The potential harms of herbs to the pregnant mothers and their foetuses as well as the effect of herbs taken by nursing mothers on their babies remain largely unknown. Common perception is that herbal medicines ingestion during pregnancy and confinement period is a common practice among multi-racial Malaysian mothers. The purpose of this study was to explore the usage of herbal medicines during...

Herbal medicines are widely used in the United States, with approximately one quarter of adults reporting use of an herb to treat a medical illness within the past year. Herbs contain complicated mixtures of organic chemicals, the levels of which may vary substantially depending upon many factors related to the growth, production, and processing of the herbal product. While many manufacturers a...

Herbs are widely used in the treatment of atopic dermatitis (AD) in Eastern Asian countries, and certain herbs regarded have anti-inflammatory properties that can help with AD. With the goal of developing a topical herbal agent for AD, we conducted a systematic review of in vivo studies of AD-like skin models for screening potential herbs. Searches were conducted from PubMed and EMBASE. After a...

This work examines the potential for computational creativity in the culinary arts. In particular, we present the outcome of our efforts to create an artificial chef that produces novel salad recipes with limited human assistance. Our system was designed in two steps: first, we constructed a statistical model to rank recipes. Then, we experimented with various search algorithms to explore the s...

With the hindsight of half a century, Greenbergian formalism may now be seen not as the prescriptive, proscriptive, restrictive paradigm it was intended to be, but rather as a threshold between aesthetic types, a descriptive mechanism that pertains only to a very limited set of aesthetic objects, linked to a brief moment in history and responding to a specific polemic. The reduction of artistic...

In this paper, we report developments in the evaluation and generation processes in culinary computational creativity. In particular, we explore the personalization aspect of the quality and novelty assessment of newly created recipes. In addition, we argue that evaluation should be a part of the generation process and propose an optimization-based approach for the recipe creation problem. The ...

In this paper I examine intersections of food, identity, and place within the imagined `regions' of everyday practices, stories, and memories. As such, I continue traditions of writing in cultural geography exemplified by David Bell and Gill Valentine's [1997 Consuming Geographies (Routledge, London)] focus on connecting cultures of food and place, Jon May's (1996a, `` `A little taste of someth...