Questões de Concurso

Experts Try to Gauge Health Effects of Gulf Oil Spill
                                              Wednesday, June 23, 2010

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

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, ...1... , 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 [modal] 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#)