【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障4系列】【4-20】经管

Rena张

恭喜baby姐取得760的好成绩！！！大家继续加油！！！

【SPEED】

Stephen Covey, RIP
The legacy of the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”


[Time 1]
Stephen Covey, who died on July 16th, was one of the most successful management gurus ever. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has sold more than 20m copies; three of his other titles have sold at least 1m each. His Covey Leadership Centre (now part of a firm called FranklinCovey) claims to have had three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies as clients.

Mr Covey’s message was old-fashioned. So old-fashioned, in fact, that it seemed fresh and exciting when “7 Habits” was first published in 1989. At a time when other management gurus were obsessed with how to build a better organisation, Mr Covey argued that personal character, purpose and self-discipline were what mattered. This message is still relevant, as the nasty habits of highly ineffective bankers make plain. Mr Covey taught that employees were not merely cogs in a machine powered by rewards and punishments, but individuals.

Mr Covey was influenced by Peter Drucker, the king of management theorists, who wrote in 1967 that “effectiveness…is a habit.” Mr Covey also drew inspiration from the two centuries-worth of American “success literature” that he read for his doctoral thesis. He discovered that, in the first 150 years or so of the republic, self-help books mostly emphasised character; it was only after the second world war that they switched to touting superficial qualities such as appearance and style.

[225 words]


[Time 2]
He was also guided by his Mormon faith. He went to Britain as a missionary when he was 20, and preached on street corners. “It helped me learn how to speak in public and interact with an audience,” he recalled. He drew crowds in their hundreds, a feat Mitt Romney, now the Republican contender for the White House, never equalled as a Mormon missionary in France. The seven habits are essentially a secular distillation of Mormon teaching, says Clayton Christensen, a Harvard management guru and a Mormon, written for anyone regardless of “which sort of God you believe in or whether you even believe in God”. (This has made it an easier sell to corporate buyers than “The Purpose-Driven Life” by Rick Warren, a more explicitly Christian bestseller.) What set Mr Covey apart from other management thinkers, says Mr Christensen, is that “he lived the life he wrote about. He had a conviction that came from experience.”

The seven habits are as follows. “Be proactive.” “Begin with the end in mind.” “Put first things first” (oddly, this is third on the list). “Think win-win.” “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” “Synergise”: learn to work with others to the benefit of all parties. “Sharpen the saw”: keep yourself physically, mentally and spiritually refreshed through such things as exercise, reading, prayer and good works. Mr Covey later added an eighth habit: find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

Cynics scoffed that this was all rather obvious. Yet spelling out these principles clearly met a widespread need. So did Mr Covey’s simple methods to help people apply his principles. For example, he encouraged them to divide their tasks into four categories: urgent and important; non-urgent and unimportant; urgent and unimportant; non-urgent and important. Then he told them to prioritise the fourth sort so as to minimise the number that became both important and urgent.

[316 words]


[Time 3]
The weakest aspect of Mr Covey’s work was his belief that combining lots of highly effective people would result in highly effective businesses. This is by no means inevitable, as he discovered first hand after the Covey Leadership Centre merged with Franklin, a firm that had pioneered time-management products. Soon after, new smartphones such as the BlackBerry, a time-management device that does not require you to listen to lectures, threatened the survival of the newly combined firm. FranklinCovey has since recovered by shifting its focus to advising organisations. “It’s one thing to be a very effective individual; another to be a very effective company,” points out Mr Christensen, who is also a non-executive director of FranklinCovey.

Work second, family first
Perhaps Mr Covey’s most appealing principle was that people should balance life and work. A father of nine and a grandfather of 52, he reserved one distraction-free weekday evening to bond with his family. He wrote a book on “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families”, which urged them to set mission statements and hold regular meetings to discuss progress. Really.

He hated the idea of retirement. He worked until the end, which came after he fell off his bicycle at the age of 79. He was writing several books, including one on how to reduce crime, which will be published posthumously. He will be remembered as a man who, as Schumpeter once put it:

tried to rescue [the notion of] “character” from both the simple-minded purveyors of self-help (who imply that you can change your character as easily as your underpants) and the social-service establishment (which ignores questions of character by blaming everything on “the system”).

He died peacefully, surrounded by his family.

[284 words]



Global health
One potato, two potato, three potato
An effort to count the world’s sloths



[Time 4]
A PAPER in the Lancet, shamelessly timed to coincide with the Olympic games, compares countries’ rates of physical activity. The study it describes, led by Pedro Hallal of the Federal University of Pelotas, in Brazil, is the most complete portrait yet of the world’s busy bees and couch potatoes. It suggests that nearly a third of adults, 31%, are not getting enough exercise.

That rates of exercise have declined is hardly a new discovery. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, technology and economic growth have conspired to create a world in which the flexing of muscles is more and more an option rather than a necessity. But only recently have enough good data been collected from enough places to carry out the sort of analysis Dr Hallal and his colleagues have engaged in.

In all, they were able to pool data from 122 countries, covering 89% of the world’s population. They considered sufficient physical activity to be 30 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week, 20 minutes of vigorous exercise three days a week, or some combination of the two.

[182 words]

[Time 5]
There are common themes in different places. Unsurprisingly, people in rich countries are less active than those in poor ones, and old people are less active than young ones. Less obviously, women tend to exercise less than men—34% are inactive, compared with 28% of men. But there are exceptions. The women of Croatia, Finland, Iraq and Luxembourg, for example, move more than their male countrymen.

Malta wins the race for most slothful country, with 72% of adults getting too little exercise. Swaziland and Saudi Arabia slouch in close behind, with 69%. In Bangladesh, by contrast, just 5% of adults fail to exercise enough. Surprisingly, America does not live up to its sluggish reputation. Six Americans in ten are sufficiently active by Dr Hallal’s definition, compared with fewer than four in ten Britons.

In an accompanying analysis of people’s habits, Dr Hallal found equally wide differences. In South-East Asia fewer than a quarter sit for at least four hours each day; in Europe 64% do. And even neighbours may differ. Only 2% of Swiss walk to work, whereas 23% of Germans do so.

These high rates of inactivity are worrying. Paradoxically, human beings seem to have evolved to benefit from exercise while eschewing it whenever they can. In a state of nature it would be impossible to live a life that did not provide enough of it to be beneficial, while over-exercising would use up scarce calories to little advantage. But that no longer pertains. According to another paper in the Lancet, insufficient activity these days has nearly the same effect on life expectancy as smoking.
[266 words]





【OBSTACLE】


Oilfield services
The unsung masters of the oil industry
Oil firms you have never heard of are booming


A TECHNIQUE called “directional drilling” has transformed the energy business. Fifteen years ago the best drillers could force a well-shaft into a gentle arc. These days shafts can be drilled vertically to a depth of several kilometres—then made to turn sharply and continue horizontally for up to 12km (or 7 miles). Will Grace of Schlumberger, an oilfield services company, likens it to dropping a plumb-line from the top of the Empire State Building and then guiding it through the rear and front windscreens of every car parked in the nearby streets.



Such technology vastly increases the area one rig can cover (see diagram). For an illustration, Mr Grace points to squiggles and shadings on a computer screen in one of the 34 offices Schlumberger operates in Aberdeen, a Scottish oil city. The lines show the progress of a well completed for a Canadian oil firm a few hours earlier. It is 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) deep and has been brought to a halt 6,500 feet horizontally away from the rig, within three feet of its target.

Instruments in the “drill-string”—as formerly inflexible steel drill-shafts are now called—are meanwhile transmitting dozens of additional measurements: of the radioactivity of the surrounding rock, its resistivity to electromagnetic waves, and so on. In this case, the rock gives a low radioactivity reading, which suggests that it is sand; its resistivity is high, which suggests it is oil-bearing. This is wizardry that few firms can match. And probably none is a regular oil company.

Oilfield services (OFS) firms such as Schlumberger are the unsung workhorses of the oil industry. They do most of the heavy lifting involved in finding and extracting oil and gas. They are far less well-known than the oil firms that hire them, but immensely lucrative. Schlumberger, with headquarters in Paris and Houston, earned profits of $5 billion on revenues of $40 billion last year. Its market capitalisation has risen fourfold in the past decade, to $91 billion. That is bigger than several international oil companies, including ENI ($82 billion), Statoil ($75 billion) and Conoco-Philips ($71 billion).

Schlumberger’s success highlights a shift in the balance of power between oil companies and their flunkeys. Until the 1990s OFS companies were far smaller and earned low margins on straightforward tasks, such as drilling vertical wells. That has changed dramatically.

With the price of oil so high, firms are scrambling to pump it out of ever more remote and costly crevices. Over the past decade the oil industry’s annual spending on exploration and production has increased fourfold in nominal terms, while oil production is up by only 12%. The big services companies, which invest heavily in technology (see chart), have been growing by around 10% a year. According to McKinsey, a consultancy, OFS companies grossed around $750 billion last year.

OFS firms come in three flavours. Some make and sell expensive kit for use on drilling rigs or the seabed. These include FMC, Cameron and National Oilwell Varco, all $10-billion-plus companies. Some own and lease out drill-rigs. These companies include Transocean, Seadrill, Noble and Rowan. The third group carries out most of the tasks involved in finding and extracting oil. It is dominated by four giants: Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Weatherford International.

Most of these firms were relatively small until the 1980s, when several oil companies decided that humdrum drilling chores were no longer worth doing in-house. Oil was easy then. Drilling yielded low margins that did not justify its claim on capital, so the oil majors outsourced it. This gave OFS firms space to grow.

They grew even faster in the early 1990s, when a tightening oil market drove demand for new technology. This led to breakthroughs in 3D seismology and directional drilling. These breakthroughs allow oil to be sucked economically from far beneath the ocean floor, and out of depleted and formerly abandoned wells.

But such inventions do not come cheap. Schlumberger invests roughly $1 billion a year in research and development, a level it maintained even during the slump after the 2008 financial crisis. That is as much as the mighty ExxonMobil spends; as a share of sales, five times more. The big OFS companies now probably file more patent applications than the oil majors, whose technological skills are largely interpretive. (For example, an oil major may decide where and how to drill based on geophysical data provided by an OFS firm.)

The oil business is likely to grow even more dependent on brainy OFS firms. Global production from mature oilfields is falling by between 2% and 6% a year. In the North Sea it has declined by 6% a year on average since 1999. With global demand for oil growing by 1-2% a year, there are persistent fears of a supply shock. Hence the current high oil prices: even after a 20% fall in recent months, Brent Crude is now around $100 a barrel. Oil firms are searching harder in more remote places, such as the Arctic and the deep seas off Brazil. Operating in such places will require yet more snazzy technology.

With hindsight, the oil companies’ decision to outsource the grubby bits of the job looks like an opportunity squandered. It has also left the oil firms hostage to the availability of increasingly expensive and sought-after services, from advanced drilling to deepwater rigs, which a dwindling number of OFS firms can provide.

There is, at present, still a fair amount of competition in most parts of the services industry. Each big OFS firm has different strengths, and plenty of smaller ones occupy specialised niches. Yet in some areas, especially the geographically remote ones, the demand for complex services often outstrips the supply.
Even worse for the likes of Exxon and BP, this has come at a time when state-owned oil firms have been muscling onto the stage. In the past couple of decades these national oil companies have claimed the best acreage in most old oilfields. The OFS firms have helped them to do so. Where once the state-owned giants hired oil majors to do the work, now they can manage projects themselves and hire technical help directly from the services firms. This can sometimes involve a limited sharing of risk between national and OFS firms, just as in a regular joint venture between oil companies.

Schlumberger, for example, will agree to a measure of payment-for-performance in big contracts. If it can drill more oil from a well than the contract says it must, it charges a higher fee. Other services firms have gone further, taking small equity stakes in exploration projects.

Some analysts wonder how all this might hurt the oil majors. A few decades ago national oil companies had to turn to oil majors for the technology required to get the stuff out of the ground. Today, oilfield service companies offer all the necessary technology and are increasingly willing to take on some of the same risks as an oil company, notes Marcel Brinkman of McKinsey.

Still, it would be wildly premature to bid Exxon adieu. Schlumberger’s performance-based contracts are a long way short of owning reserves—something the company says it will never do. It lacks the mammoth balance-sheet that oil firms maintain to manage the huge risks in oil exploration. It also lacks Exxon’s expertise in managing huge projects. And it is reluctant to annoy its customers by competing with them. Moreover, choosing where and how to explore (another strength of the oil majors) is trickier than you might think.

Instead, Schlumberger is planning more of what it is best at: pushing the technological boundaries of extracting the black stuff. It has recently been busy making acquisitions—including of Smith International, an American drill-bit company, for $11.3 billion—which have given it know-how in most segments of exploration and production. It now hopes to re-engineer the entire process.

The prize of increased efficiencies—delivered in barrels of money, not oil—could be vast. A big deepwater drilling rig costs half a million dollars a day to rent, and can take three months to drill a complicated well. Any OFS company that can shave a few days off that time will be in the money. Drilling is thrilling, and getting more so.

[1371 words]

草莓葡萄

抢沙发~

1:32 Introduce Covey's 7 habits theory and its influence
2:12 Covey has guided by Momon； What is the content of 7 habits and how to apply one's principles
1:44 Covey believe that effective individual would result to be effective company and business. His life time was balance of work and family.

1:15 physical activity is decreased. An institution get the exercise data and the data descried.

1:58 The data analysis show insufficient exercise among lots of countries. How does insufficient exercise harmful for the health

8:53

太长了，看了看着走神了，也忘了说啥了。。。。明天再看一遍

大概意思是15年前开始水平开凿技术，让石油开采有了很大的进步， 1980年代的公司怎么样， 1990年代的公司如何……这些技术的开发需要很多cost……，后面讲这些公司的risk，巴拉巴拉……

cleotina

板凳  

7-20
1'14
the author of The seven habits of hight effective people died this month, and he write the self-help book are sable.
1'27
an introduction of the seven habits. he also encourage people to divided job into four parts.
1'28
time management, to manage oneself is different from manage oneself.
He advocats the principle of keeping balance of work and life. and he do find the balance.
he dislike the idea of retire, so he works till the end
he died peaceful with family surrounding
56''
as the Olympic game is approaching, let tall about the excercise.  a huge pertion of people tend to do less or not do exercise.
1'28''
a survey about how many percent of people all over the world do exerse. and  found that yonger people do more exercise tha older, man do more than women. people in poor area do more than rich, and that the most sloth country.  
it is not a good signal, do less exercise is bad for the people's health, the harm is as serious as smoking.
8'30''
fist: an introduction of a new method to extract oil.  on the countrary to the traditional perpendiculer way to drill, the new mathod can cover an lager area.
then: extraction the oil service company, which offer the technology and equeipent to oil companies. as the need of oil keep on increase in the rate of 1%-2% all over the world. so. this kind of company have a chance to develop huge, with a scale even bigger than the oil companies.
with the new technology, it can earn a lot each day from rent.

angelafeng

1:42
2:00
1:34
1:06
1:35

7:31

ladyMcc

1'37''
2'30''
1'58''
1'13''
1'58''
9'33''越障后面走神鸟~好像是说一些知名度不高的公司，其实是暴利。后面又说了他们的发展过程？做什么是没什么利润的，于是外包了。。。。
再看一遍。

一项新的技术革新了石油产业。S公司的受众范围忒大。
这项技术增大了钻探覆盖面积。
这项技术提供了很多其他的测量值，通过电磁波的反射，可以判断是岩石还是油田。
ofs公司很赚钱牛逼，尽管不那么知名。
ofs的成功说明平衡石油公司和谄媚者之间的关系很重要。直到哪年以前他都是自己钻探获取微薄利润。
尽管在勘探中的投资增加了很多，但石油的产量增量仍然较小
ofs在三个领域：卖设备、租设备、开采
某年后，将开采外包，给了ofs更多发展空间
于是一项新技术诞生了，它所带来的费用也是杠杠滴
石油商业将会越来越依赖ofs，在全球石油供应恐慌的背景下。
ofs的发展趋势。。。

babybearmm

谢谢Rena亲~我好久没来做小分队了，来看看大家~
我没计时，读着玩的，Rena找的文章真好，都很有趣的~


越障
MI: to describe oilfield service (OFS) industry
1. new technique by Sch (the world's largest OFS firm): directional digging... can dig a long horizontal displacement, with some incorporated detection techniques ... a fantastic technique
2. OFS has been very profitable (more than the oil giants), and is has even more auspicious prospect, as the oil resource is dwindling.
3. OFS performs in three categories: 1. sell 2. lease 3. provide technology
4. major oil firms (e.g. Exxon Mobil) are outsourcing, providing more opportunities for OFS. Technology is the king.
(in the past some oil giants have suffered from the competition coming from the corporation of state-owned oil companies and OFS)
5. in oil industry, production efficiency (measured in $, not barrels of oils) is vital. If the technology can shorten the time of drilling, it would be very promising. Drilling is thrilling.

暮已央

今天好多人···先占着~
竟然看到baby姐姐了恭喜姐姐高分！
计时：
1:28；
1:46；
1:35；
00:56；
1:33；
好有意思的文章！其实我也是lazybone···
特别这些天，一天可以坐上10个小时不运动···
越障：
8:49；
这石油把人绕的···
我想想，只能回忆个大概：
油田真正的主人往往是低调的隐藏在卖石油者后背的石油勘探公司
他们很重要也很赚钱，利润比卖石油公司还要高
他们通过很好的机器和技术能勘探出比过去更多的油田
他们一般有三项业务，卖机器、租机器和开探挖掘
现在石油被开采的很多，石油需求量也逐年增加，所以不得不去一些远的地方勘探石油，比如北极和巴西深海；
以前，石油公司是要依赖他们这些石油服务公司，双方是合作关系——在石油公司还大部分是国有时
现在石油公司外包，石油服务公司的机会来了，他们也想要自己聘请专业的石油专家？在O公司提供的数据上决定开采哪里的石油
毕竟，现在技术才是一切。

haibaraaifly

Speed:
56''  1'28  1'13  50''  1'08

Obstacle:
10’40
Recall:
OFS companies are less-known than oil majors to the public, but their profits are as much as oil majors’ nowadays.
There are 3 types of OFS firms: firms that sell the kits used on the drill; firms that rent the drill; firms that find and extract oil.
The OFS firms had their first boom since 1980s when oil companies decided to outsource the work of oil extraction or something like this; then OFS firms got their second chance to thrive due to the technology breakthrough in the 1990s. Ever since then, the OFS firms have been increasingly prosperous.
Since the demand of oil will not diminish and the supply of oil is highly restricted by the current reserve of oil on earth, the oil price keeps soaring and now the OFS firms are putting them in a favorable position in the oil market. However, the big OFS firms are still too premature to buy any of the big oil majors but exert their own advantages further by making acquisitions of firms in their field.

clover928

啊哈哈哈。。。。貌似我由3-2就没有做了。。。。
ashamed.......
1:02
1:29
1:22
46
1:21  inactive=smoking!!!! So terrible!!!!
~~~~
10:57
With the development of technology, “d-s” has transmitted the measurement of oil business.
*OFS firms,eg.S co. 1.profit increased
                  2.market capitalization increased
                  #S co. lead a shift in the balance between oil co. and their flunkeys.
-->OFS firms earn higher margin and became bigger after 1990s

The increase in oil price --> co. are scrambling to pump it-->production of oil increase

3 flavors of OFS firms:
1.make and set expensive kit for the use of drill-rig
2.own and lease out d-r
3.finding and extracting oil

Time frame:
1980s: co.s were small
1990s: demand of oil increase-->new technology(expensive)

Oil business became more dependent on brainy OFS firms-->production decreased

A fair amount of competion in service industry:
*oil industry: demand>supply
Example:S co.
*its service p-p-c-->price increased

torresAing

恭喜baby姐取得760的好成绩！！！大家继续加油！！！

【SPEED】

Stephen Covey, RIP
The legacy of the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”


[Time 1]
Stephen Covey, who died on July 16th, was one of the most successful management gurus ever. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has sold more than 20m copies; three of his other titles have sold at least 1m each. His Covey Leadership Centre (now part of a firm called FranklinCovey) claims to have had three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies as clients.

Mr Covey’s message was old-fashioned. So old-fashioned, in fact, that it seemed fresh and exciting when “7 Habits” was first published in 1989. At a time when other management gurus were obsessed with how to build a better organisation, Mr Covey argued that personal character, purpose and self-discipline were what mattered. This message is still relevant, as the nasty habits of highly ineffective bankers make plain. Mr Covey taught that employees were not merely cogs in a machine powered by rewards and punishments, but individuals.

Mr Covey was influenced by Peter Drucker, the king of management theorists, who wrote in 1967 that “effectiveness…is a habit.” Mr Covey also drew inspiration from the two centuries-worth of American “success literature” that he read for his doctoral thesis. He discovered that, in the first 150 years or so of the republic, self-help books mostly emphasised character; it was only after the second world war that they switched to touting superficial qualities such as appearance and style.

[225 words]


[Time 2]
He was also guided by his Mormon faith. He went to Britain as a missionary when he was 20, and preached on street corners. “It helped me learn how to speak in public and interact with an audience,” he recalled. He drew crowds in their hundreds, a feat Mitt Romney, now the Republican contender for the White House, never equalled as a Mormon missionary in France. The seven habits are essentially a secular distillation of Mormon teaching, says Clayton Christensen, a Harvard management guru and a Mormon, written for anyone regardless of “which sort of God you believe in or whether you even believe in God”. (This has made it an easier sell to corporate buyers than “The Purpose-Driven Life” by Rick Warren, a more explicitly Christian bestseller.) What set Mr Covey apart from other management thinkers, says Mr Christensen, is that “he lived the life he wrote about. He had a conviction that came from experience.”

The seven habits are as follows. “Be proactive.” “Begin with the end in mind.” “Put first things first” (oddly, this is third on the list). “Think win-win.” “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” “Synergise”: learn to work with others to the benefit of all parties. “Sharpen the saw”: keep yourself physically, mentally and spiritually refreshed through such things as exercise, reading, prayer and good works. Mr Covey later added an eighth habit: find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

Cynics scoffed that this was all rather obvious. Yet spelling out these principles clearly met a widespread need. So did Mr Covey’s simple methods to help people apply his principles. For example, he encouraged them to divide their tasks into four categories: urgent and important; non-urgent and unimportant; urgent and unimportant; non-urgent and important. Then he told them to prioritise the fourth sort so as to minimise the number that became both important and urgent.

[316 words]


[Time 3]
The weakest aspect of Mr Covey’s work was his belief that combining lots of highly effective people would result in highly effective businesses. This is by no means inevitable, as he discovered first hand after the Covey Leadership Centre merged with Franklin, a firm that had pioneered time-management products. Soon after, new smartphones such as the BlackBerry, a time-management device that does not require you to listen to lectures, threatened the survival of the newly combined firm. FranklinCovey has since recovered by shifting its focus to advising organisations. “It’s one thing to be a very effective individual; another to be a very effective company,” points out Mr Christensen, who is also a non-executive director of FranklinCovey.

Work second, family first
Perhaps Mr Covey’s most appealing principle was that people should balance life and work. A father of nine and a grandfather of 52, he reserved one distraction-free weekday evening to bond with his family. He wrote a book on “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families”, which urged them to set mission statements and hold regular meetings to discuss progress. Really.

He hated the idea of retirement. He worked until the end, which came after he fell off his bicycle at the age of 79. He was writing several books, including one on how to reduce crime, which will be published posthumously. He will be remembered as a man who, as Schumpeter once put it:

tried to rescue [the notion of] “character” from both the simple-minded purveyors of self-help (who imply that you can change your character as easily as your underpants) and the social-service establishment (which ignores questions of character by blaming everything on “the system”).

He died peacefully, surrounded by his family.

[284 words]



Global health
One potato, two potato, three potato
An effort to count the world’s sloths



[Time 4]
A PAPER in the Lancet, shamelessly timed to coincide with the Olympic games, compares countries’ rates of physical activity. The study it describes, led by Pedro Hallal of the Federal University of Pelotas, in Brazil, is the most complete portrait yet of the world’s busy bees and couch potatoes. It suggests that nearly a third of adults, 31%, are not getting enough exercise.

That rates of exercise have declined is hardly a new discovery. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, technology and economic growth have conspired to create a world in which the flexing of muscles is more and more an option rather than a necessity. But only recently have enough good data been collected from enough places to carry out the sort of analysis Dr Hallal and his colleagues have engaged in.

In all, they were able to pool data from 122 countries, covering 89% of the world’s population. They considered sufficient physical activity to be 30 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week, 20 minutes of vigorous exercise three days a week, or some combination of the two.

[182 words]

[Time 5]
There are common themes in different places. Unsurprisingly, people in rich countries are less active than those in poor ones, and old people are less active than young ones. Less obviously, women tend to exercise less than men—34% are inactive, compared with 28% of men. But there are exceptions. The women of Croatia, Finland, Iraq and Luxembourg, for example, move more than their male countrymen.

Malta wins the race for most slothful country, with 72% of adults getting too little exercise. Swaziland and Saudi Arabia slouch in close behind, with 69%. In Bangladesh, by contrast, just 5% of adults fail to exercise enough. Surprisingly, America does not live up to its sluggish reputation. Six Americans in ten are sufficiently active by Dr Hallal’s definition, compared with fewer than four in ten Britons.

In an accompanying analysis of people’s habits, Dr Hallal found equally wide differences. In South-East Asia fewer than a quarter sit for at least four hours each day; in Europe 64% do. And even neighbours may differ. Only 2% of Swiss walk to work, whereas 23% of Germans do so.

These high rates of inactivity are worrying. Paradoxically, human beings seem to have evolved to benefit from exercise while eschewing it whenever they can. In a state of nature it would be impossible to live a life that did not provide enough of it to be beneficial, while over-exercising would use up scarce calories to little advantage. But that no longer pertains. According to another paper in the Lancet, insufficient activity these days has nearly the same effect on life expectancy as smoking.
[266 words]





【OBSTACLE】


Oilfield services
The unsung masters of the oil industry
Oil firms you have never heard of are booming


A TECHNIQUE called “directional drilling” has transformed the energy business. Fifteen years ago the best drillers could force a well-shaft into a gentle arc. These days shafts can be drilled vertically to a depth of several kilometres—then made to turn sharply and continue horizontally for up to 12km (or 7 miles). Will Grace of Schlumberger, an oilfield services company, likens it to dropping a plumb-line from the top of the Empire State Building and then guiding it through the rear and front windscreens of every car parked in the nearby streets.



Such technology vastly increases the area one rig can cover (see diagram). For an illustration, Mr Grace points to squiggles and shadings on a computer screen in one of the 34 offices Schlumberger operates in Aberdeen, a Scottish oil city. The lines show the progress of a well completed for a Canadian oil firm a few hours earlier. It is 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) deep and has been brought to a halt 6,500 feet horizontally away from the rig, within three feet of its target.

Instruments in the “drill-string”—as formerly inflexible steel drill-shafts are now called—are meanwhile transmitting dozens of additional measurements: of the radioactivity of the surrounding rock, its resistivity to electromagnetic waves, and so on. In this case, the rock gives a low radioactivity reading, which suggests that it is sand; its resistivity is high, which suggests it is oil-bearing. This is wizardry that few firms can match. And probably none is a regular oil company.

Oilfield services (OFS) firms such as Schlumberger are the unsung workhorses of the oil industry. They do most of the heavy lifting involved in finding and extracting oil and gas. They are far less well-known than the oil firms that hire them, but immensely lucrative. Schlumberger, with headquarters in Paris and Houston, earned profits of $5 billion on revenues of $40 billion last year. Its market capitalisation has risen fourfold in the past decade, to $91 billion. That is bigger than several international oil companies, including ENI ($82 billion), Statoil ($75 billion) and Conoco-Philips ($71 billion).

Schlumberger’s success highlights a shift in the balance of power between oil companies and their flunkeys. Until the 1990s OFS companies were far smaller and earned low margins on straightforward tasks, such as drilling vertical wells. That has changed dramatically.

With the price of oil so high, firms are scrambling to pump it out of ever more remote and costly crevices. Over the past decade the oil industry’s annual spending on exploration and production has increased fourfold in nominal terms, while oil production is up by only 12%. The big services companies, which invest heavily in technology (see chart), have been growing by around 10% a year. According to McKinsey, a consultancy, OFS companies grossed around $750 billion last year.

OFS firms come in three flavours. Some make and sell expensive kit for use on drilling rigs or the seabed. These include FMC, Cameron and National Oilwell Varco, all $10-billion-plus companies. Some own and lease out drill-rigs. These companies include Transocean, Seadrill, Noble and Rowan. The third group carries out most of the tasks involved in finding and extracting oil. It is dominated by four giants: Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Weatherford International.

Most of these firms were relatively small until the 1980s, when several oil companies decided that humdrum drilling chores were no longer worth doing in-house. Oil was easy then. Drilling yielded low margins that did not justify its claim on capital, so the oil majors outsourced it. This gave OFS firms space to grow.

They grew even faster in the early 1990s, when a tightening oil market drove demand for new technology. This led to breakthroughs in 3D seismology and directional drilling. These breakthroughs allow oil to be sucked economically from far beneath the ocean floor, and out of depleted and formerly abandoned wells.

But such inventions do not come cheap. Schlumberger invests roughly $1 billion a year in research and development, a level it maintained even during the slump after the 2008 financial crisis. That is as much as the mighty ExxonMobil spends; as a share of sales, five times more. The big OFS companies now probably file more patent applications than the oil majors, whose technological skills are largely interpretive. (For example, an oil major may decide where and how to drill based on geophysical data provided by an OFS firm.)

The oil business is likely to grow even more dependent on brainy OFS firms. Global production from mature oilfields is falling by between 2% and 6% a year. In the North Sea it has declined by 6% a year on average since 1999. With global demand for oil growing by 1-2% a year, there are persistent fears of a supply shock. Hence the current high oil prices: even after a 20% fall in recent months, Brent Crude is now around $100 a barrel. Oil firms are searching harder in more remote places, such as the Arctic and the deep seas off Brazil. Operating in such places will require yet more snazzy technology.

With hindsight, the oil companies’ decision to outsource the grubby bits of the job looks like an opportunity squandered. It has also left the oil firms hostage to the availability of increasingly expensive and sought-after services, from advanced drilling to deepwater rigs, which a dwindling number of OFS firms can provide.

There is, at present, still a fair amount of competition in most parts of the services industry. Each big OFS firm has different strengths, and plenty of smaller ones occupy specialised niches. Yet in some areas, especially the geographically remote ones, the demand for complex services often outstrips the supply.
Even worse for the likes of Exxon and BP, this has come at a time when state-owned oil firms have been muscling onto the stage. In the past couple of decades these national oil companies have claimed the best acreage in most old oilfields. The OFS firms have helped them to do so. Where once the state-owned giants hired oil majors to do the work, now they can manage projects themselves and hire technical help directly from the services firms. This can sometimes involve a limited sharing of risk between national and OFS firms, just as in a regular joint venture between oil companies.

Schlumberger, for example, will agree to a measure of payment-for-performance in big contracts. If it can drill more oil from a well than the contract says it must, it charges a higher fee. Other services firms have gone further, taking small equity stakes in exploration projects.

Some analysts wonder how all this might hurt the oil majors. A few decades ago national oil companies had to turn to oil majors for the technology required to get the stuff out of the ground. Today, oilfield service companies offer all the necessary technology and are increasingly willing to take on some of the same risks as an oil company, notes Marcel Brinkman of McKinsey.

Still, it would be wildly premature to bid Exxon adieu. Schlumberger’s performance-based contracts are a long way short of owning reserves—something the company says it will never do. It lacks the mammoth balance-sheet that oil firms maintain to manage the huge risks in oil exploration. It also lacks Exxon’s expertise in managing huge projects. And it is reluctant to annoy its customers by competing with them. Moreover, choosing where and how to explore (another strength of the oil majors) is trickier than you might think.

Instead, Schlumberger is planning more of what it is best at: pushing the technological boundaries of extracting the black stuff. It has recently been busy making acquisitions—including of Smith International, an American drill-bit company, for $11.3 billion—which have given it know-how in most segments of exploration and production. It now hopes to re-engineer the entire process.

The prize of increased efficiencies—delivered in barrels of money, not oil—could be vast. A big deepwater drilling rig costs half a million dollars a day to rent, and can take three months to drill a complicated well. Any OFS company that can shave a few days off that time will be in the money. Drilling is thrilling, and getting more so.

[1371 words]

-- by 会员 Rena张 (2012/7/20 22:16:02)

LZ，这期怎么报名啊？！！ 谢谢