【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障5系列】【5-19】经管

Rena张

……我二了……我以为今天才星期五撒……斯咪嘛san。。。。。。

【speed】

The London games
The joy of the nudge Olympics
A highly successful Olympics contains two lessons for Britain’s policymakers. Only one is reassuring



【time 1】
BY ANY measure Britain has shown the world—and its own sceptical population—that the country can stage a brilliant Olympics. As the games draw to a close on August 12th, David Cameron, the prime minister, will be delighted that the predicted “feel good factor” of hosting the event did indeed emerge. Even the sun has (mostly) shone.

In fact most Olympics work pretty well. But each host achieves that end by different means. In 2008 China staged a command-and-control games, shunting dissidents and other undesirables out of Beijing, ordering locals not to drive and even launching 1,100 cloud-seeding missiles before the opening ceremony to make it rain somewhere other than over the main stadium.

By contrast, the London games have been a “nudge” Olympics, where locals and visitors have been coaxed rather than coerced. Nudging, a theory developed by two American academics, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, is in vogue in Britain. In 2010 the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition set up a behavioural insight unit to consider how government might subtly steer people’s decisions.

Organisers have, for example, tried to make enjoyable Olympic experiences that might otherwise be annoying. The long trudge from Stratford station to the Olympic Park is lined with grinning volunteers, many shouting cheery messages reminding people that this is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Banners carry slogans: “You’re part of it.” Commentators rouse crowds in a similar way. It sounds cheesy, particularly for Britain. Yet it works.

【239 words】

【time 2】
Spectators have been nudged out of their cars—public travel passes were sent out with tickets—and persuaded to avoid hotspots by a heavily-marketed website that helps them plan their journeys. “People aren’t passive. They like to feel they are making decisions,” says Peter John of UCL, an adviser to the government’s behavioural insight team. Less subtly, Transport for London repeatedly warned people how “exceptionally busy” the city would be.
Though many Londoners were cross about being elbowed aside for Olympic bigwigs, a diverse city of individuals not known for their pliancy listened. Many stayed at home, whereas others travelled early or late to avoid crowds. West End firms gripe about the loss of trade. With an eye on the faltering economy, even Mr Cameron has started urging people to return to the capital and eat and shop.

Henry Ford at the track
But a parallel policy lesson has also emerged, which is much less reassuring—the advantage of sheer numbers. The Olympics workforce is huge: the organising committee directly employs over 7,000 staff alongside 70,000 volunteers and 100,000 contractors. In every other sphere of British public life, staff numbers are being cut and roles merged to save money. Not so at the games.

【204 words】

【time 3】
In May, for example, Heathrow airport was castigated for long queues at passport control, caused partly by job cuts in the immigration service. Olympic organisers, by contrast, keep crowds moving through airport-style security checks in part by having lots of workers and scanners. When G4S, a private security firm, failed to provide enough workers, the army and police were simply drafted in.

Within Olympic venues, each worker is given a single task so that nothing may distract him or her from it—a kit bag to carry, a starting block to remove, a rake to smooth the sand. “Simplicity and clarity” is the guiding principle, says Paul Deighton of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Such an inflexible apportionment of jobs, rather like an old-fashioned assembly line, flouts modern management techniques where team members typically float between roles. It is viable during the Olympics because so many workers are volunteers, rewarded only with a garish purple-and-red uniform and, hopefully, a fun time. As Mr Deighton acknowledges, “If you were paying these people you’d obviously reach the conclusion that you could save costs by having fewer of them.”

The Olympics shows what can be done with volunteers—a welcome win for Mr Cameron’s flailing “Big Society” agenda. Yet it also shows the limitations of such schemes. Despite all the free labour, the London games hugely bust their original budget. What works stunningly well for a fortnight is impossible to replicate over a longer period. And, like all those Olympic athletes, the games organisers toiled for seven long years to achieve two glorious weeks in 2012.

【268 words】

The science of music
Same old song



【time 4】
THE kids these days play their music too loud and it all sounds the same. Old fogies familiar with such sentiments will be happy to hear that maths bears them out. An analysis published in Scientific Reports by Joan Serrà of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona and his colleagues has found that music has indeed become both more homogeneous and louder over the decades.

Dr Serrà began with the basic premise that music, like language, can evolve over time, often pulled in different directions by opposing forces. Popular music especially has always prized a degree of conformity—witness the enduring popularity of cover songs and remixes—while at the same time being obsessed with the new. To untangle these factors, Dr Serrà's team sifted through the Million Song Dataset, run jointly by Columbia University, in New York, and the Echo Nest, an American company, which contains beat-by-beat data on a million Western songs from a variety of popular genres. The researchers focussed on the primary musical qualities of pitch, timbre and loudness, which were available for nearly 0.5m songs released from 1955 to 2010.

【186 words】

【time 5】
They found that music today relies on the same chords as music from the 1950s. Nearly all melodies are composed of ten most popular chords. They follow a similar pattern to written texts, where the most common word occurs roughly twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third most common, and so on, a linguistic regularity known as Zipf's law. What has changed is how the chords are spliced into melodies. In the 1950s many of the less common chords would chime close to one another in the melodic progression. More recently, they have tended to be separated by the more pedestrian chords, leading to a loss of some of the more unusual transitions. Timbre, lent by instrument types and recording techniques, similarly shows signs of narrowing, after peaking in the mid-60s, a phenomenon Dr Serrà attributes to experimentation with electric-guitar sounds by Jimi Hendrix and the like.

What music lost in variety, it has gained in volume. Songs today are on average 9 decibels louder than half a century ago, confirming what industry types have long suspected: that record labels engage in a "loudness race" in order to catch radio listeners’ attention. Since digital audio formats max out at a certain decibel level, as the average loudness inches towards that ceiling, songs will lose dynamic range, becoming ever more uniform.

This homogeneity is not just jarring to melomaniacs. It might confuse the popular algorithms for identifying and recommending tracks, like those used by Spotify and other music services. Many of these rely on timbre measurements to sort songs into genres, for instance. Some musicians are bound to respond by confounding expectations with new sounds. Whether audiences wish to be confounded remains moot.

【290 words】


【obstacle】

Standard Chartered
My dollar, my rules
American regulators threaten an emerging-markets bank



IN RECENT years Standard Chartered’s shares have traded at a premium to its peers in large part because its businesses are focused on Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Although headquartered in London, only 5% of group pre-tax profit in 2011 directly stemmed from the Americas, Britain and Europe. The bank has been able to sell itself as a play on the bounciest parts of the world economy, and the ones least exposed to the Western regulatory minefield.

No longer. The bank’s shares swooned this week (see chart) after the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) issued an inflammatory 27-page order, labelling Standard Chartered a “rogue” institution and accusing it of “grave violations of law” for allegedly hiding 60,000 transactions, totalling $250 billion, to enable Iran to evade American sanctions. That, the DFS said, exposed America’s financial system to “terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins and corrupt regimes”. A footnote in the order said that in the course of investigating Iranian transactions, evidence was uncovered of similar “schemes” on behalf of other countries sanctioned by America, such as Libya and Myanmar.

The sensationalist language describes some sensational charges. The DFS says Standard Chartered’s actions were the result of a “documented willingness of its most senior management to deceive regulators and violate US law”. The suspect transactions took place between 2001 and 2007, a period when sanctions against Iran were largely imposed only by America and even then could be avoided by using a “U-turn” transaction whereby dollar-based payments could pass through America on condition they did not end there, were not rerouted directly to Iran, and were tightly documented.

According to the DFS, from 2001 Standard Chartered began doing business with the central bank of Iran on behalf of the National Iranian Oil Company, which received $500m a day in dollar payments. The order alleges that Standard Chartered’s legal counsel said the client and the purpose of these payments should not be identified. As a result, any reference to Iranian clients in wire transfers was masked. Over time the masking process became so large that it was automated.

The DFS says this did not sit well with everyone. In 2006, according to the order, Standard Chartered’s (unnamed) chief executive for the Americas sent a message to an (also unnamed) group executive director in London warning that the Iranian business had the “potential to cause very serious or even catastrophic reputational damage to the group” as well as “serious criminal liability” to management “e.g. you and I”. According to a branch officer interviewed by regulators, the unnamed director replied: “You f---ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?”
As if all that were not enough, the order alleges that Standard Chartered’s deception was aided by Deloitte & Touche, an auditor, which had been hired by the bank in 2004 as a result of a prior settlement with regulators to provide an independent report on its compliance failures. Instead, the DFS alleges that Deloitte provided Standard Chartered with confidential reports on other banks that gave it insights into how regulators were investigating Iranian transfers; and then, at the bank’s request, drafted a “watered-down” version of a report that deleted references to sensitive payments.

Standard Chartered must now appear before the DFS on August 15th to explain, among other things, why it should not be stripped of its licence to operate in New York. That sanction is extremely rare but it is not to be taken lightly. Although its purely American operations are negligible, Standard Chartered’s wholesale franchise rests on providing a financial bridge between the 70 countries in which it does operate, much of it denominated in dollars that must pass through America’s financial system. The bank also has strong ties with American institutions, providing, for example, “sub-custodian” services in African and Asian countries for JPMorgan Chase, Northern Trust and State Street.

Rather than the contrite blather that typically follows any criticism from a politician or government agency, the bank’s response was almost as scathing as the report. Standard Chartered said it “strongly rejects the position and portrayal of facts” presented by the regulator, and that over 99.9% of the Iranian transactions complied with the U-turn rules and only $14m of them were in breach of those rules. Deloitte was equally emphatic in its denials, saying it “had no knowledge of any alleged misconduct…and categorically denies that it aided in any way any violation of law by the Bank.”

British politicians are also getting in on the act, with some accusing US regulators of pursuing an anti-London agenda following recent investigations into HSBC and Barclays. There are reports of disquiet among other American agencies about the DFS’s aggressive stance. The DFS is newly created: some suspect it of grandstanding.

The bank’s shares recovered a bit on August 8th as investors reassessed the likelihood of the worst outcomes. The last time New York authorities revoked the licence of a major bank was in the 1990s. That was the notorious BCCI; Standard Chartered is an unlikely addition to this club. But it still faces a tough task to restore its advantage over other banks. A stand-off with the regulators sets the stage for prolonged uncertainty. A big fine may be unavoidable. Above all, investors have been reminded that Standard Chartered’s vaunted emerging-market franchise is vulnerable to the conflicting values of those markets and the country that prints the world’s reserve currency.

【924 words】

暮已央

沙发！热泪盈眶~~
最近几天都没有做阅读小分队···我表示愧疚···
因为出了点小情况···这几天都没有精神集中复习
哎···还有三天呢~这可肿么是好~

xjbb

占位～谢谢Rena！楼上小暮准备得怎么样了？

Speed:
1'32
Britain officially thinks that the 2012 Olympic is a successful one, and would like to discuss in what way they're achieving it. the author makes a comparison between London and Beijing, pointing out that London is using 'nudging' method, which is quite different from Beijing(implies that it's better than that of Beijing)
46"
Keep the transportation well-organized.
2'11
How the work force and volunteers are assigned.
1'15
Current musics have a common problem of being too loud. Studies in how the songs evolve.
1'46
They found that today's musics have the same chords as the past ones. the conclusion is that as evolving, music lost variety but gained volume.
7'26
Main idea:
Standard Chartered recently have been focusing on businesses with Africa, Asia and Middle East, thus their shares are difficult to get for their peers. However, the price of shares plunged lately because they were accused by DFS, for some Iran issue. the passage states that Standard Chartered intended to do so.  Now they're facing a big fine in the U.S.

铁板神猴

囧~ 将错就错吧 谢谢Rena~

spencerX

今天的文章超级棒，喜欢，rena辛苦了...话说伦敦奥运会真是出了不少事情啊...

1’16
57’’
1’21
51’’
1’32

6’16
Main Idea: DFS has accused SC of enabling foreign countries such as I, L, and M to encroach into American’s economic system.
1. As a bank rooted in London, SC, however, makes more pre-tax profits in Asia and Africa than in America and Europe.
2. But recently, DFS made a inflammatory report in which DFS accused SC of dealing with dangerous people and breaking the law of USA. Then DFS put out some evidences to confirm what they had said in the report. DFS said that the managers of SC had deceived regulators and tried to violate the laws.
3. SC denied what DFS charged them, and insisted that most of their incomes complied with the law, only a few fraction of the profits may violate the u-turn law.
4. DFS is unlikely to revoke the license of a bank such as SC, but in long terms, they may fine SC. SC has been reminded that a company like it may be vulnerable in a country who print the current.

spencerX

沙发！热泪盈眶~~
最近几天都没有做阅读小分队···我表示愧疚···
因为出了点小情况···这几天都没有精神集中复习
哎···还有三天呢~这可肿么是好~

-- by 会员 暮已央 (2012/8/11 16:56:28)

加油，你一定可以的！相信自己！

Rena张

沙发！热泪盈眶~~
最近几天都没有做阅读小分队···我表示愧疚···
因为出了点小情况···这几天都没有精神集中复习
哎···还有三天呢~这可肿么是好~

-- by 会员 暮已央 (2012/8/11 16:56:28)

加油，你一定可以的！相信自己！

-- by 会员 spencerX (2012/8/11 22:26:27)

谢谢Spencer哇~~~每次都很鼓励人~~~嘻嘻
暮TX加油 最后三天 心态把握住~~~相信自己是最棒的~~~巩固一下自己的知识点，然后有多少JJ就看多少先~~~没问题的！！！

风静静

1:38
nudge = If you nudge someone, you push them gently, usually with your elbow, in order to draw their attention to something.

1:49
1:21
1:39
7:17
昨天木有做，怎么今天就觉得看文章的感觉木有了~~囧~

yqhpsyche

谢谢Rena~~

1'30
1'08
1'29
58''
1'33    看了大家的速度..觉得我的速度好慢

越障  6'11
1/Standard Chartered's share is mostly focused on Africa, Asia and Middle East.Recently, the bank hided 60,000 transactions, totalling $250 billion, to enable Iran evade American sactions.
2/DFS accused the bank of exposing American finacial system to "terrorists, weapon dealers, drug kingpins and...". DFS treated the bank as deceiving regulators and violating US laws.
3/British and some others explained about DFS's aggressive stance.
4/The bank denied the accusition.
5/It is unlikely that DFS will revoke the bank's licence, but a large amount of fine is unavoidable.

暮已央

谢谢S和Rena~
我会努力调整好自己的！
大家加油！