Yet Another Optical Illusion

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Great People talk about ideas

"Great People talk about ideas.
Average People talk about things.
Small People talk about other people. "

Steve Jobs has Cancer

Whenever Steve Jobs takes a medical leave, chaos erupts in the Apple community. Rumors fly back and forth of what could possibly be wrong. The latest one is that Steve has been seen at the Stanford Cancer Center receiving treatment.

In more positive news though, he was also spotted at the Silicon Valley Summit last night for dinner with Obama and other tech giants. Details after the jump.

President Obama sat down and had dinner with a ton of industry leader’s last night, including Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt included, just to point out some names.

Who sat next to the man himself? Steve and Mark of course. Interesting to see because this is the first picture of Steve since he went on medical leave, although you can’t really see too much of him.

The news about his cancer coming back broke Radar Online reported that Steve Jobs was spotted at the Stanford Cancer Center, presumably receiving ongoing treatment. Photos of Jobs are to be published in U.S. tabloid The National Enquirer.

Obviously everyone is already reporting the worse, but as far as everyone knows, we DON’T know. We can only hope that Steve gets better, and that his privacy is somewhat respected despite being a celebrity. theappera.com

Another guest blog. Enjoy

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs is one of the most well known business personalities in recent times. Very few know, however, that he is a cancer patient.

Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. Called islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, this is a rare form of pancreatic cancer, which required Jobs to have a tumor removed from his pancreas. The process is called pancreaticoduodenectomy (or "Whipple procedure"), and it appeared that the tumor had been successfully removed. He was not required to have chemo or radiation.

Late in 2008, Bloomberg mistakenly published an obituary of Steve Jobs, with date and cause of death left blank. Though this was quickly corrected, this fueled intense speculation about his health. Then, in January, 2009, Jobs took a 6 month leave from work “on health concerns.” While he continued to implicitly deny questions about cancer, it has been known that he underwent a liver replacement surgery in April, 2009 in Memphis, TN.

Ordinarily, a liver replacement requires patients to be on a waitlist until a donor is found. But Jobs’ private jet enabled him to get on two waitlists simultaneously, and he chose Memphis. Over 6000 liver transplants are performed in the US every year, but region 11 of the United Network for Organ Sharing, to which Memphis belongs, has a relatively shorter waiting period.

A liver transplant operation is a lengthy process. It can take anywhere from between 5-6 hours to more than 10 hours in cases of complications. The transplant requires a large incision in the stomach (upper abdomen). The liver is removed after cutting a number of ligaments that hold it in place, as well as several ducts, arteries and veins.

While a new liver is being procured from a recently deceased donor, the blood from the liver is replaced with a very cold liquid. The new liver has to be placed in the empty liver cavity and tied to the severed ligaments, ducts and blood vessels. To prevent the body from rejecting the foreign organ, patients are often required to take immunosuppressive drugs throughout their lives.

The surgery is followed by a lengthy recovery process, but the survival rate is pretty high. Survival rate of 5 plus years is over 90 percent at good facilities.

In Steve Jobs’ case, recovery was said to have been splendid. He was said to have completely recouped from the procedure. Medical experts say that if Jobs did this procedure, it means that even if his cancer had spread to the liver, it did not metastasize any further. That is because most hospitals will not perform a liver transplant on you if your cancer had already spread beyond the liver.

Apple is perhaps one of the most widely known and generally liked companies of today. It has been led by Steve Jobs’ innovation and smart business sense. It is sad that somebody like Jobs has had to go through this at the pretty early age of 50. But, perhaps, even something as evil as cancer can produce some good results, probably in the form of a research endorsement from Jobs to discover better treatments for liver cancer.

About the guest blogger:


We've got everything you need to know about arthritis. But if there is a question unanswered, send us an email and we will answer your question to the best of our knowledge, or at least will give you the resources to help you reach your goal. We are a group of caregivers whose family members are suffering from arthritis. This condition is a very common disease and has caused much distress to their victims. Nearly 1 in 5 adults have some form of arthritis. That's 46 million Americans affected. Americans age 65 and over are most likely at risk, but two-thirds of the cases are under 65. Women are more at risk than men. Please help us spread the word for prevention.


matthewr.chan@yahoo.com

Mel is the producer/co-host of The Vic McCarty Show 10am-Noon Monday-Friday eastern standard time. Listen live on wmktthetalkstation.com"

article from thecancerwarrior blog

Watson

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system which answers questions posed in natural language,developed in IBM's DeepQA project by principal investigator David Ferruci and a research team. Watson was named for IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson. The program operates on POWER7 processor-based systems.

In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show's first and only human-versus-machine matchup. In a two-game, combined-point match, which was broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes broadcast from February 14–16, Watson bested Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship series. Watson received the first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM divided Watson's winnings between two charities.

In the match, all contestants, including Watson, had to wait until host Alex Trebek spoke each clue entirely, then a light was lit as a signal; the first to activate their buzzer button won the chance to answer. Although Watson suffers from cognitive deficiencies when analyzing the clue's contexts, it typically activated its button faster than its opponents. Watson also only had trouble answering a few categories, such as short clues containing only a few words. For each clue, Watson's three most probable answers were displayed by the television screen. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of hard disk storage, including the full text of Wikipedia. Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game.
- source wikipedia

Grand Challenges serve as a way for the computer science community to explore the limits of what computers can do. These challenges push the boundaries of computing and lead to industry transformations that make our planet smarter.

The next challenge? A computer that can understand and respond to human language that will change the way we interact with machines. Watson, the IBM system designed to play Jeopardy!, represents a breakthrough in language processing and analytics. Watson will be playing against two of the most well-known and successful Jeopardy! Champions - Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter - in a two-match contest to be aired over three consecutive nights beginning on February 14, 2011 on US TV.

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Watson represents the future of systems design, where workload optimized systems are tailored to fit the requirements of a new era of smarter planet solutions.

Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and DeepQA technology to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds.

Watch the video (03:01min) featuring Dr. Dave Ferrucci, principal investigator for the IBM Research team responsible for building Watson, as he and other IBMers talk about how Watson’s DeepQA technology exploits the massive parallelism capability of POWER7 processors.

Program Description

"Watson," an IBM computing system, is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge—taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent."

On February 16, 2011, two AI experts from Carnegie Mellon University, Tom Mitchell and Eric Nyberg, live-blogged and answered viewer questions here during the final of three consecutive Jeopardy! shows in which Watson challenged top human competitors Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

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