Questões de Inglês

Does Bacon Really Make Everything Better? Here’s The Math

You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the signs of
our cultural obsession with bacon. There are bacon Band-Aids,
bacon tattoos, bacon sundaes, bacon-infused cocktails and even
babies wrapped in bacon costumes, just in time for Halloween.

But is all this devotion to fatty pig flesh merited? Does
bacon truly make everything better, as some cookbooks have boldly
declared?

When it comes to recipes online, the answer seems to be
pretty much yes, according to a data-mining project from the folks
at Wired.com. They teamed up with FoodNetwork.com to sift
through 906,539 ratings on the cooking channel’s website. Here’s
how Wired.com described the methodology:

“First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain
description — sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the
average rating for those foods if they did not include the word
‘bacon’. We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did
include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we
analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many
other foods also benefited. In fact, we found that when you crunch
the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.”

All this might sound too good to be true if you’re a bacon
lover. So we decided to check Wired’s math by running the results
past Lada Adamic, a computer scientist at the University of
Michigan.

She’s also a budding foodie who has used her big
data-crunching skills to develop an algorithm for predicting how
successful a recipe will be, based on the ingredient combinations
used. That is to say, she knows her stuff.

Wired’s findings, Adamic says, seem fairly
straightforward. In fact, when she checked her data from a different
recipe website, she came up with similar results. “The fact that
bacon-containing recipes are rated more highly in a separate data
set makes the result believable,” she says.

Still, she says, it is too much of a leap to declare bacon “a
miracle food,” as Wired’s headline trumpets.

“It’s not that much of a miracle food — the average rating
of a recipe with bacon in our data is 4.26, which is only 15 percent
of a standard deviation above the mean of 4.13,” she writes. In
other words, the flavor boost from bacon is hardly mind-blowing,
from a mathematical perspective.

And what if you’re going easy on the bacon because of the
definitely unsavory health risks — like heart disease and premature
death — associated with a lifetime of eating the stuff? We asked
Adamic, who ran the numbers for us. Her preliminary results
suggest you can get as much or more flavor bang for the calories
from other ingredients.

Recipes with feta and cream cheese, cranberries,
strawberries, avocado and “whipped topping” all appeared with
equal or greater frequency in highly rated recipes, she says.

Internet: (adapted).


Based on the article above, judge the following items.

Adamic"s study corroborates Wired.com"s findings.

A resposta correta é:

The nature of television programming in the
current era is one of hybridity. Comedy programs take
the appearance of news programs, and news programs
are increasingly adopting techniques from comedy
programs. The televised interview, in particular, is by
nature a hybrid format, often mixing the formality of
traditional journalism with the informality of a talk
show. In the second quarter of 2011, viewership of
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show trumped other
late-night programs in key demographics, with well over
two million viewers per episode. At the same time, news
and opinion programs like Hannity on Fox can draw an
average of 2.5 million viewers. But the format and style
— not to mention the content — of these shows and their
interview segments can vary drastically from one
episode to the next, depending on whether they are
structured more traditionally or not.

In theory, the televised journalistic interview —
especially with a candidate for high office — represents
that idealistic version of Habermas’ public sphere. In
this vision, the candidate is asked about his or her policy
stances, and is then forced by the interviewer to defend
those positions in the face of opposition. But in reality,
these interviews take the form of rule-governed speech
situations that rely on specified rituals. Deluca and
Peeples argue that televised political discourse — as
seen in political interviews — does not reflect rational
debate, but rather, emphasizes image, emotion, and style.
Baym suggests, however, that there is a space in between
the ideal of the public sphere and the image-centered
focus of the televised interview. His textual analyses of
interviews on programs like The Daily Show reveal that
these interviews reflect a traditional perspective on the
journalistic interview combined with a more
conversational, celebrity-type chat — a “hybrid mode of
publicity and political discourse”.

International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013),

p. 471. Internet: (adapted).


Judge the following items according to the text above.

News and opinion programs can vary from one episode to the next, regardless of how traditionally structured they may be.

A resposta correta é:

Does Bacon Really Make Everything Better? Here’s The Math

You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the signs of
our cultural obsession with bacon. There are bacon Band-Aids,
bacon tattoos, bacon sundaes, bacon-infused cocktails and even
babies wrapped in bacon costumes, just in time for Halloween.

But is all this devotion to fatty pig flesh merited? Does
bacon truly make everything better, as some cookbooks have boldly
declared?

When it comes to recipes online, the answer seems to be
pretty much yes, according to a data-mining project from the folks
at Wired.com. They teamed up with FoodNetwork.com to sift
through 906,539 ratings on the cooking channel’s website. Here’s
how Wired.com described the methodology:

“First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain
description — sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the
average rating for those foods if they did not include the word
‘bacon’. We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did
include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we
analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many
other foods also benefited. In fact, we found that when you crunch
the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.”

All this might sound too good to be true if you’re a bacon
lover. So we decided to check Wired’s math by running the results
past Lada Adamic, a computer scientist at the University of
Michigan.

She’s also a budding foodie who has used her big
data-crunching skills to develop an algorithm for predicting how
successful a recipe will be, based on the ingredient combinations
used. That is to say, she knows her stuff.

Wired’s findings, Adamic says, seem fairly
straightforward. In fact, when she checked her data from a different
recipe website, she came up with similar results. “The fact that
bacon-containing recipes are rated more highly in a separate data
set makes the result believable,” she says.

Still, she says, it is too much of a leap to declare bacon “a
miracle food,” as Wired’s headline trumpets.

“It’s not that much of a miracle food — the average rating
of a recipe with bacon in our data is 4.26, which is only 15 percent
of a standard deviation above the mean of 4.13,” she writes. In
other words, the flavor boost from bacon is hardly mind-blowing,
from a mathematical perspective.

And what if you’re going easy on the bacon because of the
definitely unsavory health risks — like heart disease and premature
death — associated with a lifetime of eating the stuff? We asked
Adamic, who ran the numbers for us. Her preliminary results
suggest you can get as much or more flavor bang for the calories
from other ingredients.

Recipes with feta and cream cheese, cranberries,
strawberries, avocado and “whipped topping” all appeared with
equal or greater frequency in highly rated recipes, she says.

Internet: (adapted).


Based on the article above, judge the following items.

Adamic does not agree that bacon should be classified as "a miracle food" because of the substantial risks it poses to our health.

A resposta correta é:

Does Bacon Really Make Everything Better? Here’s The Math

You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the signs of
our cultural obsession with bacon. There are bacon Band-Aids,
bacon tattoos, bacon sundaes, bacon-infused cocktails and even
babies wrapped in bacon costumes, just in time for Halloween.

But is all this devotion to fatty pig flesh merited? Does
bacon truly make everything better, as some cookbooks have boldly
declared?

When it comes to recipes online, the answer seems to be
pretty much yes, according to a data-mining project from the folks
at Wired.com. They teamed up with FoodNetwork.com to sift
through 906,539 ratings on the cooking channel’s website. Here’s
how Wired.com described the methodology:

“First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain
description — sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the
average rating for those foods if they did not include the word
‘bacon’. We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did
include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we
analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many
other foods also benefited. In fact, we found that when you crunch
the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.”

All this might sound too good to be true if you’re a bacon
lover. So we decided to check Wired’s math by running the results
past Lada Adamic, a computer scientist at the University of
Michigan.

She’s also a budding foodie who has used her big
data-crunching skills to develop an algorithm for predicting how
successful a recipe will be, based on the ingredient combinations
used. That is to say, she knows her stuff.

Wired’s findings, Adamic says, seem fairly
straightforward. In fact, when she checked her data from a different
recipe website, she came up with similar results. “The fact that
bacon-containing recipes are rated more highly in a separate data
set makes the result believable,” she says.

Still, she says, it is too much of a leap to declare bacon “a
miracle food,” as Wired’s headline trumpets.

“It’s not that much of a miracle food — the average rating
of a recipe with bacon in our data is 4.26, which is only 15 percent
of a standard deviation above the mean of 4.13,” she writes. In
other words, the flavor boost from bacon is hardly mind-blowing,
from a mathematical perspective.

And what if you’re going easy on the bacon because of the
definitely unsavory health risks — like heart disease and premature
death — associated with a lifetime of eating the stuff? We asked
Adamic, who ran the numbers for us. Her preliminary results
suggest you can get as much or more flavor bang for the calories
from other ingredients.

Recipes with feta and cream cheese, cranberries,
strawberries, avocado and “whipped topping” all appeared with
equal or greater frequency in highly rated recipes, she says.

Internet: (adapted).


Based on the article above, judge the following items.

The cookbooks that claimed bacon makes everything better benefited from the research.

A resposta correta é:

The nature of television programming in the
current era is one of hybridity. Comedy programs take
the appearance of news programs, and news programs
are increasingly adopting techniques from comedy
programs. The televised interview, in particular, is by
nature a hybrid format, often mixing the formality of
traditional journalism with the informality of a talk
show. In the second quarter of 2011, viewership of
Comedy Central’s The Daily Show trumped other
late-night programs in key demographics, with well over
two million viewers per episode. At the same time, news
and opinion programs like Hannity on Fox can draw an
average of 2.5 million viewers. But the format and style
— not to mention the content — of these shows and their
interview segments can vary drastically from one
episode to the next, depending on whether they are
structured more traditionally or not.

In theory, the televised journalistic interview —
especially with a candidate for high office — represents
that idealistic version of Habermas’ public sphere. In
this vision, the candidate is asked about his or her policy
stances, and is then forced by the interviewer to defend
those positions in the face of opposition. But in reality,
these interviews take the form of rule-governed speech
situations that rely on specified rituals. Deluca and
Peeples argue that televised political discourse — as
seen in political interviews — does not reflect rational
debate, but rather, emphasizes image, emotion, and style.
Baym suggests, however, that there is a space in between
the ideal of the public sphere and the image-centered
focus of the televised interview. His textual analyses of
interviews on programs like The Daily Show reveal that
these interviews reflect a traditional perspective on the
journalistic interview combined with a more
conversational, celebrity-type chat — a “hybrid mode of
publicity and political discourse”.

International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013),

p. 471. Internet: (adapted).


Judge the following items according to the text above.

There has been a noticeable hybridization of different kinds of television programming lately.

A resposta correta é:

Does Bacon Really Make Everything Better? Here’s The Math

You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the signs of
our cultural obsession with bacon. There are bacon Band-Aids,
bacon tattoos, bacon sundaes, bacon-infused cocktails and even
babies wrapped in bacon costumes, just in time for Halloween.

But is all this devotion to fatty pig flesh merited? Does
bacon truly make everything better, as some cookbooks have boldly
declared?

When it comes to recipes online, the answer seems to be
pretty much yes, according to a data-mining project from the folks
at Wired.com. They teamed up with FoodNetwork.com to sift
through 906,539 ratings on the cooking channel’s website. Here’s
how Wired.com described the methodology:

“First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain
description — sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the
average rating for those foods if they did not include the word
‘bacon’. We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did
include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we
analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many
other foods also benefited. In fact, we found that when you crunch
the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.”

All this might sound too good to be true if you’re a bacon
lover. So we decided to check Wired’s math by running the results
past Lada Adamic, a computer scientist at the University of
Michigan.

She’s also a budding foodie who has used her big
data-crunching skills to develop an algorithm for predicting how
successful a recipe will be, based on the ingredient combinations
used. That is to say, she knows her stuff.

Wired’s findings, Adamic says, seem fairly
straightforward. In fact, when she checked her data from a different
recipe website, she came up with similar results. “The fact that
bacon-containing recipes are rated more highly in a separate data
set makes the result believable,” she says.

Still, she says, it is too much of a leap to declare bacon “a
miracle food,” as Wired’s headline trumpets.

“It’s not that much of a miracle food — the average rating
of a recipe with bacon in our data is 4.26, which is only 15 percent
of a standard deviation above the mean of 4.13,” she writes. In
other words, the flavor boost from bacon is hardly mind-blowing,
from a mathematical perspective.

And what if you’re going easy on the bacon because of the
definitely unsavory health risks — like heart disease and premature
death — associated with a lifetime of eating the stuff? We asked
Adamic, who ran the numbers for us. Her preliminary results
suggest you can get as much or more flavor bang for the calories
from other ingredients.

Recipes with feta and cream cheese, cranberries,
strawberries, avocado and “whipped topping” all appeared with
equal or greater frequency in highly rated recipes, she says.

Internet: (adapted).


Based on the article above, judge the following items.

Of all the foods investigated by Wired.com, it was in sandwiches that the presence of bacon made the greatest difference in ratings.

A resposta correta é:

In a recent IBM ad campaign titled Let’s Build a Smarter
Planet, a collection of company technologists explain why database
and data mining technologies matter. According to one of the IBM
scientists, “Every day we are creating fifteen petabytes of new data.
That’s eight times as much data as there is in all of the libraries in the
United States combined.” Another IBM researcher in the commercial
explains, “If we can analyze and mine this data, then we can
understand it. If we can understand it, then we can understand trends
about it. (…) The more data you have, the clearer you see.” Data
entrepreneurs such as these IBM researchers assume that gathering
and mining massive amounts of data will give objective insight into
human relations and concerns. However, what is the nature of these
trends and new data-driven ways of seeing? The ad is an excellent
example of technology boosterism in the Age of Big Data, where
actors argue that data mining improves our understanding of social
and organizational life. Yet, IBM fails to comment on how society
shapes data mining technologies and how the use of these
technologies may construct, perform, and categorize us in old and
new ways. For example, recent research into genomics demonstrates
an increased capacity to group people in new ways based upon their
genetic characteristics. The construction, management, and analysis
of a database are more than simply technical exercises in data
collection and processing. Data-driven ways of seeing human
relations purposefully organizes the social world via communicative
acts that incorporate cultural values and practices of power. As
scholars in science and technology studies argue, human actors’
decisions, politics, and cultural values socially shape the direction and
development of technology and innovation. How will the social
shaping of data mining technologies at the core of new data-intensive
practices of seeing the world mediate social relations, identities, and
practices?

International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013),

p. 556. Internet: (adapted).


According to the text above, judge the following items.

IBM scientists and data entrepreneurs believe that gathering and mining massive amounts of data will lead to a better comprehension of social life.

A resposta correta é:

Does Bacon Really Make Everything Better? Here’s The Math

You’d have to be living under a rock to miss the signs of
our cultural obsession with bacon. There are bacon Band-Aids,
bacon tattoos, bacon sundaes, bacon-infused cocktails and even
babies wrapped in bacon costumes, just in time for Halloween.

But is all this devotion to fatty pig flesh merited? Does
bacon truly make everything better, as some cookbooks have boldly
declared?

When it comes to recipes online, the answer seems to be
pretty much yes, according to a data-mining project from the folks
at Wired.com. They teamed up with FoodNetwork.com to sift
through 906,539 ratings on the cooking channel’s website. Here’s
how Wired.com described the methodology:

“First, we searched out all the recipes that fit a certain
description — sandwiches, for example. Then, we calculated the
average rating for those foods if they did not include the word
‘bacon’. We ran the numbers again using only recipes that did
include bacon. The results were pretty great. Of all the foods we
analyzed, bacon lends the most improvement to sandwiches. Many
other foods also benefited. In fact, we found that when you crunch
the data for all recipes, those with bacon do in fact rate higher.”

All this might sound too good to be true if you’re a bacon
lover. So we decided to check Wired’s math by running the results
past Lada Adamic, a computer scientist at the University of
Michigan.

She’s also a budding foodie who has used her big
data-crunching skills to develop an algorithm for predicting how
successful a recipe will be, based on the ingredient combinations
used. That is to say, she knows her stuff.

Wired’s findings, Adamic says, seem fairly
straightforward. In fact, when she checked her data from a different
recipe website, she came up with similar results. “The fact that
bacon-containing recipes are rated more highly in a separate data
set makes the result believable,” she says.

Still, she says, it is too much of a leap to declare bacon “a
miracle food,” as Wired’s headline trumpets.

“It’s not that much of a miracle food — the average rating
of a recipe with bacon in our data is 4.26, which is only 15 percent
of a standard deviation above the mean of 4.13,” she writes. In
other words, the flavor boost from bacon is hardly mind-blowing,
from a mathematical perspective.

And what if you’re going easy on the bacon because of the
definitely unsavory health risks — like heart disease and premature
death — associated with a lifetime of eating the stuff? We asked
Adamic, who ran the numbers for us. Her preliminary results
suggest you can get as much or more flavor bang for the calories
from other ingredients.

Recipes with feta and cream cheese, cranberries,
strawberries, avocado and “whipped topping” all appeared with
equal or greater frequency in highly rated recipes, she says.

Internet: (adapted).


Based on the article above, judge the following items.

Besides being a scientist, Lada Adamic is also an experienced gourmet.

A resposta correta é:

Public health is what we, as a society, do collectively
to assure the conditions for people to be healthy. This requires
that continuing and emerging threats to the health of the public
be successfully countered. These threats include immediate
crises, such as the AIDS epidemic; enduring problems, such as
injuries and chronic illnesses; and growing challenges, such as
the aging of the populations and the toxic by-products of a
modern economy, transmitted through air, water, soil, or food.
These and many other problems raise in common the need to
protect the nation’s health through effective, organized, and
sustained efforts led by the public sector.

Internet: (adapted).


Based on the text above, judge the following items.

The author suggests that in a modern economy the public and private sectors must work closely together to protect a nation’s health.

A resposta correta é:

In a recent IBM ad campaign titled Let’s Build a Smarter
Planet, a collection of company technologists explain why database
and data mining technologies matter. According to one of the IBM
scientists, “Every day we are creating fifteen petabytes of new data.
That’s eight times as much data as there is in all of the libraries in the
United States combined.” Another IBM researcher in the commercial
explains, “If we can analyze and mine this data, then we can
understand it. If we can understand it, then we can understand trends
about it. (…) The more data you have, the clearer you see.” Data
entrepreneurs such as these IBM researchers assume that gathering
and mining massive amounts of data will give objective insight into
human relations and concerns. However, what is the nature of these
trends and new data-driven ways of seeing? The ad is an excellent
example of technology boosterism in the Age of Big Data, where
actors argue that data mining improves our understanding of social
and organizational life. Yet, IBM fails to comment on how society
shapes data mining technologies and how the use of these
technologies may construct, perform, and categorize us in old and
new ways. For example, recent research into genomics demonstrates
an increased capacity to group people in new ways based upon their
genetic characteristics. The construction, management, and analysis
of a database are more than simply technical exercises in data
collection and processing. Data-driven ways of seeing human
relations purposefully organizes the social world via communicative
acts that incorporate cultural values and practices of power. As
scholars in science and technology studies argue, human actors’
decisions, politics, and cultural values socially shape the direction and
development of technology and innovation. How will the social
shaping of data mining technologies at the core of new data-intensive
practices of seeing the world mediate social relations, identities, and
practices?

International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013),

p. 556. Internet: (adapted).


According to the text above, judge the following items.

All the libraries in the United States combined would encompass as much as fifteen petabytes of new data a day.

A resposta correta é: