Sabe aquela maquina trituradora de papeis? Poise, a confianca sobre ela pode esta abalada. Programadores da California descobriram um metodo mais rapido para juntar os "fiapos" de papel produzidos pelo processo de picotagem do papel.Campanha da Lanchonete do Roberto: Estudante, aumente a qualidade de seu ingless e leia isso. Mas...se nao for realmente possivel: Google Transltor.Who, What, Why: How do you reassemble shredded documents?Governments and businesses have long used shredders to destroy sensitive documents. How easy is it to reassemble the pieces?lmost every office has one - a document shredder and a bin filled with strips of paper fit for the bottom of a birdcage.But in war time, the shredded pages found in a captured bunker or command post could contain intelligence, if the thousands of pieces could be reassembled.After Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, they spent years painstakingly reassembling the intelligence reports and operational accounts shredded by the CIA officers who were the last workers captured.Now, a team of computer programmers from California have developed software they say shows that computers can, in theory, do most of the hard work.It works by matching up individual shreds based on minuscule clues in each shred - the contour of the tears, a barely-visible watermark, and traces of writing, for instance - and can work incalculably faster than a human undertaking the same task.It was the successful entry in a document shredder competition launched this autumn by the US military, in an attempt to encourage research on what is essentially a maths problem - how to assemble a puzzle efficiently.In October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's research arm, offered $50,000 (31,961) to the first team to reassemble five shredded hand-written documents and answer the puzzles contained in each of them."Any time you're in conflict or in war and you were to take over a building or a compound, it wouldn't be terribly surprising to have the enemy try to destroy or shred their documents," says Dan Kaufman, director of Darpa's information innovation office."How can we quickly put them together and get some value and try to save some lives?"A decent commercial shredder can reduce a sheet of paper to more than 400 pieces. That yields a total of 1,276,800 possible two-piece combinations - for one single-sided sheet.Most office documents are a lot longer, many are printed on both sides, and the bin containing the shreddings could hold the remnants of hundreds of pages.The last embassy workers captured by the Iranian students on 4 November 1979 included a team of CIA officers who had locked themselves in a vault in order to burn and shred sensitive embassy documents, says Malcolm Byrne, deputy director of the National Security Archive, a research organisation at George Washington University."When those guys gave themselves up, they left all the stuff in there thinking, 'okay, we've done our job,'" he says.nstead, the Iranians laid the shreds out on a floor and devised a sophisticated procedure for numbering, indexing and reassembling the individual shreds, Mr Byrne says."Certainly it took a number of years