【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障5系列】【5-21】

shelvey

速度

No Secrets

速度一【字数：255】

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.



速度二【字数：255】

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

速度三【字数：345】

Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy. The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.



Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.) Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country. The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.

速度四【字数：262】

Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed. Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce, “WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.”



In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.

In private, however, Assange is often bemused and energetic. He can concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport. People around him seem to want to care for him; they make sure that he is where he needs to be, and that he has not left all his clothes in the dryer before moving on. At such times, he can seem innocent of the considerable influence that he has acquired.

速度五【字数：350】

Sitting at a small wooden table in the Bunker, Assange looked exhausted. His lanky frame was arched over two computers—one of them online, and the other disconnected from the Internet, because it was full of classified military documents. (In the tradecraft of espionage, this is known as maintaining an “air gap.”) He has a cyber-security analyst’s concern about computer vulnerability, and habitually takes precautions to frustrate eavesdroppers. A low-grade fever of paranoia runs through the WikiLeaks community. Assange says that he has chased away strangers who have tried to take his picture for surveillance purposes. In March, he published a classified military report, created by the Army Counterintelligence Center in 2008, that argued that the site was a potential threat to the Army and briefly speculated on ways to deter government employees from leaking documents to it. Assange regarded the report as a declaration of war, and posted it with the title “U.S. Intelligence Planned to Destroy WikiLeaks.” During a trip to a conference before he came to the Bunker, he thought he was being followed, and his fear began to infect others. “I went to Sweden and stayed with a girl who is a foreign editor of a newspaper there, and she became so paranoid that the C.I.A. was trying to get me she left the house and abandoned me,” he said.

Assange was sitting opposite Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist, hacker, and businessman. Gonggrijp—thin and balding, with a soft voice—has known Assange well for several years. He had noticed Assange’s panicky communiqués about being watched and decided that his help was needed. “Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep, and a hell of a lot of chaos, but even he has his limits, and I could see that he was stretching himself,” Gonggrijp told me. “I decided to come out and make things sane again.” Gonggrijp became the unofficial manager and treasurer of Project B, advancing about ten thousand euros to WikiLeaks to finance it. He kept everyone on schedule, and made sure that the kitchen was stocked with food and that the Bunker was orderly.

余下部分太长了，足足有十一页呢，就不贴这儿了。

链接上：

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=1

越障【字数：741】

之前两周越障都弄了些哲学的东西，今天就不害大家眼睛了，来了一篇短的~~

What’s a man?

THE problem with understanding human uniqueness is precisely that it is unique. Though the proper study of mankind may be man, that study will yield little if there is no reference point to compare man with.

That, at least, is the philosophy of Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. Dr Paabo, whose work on fossil DNA was the inspiration for “Jurassic Park”, has since become interested in human evolution. To this end, he and his colleagues have sequenced the DNA of both Neanderthal man and an Asian species of prehistoric human, the Denisovians, which Dr Paabo’s own work identified.

Now he has turned his attentions to modern Homo sapiens. In collaboration with a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dr Paabo and his colleague Philipp Khaitovich have compared genetic activity over the course of a lifetime in the brains of humans, chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys. They have then matched what they found with what is known of Neanderthals, and think they have thus discovered at least part of the genetic difference between Homo sapiens and the others that creates human uniqueness.

Dr Paabo and his colleagues focused their examination, just published in Genome Research, on two parts of the brain. One was the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of abstract reasoning and social behaviour—things that humans are particularly good at. The other was the lateral cerebellar cortex, which is more to do with manual abilities. They extracted cells, post mortem, from people, chimps and monkeys of many ages, and looked at which genes had been active in these cells when the owners were alive.

The vortex of the cortex

They did this by examining the RNA in the cells. RNA molecules are single-stranded copies of the double-helical DNA genes in the cell nucleus. Their job is to carry instructions from the genes to a cell’s protein-making machinery. Most primate genes have now been identified, so it is possible to make chips covered with complementary strands to the RNA messengers, to which these messengers will uniquely stick, and which thus act as probes for particular messenger molecules.

Using such chips, Dr Khaitovich and Dr Paabo were able to find out when, during the course of life, particular genes were active, by working out how much RNA from each gene cells from particular parts of the brains of individuals of different ages contained. Their results fell into six categories.

First, they found some genes whose expression patterns over a lifetime were uniquely human (ie, were the same in chimpanzees and monkeys, but different in people) and others that were uniquely chimpanzee (ie, the same in people and monkeys, but different in chimpanzees). Second, they discovered that there were more uniquely human expression patterns than uniquely chimp ones. Third, unique human expression patterns were more common in the prefrontal cortex than in the cerebellum. Fourth, though these uniquely expressed genes were most active in the young of all species, their period of activity was several years longer in humans than in the others. Fifth, the activities of a lot of the uniquely active genes seemed to be correlated: the researchers identified seven groups of genes (five in the prefrontal cortex and two in the cerebellum) which each seemed to be working as a module. And sixth, these modular genes seem to be involved in the crucial job of linking nerve cells together through junctions called synapses.

To summarise, human beings have suites of genes that probably cause their brains to be “plastic” and thus receptive to change far longer (to the age of about five) than is true for chimps or monkeys (whose brains are plastic for less than a year after birth). Moreover, Dr Khaitovich was able to work out how the expression of these modules of genes was co-ordinated, by looking at the switches, known as transcription factors, that turn them on and off.

Indeed, by comparing modern genomes with their discoveries about Neanderthals Dr Paabo’s group has found that the regulatory process for one of the modules came into existence after the modern human and Neanderthal lines separated from one another, about 300,000 years ago. Unfortunately, it is not possible to look at the expression pattern of genes in Neanderthals, and it probably never will be. But it might be possible, as knowledge advances, to reconstruct part of it from a better understanding of that extinct species’s DNA. “Pleistocene Park”, anybody?

泾渭不凡

谢谢shelvey~~~~介个要留着白天做哇~~~

Sophia001

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讲科学家研究人类ＤＮＡ和猴子的，猩猩的ＤＮＡ的一些发现。。。细节没记住啊，就记住了有６个发现，然后总结了下说人类有好多基因使人脑可塑，并且远超过猩猩大脑的可塑期。

铁板神猴

floor is OK

h14zpsn

顶起，吃好饭开始做这个！！！

xinnono

来报到~~~

xinnono

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刚喝了咖啡再速度, 果然好一些~

xinnono

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讲科学家研究人类ＤＮＡ和猴子的，猩猩的ＤＮＡ的一些发现。。。细节没记住啊，就记住了有６个发现，然后总结了下说人类有好多基因使人脑可塑，并且远超过猩猩大脑的可塑期。

-- by 会员 Sophia001 (2012/2/4 1:32:31)

sophia怎么速度shift这么大, 有的多将近4分钟, 有的不到1分钟就读完了!!! 不过看来潜力还是大大滴~ 我怎么读都没进过1分钟的圈子~ 今天喝了咖啡也要1分半以上~

xinnono

okay~ 越障..

有好几天没认真做越障了~

to find out how unique human is, we need to find something to compare with first. inspired by 侏罗纪公园, Mr. P started some research on comparing genes of human, chimpanzees, and some monkeys of the modern species.

they examine the RNA, which carries the instructions for the cells to function. they are able to create some chips, which can simulate the DNA strands or something.

then with those chips, they found the following:
1. they found some unique genes, some only unique in human, some only unique in chimpanzees.
2. the unique genes in human are more than those in chimpanzees.
3. the active time of unique genes in human is longer than that of those in chimpanzees.
4. the unique genes of human are more found at the prefrontal cortex.
5. unique genes are more active when the host is young.
6. the unique genes seem to be related, and work in groups.
7. unique genes inter-connect some nerves

(为什么出来了7点啊!!! darn it.... it should be 6 i think... )

then summary.

then talking about it's not possible to get the genes evolution or something of the old fossils, and probably will never be. it might be possible in the future to use some of what they've found to create some simulations of part of the old genes.

monalisa0421

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惭愧了，越障基本没看懂，就在几个不懂的单词里绕啊绕
human cannot be considered as human without pointing out the genes of human.
give the example of monkey and who and offer six ideas
it is not possible to prove the gene of who