Cleaning up a spill 
                                                       Written by Laura Hill

Water and oil don’t mix. We see this every day; just try washing olive oil off your hands without soap or washing your face in the morning with only water. It just doesn’t work!
When an oil spill occurs in the ocean, like the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, what do scientists do to clean up the toxic mess? There are a number of options for an oil spill cleanup and most efforts use a combination of many techniques. The fact that oil and water don’t mix is a blessing and a curse. If oil mixed with water, it would be difficult to divide the two.
Crude oil is less dense than water; it spreads out to make a very thin layer (about one millimetre thick) that floats on top of the water. This is good because we can tell what is water and what is oil. It is also bad, because it means the oil can spread really quickly and cover a very large area, which becomes difficult to manage. Combined with wind, ocean currents and waves, oil spill cleanup starts to get really tricky.
Chemical dispersants can be used to break up big oil slicks into small oil droplets. They work like soaps by emulsifying the hydrophobic (waterrepelling) oil in the water. These small droplets can degrade in the ecosystem quicker than the big oil slick. But unfortunately, this means that marine life of all sizes ingest these toxic, broken-down particles and chemicals.
If the oil is thick enough, it could be set fire, a process called “in situ burning”. Because the oil is highly flammable and floats on top of the water, it is very easy to set it alight. It’s not environmentallyfriendly though; the combustion of oil releases thick smoke that contains greenhouse gases and other dangerous air pollutants.
Some techniques can contain and recapture spilled oil without changing its chemical composition. Booms float on top of the water and act as barriers to the movement of oil. Once the oil is controlled, it can be gathered using sorbents. “Sorbent” is a fancy word for sponge. These sponges absorb the oil and allow it to be collected by siphoning it off the water.
However, weather and sea conditions can prevent and obstruct the use of booms, sorbents and in situ burning. Imagine trying to perform these operations on the open sea with wind, waves and water currents moving the oil (and your boat!) around on the water.
What about the plants and animals? It’s easy to forget about the organisms in the sea that are under water. Out of sight, out of mind! There is not much we can do to help them. But when oil reaches the shore it impacts sensitive coastal environments including the many fish, bird, amphibian, reptilian, and crustaceanspecies that live there. We have easy access to these areas and there are some things we can do to clean up. For the plants, it is often a matter of setting them on fire, or leaving them to degrade the oil naturally. Sometimes, we can spray the oil with nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen) that can encourage the growth of specialized microorganisms. For species that can tolerate our soaps, manpower is needed to wash every affected animal. Yet, if the animal has tried to lick itself clean, it can die from ingesting the toxic oil.
Unfortunately, there can be many negative economic and social impacts, in addition to the environmental impacts of oil spills and, as you’ve just read, the clean up techniques are far from perfect. Prevention is the very best cleanup technique we have. http://www.curiocity.ca/everyday-science/environme... -cleaning-up-a-spill.html, retrieved on Dec 10, 2010

                                                 Computer Systems Analysts
Nearly all organizations rely on computer and information technology (IT) to conduct business and operate efficiently. Computer systems analysts use IT tools to help enterprises of all sizes achieve their goals. They may design and develop new computer systems by choosing and configuring hardware and software, or they may devise ways to apply existing systems resources to additional 5 tasks. Training requirements for computer systems analysts vary depending on the job, but many employers, when hiring computer systems analysts, usually prefer applicants who have a bachelor's degree. Relevant work experience also is very important. Advancement opportunities are good for those with the necessary skills and experience. For more technically complex jobs, people with graduate 10 degrees are preferred. For jobs in a technical or scientific environment, employers often seek applicants who have at least a bachelor's degree in a technical field, such as computer science, information science, applied mathematics, engineering, or the physical sciences. For jobs in a business environment, employers often seek applicants with at least a bachelor" degree in a business-related field such as management information systems (MIS). Increasingly, employers are seeking individuals 15 who have a master's degree in business administration (MBA) with a concentration in information systems. Despite the preference for technical degrees, however, people who have degrees in other areas may find employment as systems analysts if they also have technical skills. Courses in computer science or related subjects combined with practical experience can qualify people for some jobs in the 20 occupation. Employers generally look for people with expertise relevant to the job. For example, systems analysts who wish to work for a bank may need some expertise in finance, and systems analysts who wish to work for a hospital may need some knowledge of health management. Furthermore, business enterprises generally prefer individuals with information technology, business, and accounting skills and 25 frequently assist employees in obtaining these skills. Technological advances come so rapidly in the computer field that continuous study is necessary to remain competitive. Employers, hardware and software vendors, colleges and universities, and private training institutions offer continuing education to help workers attain the latest skills. Additional training may come from professional development seminars offered by professional 30 computing societies. COMPUTER Systems Analysts. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 5 jan. 2011. Adaptado. 

Model copes with chaos to deliver relief Computer program helps responders transport supplies in tough conditions
By Rachel Ehrenberg Science News, Web edition: Monday, February 21st, 2011
WASHINGTON — Getting blood or other perishable supplies to an area that’s been struck by an earthquake or hurricane isn’t as simple as asking what brown can do for you. But a new model quickly determines the best routes and means for delivering humanitarian aid, even in situations where bridges are out or airport tarmacs are clogged with planes.
The research, presented February 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, could help get supplies to areas which have experienced natural disasters or help prepare for efficient distribution of vaccines when the flu hits.
Efficient supply chains have long been a goal of manufacturers, but transport in fragile networks — where supply, demand and delivery routes may be in extremely rapid flux — requires a different approach, said Anna Nagurney of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who presented the new work. Rather than considering the shortest path from one place to another to maximize profit, her system aims for the cleanest path at minimum cost, while capturing factors such as the perishability of the product and the uncertainty of supply routes. ‘You don’t know where demand is, so it’s tricky,’ said Nagurney. ‘It’s a multicriteria decision-making problem.’
By calculating the total cost associated with each link in a network, accounting for congestion and incorporating penalties for time and products that are lost, the computer model calculates the best supply chain in situations where standard routes may be disrupted.
‘Mathematical tools are essential to develop formal means to predict, and to respond to, such critical perturbations,’ said Iain Couzin of Princeton University, who uses similar computational tools to study collective animal behavior. ‘This is particularly important where response must be rapid and effective, such as during disaster scenarios … or during epidemics or breaches of national security.
’ The work can be applied to immediate, pressing situations, such as getting blood, food or medication to a disaster site, or to longer-term problems such as determining the best locations for manufacturing flu vaccines. . Retrieved April 7th, 2011.

Technology and legal pressure have changed
spammers’ terms of trade. They long relied on sending
more e-mails from more computers, knowing that some
will get through. But it is hard to send 100m e-mails
without someone noticing. In 2008 researchers from the
University of California at Berkeley and San Diego posed
as spammers, infiltrated a botnet and measured its
success rate. The investigation confirmed only 28 “sales”
on 350m e-mail messages sent, a conversion rate
under .00001%. Since then the numbers have got worse.
But spammers are a creative bunch.
of tricking
consumers into a purchase, they are stealing their money
directly. Links used to direct the gullible to a site selling
counterfeits. Now they install “Trojan” software that
ransacks hard drives for bank details and the like.
Spammers also have become more sophisticated
about exploiting trust. In few places is it granted more
readily than on social-networking sites. Twitter, a forum for
short, telegram-like messages, estimates that only 1% of
its traffic is spam. But researchers from the University of
California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana show that 8% of links published were
shady, with
of them leading to scams and the rest to
Trojans. Links in Twitter messages, they found, are over
20 times more likely to get clicked than those in e-mail
spam.
Nor is Facebook as safe as it seems. As an
experiment, BitDefender, an online-security firm, set up
fake profiles on the social network and asked strangers to
enter into a digital friendship. They were able to create as
many as 100 new friends a day. Offering a profile picture,
particularly of a pretty woman, increased their odds. When
the firm’s researchers expanded their requests to strangers
who shared even one mutual friend, almost half accepted.
Worse, a quarter of BitDefender’s new friends clicked on
links posted by the firm, even when the destination was
obscured.

(Adapted from http://www.economist.com/node/17519964)

Ten Tips for Microsoft Word and Excel

Our latest tips tell you how to make Microsoft Office 2010's word
processor and spreadsheet apps perform some handy tricks that
Microsoft has documented poorly.

By Edward Mendelson

PCMag.com's Microsoft Office 2010 tips collection
continues, this time with ten tips for Word and Excel users. Most
of these tips are fairly straightforward, and most apply to the
most recent versions of Office. Some of them, however, offer
new twists for the latest version of Office. Expert users will be
familiar with some of these ten tips, but we hope that any user
will find at least a few of these to be useful.
What kind of tips am I talking about this time? Finding
ways to perform poorly documented functions in Word and
Excel. One of these tips, for example, tells you what to do when
Word inserts a horizontal line across the page when you only
wanted to type a few dashes. In the past few months, everyone
in my family has tried and failed to wrestle an unwanted
horizontal line out of a Word document. It might not sound like a
big issue, but once you've got it in your document, good luck
finding help from Microsoft on how to get rid of it.

Some software vendors, like Adobe, continue to provide
help systems that work like improved versions of traditional
software manuals. In those apps, every menu item, every
toolbar icon, is carefully explained, and with a little patience you
can find all the information you need. Microsoft, provides
you with a kind of information supermarket, with huge essays
about topics you don't care about, dozens of selections when
you only need one, and no consistent way to find the information
you want.


Combine Portrait and Landscape Pages in a Word Document

Microsoft Word expects you to organize your documents
in a highly-structured but not very intuitive way. If you want to
format most of a document in portrait mode, but one or two
pages in landscape, you simply change the orientation
of the current page. Instead you need to insert a section break
before and after the text you want to format in landscape mode,
and then apply landscape orientation to the section that you
created. Place the insertion point at the point where you want
landscape orientation to begin. On the Page Layout tab, choose
Breaks, then, under Section Breaks, choose New Page. Then
move the insertion point to the end of the text you want to format
in landscape, and insert the same kind of break. Then put the
insertion point anywhere between the two breaks; return to the
Page Layout tab, and click the down-pointing arrow at the lower
right of the Page Setup group. In the Page Setup dialog, on the
Margins tab, select Landscape orientation, then go to the "Apply
to" dropdown and select This Section.
(Adapted from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,
2379207,00.asp#)