Good
I am Sorry!
Rules for Pranyams
Importance Of Pranyam And Its Benefits
Pranayama has the capacity of freeing the mind from untruthfulness, ignorance and all other painful and unpleasant experiences of the body and mind; and when the mind becomes clean it becomes easy for the Sadhaka to concentrate on the desired object and it becomes possible for him to progress further in the direction of Dhyana and Samadhi.
By Yog asanas, we remove the distortions and disabilities of the physical body and bring it into discipline. However Pranayama influences the subtle and the physical bodies in a greater measure than Yogsanas do and that too in a perceptible manner. In the human body, lungs, heart and brain hold very important positions and they depend on each other heavily for their health.
Physically, Pranayam appears to be a systematic exercise of respiration, which makes the lungs stronger, improves blood circulation, makes the man healthier and bestows upon him the boon of a long life. Physiology teaches us that the air (Prana) we breathe in fills our lungs, spreads in the entire body, providing it with essential form the body, take them to the heart and then to the lungs, which throws the useless material like carbon dioxide out of the body through the act of exhalation. If this action of the respiratory system is done regularly and efficiently, lungs become stronger and blood becomes pure.
However, most of the people do not ha ve the habit of breathing deeply with the result that only one-fourth part of the lungs is brought into action and 75 percent remains idle. Like the honeycomb, lungs are made of about 73 million cells, comparable to a sponge in their making. On normal breathing, to which we all are accustomed, only about 20 million pores in the lungs get oxygen, whereas remaining 53 million pores remain deprived of the benefit, with the result that they get contaminated by several diseases like tuberculosis, respiratory diseases and several ailments like coughing, bronchitis etc.
In this way, the inefficient functioning of the lungs affects the process of blood purification. Heart weakens because of this with a constant possibility of untimely death. It is for this reason that the importance of Pranayama has come to be recognised, for a healthy long life. Several diseases can be averted by regular practice of Pranayama.Hence, it is obvious that the knowledge of the science of Pranayama and its regular practice enables a man to lead a healthy and long life. It is for this reason that in several Hindu religious rites, Pranayama is found to have been introduced as an essential element.
Mental disturbances like excitement, anxiety, fear, anger, disappointment, lust for sex (lasciviousness) and other mental perversions can be calmed down by regular practice of Pranayama. Besides, Pranayama practice improves the functions of the brain cells with the result that memory and the faculty of discrimination and observation improves, making it easy for the Sadhaka to perform concentration and meditation.
Another benefit of Pranayama is that by its regular practice, habit of deep breathing is developed which results in several health benefits. It is said that the nature determines our life span on the basis of the number of respirations we do. Man gets the next birth in accordance with his karmas (deeds) done in the present life.
Our karmas (deeds) result in the formation of certain tendencies, which determine the nature of our next birth either as humans or as animals of various categories. A man, who regularly performs Pranayama, is required to take lesser number of breaths and therefore lives longer.
Some rules for Pranayam
- Select a clean and peaceful place for doing Pranayama. If possible, choose a place near a clean pond or river.
- As there is a lot of pollution in the cities, some kind of incense can be lit like Guggulu and purified butter, to create a clean environment at that place, igniting a lamp with purified butter only, can also serve the purpose.
- Sit either in any of the Asanas, viz. Padmasana, Sidhasana or Vajrasana, which ever you find convenient. The sheet or cloth (cotton or wool etc.) on which you sit must be a non-conductor of electricity.
- Breathe only through the nose, because by doing so the air which you take in, is filtered. During daytime when you are not sitting for the performance of Pranayama make it a habit to do respire only through nose and not through mouth. Nasal respiration keeps the temperature of the Nadis (Vessels) –'Ida',Pingala and 'susmana' even. It also prevents foreign and harmful objects from getting into lungs.
- Like ‘Yog’, Pranayama should also be performed four or five hours after taking food. In the morning Pranayama should be done after finishing daily routine acts like cleansing mouth, emptying of bowels etc., it should also be done before Yogsana. In the beginning Pranayama should be done for five or ten minutes gradually the time may be increased up to about 1/2 or 1 hour. Maintain a specific number of repetitions and do not variate. Maintain a specific rhythm. If it is not possible to clean the bowels by morning, at night take some mild laxative like terminalia chebula (Indian Hardaya) or any other mild laxative (a non habit forming medicinal herb having a laxative effect). Kapala-bhati Pranayama, if done regularly for a few days will help in curing constipation.
- Keep your mind calm and composed. However, Pranayama can also calm down the disturbed mind and keep one happy.
Methods of Pranayama may be varied according to the seasons and your own physical make up and mental attitude. Keep this in mind and modulate the method accordingly. Some Pranayama increase the body temperature, whereas, some bring it down. Some Pranayama maintain the temperature at the normal level.
- If you feel fatigued in the course of doing Pranayama , rest for sometime and then begin deep breathing, which will remove the fatigue.
- Pregnant women, hungry persons, persons suffering from fever and those who are lustful having no control on their passions should not do Pranayama . If you are sick, keep in mind the instructions to be followed by sick persons while during Pranayama.
- For prolonged exercises of Pranayama, observance of celibacy is necessary. Besides, food should be simple not containing irritating spices. It should be ‘Sattvika’ – (Plain and simple, non-spicy food). Use of cow’s milk, ghee (clarified butter), fruits and green vegetables can be said to be ideal food. Moderation also is a good rule to observe.
- Do not strain yourself while doing ‘Kumbhak’ i.e. retaining the breathed air inside or keeping the air out after exhaling (Breathing in is called ‘puraka’, retaining the breathed air in is called ‘Kumbhak’ and exhaling the air is called ‘Recak').
- Pranayama does not mean just breathing in, keeping the breathed air in and exhaling it. It also means establishing control on the entire breathing process, and maintaining mental equilibrium, and concentration of mind.
- It is beneficial to chant the mantra (a group of words that carry vibrations and energy) Om (the first cosmic soundless sound), aloud and repeat the same several times before doing Pranayama. Even recital of sacred songs in the praise of almighty God or recital of some sacred hymns may be beneficial. This will calm your mind and make you fit for Pranayama, because a peaceful mind is very essential while doing Pranayama . Mental or loud recitation of Gayatri Mantra (considered as one of the greatest mantra, used in meditation and also for chanting) or any other sacred hymn brings spiritual benefits to the Sadhaka.
See that while doing Pranayama , none of your organs such as mouth, eyes, nose, etc. feels any strain and it should be done gradually without any undue stress or strain. All the organs of the body should be kept in normal condition. While doing Pranayama sit in an erect posture. Keep your spine and neck straight. This is essential for reaping the full benefit of Pranayama . - If possible Pranayama should be done after your usual morning functions like cleansing of mouth, evacuation of bowels, bathing etc. However, if it becomes necessary for you to take bath after Pranayama , keep an interval of about 15 to 20 minutes between Pranayama and bathing. For acquiring proficiency in Pranayama do not depend on books or what is done and preached by others. Seek the guidance of an expert and do Pranayama under his direct supervision.
· Different treatise advocating or dealing with the subject of Pranayama describe several methods and each of them has its own importance. However, it is not possible for most people to do all these exercises daily. Hence, with the blessings of our teachers and in view of our experience, we have evolved seven methods of Pranayama , which incorporate into themselves, almost all the peculiarities of Pranayama rendering them scientific and useful from a spiritual point of view. All these seven types of Pranayama can be done, as a routine and in a time bound programme of about 20 minutes. The person who does these exercises daily and regularly can attain following benefits which are briefly described as under:
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The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works
The Google Pagerank Algorithm
and How It Works
Ian Rogers
IPR Computing Ltd.
ian@iprcom.com
Introduction
Page Rank is a topic much discussed by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts. At the heart of PageRank is a mathematical formula that seems scary to look at but is actually fairly simple to understand.
Despite this many people seem to get it wrong! In particular “Chris Ridings of www.searchenginesystems.net” has written a paper entitled “PageRank Explained: Everything you’ve always wanted to know about PageRank”, pointed to by many people, that contains a fundamental mistake early on in the explanation! Unfortunately this means some of the recommendations in the paper are not quite accurate.
By showing code to correctly calculate real PageRank I hope to achieve several things in this response:
- Clearly explain how PageRank is calculated.
- Go through every example in Chris’ paper, and add some more of my own, showing the correct PageRank for each diagram. By showing the code used to calculate each diagram I’ve opened myself up to peer review - mostly in an effort to make sure the examples are correct, but also because the code can help explain the PageRank calculations.
- Describe some principles and observations on website design based on these correctly calculated examples.
Any good web designer should take the time to fully understand how PageRank really works - if you don’t then your site’s layout could be seriously hurting your Google listings!
[Note: I have nothing in particular against Chris. If I find any other papers on the subject I’ll try to comment evenly]
How is PageRank Used?
PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and PageRank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.
PageRank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you’ve installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). But the Toolbar PageRank only goes from 0 – 10 and seems to be something like a logarithmic scale:
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We can’t know the exact details of the scale because, as we’ll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest appropriately.
Also the toolbar sometimes guesses! The toolbar often shows me a Toolbar PR for pages I’ve only just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index yet!
What seems to be happening is that the toolbar looks at the URL of the page the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last “/” (i.e. it goes to the “parent” page in URL terms). If Google has a Toolbar PR for that parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that as the Toolbar PR for this page. If there’s no PR for the parent it goes to the parent’s parent’s page, but subtracting 2, and so on all the way up to the root of your site. If it can’t find a Toolbar PR to display in this way, that is if it doesn’t find a page with a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out.
Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page is 0 - though its PR will be calculated shortly after the Google spider first sees it.
PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it’s written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link!
Definitions
I’ve started to use some technical terms and shorthand in this paper. Now’s as good a time as any to define all the terms I’ll use:
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That’s enough of that, let’s get back to the meat…
So what is PageRank?
In short PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there’s no support (but it’s an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page).
Quoting from the original Google paper, PageRank is defined like this:
We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one.
PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.
but that’s not too helpful so let’s break it down into sections.
- PR(Tn) - Each page has a notion of its own self-importance. That’s “PR(T1)” for the first page in the web all the way up to “PR(Tn)” for the last page
- C(Tn) - Each page spreads its vote out evenly amongst all of it’s outgoing links. The count, or number, of outgoing links for page 1 is “C(T1)”, “C(Tn)” for page n, and so on for all pages.
- PR(Tn)/C(Tn) - so if our page (page A) has a backlink from page “n” the share of the vote page A will get is “PR(Tn)/C(Tn)”
- d(... - All these fractions of votes are added together but, to stop the other pages having too much influence, this total vote is “damped down” by multiplying it by 0.85 (the factor “d”)
- (1 - d) - The (1 – d) bit at the beginning is a bit of probability math magic so the “sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one”: it adds in the bit lost by the d(.... It also means that if a page has no links to it (no backlinks) even then it will still get a small PR of 0.15 (i.e. 1 – 0.85). (Aside: the Google paper says “the sum of all pages” but they mean the “the normalised sum” – otherwise known as “the average” to you and me.
How is PageRank Calculated?
This is where it gets tricky. The PR of each page depends on the PR of the pages pointing to it. But we won’t know what PR those pages have until the pages pointing to them have their PR calculated and so on… And when you consider that page links can form circles it seems impossible to do this calculation!
But actually it’s not that bad. Remember this bit of the Google paper:
PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.
What that means to us is that we can just go ahead and calculate a page’s PR without knowing the final value of the PR of the other pages. That seems strange but, basically, each time we run the calculation we’re getting a closer estimate of the final value. So all we need to do is remember the each value we calculate and repeat the calculations lots of times until the numbers stop changing much.
Lets take the simplest example network: two pages, each pointing to the other:
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Each page has one outgoing link (the outgoing count is 1, i.e. C(A) = 1 and C(B) = 1).
Guess 1
We don’t know what their PR should be to begin with, so let’s take a guess at 1.0 and do some calculations:
| d | = 0.85 |
| PR(A) | = (1 – d) + d(PR(B)/1) |
| PR(B) | = (1 – d) + d(PR(A)/1) |
i.e.
| PR(A) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 1 |
| PR(B) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 1 |
Hmm, the numbers aren’t changing at all! So it looks like we started out with a lucky guess!!!
Guess 2
No, that’s too easy, maybe I got it wrong (and it wouldn’t be the first time). Ok, let’s start the guess at 0 instead and re-calculate:
| PR(A) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0 |
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| PR(B) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.15 | NB. we’ve already calculated a “next best guess” at PR(A) so we use it here |
And again:
| PR(A) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.2775 |
| PR(B) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.385875 |
And again
| PR(A) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.47799375 |
| PR(B) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.5562946875 |
and so on. The numbers just keep going up. But will the numbers stop increasing when they get to 1.0? What if a calculation over-shoots and goes above 1.0?
Guess 3
Well let’s see. Let’s start the guess at 40 each and do a few cycles:
PR(A) = 40
PR(B) = 40
First calculation
| PR(A) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 40 |
| PR(B) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.385875 |
And again
| PR(A) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 29.1775 |
| PR(B) | = 0.15 + 0.85 * 24.950875 |
Yup, those numbers are heading down alright! It sure looks the numbers will get to 1.0 and stop
Here’s the code used to calculate this example starting the guess at 0: Show the code | Run the program
- Principle: it doesn’t matter where you start your guess, once the PageRank calculations have settled down, the “normalized probability distribution” (the average PageRank for all pages) will be 1.0
Getting the answer quicker
How many times do we need to repeat the calculation for big networks? That’s a difficult question; for a network as large as the World Wide Web it can be many millions of iterations! The “damping factor” is quite subtle. If it’s too high then it takes ages for the numbers to settle, if it’s too low then you get repeated over-shoot, both above and below the average - the numbers just swing about the average like a pendulum and never settle down.
Also choosing the order of calculations can help. The answer will always come out the same no matter which order you choose, but some orders will get you there quicker than others.
I’m sure there’s been several Master’s Thesis on how to make this calculation as efficient as possible, but, in the examples below, I’ve used very simple code for clarity and roughly 20 to 40 iterations were needed!
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I’m not going to repeat the calculations here, but you can see them by running the program (yes, if you click the link the program really is re-run to do the calculations for you)
So the correct PR for the example is:
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You can see it took about 20 iterations before the network began to settle on these values!
Look at Page D though - it has a PR of 0.15 even though no-one is voting for it (i.e. it has no incoming links)! Is this right?
The first part, or "term" to be techinal, of the PR equation is doing this:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
So, for Page D, no backlinks means the equation looks like this:
| PR(A) | = (1-d) + d * (0) |
no matter what else is going on or how many times you do it.
Observation: every page has at least a PR of 0.15 to share out. But this may only be in theory - there are rumours that Google undergoes a post-spidering phase whereby any pages that have no incoming links at all are completely deleted from the index...
A simple hierarchy with some outgoing links
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As you’d expect, the home page has the most PR – after all, it has the most incoming links! But what’s happened to the average? It’s only 0.378!!! That doesn’t tie up with what I said earlier so something is wrong somewhere!
Well no, everything is fine. But take a look at the “external site” pages – what’s happening to their PageRank? They’re not passing it on, they’re not voting for anyone, they’re wasting their PR like so much pregnant chad!!! (NB, a more accurate description of this issue can be found in this thread)
Let’s link those external sites back into our home page just so we can see what happens to the average…
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That’s better - it does work after all! And look at the PR of our home page! All those incoming links sure make a difference – we’ll talk more about that later.
What happens to PR if we follow a suggestion about writing page reviews?
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A simple hierarchy
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Our home page has 2 and a half times as much PR as the child pages! Excellent!
- Observation: a hierarchy concentrates votes and PR into one page
Looping
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This is what we’d expect. All the pages have the same number of incoming links, all pages are of equal importance to each other, all pages get the same PR of 1.0 (i.e. the “average” probability).
Extensive Interlinking – or Fully Meshed
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Yes, the results are the same as the Looping example above and for the same reasons.
Hierarchical – but with a link in and one out.
We’ll assume there’s an external site that has lots of pages and links with the result that one of the pages has the average PR of 1.0. We’ll also assume the webmaster really likes us – there’s just one link from that page and it’s pointing at our home page.
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In example 5 the home page only had a PR of 1.92 but now it is 3.31! Excellent! Not only has site A contributed 0.85 PR to us, but the raised PR in the “About”, “Product” and “More” pages has had a lovely “feedback” effect, pushing up the home page’s PR even further!
- Priciple: a well structured site will amplify the effect of any contributed PR
Looping – but with a link in and a link out
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Well, the PR of our home page has gone up a little, but what’s happened to the “More” page?
The vote of the “Product” page has been split evenly between it and the external site. We now value the external Site B equally with our “More” page. The “More” page is getting only half the vote it had before – this is good for Site B but very bad for us!
Fully meshed – but with one vote in and one vote out
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That’s much better. The “More” page is still getting less share of the vote than in example 7 of course, but now the “Product” page has kept three quarters of its vote within our site - unlike example 10 where it was giving away fully half of it’s vote to the external site!
Keeping just this small extra fraction of the vote within our site has had a very nice effect on the Home Page too – PR of 2.28 compared with just 1.66 in example 10.
- Observation: increasing the internal links in your site can minimise the damage to your PR when you give away votes by linking to external sites.
- Principle:
- If a particular page is highly important – use a hierarchical structure with the important page at the “top”.
- Where a group of pages may contain outward links – increase the number of internal links to retain as much PR as possible.
- Where a group of pages do not contain outward links – the number of internal links in the site has no effect on the site’s average PR. You might as well use a link structure that gives the user the best navigational experience.
Site Maps
Site maps are useful in at least two ways:
- If a user types in a bad URL most websites return a really unhelpful “404 – page not found” error page. This can be discouraging. Why not configure your server to return a page that shows an error has been made, but also gives the site map? This can help the user enormously
- Linking to a site map on each page increases the number of internal links in the site, spreading the PR out and protecting you against your vote “donations”
Lets try to fix our site to artificially concentrate the PR into the home page.
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That looks good, most of the links seem to be pointing up to page A so we should get a nice PR.
Try to guess what the PR of A will be before you scroll down or run the code.
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Oh dear, that didn’t work at all well – it’s much worse than just an ordinary hierarchy! What’s going on is that pages C and D have such weak incoming links that they’re no help to page A at all!
- Principle: trying to abuse the PR calculation is harder than you think.
A common web layout for long documentation is to split the document into many pages with a “Previous” and “Next” link on each plus a link back to the home page. The home page then only needs to point to the first page of the document.
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In this simple example, where there’s only one document, the first page of the document has a higher PR than the Home Page! This is because page B is getting all the vote from page A, but page A is only getting fractions of pages B, C and D.
- Principle: in order to give users of your site a good experience, you may have to take a hit against your PR. There’s nothing you can do about this - and neither should you try to or worry about it! If your site is a pleasure to use lots of other webmasters will link to it and you’ll get back much more PR than you lost.
Can you also see the trend between this and the previous example? As you add more internal links to a site it gets closer to the Fully Meshed example where every page gets the average PR for the mesh.
- Observation: as you add more internal links in your site, the PR will be spread out more evenly between the pages.
Getting high PR the wrong way and the right way.
Just as an experiment, let’s see if we can get 1,000 pages pointing to our home page, but only have one link leaving it…
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Yup, those spam pages are pretty worthless but they sure add up!
- Observation: it doesn’t matter how many pages you have in your site, your average PR will always be 1.0 at best. But a hierarchical layout can strongly concentrate votes, and therefore the PR, into the home page!
This is a technique used by some disreputable sites (mostly adult content sites). But I can’t advise this - if Google’s robots decide you’re doing this there’s a good chance you’ll be banned from Google! Disaster!
On the other hand there are at least two right ways to do this:
1. Be a Mega-site
Mega-sites, like http://news.bbc.co.uk have tens or hundreds of editors writing new content – i.e. new pages - all day long! Each one of those pages has rich, worthwile content of its own and a link back to its parent or the home page! That’s why the Home page Toolbar PR of these sites is 9/10 and the rest of us just get pushed lower and lower by comparison…
- Principle: Content Is King! There really is no substitute for lots of good content…
2. Give away something useful
www.phpbb.com has a Toolbar PR of 8/10 (at the time of writing) and it has no big money or marketing behind it! How can this be?
What the group has done is write a very useful bulletin board system that is becoming very popular on many websites. And at the bottom of every page, in every installation, is this HTML code:
Powered by phpBB
The administrator of each installation can remove that link, but most don’t because they want to return the favour…
Can you imagine all those millions of pages giving a fraction of a vote to www.phpbb.com? Wow!
- Principle: Make it worth other people’s while to use your content or tools. If your give-away is good enough other site admins will gladly give you a link back.
- Principle: it’s probably better to get lots (perhaps thousands) of links from sites with small PR than to spend any time or money desperately trying to get just the one link from a high PR page.
A Discussion on Averages
From the Brin and Page paper, the average Actual PR of all pages in the index is 1.0!
So if you add pages to a site you’re building the total PR will go up by 1.0 for each page (but only if you link the pages together so the equation can work), but the average will remain the same.
If you want to concentrate the PR into one, or a few, pages then hierarchical linking will do that. If you want to average out the PR amongst the pages then "fully meshing" the site (lots of evenly distributed links) will do that - examples 5, 6, and 7 in my above. (NB. this is where Ridings’ goes wrong, in his MiniRank model feedback loops will increase PR - indefinitely!)
Getting inbound links to your site is the only way to increase your site's average PR. How that PR is distributed amongst the pages on your site depends on the details of your internal linking and which of your pages are linked to.
If you give outbound links to other sites then your site's average PR will decrease (you're not keeping your vote "in house" as it were). Again the details of the decrease will depend on the details of the linking.
Given that the average of every page is 1.0 we can see that for every site that has an actual ranking in the millions (and there are some!) there must be lots and lots of sites who's Actual PR is below 1.0 (particularly because the absolute lowest Actual PR available is (1 - d)).
It may be that the Toolbar PR 1,2 correspond to Actual PR's lower than 1.0! E.g. the logbase for the Toolbar may be 10 but the Actual PR sequence could start quite low: 0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 1,000 etc...
Finally
PageRank is, in fact, very simple (apart from one scary looking formula). But when a simple calculation is applied hundreds (or billions) of times over the results can seem complicated.
PageRank is also only part of the story about what results get displayed high up in a Google listing. For example there’s some evidence to suggest that Google is paying a lot of attention these days to the text in a link’s anchor when deciding the relevance of a target page – perhaps more so than the page’s PR…
PageRank is still part of the listings story though, so it’s worth your while as a good designer to make sure you understand it correctly.
Links
- The original PageRank paper by Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- Chris Ridings’ “PageRank Explained” paper which, as of April 2002 http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.goodlookingcooking.co.uk/PageRank.pdf , contains one major mistake/misunderstanding - http://www.goodlookingcooking.co.uk/PageRank.pdf
- Phil Craven’s PageRank Calculator (fortunately his figures agree with mine)
- A detailed explanation of how easy it is to alter the PageRank equation by mistake
- An excellent discussion on chad-jams (including “pregnant chad”) by Douglas W. Jones - http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/chad.html - I don’t think many people know the United States’ voting system is this flawed!!!
- Discussion forums on this topic:
About the Author
Ian Rogers first used the Internet in 1986 sending email on a University VAX machine! He first installed a webserver in 1990, taught himself HTML and perl CGI scripting. Since then he has been a Senior Research Fellow in User Interface Design and a consultant in Network Security and Database Backed Websites. He has had an informal interest in topology and the mathematics and behaviour of networks for years and has also been known to do a little Jive dancing.
This paper was sponsored by IPR Computing Ltd – specialists in Secure Networks and Database Backed Websites
Cry your heart out
It's Okay to Cry
Tears - An outlet for powerful emotions
What would it be like to be in a family in which young and old gathered together to cry their way through the pain of life, letting it out freely through tears and sobs rather than angry words and hurtful actions? Imagine a workplace with a room designated for crying where people could go to let out there overwhelm, frustrations, and fears. Consider the possibility of churches with tissue holders next to the hymnbooks, placed with the expectation that tears will fall both for grief and for joy as songs are sung and heartfelt words are spoken. As we will see, the overall impact of such emotional freedom could well be a very healthy alternative to the current emotional climate in which most of us live.
When was the last time you were told, “It's Okay to cry?” Who do you know that is willing to allow you to express your feelings through tears? If you are a woman, chances are better that you have at least one person who will encourage such heartfelt expression. However, few men have anyone in their lives who can tolerate the image of a man shedding tears. Even parents have difficulty being with a child who is crying, without instantly trying to “make it better.”
Our society tends to admire and elevate those who appear to be strong, through an emotionless exterior that guards against any display of deep or painful feelings. As a result, people fear being viewed as weak or out of control and work hard to choke back or push down tears that would otherwise flow freely. Few circumstances of life permit us outward and open tearful release without risking embarrassment to ourselves, or the discomfort of others.
Crying is always a cleansing of the heart, whether if comes from laughter that is so intense it flows into tears, or from sadness that overwhelms us with sobs of grief. This intimate contact with the heart, which shows itself so visibly, may well be the source of our discomfort. Our tears become a window to the inner self, revealing pain and hurt that we have spent years trying to protect, deny or wall off. Tears reveal our vulnerability and we shrink back in an effort to hide the soft and tender places within.
Dr. Karl Menninger, in his book The Vital Balance writes, “Weeping is perhaps the most human and most universal of all relief measures.” Indeed, many people describe crying as deep feeling of release. This process of letting go may well be a natural and effective source for healing that many have denied themselves.
Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the
The burgeoning field of pschoneuroimmunology explores how emotional status affects the body's health, specifically the immune system. Many studies are being conducted that demonstrate the relationship between suppressed emotion and disease. As early as 1979 a study was done at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing to examine the relationship between the free expression of tears and health. Findings showed that “healthy people are more likely to cry and have a more positive attitude towards tears than those persons with ulcers and colitis, two conditions thought to be aggravated by stress.” The ability to cry, apparently because of its stress relieving quality, may have a positive affect on preventing or alleviating physical conditions, which are brought on or exacerbated by stress. Crying seems to be a natural outlet for powerful emotions that otherwise may become buried in our bodies, taking on various forms of ill health.
Thomas Stone is the author of Cure by Crying, which is his story about being kidnapped at the age of four and being brutally abused. He explains how the nervous system represses traumatic events in our life and gives techniques for moving through the pain. The essential ingredients he encourages for healing deep wounds of our past are to remember and cry until there are no more tears left. This process allows for release that goes beyond words into letting the body free itself from deep grief and sadness.
As individuals, and as society, it may be time to rethink our attitudes about crying and consider ways that we can free ourselves to take advantage of what seems to be a biological design to help us wash away the pain and stress of living. The next time you feel a lump in your throat, or your eyes beginning to well up, you may want to give yourself permission to truly feel your feelings and express them with tears. As we begin to be more accepting of our own tearfulness, we will naturally become more willing to allow others to express their tears. Life sometimes offers up many things to cry about. It is comforting to think that when such things arise, we can tell ourselves “It's Okay to cry” and that others would support and honor this process. •
Paula Becker is a Licensed Psychologist and owner of
09/14/06 By Paula Becker
Creating Sitemaps for Google, MSN and Yahoo! - The Easy Way
If you own or maintain a website or intend to own one, wouldn't it be great if you get frequent visitors who find satisfaction in getting exactly the information they need from your page?
While that satisfaction largely depends on the contents of your website, how you get to be accessed by website users is the most critical factor of website development. For if your website can't be reached universally, you defeat the very purpose of the internet: that is, to make information available to any website user from across the world.
How you get to be accessed is actually a matter of presentation style, organization, and most importantly, how fast and extensive search engines get to lead users to your website. Unless your pages are indexed in the search engines they can't send you the free visitors you are all looking for.
Fortunately, the search engines want your content too and there are a number of ways you can help them, which they encourage you to do - by creating sitemaps of your website. Sitemaps created for the various search engines will enable these search engines' spiders to crawl faster, more systematically, and more extensively into your website's pages.
By doing so, you get the maximum exposure you can. Such exposure will boost your pride in having your pages viewed, read, and used by more and more visitors the way you intended them to. On the financial aspect, the more visitors your website gets, the higher your website's potential advertising value.
Now with the vast expansion of websites on the internet, it has become necessary to create different types of sitemaps, each having its own complexity in setting up.
HTML Sitemaps
Creating an HTML sitemap linked to and from your home page is something savvy webmasters have been doing for years and perhaps is the simplest to create. This sitemap is simply a list of pages contained on your site and enables the search engines spiders to easily find your pages, especially the ones that are linked deep in your website that they may have trouble finding otherwise.
TEXT Sitemaps
A text sitemap is simply a list of the URLs of your site in the form of a text file. These can then be submitted to search engines such as Yahoo! to notify them that all the pages exist and by doing so invites their spider to visit.
XML Sitemaps
Google launched Google Sitemaps as a way for webmasters to give them information they could use to better crawl their sites. This involves creating an XML Sitemap for which they provided their Google Sitemap Generator. This can be the most complicated to set up using the tools provided by Google as you need to be running Python on your server. It's perhaps the most important one too given the current dominance of the search engine.
Setting up all three types of sitemaps may seem a daunting task but luckily there are websites that take the strain out of this and you can create all three within a matter of minutes.
XML-Sitemaps.com is one such site. Originally developed to easily create Google sitemaps for webmasters without an understanding of Python, it has evolved through demand for new features.
We offer a Sitemap Generator that lets you build your sitemap online in four simple steps, for free! The Sitemap Generator is easy to use and user-friendly even for average computer literates. Just type in your URL and other parameters (e.g. frequency of change or update that your website will likely undergo, the priority of a specific URL relative to the other pages on the same website, etc.) and follow the ensuing instructions until you get to add your URL to the Google Webmaster account. You will then be given the options to download your websites sitemaps in XML, HTML and TXT format. If still you get stuck with a step, you may enquire and get assistance from our technical support.
The only limitation of the free sitemap Generator is that it allows only up to 500 pages per website. Still, this limit is high. Statistics show that out of the more than 67000 sitemaps generated using this service, the average website size was only 155 pages, way below the 500-page limit. This figure is represented by 78% of all webmasters who have used the Generator.
However, in case your website falls beyond this limit, you may check out the PHP XML Sitemap generator script. Offered at a very reasonable price, this stand-alone script is intended for unlimited-sized sitemaps, which is beyond the capacity of online services.
Whichever search engine or for whatever search purpose, sitemaps are clearly the fastest and most efficient way to navigate this digital highway. The best thing about it is, with these easy-to-use sitemap generators, you don't have to be a computer geek to help keep this internet traffic moving.
XML-Sitemaps.com 27/01/06
News
Our Sitemap Generator now supports sitemaps in ROR format (both Free Online version and Unlimited Standalone generator). ROR Sitemaps (ROR - Resources of a Resource) is an independent XML format for describing any object of your content in a generic fashion, so any search engine can better understand that content.
Additionally to Google sitemaps and Yahoo sitemaps, the generator also will optionally create HTML sitemap for human visitors with the whole site structure.
Our online sitemap generator now creates not only an xml sitemap (that is submitted to Google), but also a sitemap in text format. You can use the text sitemap to submit to Yahoo!
What is "XML sitemap"?
By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.
Testimonials
Do yourself a favor and pick up this handy little script if you're looking for an effective and EASY TO USE Google site map generator.
It's probably one of the best search engine optimization tools I've ever purchased.
Stephen Ralph
http://www.top-affiliate.com
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Please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.
About the site
XML-Sitemaps.com is a site specializing in sitemap software that generates XML, HTML and TXT sitemaps for webmasters to help get better crawling from search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!