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Updated 271 Days ago
Update on Swayze Terminal Illness Story: Another Tabloid Claims Confirmation
by George Sells
“Actor Patrick Swayze has been diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer and is currently undergoing treatment. Patrick’s physician Dr. George Fisher states, ‘Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far. All of the reports stating the timeframe of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue. We are considerably more optimistic.’ Patrick is continuing his normal schedule during this time, which includes working on upcoming projects. The outpouring of support and concern he has already received from the public is deeply appreciated by Patrick and his family.”
Update: The New York Post (not exactly the bastion of journalism either)reports Patrick Swayze's publicist has confirmed the National Enquirer Report discussed below. It's looking more like the dream that the Enquirer is full of it was just wishful thinking. My thoughts before the Post report:
Patrick Swayze has five weeks to live. That's the report spreading like wildfire across the internet. But the source of the information provides at least a little hope that reports of Swayze's demise are premature. It comes from the National Enquirer.
The tabloid claims to have an inside source revealing that Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. Treatments at Stanford University reportedly have failed, leaving the star of such legendary 80's and 90's flicks as "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost" with five weeks to live. 
But other gossipers provide hope for Swayze fans. Perez Hilton cites another "insider" who says Swayze has been showing up on the set of a new movie like clockwork, "and he definitely does not look like he has 5 more weeks of life left…im
not sure of his medical condition(s), but if he is gravely ill, he is
hiding it very well."So what does it all mean? Well here's how some of the mainstream media is handling it. CNN.com hasn't touched it so far. Fox News has the report on it's site but is VERY CAREFUL to attribute all the reporting to the National Enquirer. USA Today hasn't laid a finger on it. The same goes for People Magazine and the New York Times.
You'll also note the other front page headlines on the latest edition of the grocery store gossip rag, "Obama's Secrets" and "Britney Aborts Baby" have not turned up anywhere else. I guess we can just hope the Enquirer lives up to its reputation as bird cage liner, and little else.
Either way, click on the video tab for one of Patrick Swayze's funniest TV moments, compliments of Saturday Night Live.
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I think I need to buy the North & South miniseries(s) on DVD now...that's when I first fell in love with him.
The irony is that his Roadhouse co-star Jeff Healey passed away from cancer last weekend.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.