Questões de Concurso

Atenção: As questões de números 53 a 60 referem-se ao texto abaixo.

Data mining
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Not to be confused with information extraction.

    Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is seen as an increasingly important tool by modern business to transform data into an informational advantage. It is currently used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery.
    The related terms data dredging, data fishing and data snooping refer to the use of data mining techniques on sample portions of the larger population data set that are (or may be) too small for reliable statistical inferences to be made about the validity of any patterns discovered (see also data-snooping bias). These techniques can, however, be used in the creation of new hypotheses to test against the larger data populations.

    [edit] Background

    The manual extraction of patterns from data has occurred for centuries. Early methods of identifying patterns in data include Bayes' theorem (1700s) and regression analysis (1800s). The proliferation, ubiquity and increasing power of computer technology has increased data collection and storage. As data sets have grown in size and complexity, direct hands-on data analysis has increasingly been augmented with indirect, automatic data processing. This has been aided by other discoveries in computer science, such as neural networks, clustering, genetic algorithms (1950s), decision trees (1960s) and support vector machines (1980s). Data mining is the process of applying these methods to data with the intention of uncovering hidden patterns. It has been used for many years by businesses, scientists and governments to sift through volumes of data such as airline passenger trip records, census data and supermarket scanner data to produce market research reports. (Note, however, that reporting is not always considered to be data mining.)
    A primary reason for using data mining is to assist in the analysis of collections of observations of behaviour. Such data are vulnerable to collinearity because of unknown interrelations. An unavoidable fact of data mining is that the (sub-)set(s) of data being analysed may not be representative of the whole domain, and [CONJUNCTION] may not contain examples of certain critical relationships and behaviours that exist across other parts of the domain. To address this sort of issue, the analysis may be augmented using experiment-based and other approaches, such as Choice Modelling for humangenerated data. In these situations, inherent correlations can be either controlled for, or removed altogether, during the construction of the experimental design.

Atenção: As questões de números 56 a 60 referem-se ao texto abaixo

WINDOWS 7 REVIEW
Windows 7 gets the basics right. Here's what you need to know about the new OS.
Harry McCracken, PC World
Monday, October 19, 2009 2:00 pm

    What if a new version of Windows didn't try to dazzle you? What if, instead, it tried to disappear except when you needed it? Such an operating system would dispense with glitzy effects in favor of low-key, useful new features. Rather than pelting you with alerts, warnings, and requests, it would try to stay out of your face. And if any bundled applications weren't essential, it would dump 'em.
    It's not a what-if scenario. Windows 7, set to arrive on new PCs and as a shrinkwrapped upgrade on October 22, has a minimalist feel and attempts to fix annoyances old and new. In contrast, Windows Vista offered a flashy new interface, but its poor performance, compatibility gotchas, and lack of compelling features made some folks regret upgrading and others refuse to leave Windows XP.
    Windows 7 is hardly flawless. Some features feel unfinished; others won't realize their potential without heavy lifting by third parties. And some long-standing annoyances remain intact. But overall, the final shipping version I test-drove appears to be the worthy successor to Windows XP that Vista never was.

(Adapted from http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_review.html

Atenção: As questões de números 56 a 60 referem-se ao texto abaixo

WINDOWS 7 REVIEW
Windows 7 gets the basics right. Here's what you need to know about the new OS.
Harry McCracken, PC World
Monday, October 19, 2009 2:00 pm

    What if a new version of Windows didn't try to dazzle you? What if, instead, it tried to disappear except when you needed it? Such an operating system would dispense with glitzy effects in favor of low-key, useful new features. Rather than pelting you with alerts, warnings, and requests, it would try to stay out of your face. And if any bundled applications weren't essential, it would dump 'em.
    It's not a what-if scenario. Windows 7, set to arrive on new PCs and as a shrinkwrapped upgrade on October 22, has a minimalist feel and attempts to fix annoyances old and new. In contrast, Windows Vista offered a flashy new interface, but its poor performance, compatibility gotchas, and lack of compelling features made some folks regret upgrading and others refuse to leave Windows XP.
    Windows 7 is hardly flawless. Some features feel unfinished; others won't realize their potential without heavy lifting by third parties. And some long-standing annoyances remain intact. But overall, the final shipping version I test-drove appears to be the worthy successor to Windows XP that Vista never was.

(Adapted from http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_review.html

Atenção: As questões de números 16 a 20 referem-se ao texto seguinte.

Some Tips for Microsoft Word and Excel

    When I need help with Office, I don't click the help button on the upper right of the ribbon− I go to Google or Bing. Curiously, Google is more likely than Bing to send me to useful pages at Microsoft.com.
    Here are some tips, therefore, on convenient ways to do things that Office doesn't offer much guidance about, either on its menu or on its ill-conceived online help system, which has a bad habit of not telling me what I need to know.
    Whatever your level of Word and Excel expertise, you'll find a technique worth remembering among these tips.

Use Word to Write and Post to Your Blog

    Word 2010 includes a feature that lets you post to a blog directly from Word's editing screen. Here's how it works. From Word's File menu, choose New, ...1... select Blog Post from the gallery of document types. Word opens a document with a placeholder title, a horizontal line, and an empty space for typing your blog post. Type in a title and a posting, and click Publish on the Blog Post tab of the Ruler. The first time you post, a wizard will walk you through the process of entering your blog's URL, your username, and your password. Click OK and your posting appears on your blog. The Ribbon also includes a Manage Accounts button that lets you revise or add to your list of hosting sites.
    Microsoft seems to have lost interest in this feature, because it no longer works reliably with some services, such as Blogger, and continues to list Windows Live Spaces as a provider though Windows Live Spaces no longer exists. But the blog post feature is smooth as silk with other services, such as WordPress. (Here's a funny coincidence: Blogger is owned by Google; WordPress partners with Microsoft.) Microsoft wants you to use its free Windows Live Writer instead of Word, but I prefer not to clutter my disk with multiple programs when a single one gets the job done.

(Adapted from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379207,00.asp#)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir para responder as questões de números 56 a 60.

    December 12, 2012
    If It’s for Sale, His Lines Sort It
    By MARGALIT FOX

    It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man’s fingers through the sand.
    The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding.
    The man on the beach that day was a mechanical-engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative stroke of his fingers − yielding a set of literal lines in the sand − Mr. Woodland, who died on Sunday at 91, conceived the modern bar code.
    Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology, based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations, that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.
    Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time, and the two men together made only $15,000 from it, when they sold their patent to Philco. But the curious round symbol they devised would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code (it graces tens of millions of different items) is officially known.

    Here is part of the story behind the invention:
    To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
    What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
    “What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason − I didn’t know − I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”
    That consequential pass was merely the beginning. “Only seconds later,” Mr. Woodland continued, “I took my four fingers − they were still in the sand − and I swept them around into a full circle.”
    Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.
    But that method − a variegated bull’s-eye of wide and narrow bands −, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.
    The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 − all they ever made from their invention.
    By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.
    Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland’s considerable input.

(Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/business/n-joseph-woodland-inventor-of-the-bar-code-dies-at-91.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121214&_r=0)