to deliver his line.
"In totally unscripted footage, you see the very human reactions and emotions that occurred in the football players as they thought about these issues, and struggled to speak about them," Witt says.
In one "Speechless" ad, Hall of Fame wide receiver Cris Carter takes a deep breath. He looks around the room, collecting himself. Clapping his hands, rocking on his feet. Off screen, the director can be heard telling him, "Whenever you're ready."
Torre says these ads are able to cut through because they show football players with their guards down.
"That's the most jarring part, I think," he says. "Seeing these guys who are paragons of masculinity and machoness being vulnerable and showing human emotion ... and that's something you don't see very often."
In these ads, the players never do deliver their lines. Instead, across the white screen appear the words "Domestic violence and sexual assault are hard subjects for everyone to talk about. Help us start the conversation."
The PSAs were created by Y&R and produced by Viacom Velocity and the Joyful Heart Foundation. They will continue to run throughout the playoffs.
 In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, embattled actor Stephen Collins admits to sexual misconduct with underage girls and talks about his time starring on the hit show "7th Heaven."
(WATCH: More of Katie Couric's interview with Stephen Collins)
The actor said pointedly that all of the incidents occurred before he was cast on "7th Heaven" and was emphatic that absolutely nothing inappropriate or illegal ever occurred with anyone from the cast of the show. He also discussed former cast member Jessica Biel and remarks he made about a racy photo shoot she did for Gear magazine when she was 17-years-old. "I wasn't judging her at all. Jessie is one of the great people I've ever known. And she just felt that she had been taken advantage of."
Cretin. Sean Wix/Courtesy of the artisthide caption
itoggle caption Sean Wix/Courtesy of the artist
Cretin.
Sean Wix/Courtesy of the artist
How's this for an opening line? "Gross. They say I ate you in the womb, that Mom had no room." After eight years of other projects, members joining Repulsion on tour, and vocalist/guitarist Marissa Martinez-Hoadley's sex-reassignment process, Cretin has crawled back out of its delightfully gore-obsessed grindcore hole for Stranger and the pit-baiting song "Ghost Of Teeth And Hair."
Cretin makes no apologies for its allegiances to the grind and death-metal fathers of nasty — Carcass, Repulsion and Autopsy — heard here in a ferocious chug-a-lug that hits like a steel-toe boot to the shins. By contrast, new member Elizabeth Schall's (Dreaming Dead) guitar solo is atonally acrobatic, but you can almost hear her grin as Matt Widener blasts the twin-eating-twin track wide open with a bass solo that channels Mike Watt in a spastic mood.
We'll bet you didn't wake up this morning wanting to experience what a particle goes through as it zooms along the massive tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider. Oh, wait -- you did? Well, game development studio Funktronic Labs is waaay ahead of...
You don't need to be a financial genius to know that 28 straight months of declining sales is not a good thing. HTC finally broke that streak this quarter, but that's the only silver lining in an otherwise dismal earnings report. While March 2014...
Visitors to Volkswagen's Autostadt, the museum adjacent to its Wolfsburg factory in Germany, will now find themselves confronted with these grey, blobby forms in the lobby. Is it a sculpture? An ode to Fahrvergnügen? Nope, it's a playground. For kids.
After announcing her engagement earlier this month, Whitney Port and Tim Rosenman enjoyed a romantic lunch in Los Angeles on Saturday (November 23).
The "Hills" star smiled brightly in an olive green jacket, white top, and blue skinnies as she showed off her sparkler next to her man.
Explaining how it all went down, the 28-year-old fashion designer told Us Weekly, "I was very surprised! He was planning a whole ordeal -- like possibly taking out a boat and doing this whole thing on the harbor, and then it was like the day before we were leaving and it was really rainy and grey and cold. So everything went down the drainpipe there. So he just did it in our hotel room, he asked me really low key."
As for her reaction, Whitney admitted, "I cried a lot. I was first screaming, 'No!' out of disbelief. And he was like, 'You mean yes??' And I said, 'Yeah! Of course!'"
No one likes using a scanner, so that's why we have scanning apps on our iPhones. Most of those let you share PDFs after photographing them to either email, Dropbox, or another sync service. InstaPDF changes all that and syncs them instantly to the cloud and right to your Mac.
InstaPDF lets you use two different modes for scanning documents, an auto-enhance mode or a photo mode that takes a photo of an image just as you see it. For documents, you want to use the auto-enhance. I've always enjoyed the photo mode of PDF scanners for iPhone simply due to the fact that it makes for a convenient way to store things I want to personally reference later.
Where InstaPDF stands out is that it instantly uploads your scans to your InstaPDF account where they magically show up on your Mac and on the web. Yes, you'll have to sign up for an InstaPDF account but it's a very small price to pay for the convenience it provides. I tried both the web interface and the Mac app and they were almost instantaneous. The Mac app simply sits in your task bar and stays out of the way unless you need it for something.
For me, apps like InstaPDF are invaluable since I can easily store documents immediately to share lately. No more leaving things at the office or at home and not having them when you need them. InstaPDF also has an iOS 7 inspired interface so if that's your thing, you'll especially like it.
While InstaPDF for iPhone will run you $2.99 in the App Store, the Mac version is free and can be downloaded from the InstaPDF website via the link below.
New cause found for muscle-weakening disease myasthenia gravis
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
11-Nov-2013
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Contact: Toni Baker [email protected] 706-721-4421 Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University
Augusta, Ga. An antibody to a protein critical to enabling the brain to talk to muscles has been identified as a cause of myasthenia gravis, researchers report.
The finding that an antibody to LRP4 is a cause of the most common disease affecting brain-muscle interaction helps explain why as many as 10 percent of patients have classic symptoms, like drooping eyelids and generalized muscle weakness, yet their blood provides no clue of the cause, said Dr. Lin Mei, Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.
"You end up with patients who have no real diagnosis," Mei said.
The finding also shows that LRP4 is important, not only to the formation of the neuromuscular junction where the brain and muscle talk but also maintaining this important connection, said Mei, corresponding author of the paper in TheJournal of Clinical Investigation.
Mei and his colleagues first reported antibodies to LRP4 in the blood of myasthenia gravis patients in the Archives of Neurology in 2012. For the new study, they went back to animals to determine whether the antibodies were harmless or actually caused the disease. When they gave healthy mice LRP4 antibodies, they experienced classic symptoms of the disease along with clear evidence of degradation of the neuromuscular junction.
LRP4 antibodies are the third cause identified for the autoimmune disease, which affects about 20 out of 100,000 people, primarily women under 40 and men over age 60, according to the National Institutes of Health and Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America, Inc.
An antibody to the acetylcholine receptor is causative in about 80 percent of patients, said Dr. Michael H. Rivner, MCG neurologist and Director of the Electrodiagnostic Medicine Laboratory, who follows about 250 patients with myasthenia gravis. Acetylcholine is a chemical released by neurons which act on receptors on the muscle to activate the muscle. More recently, it was found that maybe 10 percent of patients have an antibody to MuSK, an enzyme that supports the clustering of these receptors on the surface of muscle cells.
"That leaves us with only about 10 percent of patients who are double negative, which means patients lack antibodies to acetylcholine receptors and MuSK," said Rivner, a troubling scenario for physicians and patients alike. "This is pretty exciting because it is a new form of the disease," Rivner said of the LRP4 finding.
Currently, physicians like Rivner tell patients who lack antibody evidence that clinically they appear to have the disease. Identifying specific causes enables a more complete diagnosis for more patients in the short term and hopefully will lead to development of more targeted therapies with fewer side effects, Rivner said.
To learn more about the role of the LRP4 antibody, Mei now wants to know if there are defining characteristics of patients who have it, such as more severe disease or whether it's found more commonly in a certain age or sex. He and Rivner have teamed up to develop a network of 17 centers, like GR Medical Center, where patients are treated to get these questions answered. They are currently pursuing federal funding for studies they hope will include examining blood, physical characteristics, therapies and more.
Regardless of the specific cause, disease symptoms tend to respond well to therapy, which typically includes chronic use of drugs that suppress the immune response, Rivner said. However, immunosuppressive drugs carry significant risk, including infection and cancer, he said.
Removal of the thymus, a sort of classroom where T cells, which direct the immune response, learn early in life what to attack and what to ignore, is another common therapy for myasthenia gravis. While the gland usually atrophies in adults, patients with myasthenia gravis tend to have enlarged glands. Rivner is part of an NIH-funded study to determine whether gland removal really benefits patients. Other therapies include a plasma exchange for acutely ill patients.
###
TheJournal of Clinical Investigation study was funded by the NIH and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Mei is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Neuroscience.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
New cause found for muscle-weakening disease myasthenia gravis
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
11-Nov-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Toni Baker [email protected] 706-721-4421 Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University
Augusta, Ga. An antibody to a protein critical to enabling the brain to talk to muscles has been identified as a cause of myasthenia gravis, researchers report.
The finding that an antibody to LRP4 is a cause of the most common disease affecting brain-muscle interaction helps explain why as many as 10 percent of patients have classic symptoms, like drooping eyelids and generalized muscle weakness, yet their blood provides no clue of the cause, said Dr. Lin Mei, Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.
"You end up with patients who have no real diagnosis," Mei said.
The finding also shows that LRP4 is important, not only to the formation of the neuromuscular junction where the brain and muscle talk but also maintaining this important connection, said Mei, corresponding author of the paper in TheJournal of Clinical Investigation.
Mei and his colleagues first reported antibodies to LRP4 in the blood of myasthenia gravis patients in the Archives of Neurology in 2012. For the new study, they went back to animals to determine whether the antibodies were harmless or actually caused the disease. When they gave healthy mice LRP4 antibodies, they experienced classic symptoms of the disease along with clear evidence of degradation of the neuromuscular junction.
LRP4 antibodies are the third cause identified for the autoimmune disease, which affects about 20 out of 100,000 people, primarily women under 40 and men over age 60, according to the National Institutes of Health and Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America, Inc.
An antibody to the acetylcholine receptor is causative in about 80 percent of patients, said Dr. Michael H. Rivner, MCG neurologist and Director of the Electrodiagnostic Medicine Laboratory, who follows about 250 patients with myasthenia gravis. Acetylcholine is a chemical released by neurons which act on receptors on the muscle to activate the muscle. More recently, it was found that maybe 10 percent of patients have an antibody to MuSK, an enzyme that supports the clustering of these receptors on the surface of muscle cells.
"That leaves us with only about 10 percent of patients who are double negative, which means patients lack antibodies to acetylcholine receptors and MuSK," said Rivner, a troubling scenario for physicians and patients alike. "This is pretty exciting because it is a new form of the disease," Rivner said of the LRP4 finding.
Currently, physicians like Rivner tell patients who lack antibody evidence that clinically they appear to have the disease. Identifying specific causes enables a more complete diagnosis for more patients in the short term and hopefully will lead to development of more targeted therapies with fewer side effects, Rivner said.
To learn more about the role of the LRP4 antibody, Mei now wants to know if there are defining characteristics of patients who have it, such as more severe disease or whether it's found more commonly in a certain age or sex. He and Rivner have teamed up to develop a network of 17 centers, like GR Medical Center, where patients are treated to get these questions answered. They are currently pursuing federal funding for studies they hope will include examining blood, physical characteristics, therapies and more.
Regardless of the specific cause, disease symptoms tend to respond well to therapy, which typically includes chronic use of drugs that suppress the immune response, Rivner said. However, immunosuppressive drugs carry significant risk, including infection and cancer, he said.
Removal of the thymus, a sort of classroom where T cells, which direct the immune response, learn early in life what to attack and what to ignore, is another common therapy for myasthenia gravis. While the gland usually atrophies in adults, patients with myasthenia gravis tend to have enlarged glands. Rivner is part of an NIH-funded study to determine whether gland removal really benefits patients. Other therapies include a plasma exchange for acutely ill patients.
###
TheJournal of Clinical Investigation study was funded by the NIH and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Mei is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Neuroscience.
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
We'll bet you didn't wake up this morning wanting to experience what a particle goes through as it zooms along the massive tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider. Oh, wait -- you did? Well, game development studio Funktronic Labs is waaay ahead of...
You don't need to be a financial genius to know that 28 straight months of declining sales is not a good thing. HTC finally broke that streak this quarter, but that's the only silver lining in an otherwise dismal earnings report. While March 2014...
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