There was a time when offshore platforms were secure communities in which production was controlled by closed processes that were isolated from the external world. Not so today. With modern integrated operations, offshore-onshore contact is transparent and may of the processes out on the platform are controlled by onshore personnel via networked PCs.
Oil company data security is inadequate, and production systems are at risk of attack by hackers, viruses and worms.
Integration and onshore control has several advantages but a big disadvantage is a fall in information security. When onshore and offshore networks are linked together, the chances of attacks by viruses and hackers increase.
I keep seeing these ads for Acai pills that help you lose belly fat, supposedly used by Oprah. Sometimes I’m slapped with these commercials saying that you have belly fat because you're very stressed and you should take their drugs, because, obviously, it’s the only solution. Then I see articles about how there are these magical foods that burn belly fat.
In a state of confusion and depression, I stumbled into Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist and author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers", giving a talk at UC Davis about stress and his work.
After studying the baboons in Africa for about 30 years, he saw that some of the same social structures play a part in their lives. Humans, and apes alike, are social beings.
Vegetarians must have felt a little left out when hearing stories of startling weight loss by people consuming nothing except bacon and cheddar cheese.
It was only a matter of time before a study came along showing that vegetarians could get thin too. Of course, the secret ingredient was, as always, participants consuming fewer calories than they burned. Again.
But the non-weight benefits are worth discussion. Overweight individuals who ate a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet high in plant-based proteins for four weeks lost weight and experienced improvements in blood cholesterol levels and other heart disease risk factors, according to a report in the June 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
If you've ever been an engineering student, taught engineering or hired a young engineer, this will sound familiar: tales of students splitting up group projects so they don't have to work together or a student stating he didn't bother with the directions but still got the right answer or students who do the whole project an hour before class.
Expert engineers waiting to happen? Maybe some day, but that stuff irks hiring managers in the real world, where huge mistakes and sloppy work bring on costly overruns and maybe lawsuits.
Do you think high fructose corn syrup makes you fatter than sugar? You're not alone. In the culture wars, they like lines blurry and corporations who got rid of corn syrup have been using that as a marketing claim.
Three top researchers say they have corrected inaccuracies and misunderstandings concerning high fructose corn syrup's impact on the American diet and examined how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers this sweetener in light of the upcoming 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans in their session, 'High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sorting Myth from Reality', at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.
More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes.
The researchers located what they believe to be caribou-hunting structures and camps used by the early hunters of the period.
"This is the first time we've identified structures like these on the lake bottom," said John O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology and professor in the Department of Anthropology. "Scientifically, it's important because the entire ancient landscape has been preserved and has not been modified by farming, or modern development."
Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek? Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN!
But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then, deep down, you’ll know you’re a bad person. Then again, you might win a free
Geeks’ Guide to World Domination. So you’ll have to balance total loss of self worth with free geek schwag. It’s up to you.
Email your answers to
geekoff@gmail.com. DON'T COMMENT YOUR ANSWERS or you will allow slackers to water down the winner’s pool, thus decreasing your chances of receiving said geek schwag (and you’ll get moderated,
It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything!
A trivial demonstration of the above fact is the following. Consider you are measuring the mass of the top quark (why, I know you do it at least once a week, just to keep mentally fit). You could say you have no idea whatsoever of what the top mass is, but you are capable of guessing, and your best guess is that the top mass is twice the mass of the W boson: after all, you have read somewhere that the top quark decays into a W boson plus other stuff, so a good first-order estimate is 2x80.4= 160.8 GeV.
According to research presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, in the presence of free access to food, sleep restricted subjects reported decrease in appetite, food cravings and food consumption; however, they gained weight over the course of the study. Thus, the finding suggests that energy intake exceeded energy expenditure during the sleep restriction
Results indicate that people whose sleep was restricted experienced an average weight gain of 1.31 kilograms over the 11 days of the study. Of the subjects with restricted sleep who reported a change in their appetite and food consumption, more than 70 percent said that it decreased by day 5 of the study. A group of well rested control subjects did not experience the weight gain.
