Friday, April 6, 2007
U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned that limiting funding for the United States efforts in Iraq could lead to more bloodshed in the Middle Eastern country. In an interview with radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, he said it might even lead to ethnic cleansing in Bahgdad and elsewhere in Iraq.
Gates’ comment followed a proposal from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to end most spending on the Iraq war in 2008, limiting it to targeted operations against al Qaeda, training for Iraqi troops and U.S. force protection.
Sec. Gates also said that the duration of the troop increase is not clear and that evaluating whether the Administration’s new strategy was working will have to wait till mid-summer. The Army general charged with day-to-day operations has suggested that the increased deployment may extend to early next year.
Submitted by: Alexander Sviridov
Hemorrhoids is a “shamed” from the standard point of view illness, still is one of the most widespread. 40% of references to doctors concerning intestines are connected to hemorrhoids. Proctologists consider, that 70% of people sooner or later face hemorrhoids symptoms. And if you sit before a computer all days long, the probability to catch hemorrhoids is greater.
What is hemorrhoids? Hemroidal units are in an organism of each person. They are the crimps of a mucous membrane of an anal channel. In addition to muscles s action they provide deduction of feces. When in rest hemroidal units participate in blocking of anal channel of intestines. At defecation the pimples should smooth out to prevent the passage of feces. Stagnation of venous blood and an excessive exerting may cause breaking the position of units, they slip downwards together with a mucous membrane. Thus, there is a reorganization and infringement of blood supply, it results in increase of the size of hemroidal units and ledging outside.
All risk! Each of us can get hemorrhoids. Those especially risk who:
* Conducts a sedentary way of life, including working behind a computer;
* Suffers locks, adiposity;
* Likes to drink much
* Eats smoked, sharp, salty, spicy foods;
* Practicing anal sex;
* Is engaged in a serious kind of sports dealing with heavy weights
When hemorrhoids the following basic symptoms are characteristic:
* A bleeding at defecation (having found out this symptom you should consult a doctor as soon as possible)
* An itch, burning in the field of back pass
* Feeling of an alien body, feeling of weight
* Loss of units from gut
* Pain at defecation, walking and when sitting
More on symptoms here: http://www.hemorrhoids-treatment.net/hemmoroid_symptoms.htm
These are the true signs of hemorrhoids – varicose expansions of veins in a gut. Allocate different kinds of hemorrhoids, depending on an arrangement of units, developing and a stage of disease.
Diagnostics.
If the patient complaints of hemorrhoids (anal bleeding, discomfort, an itching or burning), any doctor is obliged to carry out minimal practological diagnostics. The diagnosis is made by examining the anus and anal canal.
Preventive measures.
Observance of an underwritten recommendations will allow to avoid hemorrhoids even if you sitting at a computer all days long and if they has already appeared – to ease the illness and reduce painful aggravations.
* An eutrophy: high fibre diet and bulk prevents constipation.
* Restriction of alcohol drinks and spicy food
* Defecation hygiene
* Physical exercises – hypodynamia preventive
Hemorrhoids treatment
Be not engaged in self-treatment!
The diagnosis “hemorrhoids” should be confirmed with an expert there can be more serious diseases hiding under a mask of a hemorrhoids.
How to treat hemorrhoids?
Methods of hemorrhoids treatment can be conservative (therapeutic) and operative (hemroidal units removed by a surgeon). Conservative methods are applied more often. If symptoms are mild, the first episode of thrombosed external hemorrhoids may respond to a conservative treatment strategy of sitz baths (immersion in warm water for 15 to 20 minutes twice daily), stool softening and oral analgesia. Patients with severe or prolonged external hemorrhoids symptoms generally require excision of thrombosed hemorrhoidal tissue under local anesthetic.
About the Author: Alexander Sviridov practicing proctologist. More information and advice about hemorrhoids symptoms, kinds and ways of treatment you ll find here:
hemorrhoids-treatment.net
Source:
isnare.com
Permanent Link:
isnare.com/?aid=8023&ca=Medicines+and+Remedies
Wednesday, November 30, 2005File:Turing1.jpg
More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.
The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers.File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg
Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.
Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.
In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.
Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.
Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots.Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”