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抱歉哇~今天的速度越障来迟了哇~~~Rena在祈祷考位中~~~求RP大爆发~~~
今天的速度第一篇讲的小发明 之前在李云迪那期的快本中的 啊啊啊啊 有人肉版演示过~~~ 不知道大家看过没~~~比较简单哇~~~
速度第二篇就是前几天的金星凌日啊~~~ 在睡梦中错过了哇~~~现在才知道果然是难得哇~~~o(╯□╰)o
另外今天的越障找了好久哇~~~找到的都木有1000字……最后终于有了这篇~~~
废话说完了。大家加油！！！
【速度】
MIT students' invention turns bananas into keyboard
【计时1】
Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have managed to develop a banana piano.
Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, both 32, were looking for a way of turning everyday objects into touchpads.
They have developed a kit called MakeyMakey, that can turn fruit, animals and even humans into keyboards.
Mr Rosenbaum told the BBC the idea behind the kit was to enable people to "see the world around them as a construction kit."
The basic kit contains a USB cable and a bespoke circuit board with alligator clips attached to it. The circuit board is programmed to replace a standard computer keyboard.
Once the board has been connected to a PC or laptop via USB, the alligator clips can be linked to any object that conducts electricity.
When asked about safety concerns, Mr Rosenbaum said the amount of current used in the equipment was very small and not detectable when the kit was connected to the human body or animals.
He said fuses had been incorporated into the board as well as the USB port to ensure safety.
An animal-rights group contacted by the BBC did not express concerns.
Mr Silver said the possibilities were unlimited, from connecting a broccoli head to run Skype to creating an interactive music floor. Even his cat became part of the experiment.
"Cats are conductive on their foot pads, their ears, their nose, and their mouth. But their fur is not conductive."
According to Mr Rosenbaum they have managed to turn two of his friends into sound machines, a beach-ball into a game controller and have used a cup of milk to make music.
【272 words】
【计时2】
More than a gimmick
But both students insist the kit is more than just a gimmick.
Mr Silver told the BBC that dozens of people had contacted them, wanting to customise the Makey board for people who cannot use a conventional keyboard.
"A father is currently turning it into a computer interface for his son who is suffering from cerebral palsy. We call this Hackcess."
Mr Silver and Mr Rosenbaum came up with the idea on a road trip in California two years ago.
Mr Rosenbaum, a self-taught programmer with an academic background in education, said the pair wanted to change the way people relate to technology.
"It's easy for kids to get turned off by science and maths, because of the way it is taught. We wanted to make it easier for people to use engineering as a tool to fuel creativity."
Potential to educate
Around 150 beta-versions of the kit have been made available to test-users and AnnMarie Thomas, based in Minneapolis, was among the first to try it.
She says even her four-year-old daughter has managed to connect the kit without any help.
"My kids love it. My daughter was able to plug it in and set it up. She has tried tin foil and playdough and has even managed to connect herself to the kit."
Ms Thomas, a former professor of engineering, trains future engineering teachers and thinks the kit has a lot of potential for use in schools.
"It is a great way to engage kids with science and technology," she said. "It helped my daughter understand how circuits work and how to ground herself."
Exceeding expectations
The students were looking to raise $25,000 (£16,000) to produce more kits, and launched the project on Kickstarter, a crowdsource funding site for entrepreneurs.
"We hope to develop a community of people using MaKeyMaKey and sharing their ideas and inventions with each other. We have lots of ideas for extensions and add-ons."
The project has already received more than $440,000 in funding.
According to Mr Rosenbaum, they are receiving a huge number of inquiries on a daily basis, including offers for paid services or collaborations with companies.
【359 words】
【计时3】
Venus makes rare trek across Sun
Planet Venus has put on a show for skywatchers by moving across the face of the Sun as viewed from Earth.
The transit was a very rare astronomical event that would not be seen again for another 105 years.
Observers in north and central America, and the northern-most parts of South America saw the event start just before local sunset.
The far northwest of America, the Arctic, the western Pacific, and east Asia witnessed the entire passage.
While the UK and the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and eastern Africa waited for local sunrise to try to see the closing stages of the transit.
Venus appeared as a small black dot moving slowly but surely across the solar disc. The traverse lasted more than six and a half hours.
Some of the best pictures of the event were provided by the US space agency's (Nasa) Solar Dynamics Observatory, which studies the Sun from a position 36,000km above the Earth.
"We get to see Venus in exquisite detail because of SDO's spatial resolution," said agency astrophysicist Dr Lika Guhathakurta.
"SDO is a very special observatory. It takes images that are about 10 times better than a high-definition TV and those images are acquired at a temporal cadence of one every 10 seconds. This is something we've never had before."
【226 words】
【计时4】
Many citizens keen to observe the transit first hand attended special events at universities and observatories where equipment for safe viewing had been set up.
In Hawaii, one of the best places to see the whole event, the university's Institute of Astronomy set up telescope stations on Waikiki beach.
"We've had 10 telescopes and the queues have been 10 deep to each telescope all day long," said the institute's Dr Roy Gal.
"It's a great opportunity to get people excited and teach them stuff. I was hoping for a big turn-out, and it's been fantastic," he told BBC News.
Joe Cali viewed the transit on the edge of the Outback in New South Wales, Australia, another ideal vantage point.
"It is exciting. It may look like just a black dot on the Sun but if you think about it, it's one of the few times you get to see a planet in motion," he said.
UK skywatchers had to deal with quite extensive cloud conditions across the country.
"We've had total cloud and rain," said Brian Sheen from the Roseland Observatory in Cornwall.
"But we've been improving our chances by connecting with the Shetland Islands and the people up there have done rather better than we have. We've been seeing the transit through [a feed] of one of their telescopes," he explained.
Scientists observed the transit to test ideas that will help them probe Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy, and to learn more about Venus itself and its complex atmosphere.
Venus transits occur four times in approximately 243 years; more precisely, they appear in pairs of events separated by about eight years and these pairs are separated by about 105 or 121 years.
【284 words】
【计时5】
The reason for the long intervals lies in the fact that the orbits of Venus and Earth do not lie in the same plane and a transit can only occur if both planets and the Sun are situated exactly on one line.
This has happened only seven times previously in the telescopic age: in 1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882 and 2004.
The next pair will not now occur until 2117 and 2125.
The phenomenon has particular historical significance. The 17th- and 18th-Century transits were used by the astronomers of the day to work out fundamental facts about the Solar System.
Employing a method of triangulation (parallax), they were able to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Sun - the so-called astronomical unit (AU) - which we know today to be about 149.6 million km (or 93 million miles).
This allowed scientists to get their first real handle on the scale of things beyond Earth.
Modern instrumentation now gives us very precise numbers on planetary positions and masses, as well as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But to the early astronomers, just getting good approximate values represented a huge challenge.
This is not to say the 2012 Venus transit was regarded as just a pretty show with no interest for scientists.
Planetary transits have key significance today because they represent one of the best methods for finding worlds orbiting distant stars.
Nasa's Kepler telescope, for example, is identifying thousands of candidates by looking for the tell-tale dips in light that accompany a planet moving in front of its host sun.
These planets are too far away to be visited by spacecraft in the foreseeable future, but scientists can learn something about them from the way the background star's light is affected as it passes through the planetary atmosphere.
And observing a transiting Venus, which has a known atmospheric composition, provides a kind of benchmark to support these far-flung investigations.
Researchers also took a close look at Venus itself during the transit, used the occasion to probe the middle layers of the planet's atmosphere - its mesosphere.
【351 words】
【自由阅读】
They were looking for a very thin arc of light, called the aureole, which can only be seen when Venus appears to just touch the edge of the Sun's disc at ingress and egress.
The brightness and thickness of the aureole depends on the density and temperature of the atmospheric layers above Venus's cloud tops.
Observations of the aureole were being combined with data from Europe's Venus Express spacecraft in orbit around the planet to provide information on high-altitude winds.
The Venusian atmosphere experiences super-rotation. That is - the whole atmosphere circles the planet in four Earth days, on a body that turns around just once in 243 Earth days.
【110 words】
【越障】
The Vicious Cycle of the Gender Pay Gap
The gender pay gap is a labyrinth of unconscious prejudice and blatant discrimination, a byproduct of unbalanced professional opportunities, educational prospects and deeply-entrenched societal norms. With so many forces at work, getting to the root of glass ceiling issues within a single firm or industry is difficult, if not impossible.
Janice Fanning Madden, a Wharton real estate professor and a professor of regional science and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, had the rare opportunity to examine the mechanics of the pay gap among male and female stockbrokers while acting as an expert witness in class action lawsuits filed against two large brokerage firms in the early 2000s.
Women from the firms claimed that the pay structure at the companies unfairly benefitted men. Leadership at the brokerage houses contended that both men and women were paid using the same commission-based system and that women were paid less on average because they were worse sales people than men.
(MORE: The Real Reason Women Don’t Help Other Women At Work)
Madden found that women were assigned inferior accounts, which led to them earning lower returns and smaller commissions. As Madden notes in “Performance-Support Bias and the Gender Pay Gap among Stockbrokers,” this perpetuated a vicious cycle because the firms doled out amenities that often aid in better returns — such as bigger or more attractive offices, support staff and mentors — based on employees’ sales records. Thus, women not being given the opportunity to handle a lucrative account today also hurt their chances of being given advantages that could have a significant impact on their future efforts.
“I wasn’t able to see what kind of offices [the women] had, what kind of secretaries or what kind of titles,” Madden says. “But the decisions of assigning those things to women were made by the same people who were stiffing them on the accounts. They were probably dealing with less support in these other areas, even when they had the same type of account [as men] to work with.”
Using a “natural experiment” based on sales generated by accounts that were transferred by management from one broker to another, Madden was able to analyze performance when the playing field for accounts was equal — when female employees were working with clients who had same potential to produce high commissions as those handled by male stockbrokers. Madden shows that the women produced sales that were at least equivalent to those produced by men. “I was quite surprised that women were such strong performers. I had sort of thought that the brokerages were right and that women were less likely to churn their accounts than men. That was not beyond belief to me,” she says, pointing to evidence showing that women overall tend to invest their own money more conservatively than men. “But they’re given the same incentives as men to sell on their accounts, so they behave in the same way.”
A Gut Reaction
Over the past 15 years, women have accounted for about one-third of all full-time stockbrokers. During that time, Madden notes, their earnings have grown from 54% to about two-thirds of the salaries earned by men — but the job still has the largest gender pay gap among sales positions, although it is also the highest-paid of those positions overall. The two organizations Madden studied were large, national full-service brokerage houses that sold financial products primarily to individual investors. Women made up a relatively small percentage of the stockbroker ranks at both firms — 11.2% at one and 13.8% at the other.
“But the gender gap in wages at these two big firms is much smaller than the gender gap for stockbrokers, [according to] the Census,” Madden says. “It’s not because these two firms discriminated less but because women are more likely to work in small firms that are less successful. These firms also had fewer women proportionally than the occupation as a whole so some of the difference comes from the difficulty of getting a foot in the door of a major stock brokerage firm.”
(MORE: Why We Need More Female Traders On Wall Street)
At both businesses, stockbrokers’ salaries were entirely determined by commission by the end of their second year after passing the Series 7 exam required to become a registered broker. At the time the lawsuits were filed, there were “significant” gaps in compensation among male and female stockbrokers, Madden writes. “There are really only two reasons for a gender gap in compensation derived from commissions on sales…. Women are less effective at sales, on average, than men; and/or performance support bias — the sales opportunities, including account assignments and the various supports used to produce sales assigned to women, are inferior to those assigned to men.”
Madden examined both possible factors using data on more than a billion individual transactions on customer accounts within the firms between 1994 and 1996. She notes that there are several possible reasons why women may achieve worse sales figures than men: It could be that they simply have less innate ability, but it could also be due to societal factors like clients being less willing to work with, or make purchases when dealing with, women stockbrokers.
The “natural experiment” was created by observing sales yields from stockbrokers of both genders on accounts with similar histories that were assigned to incumbent stockbrokers after the original overseer of the account left the firm. At one firm, women were significantly less likely than men to receive these transferred assets. But when they did get these accounts, women had stronger sales achievements than men. Men and women were equally likely to be given transferred accounts at the other firm, and in that case their performance on accounts with similar histories and yields was equally strong.
These results provide evidence that the performance differences do not stem from innate ability, Madden says. She also did not find strong support for the hypothesis that customer bias played a significant role in the gender pay gap. Instead, Madden discovered that women at both firms were less likely to receive the types of accounts that produced higher commissions. This in turn hurt their salaries and their ability to compete for benefits that were awarded based on performance.
(MORE: Six Ways to Reinvent the Post Office)
“Both brokerage firms alleged that women receive inferior account transfers because they generated lower commissions in the prior year, and the prior year’s commissions were used to allocate transferred accounts,” she writes. But employees weren’t operating on a level playing field in the way clients were parceled out. And the consequences of being relegated to “inferior” accounts only balloon over time, Madden adds: “The effects of small annual differences in the distribution of accounts or of other forms of performance support accumulate over a career as early career differences allow brokers to qualify for additional benefits, such as titles [and] office space, based on account size or production.”
The lawsuits were settled before going to trial and, as part of those agreements, the two firms agreed to change their policies so accounts were distributed to brokers using a standardized system. Madden heard from lawyers working with the plaintiffs that people from one of the firms commented on her findings “and said [the company] had clearly been making mistakes in assigning accounts…. They had not realized how well women were doing.”
According to Madden, the study is the first to show how gender bias affects employees working under a seemingly objective performance-based pay system like commissions, rather than one where salaries are determined by subjective performance evaluations. She notes that the research highlights how important it is for firms to examine the ways that subjectivity can creep into, and damage the effectiveness of, systems designed to encourage equal treatment in the workplace.
“In lots of occupations, women or minorities can get the short end of the stick because people are operating without thinking,” Madden says. “They would never purposely … discriminate against somebody, but they’re reacting with their gut and unfortunately, when we react with our gut, we sometimes bring in prejudices we’re not aware that we have.”
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发表于 2012-6-9 01:30:03
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发表于 2012-6-9 17:03:52
