Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Your esophagus is the tube that carries food from your mouth to your stomach.Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) happens when a muscle at the end of your esophagus does not close properly. This allows stomach contents to leak back, or reflux, into the esophagus and irritate it.
* Avoiding alcohol and spicy, fatty or acidic foods that trigger heartburn
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Most commonly, gourds are the product of the species Lagenaria siceraria (the calabash or African bottle gourd), native to Africa, and at a very early date spread throughout the world by human migrations. This species may be the oldest plant domesticated by humans.[citation needed]
Gourds can be used as a number of things, including bowls or bottles. Gourds are also used as resonating chambers on certain musical instruments including the berimbau and many other stringed instruments and drums. Instruments of this type are fairly common to the Caribbean. Gourds are also used as a tool for sipping yerba mate by means of a bombilla, in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, where it is called "cuia" (kOOya). Birdhouse gourds are commonly used in southern USA for group housing for purple martins, which reputedly help control mosquitoes. "Gourd" can also refer to the live fruit before it is dried, or to the entire
plant that produces that fruit.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Lewis Hamilton was overwhelmed by emotion after capturing the 2008 world championship by a single point at a thrilling season finale in Brazil.
"It's pretty impossible to put into words," said the 23-year-old, who is now the youngest ever F1 champion.
"It's been such a long journey and I'm so speechless. After all the sacrifices we've made I am so thrilled to be able to do this for everyone.
"It was one of the toughest races of my life - if not the toughest."
Hamilton clinched the title when he passed Timo Glock accelerating out of the final corner of the race to snatch the drivers' crown from Felipe Massa, who took the chequered flag ahead of him.With Massa winning at Interlagos, the Englishman knew he had to finish fifth to claim the title but he had slipped to sixth with one lap to go.In one final twist, however, Hamilton overtook Glock's slowing Toyota to clinch the fifth place he needed - and with it the title.
"The team didn't say anything so I thought I was shot," said Hamilton, who became Britain's ninth world champion and the first since Damon Hill in 1996."I didn't know where Glock was and Vettel was the guy to beat and I couldn't catch him, so at that point I was going to finish sixth. My heart was in my mouth," said Hamilton.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Scientific journalists also must choose which developments in science merit news coverage, as well as cover disputes within the scientific community with a balance of fairness to both sides but also with a devotion to the facts.
Many, but not all, journalists covering science have training in the sciences they cover, including several medical journalists who cover medicine.
Friday, October 31, 2008
The national calendar based on the Saka Era, with Chaitra as its first month and a normal year of 365 days was adopted from 22 March 1957 along with the Gregorian calendar for the following official purposes:
(i) Gazette of India,
(ii) news broadcast by All India Radio,
(iii) calendars issued by the Government of India and
(iv) Government communications addressed to the members of the public.
Dates of the national calendar have a permanent correspondence with dates of the Gregorian calendar, 1 Chaitra falling on 22 March normally and on 21 March in leap year.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
"Adelie penguins are a wonderful model to study the problem of climate change," said Lambert. "They have lived through temperature fluctuations much higher than those in equatorial regions."Lambert said Adelie penguins have survived several degrees of warming since the last glacial maximum 18,000 years ago.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The last remaining survivor of the Titanic plans to sell mementoes from the ship to pay her nursing home fees.
Now 96, Millvina Dean was nine weeks old when the liner sank in the North Atlantic in 1912.She hopes to raise £3,000 by selling items including a suitcase full of clothes given to her by the people of New York after her rescue.The auction in Wiltshire will also feature compensation letters sent to her mother by the Titanic Relief Fund. They explained that she would be awarded one pound, seven shillings and six pence per week.
Several rare prints of the Titanic - including one of it leaving the White Star dock in Southampton - will also go under the hammer.Miss Dean moved into a private nursing home in Ashurst, Hants, two years ago.She told the Southern Daily Echo: "I was hoping to be here for two weeks after breaking my hip, but I developed an infection and have been here for two years. I am not able to live in my home any more.
"I am selling it all now because I have to pay these nursing home fees and am selling anything that I think might fetch some money."The Dean family were emigrating to Kansas when the Titanic went down.Miss Dean was placed in a sack and carried to safety along with her mother and brother.But her father Bertram was one of more than 1,500 people who died.The auction will take place at Henry Aldridge and Son auctioneers in Devizes, Wilts, on Saturday.Andrew Aldridge said: "The suitcase is a very emotive and unusual item and epitomises what the people of New York did for the Titanic survivors.
"It also highlights what state the survivors were in when they got to New York. Many people lost everything down to the clothes they were standing in."Miss Dean is the last survivor of the Titanic after Barbara Dainton, from Cornwall, died last year aged 96.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Today’s quality managers face a myriad of challenges, from monitoring quality of goods to organizing documentation to managing compliance with multiple regulations. Many quality departments address each of their functions with a separate set of practices, leading to duplicated efforts and disorganized documentation. This is compounded by a limited, fragmented use of technology to automate processes.
IBS Quality Management Software is an easy-to-use platform for all your quality needs. The software helps users automate and integrate all their quality management activities, driving accuracy and efficiency across the enterprise. Plus, the software is easy to deploy, learn, and use.
With IBS Quality Management Software, you can:
- Maintain and distribute all your documentation
- Execute corrective and preventative actions
- Improve customer management and supplier quality
- Perform internal and supplier assessments
- Assess, prioritize and mitigate risks
- Improve employee training and qualification
- Achieve compliance with ISO and FDA regulations
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Ricky Ponting's Australia arrived in India on Monday for a four-Test tour, setting aside security worries following deadly bomb blasts in the country and in neighbouring Pakistan. The 15-man squad will spend the next week training in Jaipur before flying to Hyderabad for a four-day match against the Indian board president's XI from October 2. That will be Australia's only warm-up before the first Test starts in Bangalore on October 9. The remaining Tests will be played in Mohali, New Delhi and Nagpur. The highly-anticipated tour had been placed in doubt after five co-ordinated bomb blasts ripped through crowded markets in New Delhi on September 13, killing more than 20 people. A suicide attack on the Marriott Hotel in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad on Saturday that killed 53 people and wounded 266 forced Ponting to admit security concerns were on his mind before the team left Australia. "I've done it all day today, I've had a lot of discussions with my wife about those exact issues," Ponting said in Sydney on Sunday. "Our advice was not to go to Pakistan and the advice that we received the last few weeks to tour India has been positive." Australia cancelled a Test tour of Pakistan in March and also raised security concerns about this month's Champions Trophy there, forcing the tournament to be put off by a year.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Nootropics, popularly referred to as "smart drugs", "smart nutrients", "cognitive enhancers" and "brain enhancers", are a class of drugs that improve impaired human cognitive abilities (the functions and capacities of the brain). The term covers a broad range of substances including drugs, nutrients and herbs that have purported cognitive enhancing effects.
The word nootropic was coined in 1964 by the Romanian Dr. Corneliu E. Giurgea, derived from the Greek words noos, or "mind," and tropein meaning "to bend/turn". Typically, nootropics are alleged to work by altering the availability of the brain's supply of neurochemicals (neurotransmitters, enzymes, and hormones), by improving the brain's oxygen supply, or by stimulating nerve growth. However the efficacy of alleged nootropic substances in most cases has not been conclusively determined. This is complicated by the difficulty of defining and quantifying cognition and intelligence.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Pharmacogenomics is the whole genome application of pharmacogenetics, which examines the single gene interactions with drugs.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
In telecommunications and computing, a data stream is a sequence of digitally encoded coherent signals (packets of data or datapackets) used to transmit or receive information that is in transmission.
In electronics and computer architecture, a data stream determines for which time which data item is scheduled to enter or leave which port of a systolic array, a Reconfigurable Data Path Array or similar pipe network, or other processing unit or block. Often the data stream is seen as the counterpart of an instruction stream, since the von Neumann machine is instruction-stream-driven, whereas its counterpart, the Anti machine is data-stream-driven.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
In addition, when first turned on in these conditions, some non-assisted GPS units may not be able to download the almanac and ephemeris information from the GPS satellites, rendering them unable to function until a clear signal can be received continuously for up to one minute.
An A-GPS receiver can address these problems in several ways, using an Assistance Server:
* The Assistance Server can locate the phone roughly by what cell site it is connected to on the cellular network.
* The Assistance Server has a good satellite signal, and lots of computation power, so it can compare fragmentary signals relayed to it by cell phones, with the satellite signal it receives directly, and then inform the cell phone or emergency services of the cell phone's position.
* It can supply orbital data for the GPS satellites to the cell phone, enabling the cell phone to lock to the satellites when it otherwise could not, and autonomously calculate its position.
* By having accurate, surveyed coordinates for the cell site towers, it can have better knowledge of ionospheric conditions and other errors affecting the GPS signal than the cell phone alone, enabling more precise calculation of position. (See also Wide Area Augmentation System)
Some A-GPS solutions require an active connection to a cell phone (or other data) network to function, in others it simply makes positioning faster and more accurate, but is not required.
As an additional benefit, it can reduce both the amount of CPU and programming required for a GPS Phone by offloading most of the work onto the assistance server. (This is not a large amount for a basic GPS – many early GPSs utilized Intel 80386-class 16MHz CPUs or similar hardware.)
High Sensitivity GPS is an allied technology that addresses some of the same issues in a way that does not require additional infrastructure. However, unlike some forms of A-GPS, high sensitivity GPS cannot provide instant fixes when the phone has been off for some time.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Video logs (vlogs) also often take advantage of web syndication to allow for the distribution of video over the Internet using either the RSS or Atom syndication formats, for automatic aggregation and playback on mobile devices and personal computers
Vlogging saw a strong increase in popularity beginning in 2005. The Yahoo! Videoblogging Group saw its membership increase dramatically in 2005 . The most popular video sharing site to date, YouTube, founded in February 2005, was publicly launched between August and November 2005. The BBC launched their first official video blog in October 2006, with a feature allowing children to name a new Blue Peter puppy. Many open source content management systems, like WordPress or Drupal, enable posting of video content allowing bloggers to host and administer their own video blogging sites. Moreover, convergence of mobile phones with digital cameras allow publishing of video content to the Web almost as it is recorded.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
A strapdown system has a dynamic measurement range several hundred times that required by a gimbaled system. That is, it must integrate the vehicle's attitude changes in pitch, roll and yaw, as well as gross movements. Gimballed systems could usually do well with update rates of 50 to 60 updates per second. However, strapdown systems normally update about 2000 times per second. The higher rate is needed to keep the maximum angular measurement within a practical range for real rate gyros: about 4 milliradians. Most rate gyros are now laser interferometers.
The data updating algorithms ("direction cosines" or "quaternions") involved are too complex to be accurately performed except by digital electronics. However, digital computers are now so inexpensive and fast that rate gyro systems can now be practically used and mass-produced. The Apollo lunar module used a strapdown system in its backup Abort Guidance System (AGS).
Strapdown systems are nowadays commonly used in commercial and tactical applications (arcraft, missiles, etc). However they are still not widespread in applications where superb accuracy is required (like submarine navigation or strategic ICBM guidance).
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
From a technical perspective, a Transaction Processing System (or Transaction Processing Monitor) monitors transaction programs, a special kind of programs. The essence of a transaction program is that it manages data that must be left in a consistent state. E.g. if an electronic payment is made, the amount must be either both withdrawn from one account and added to the other, or none at all. In case of a failure preventing transaction completion, the partially executed transaction must be 'rolled back' by the TPS. While this type of integrity must be provided also for batch transaction processing, it is particularly important for online processing: if e.g. an airline seat reservation system is accessed by multiple operators, after an empty seat inquiry, the seat reservation data must be locked until the reservation is made, otherwise another user may get the impression a seat is still free while it is actually being booked at the time. Without proper transaction monitoring, double bookings may occur. Other transaction monitor functions include deadlock detection and resolution (deadlocks may be inevitable in certain cases of cross-dependence on data), and transaction logging (in 'journals') for 'forward recovery' in case of massive failures.
Transaction Processing is not limited to application programs. The 'journaled file system' provided with IBMs AIX Unix operating system employs similar techniques to maintain file system integrity, including a journal.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as
Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Some object-oriented databases are designed to work well with object-oriented programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, Visual Basic .NET, C++ and Smalltalk. Others have their own programming languages. ODBMSs use exactly the same model as object-oriented programming languages.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
E-mail spam slowly but exponentially grew for several decades to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Laws against spam have been sporadically implemented, with some being opt-out and others requiring opt in e-mail. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most e-mail users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. About 80% of all spam is sent by fewer than 200 spammers. Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers, are used to send about 80% of spam. The cost of spam is borne mostly by the recipient, so it is a form of postage due advertising.
