Archive for January 12th, 2008
January 12th, 2008 -- Posted in Portraits To Art |
Is Your Drinking Water Filter System Protecting Your Health?
An in-home drinking water filter system is becoming more important every day. We can no longer rely on the drinking water filter system provided by public utilities to protect our health.
Those systems were designed to prevent cholera outbreaks and other immediately noticeable health issues. They rely heavily on chlorine disinfection to accomplish that task. We now know that chlorine disinfection is only effective some of the time. We also know that chlorine, itself, is a threat to our health.
A good in-home drinking water filter system will remove chlorine, but the best systems are designed to take care of all the impurities in your water, those that are thrown in by nature, the environment and us. An excellent drinking water filter system will also balance the mineral content and the pH level, leaving us with the healthiest water that can be found.
All of us have done something to contaminate the water supply. Whether by using bug sprays and weed killers or simply by using the toilet, there are many things in the water that we put there.
Some people think that drinking water straight from the tap is safe, because there are no immediate symptoms. They also think that the government would not allow treatment facilities to send us water that contains large amounts of contaminants. The truth is quite different.
Federal standards for drinking water are based on how much of a single chemical would be toxic to a 175 pound adult. Those of us who have children must invest in a better drinking water filter system. Else, we are endangering the health of our children.
Many adults do not weigh 175 pounds. Depending on your height, it could be unhealthy to weigh that much. But, unless you do, the government standards are not protecting you from a single chemical. And, over two thousand different chemicals have been found in tap water. Scientists have warned the government that two or more of these chemicals can interact and the detrimental effects would be 600 times greater than what you would see with one chemical alone.
The scientists and environmental groups want the government to require that treatment facilities install a better drinking water filter system. But, that’s unlikely to happen in our lifetime. A more technologically advanced drinking water filter system would be more expensive. The cheapest choice is to add chlorine and hope for the best.
The drinking water filter system used by most facilities is not much better than the clay pot that was prevalent in India, before chemical contamination became a problem. In other countries, time has moved forward. Their drinking water might be safer.
Here in the United States, we have to face the facts. This is not something that promoters have blown out of proportion. This is the truth. Government agencies, environmentalists, researchers, scientists, reporters and health care professionals all say the same thing. Without a good drinking water filter system, our water is not safe to drink.
Our only choice is to invest in a technologically advanced drinking water filter system of our own. In-home units are reasonably priced and can do the whole job.
Dominic Anderton is a researcher on the health benefits of purified drinking and bath water. Visit his site now at http://www.pure-and-safe-water.com/ to get the facts on how to choose the best water purification system.
Is Your Drinking Water Filter System Protecting Your Health? / Author: Dominic Anderton
January 12th, 2008 -- Posted in Portraits To Art |
Trekking in Himalayas-kailash travel in Himachal Pradesh-India
It was pitch–blank darkness, the journey was steep & I was regretting my decision to travel to this end of land unaware of the splendour of place called ManiMahesh. The himalayan trek was arduous, muscle-tightening and I could clearly hear gurgling noise of mighty river “Ravi”.We had reached Barmour, located 60 kms from Chamba in.Himachal Pradesh-India.We started next morning at 4.30 A.M. & reached Hadsar, located 10 kms from here which is the starting point of travel(yatra). The road ended here and all places from here are approachable by foot.
The initial feeling of regret gave way to stunning, spell-bound reaction as the day opened up because of splendid raw Himalayan beauty of the place.We were walking for the last one & half hour & the trek was devoid of hustle and bustle. I was trying to imbibe the beauty of this place deep in my existence and enjoying the stillness, silence of this place. Only noise I could hear was of mighty river “Ravi”.
We kept moving and come across a beautiful waterfall named Dhanchoe. The variety of wildlife was immense and I would hear persistent chirping of birds. The entire trek was criss-crossing the mighty turbulent River Ravi.. The journey took us through tight treks, green valleys & provided wonderful experience.I was told by my friend that river Ravi originates from these snow covered mountains.
The last part of journey was quite difficult and persistent encouragement of my friend was the great motivation to keep me moving. We were walking for last 6 hours & finally on the top. The saying that weather on high mountains is highly unpredictable proved itself within 10 minutes of reaching at ManiMahesh lake, heavy fog & mist covered the whole area. It started raining. We were very lucky as we found a tent near the Manimahesh lake & unfortunately confined there for at least hour.
At 2.30 P.M. rain stopped, sensing the possibility of opening up of weather remote, we decided to climb-down with heavy heart. Lord Shiva did not oblige us & heavy fog covered sacred mountain.The down-hill walk in continuous heavy rainfall on a muddy, non-existent trail was serious, unromantic and never ending. After continuous walk, we reached Hadsar at about 7 P.M.& rushed towards Barmour. When we reached at our night shelter I felt relieved. Despite all, it was an amazing, memorable and wonderful religious journey.
Title:-Trekking in Himalayas-kailash travel in Himachal Pradesh-India
About Author:-Bharat Gupta is a nature photographer & lover of life in all its hues.He has traveled extensively in the Indian Himalayas. This article is aimed at helping budding photographer to know the basics of this wonderful hobby.For more information please lg on to www.adventurersparadise.com
Trekking in Himalayas-kailash travel in Himachal Pradesh-India / Author: bharat gupta
January 12th, 2008 -- Posted in Portraits To Art |
Semantic Search Technology
Today, whether you are at your PC or wandering the corporate halls with your PDA, searching the Web has become an essential part of doing business. As a result, commercial search engines have become very lucrative and companies such as Google and Yahoo! have become household names.
In ranking Web pages, search engines follow a certain set of rules with the goal to return the most relevant pages at the top of their lists. To do this, they look for the location and frequency of keywords and phrases. Keywords, however, are subject to the two well-known linguistic phenomena that strongly degrade a query’s precision and recall: Polysemy (one word might have several meanings) and Synonymy (several words or phrases might designate the same concept).
There are three characteristics required for search engine performance in order to separate useful searches from fruitless ones:
* Maximum relevant information,
* Minimum irrelevant information and,
* Meaningful ranking, with the most relevant results first.
In addition, some search engines use Googel’s approach to ranking which assess popularity by the number of links that are pointing to a given site. The heart of Google search software is PageRank, a system that relies on the vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. It interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Important sites receive a higher PageRank. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important,’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’
Nevertheless, it is still common for searches to return too many unwanted results and often miss important information. Recently, Google and other innovators have been seeking to implement limited natural language (semantic) search. Semantic search methods could improve traditional results by using, not just words, but concepts and logical relationships. Two approaches to semantics are Semantic Web Documents and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).
LSI is an information retrieval method that organizes existing HTML information into a semantic structure that takes advantage of some of the implicit higher-order associations of words with text objects. The resulting structure reflects the major associative patterns in the data. This permits retrieval based on the ‘latent’ semantic content of the existing Web documents, rather than just on keyword matches. LSI offers an application method that can be implemented immediately with existing Web documentation. In a semantic network, the meaning of content is better represented and logical connections are formed.
However, most semantic-network-based search engines suffer performance problems because of the scale of the very large semantic network. In order for the semantic search to be effective in finding responsive results, the network must contain a great deal of relevant information. At the same time, a large network creates difficulties in processing the many possible paths to a relevant solution.
Most of the early efforts on semantic-based search engines were highly dependent on natural language processing techniques to parse and understand the query sentence. One of the first and the most popular of these search engines is Cycorp (http://www.cyc.com). Cyc combines the world’s largest knowledge base with the Web. Cyc (which takes it name from en-cyc-lopedia) is an immense, multi-contextual knowledge based. With Cyc Knowledge Server it is possible for Web sites to add common-sense intelligence and distinguish different meanings of ambiguous concepts.
For more information about technology innovations and Web video see the following references.
REFERENCES
Connections: Patterns of Discovery
Developing Semantic Web Services
Web Site: Video Software Lab
Semantic Search Technology / Author: H. Peter Alesso
Occupation:
H. Peter Alesso is an innovator with twenty years of research experience at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). As Engineering Group Leader at LLNL, he led a team of computer scientists and engineers in a wide range of successful software and hardware research projects. He has published several software titles, numerous scientific journal and conference articles, and five books.
http://www.videosoftwarelab.com