START LOOKING EARLY

According to the old proverb, the early bird catches the worm, and this is certainly true when it
comes to deciding your future. You will get off to the best start with your job-hunting if you
think about it while you are still at school. Does your school have a careers officer or library? If
so, you should take advantage of them, as this will give you an idea of what's on offer and help
you decide what job will suit you. Remember! Finding out as much as possible will help you
make a better-informed decision.
CONSIDER THE FUTURE
After you have left school, you may think about applying for any jobs that you are qualified to
do. But think about the long term. Does this job have future prospects? Is it dead-end or does it
have chances of promotion? Will you be happy doing this job in five, ten or twenty years’ time?
To open the door to a wider variety of jobs with longer-term prospects, consider further
education or training.
THINK ABOUT YOURSELF
You should also take yourself into account. What are you good at? What are you interested in?
Are you a ‘people person’ or happiest with your own company? Do you have a creative flair or
are you adept at arithmetic? Don’t just apply for a job because it has a good salary. Money is
important, but what can the job offer you in terms of personal satisfaction?
HOW TO LOOK
Be systematic in your search. First write down possible career paths, then think of the different
jobs within this field. Think of the skills and qualifications you need to get that first valuable
job, and how you might go about getting them. Don’t just limit your thinking to further study.
There may be other, less immediately obvious routes, such as doing voluntary work.
WHERE TO LOOK
Traditionally, a good source of job advertisements has been newspapers, job centres and word
of mouth (friends and family can have the most useful information of all), but nowadays, any
job search would not be complete without access to the Internet. Use this checklist to ensure
you are exploring all possible avenues.
- newspapers                           - job centres
- word of mouth                       - Internet
- local shop windows
 APPLY ON SPEC
A great many jobs are found without responding to a job advertisement at all. Try writing to
companies enclosing your CV.
THE LIFE OF THE EUROPEAN BEE-EATER
A brilliant movement of colour as it catches its food in the air, the European bee-eater
moves between three continents.
True to their name, bee-eaters eat bees (though their diet includes just about any flying
insects). When the bird catches a bee, it returns to its tree to get rid of the bee’s poison,
which it does very efficiently. It hits the insect’s head on one side of the branch, then rubs
its body on the other. The rubbing makes it prey harmless.
European bee-eaters (Merops apiaster) form families that breed in the spring and summer
across an area that extends from Spain to Kazakhstan. Farmland and river valleys provide
huge numbers of insects. Flocks of bee-eaters follow tractors as they work fields. When the
birds come upon a beehive, they eat well – a researcher once found a hundred bees in the
stomach of a bee-eater near a hive.
European bees pass the winter by sleeping in their hives, which cuts off the bee-eater’s
main source of food. So, in late summer, bee-eaters begin a long, dangerous journey.
Massive flocks from Spain, France and northern Italy cross the Sahara desert to their
wintering ground in West Africa. Bee-eaters from Hungary and other parts of Central and
Eastern Europe cross the Mediterranean Sea and Arabian Desert to winter in southern
Africa. “It’s an extremely risky stratagem, this migration,” says C. Hilary Fry, a British
ornithologist who has studied European been-eaters for more than 45 years. “At least 30
percent of the birds will be killed by predators before they make it back to Europe the
following spring.” In April, they return to Europe. Birds build bests by digging tunnels in
riverbanks. They work for up to 20 days. By the end of the job, they’ve moved 15 to 26
pounds of soil – more than 80 times their weight.
The nesting season is a time when families help each other, and sons or uncles help feed
their father’s or brother’s chicks as soon as they come out of their egg. The helpers benefit,
too: parents with helpers can provide more food for chicks to continue the family line.
It’s a short, spectacular life. European bee-eaters live for five to six years. The difficulties
of migration and avoiding predators along the way affect every bird. Bee-eaters today also
find it harder to find food, as there are fewer insects around as a result of pesticides.
Breeding sites are also disappearing, as rivers are turned into concrete-walled canals.
By Bruce Barcott, National Geographic magazine, 2008
Information theory - the big idea
Information theory lies at the heart of everything - from DVD players and the genetic code
of DNA to the physics of the universe at its most fundamental. It has been central to the
development of the science of communication, which enables data to be sent electronically
and has therefore had a major impact on our lives.
A. In April 2002 an event took place which demonstrated one of the many applications of
information theory. The space probe, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, had sent back
spectacular images of Jupiter and Saturn and then soared out of the Solar System on a one-
way mission to the stars. After 25 years of exposure to the freezing temperatures of deep
space, the probe was beginning to show its age. Sensors and circuits were on the brink of
failing lose contact with their probe forever. The solution was to get a message to Voyager
I to instruct it to use spares to change the failing parts. With the probe 12 billion kilometres
from Earth, this was not an easy task. By means of a radio dish belonging to NASA's Deep
Space Network, the message was sent out into the depths of space and NASA experts
realised that they had to do something or lose contact with their probe forever. The solution
was to get a message to Voyager I to instruct it to use spares to change the failing parts.
With the probe 12 billion kilometres from Earth, this was not an easy task. By means of a
radio dish belonging to NASA's Deep Space Network, the message was sent out into the
depths of space. Even travelling at the speed of light, it took over 11 hours to reach its
target, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Yet, incredibly, the little probe managed to hear the
faint call from its home planet, and successfully made the switchover.
B. It was the longest-distance repair job in history, and a triumph for the NASA engineers.
But it also highlighted the astonishing power of the techniques developed by American
communications engineer Claude Shannon, who had died just a year earlier. Born in 1916
in Petoskey, Michigan, Shannon showed an early talent for maths and for building gadgets,
and made breakthroughs in the foundations of computer technology when still a student.
While at Bell Laboratories, Shannon developed information theory, but shunned the
resulting acclaim. In the 1940s, he single-handedly created an entire science of
communication which has since inveigled its way into a host of applications, from DVDS
to satellite communications to bar codes - any area, in short, where data has to be conveyed
rapidly yet accurately.
C. This all seems light years away from the down-to-earth uses Shannon originally had for
his work, which began when he was a 22-year-old graduate engineering student at the
prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. He set out with an apparently
simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the concept of 'information'. The most
basic form of information, Shannon argued, is whether something is true or false which can
be captured in the binary unit, or 'bit', of the form 1 or 0. Having identified this
fundamental unit, Shannon set about defining otherwise vague ideas about information and
how to transmit it from place to place. In the process he discovered something surprising: it
is always possible to guarantee information will get through random interference - 'noise' -
intact.
D. Noise usually means unwanted sounds which interfere with genuine information.
Information theory generalises this idea via theorems that capture the effects of noise with
mathematical precision. In particular, Shannon showed that noise sets a limit on the rate at
which information can pass along communication channels while remaining error-free.
This rate depends on the relative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the
communication channel, and on its capacity (its 'bandwidth'). The resulting limit, given in
units of bits per second, is the absolute maximum rate of error-free communication given
signal strength and noise level. The trick, Shannon showed, is to find ways of packaging up
- 'coding' - information to cope with the ravages of noise, while staying within the
information-carrying capacity - 'bandwidth' - of the communication system being used.
E. Over the years scientists have devised many such coding methods, and they have proved
crucial in many technological feats. The Voyager spacecraft transmitted data using codes
which added one extra bit for every single bit of information; the result was an error rate of
just one bit in 10,000 - and stunningly clear pictures of the planets. Other codes have
become part of everyday life - such as the Universal Product Code, or bar code, which uses
a simple error-detecting system that ensures supermarket check-out lasers can read the
price even on, say, a crumpled bag of crisps. As recently as 1993, engineers made a major
breakthrough by discovering so-called turbo codes - which come very close to Shannon's
ultimate limit for the maximum rate that data can be transmitted reliably, and now play a
key role in the mobile videophone revolution.
F. Shannon also laid the foundations of more efficient ways of storing information, by
stripping out superfluous ('redundant') bits from data which contributed little
real information. As mobile phone text messages like 'I CN C U' show, it is often possible
to leave out a lot of data without losing much meaning. As with error correction however,
there's a limit beyond which messages become too ambiguous. Shannon showed how to
calculate this limit, opening the way to the design of compression methods that cram
maximum information into the minimum space.