Erring in the need for speed - 16 May 2011

Working for an online media publication can be ridiculously fast-paced since news moves in and out of your inbox quite regularly. The upside to this is that you're always in the know; the downside is that in the rush of the exchange, you could make a rather nasty mistake e.g. addressing an email to someone who works for a different (but similar) company to the one you've mentioned in the email. The most horrifying moment is the second right after you've hit the "send" button and no matter how hard or frantically you hit "cancel" the mail goes through anyway - this is sadly what happened to me recently.

Next comes the task of composing a sincerely apologetic email and hoping the recipient has a forgiving nature. I'm sure we've all done this at some point or the other as multitasking becomes integrated into the digital lifestyle; I'm putting it down to human error. If you find yourself in such a nasty predicament, especially if you're in the email marketing field, you'll find our opinion piece, "Apology emails - when are they really necessary?" by Georgia Christian, very handy.

Congratulations to South Africa's Luke "robotics junkie" Taylor for making it into the semi-finals in the inaugural Google Science Fair. You've done Africa proud! To vote for Luke in the People's Choice Award category, go to google.com/sciencefair.