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[Speed]
Is There A Link Between Fast Food And Depression?
[Time 1]
According to data posted on McDonalds’ famous Golden Arches, the fast food giant has served billions of customers around the world. It’s safe to assume that other fast food purveyors such as Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and others have dished out a roughly equal amount of fried chicken, burgers, and fries.
Depending on how you look at it, this is alternately impressive and highly alarming. Impressive insofar as it testifies to the dizzyingly successful business models of fast food chains. And alarming because typical fast food meals are high in calories, salt, fat, and sugar.
And now, according to a recent study, it’s possible that eating fast food also raises your risk for depression.
The study, done by researchers at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of Granada, followed nearly 9,000 participants for six months none of whom had been diagnosed with depression or had taken antidepressants. They found that those who ate the most fast food were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression as those who ate little or none.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that eating fast food causes depression. It could be the other way around that people who become depressed for whatever reason tend to eat more fast food. But while it’s not certain that consuming fast food causes depression, the chance that it might is yet another reason to get off the fast food track and opt for more healthful options.
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[Time 2]
Many thousands of Chinese are studying at schools in the United States. And writer Liel Leibovitz says the students are following an example that began in the eighteen seventies.Mr. Leibovitz and writer Matthew Miller joined forces to tell the story of the students in their book, “Fortunate Sons.” The book says China sent one hundred twenty boys to America to learn about developments that could help modernize their country.
Mr. Leibovitz got the idea for the book about the boys a few years ago when he was traveling with his wife in China.
LIEL LEIBOVITZ: “One afternoon it was raining in Beijing, and so we decided to stay in our hotel room and flip through television stations. And we came across this very arresting photograph of a young Chinese boy dressed in what appeared to be traditional Chinese dress. And he was standing next to a building that was very clearly Yale University.”
Mr. Leibovitz learned that the Qing government sent a whole delegation of boys to learn the ways of the West. The goal was for them to return to China and help their country.
LIEL LEIBOVITZ: ”A little bit later on, I was delighted and amazed to discover that these boys, who later turned out to be very, very remarkable men, had left behind an archive of letters, of diaries, of clothing articles detailing their entire journey and also what happened to them once they finally returned to China.”
The book says the boys received their American training in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It must have been a very good education. Mr. Leibovitz says the first prime minister of the Chinese Republic completed this program. And so did the first engineer to build a large-scale railroad without foreign help. The same was true of the fathers of Chinese education, diplomacy and the Navy.
The book-writers had only to open some boxes containing the writings of these men to learn about them. Their notebooks, journals, letters and postcards were in English. Mr. Leibovitz said he was lucky to have so much information from events that took place long ago.
LIEL LEIBOVITZ: “It was an unbelievable gift. I was expecting a lot of piecing together. And instead, we were amazed to find how meticulous these men had been about documenting their lives.”
The students returned to China after about nine years. They no longer spoke Mandarin well enough to answer questions. Police welcomed them home by putting them in jail. The young men were released after about a week. But they were given low-level jobs.
Mister Leibovitz says it took about ten years for them to rise to higher positions. He said their story continues today with large numbers of Chinese studying in the United States.
And that’s the Special English Education Report. I’m Christopher Cruise.
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The view from Mexico
[Time 3]
AMERICAN elections are watched closely in Mexico, which sends most of its exports and about a tenth of its citizens north of the border. But Tuesday’s presidential contest is not the only poll that’s sparking interest south of the Rio Grande. On the same day, voters in Colorado, Oregon and Washington will vote on whether to legalise marijuana—not just for medical use, but for fun and profit. Polls suggest that the initiatives have a decent chance of passing in Washington and Colorado (Oregon is a longer shot).
The impact on Mexico could be profound. Between 40% and 70% of American pot is reckoned to be grown in Mexico. According to a recent study (in Spanish) by the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), a think-tank in Mexico City, the American marijuana business brings in about $2 billion a year to Mexico’s drug traffickers. That makes it almost as important to their business as the cocaine trade, which is worth about $2.4 billion.
In Mexico relatively few people take drugs. But many are murdered as a result of the export business. About 60,000 have been killed by organised crime during the past six years. Thousands more have disappeared. Many Mexicans therefore wonder if America might consider a new approach. Felipe Calderon, the president, has said that if Americans cannot bring themselves to stop buying drugs, they ought to consider “market alternatives”, by which he means legalisation. Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, the two previous presidents of Mexico, have reached the same conclusion.
What would happen if Colorado, Oregon or Washington were to vote for such a “market alternative” on Tuesday? None of those states is a very big drug market in itself. But if it were legal to grow pot in, say, Washington, it’s not hard to imagine that a certain amount of it would illegally leak out into neighbouring states. Would Mexico’s bandits find themselves undercut by “El Cártel de Seattle”?
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[Time 4]
IMCO reckons they could be. It calculates that the cost of growing marijuana legally is about $880 per kilo. Adding on a decent mark-up, plus the taxes that would be applied, it puts the wholesale price of Washington marijuana at just over $2,000 per kilo. The cost of illegally transporting the drug adds about $500 per kilo for every thousand kilometres that the drug is hauled, it calculates, based on the fact that pot gets pricier the further you get from the Mexican border. So smuggling legal Washington dope to New York, for instance, would add about $1,900 to the cost of a kilo, giving a total wholesale price not much below $4,000.
That would make it more expensive than imported Mexican pot. But home-grown marijuana is much better quality than the Mexican sort. The content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the part that gives you the giggles, is between 10% and 18%, whereas in Mexican pot it is only about 4% to 6%. Once you adjust for quality, Washington pot would be about half the price of the Mexican stuff, even after it had made its expensive illegal journey to New York. IMCO reckons that home-grown marijuana from Colorado, Oregon or Washington would be cheaper than the Mexican stuff virtually everywhere in the country, with the exception of a few border states where the Mexican variety would still come in a bit cheaper.
As a result, it estimates that Mexico’s traffickers would lose about $1.4 billion of their $2 billion revenues from marijuana. The effect on some groups would be severe: the Sinaloa “cartel” would lose up to half its total income, IMCO reckons. Exports of other drugs, from cocaine to methamphetamine, would become less competitive, as the traffickers’ fixed costs (from torturing rivals to bribing American and Mexican border officials) would remain unchanged, even as marijuana revenues fell.
Legalisation could, in short, deal a blow to Mexico’s traffickers of a magnitude that no current policy has got close to achieving. The stoned and sober alike should bear that in mind when they cast their votes on Tuesday.
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Success and failure after the storm
[Time 5]
There have been five New York blackouts in my lifetime, which, if nothing else, suggests that it is hardly an aberrant event. The one in 1965 was a little spooky but exciting. In retrospect, it was a crack in the city that would widen into the anarchy of the blackout in 1977, with its rampant looting and arson. A disaster is good if, for nothing else, bringing into stark relief the vulnerabilities of a community.
The World Trade Center attack in 2001 stands on its own, but two years later was a better indication of how the city’s ability to cope had been transformed from the 1970s. There was palpable fear that the outage in 2003 was the result of another attack, but the two most important public officials that year, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor, and Ray Kelly, the police chief, were calm and credible and people calmly evacuated offices, often to walk many hours back home.
The aftermath of Sandy, notwithstanding horrendous devastation and many accidental deaths, has much in common with 2003, most notably a sense of orderliness that has come to be expected, and is likely deeply appreciated only by those who experienced prior panics. The same mayor and the same police chief were very much in charge this time as well, ticking off lengthy lists of steps, with dull and self-serving political statements only protruding when other politicians managed to grab time before news cameras. Perhaps most surprising has been the remarkable response by the city’s often reviled mass transit authority, which cobbled together numerous temporary methods, began an enormous clean-up, and, through the mayor, provided constant updates.
Businesses were not surprisingly crushed by the power outages, but in Manhattan there were also examples of joyful entrepreneurism in the areas that had been most affected by the loss of power. The Old Homestead, a famous steakhouse in Chelsea, set up charcoal barbecues outside its entrance. The smoke provided an advertisement a half-mile away, drawing crowds. Electricity was out but gas still flowed. At Ben’s Pizzeria on MacDougal Street, customers sat in the dark eating slices and, it seemed, the underlying paper plates as well. Just up the street, a restaurant named La Lanterna di Vittoria trucked in a generator, which made it (perhaps appropriately given its name) a light in a dark neighbourhood, and during the day a popular charging station for laptops and cell phones.
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[More]
Numerous tiny markets and delicatessens cleared signs from their windows to capture a bit of light and did a brisk business selling out of anything useful on their shelves. Early on, it seemed that the lack of caffeine would transform one of the world’s most caffeinated populations into zombies, but coffee trucks have begun showing up, and some clever store owners have brought in vast urns. In the border area where power and phone connectivity begins to function, Starbucks’s wireless networks have become hugely popular. People congregate outside the stores. Mobile phone-chargers are doing a brisk trade .
The largest and most unintelligible failures have been with the public utilities. Four days on, there is still no detailed explanation of what went wrong at Con Ed, the local power utility, and its website has been devoid of key local information. Mobile-phone companies have been far worse, in as much as Con Ed is evidently hard at work doing repairs. Service by AT&T, America’s second-largest cell company, is pretty much non-existent in much, or all, of lower Manhattan yet there is not a single piece of useful information on its website about an emergency hotspot, or a timetable for repairs. Perhaps it felt that acknowledging its failures on a company internet site would undermine its ability to flog phones.
Service by Verizon, the other major component of what is essentially an oligopoly, has been infinitely better—it works—but its response too has been less than reassuring in a crisis, providing little information about obvious problems. It delayed opening company stores in the immediate aftermath of the storm. The almost indistinguishable units run by franchisees were quicker off the mark, but that was a mixed blessing. A woman was stunned when she entered a branch on Seventh Avenue, near Times Square, to be told that plugging in her unit for a recharge would cost her $40. Anyone not paying was told to scram.
Why these companies should perform so much worse than the city or its entrepreneurs is an open question. They are an essential public service, using public airwaves that come with public responsibilities. Any impartial post-storm reckoning should reveal these companies as a weak link. A skeptic’s explanation would be that these companies collect monthly fees regardless of service, they do not face local voters, and the one entity that supervises their conduct, the Federal Communications Commission, is in Washington, insulated from the ravages, anger, and loss tied to the storm. If their failure did not produce widespread tragedy, it is because in a disaster the most important response is local, and this time around the locals did good.
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[Obstacle]
这次的越障练习有点长 大家酌情练习吧~~~~吼吼
Books and Arts; Art and the Middle East
At 29, Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani is the art world's most powerful woman. Is she using her money well?
The starkly beautiful Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha, Qatar, is a fine setting for a dinner. Last month 200 dealers, collectors and curators gathered there for the opening of the first showing in the Middle East of work by Takashi Murakami. The hostess of the evening sat laughing with the pony-tailed Japanese artist on her right. On her left was Dakis Joannou, a Greek-Cypriot industrialist and avid collector of the work of Jeff Koons, an American sculptor. Larry Gagosian, whom many regard as the most powerful art dealer in the world, was placed at a table nearby, with the other art dealers.
Few people could get away with asking Mr Gagosian to dinner halfway around the globe, only to sit him with the rest of the class. Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani is one. The emir of Qatar's daughter has become one of the most talked-about figures of the international art world: collector, patron, cultural advocate. Mr Gagosian is not the only one who would like to catch her eye.
Until the 1980s Qatar was little more than a sandy backwater. Even its native pearl industry was on its last legs. The discovery of oil and, later, of the third-largest gas reserves in the world have made the pear-shaped peninsula unusually rich. In 2010 its tiny population had the third highest per capita GDP in the world and its economy grew by 16.6%, faster than any other. But even Qatar's oil and gas will one day run out. Transforming the country from a hydrocarbon economy to a knowledge economy in time for the post-oil afterlife is the local mantra.
The emir's blueprint, “Qatar National Vision 2030”, is leading to new schools and universities (in an area of the capital known as Education City), as well as a post-production centre to service the international film industry, and even a paperless hospital. New museums to showcase Qatar's collections of Islamic art, modernist Arab painting, photography, armour and natural history are all part of the plan.
At the same time Sheikh Saud's older brother, Sheikh Hassan, was buying 20th-century Arabic painting. Many of the artists were trained in Europe and the 6,000-piece collection at Mathaf, a modern-art museum in Education City, has a derivative feel. For a fledgling nation the paintings are important as an historical record.
Now the call to culture has fallen to a new generation. Sheikha Mayassa was a tomboyish, competitive child, the result, she says, of having two older brothers. Encouraged by her mother, a middle-class Qatari educated in a mixed school in Cairo (who is now a force for education reform), she learned French, English and her native Arabic, and went on to study political science and literature at Duke University in North Carolina.
Two years ago she and her husband, who had both been doing postgraduate work at Columbia University, returned home. Sheikha Mayassa's job, as the head of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), was to turn Qatar into a cultural powerhouse—a wellspring for exploring what art is and what it means for human beings to create it. “Above all, we want the QMA to be a ‘cultural instigator', a catalyst of arts projects worldwide,” a trustee says.
Sheikha Mayassa works in a spacious office on the top floor of the MIA. Its walls are lined in pale beech wood, and behind her long desk stretches an array of framed family photographs. Dressed in a black abaya, her hair covered, she wears hardly any jewellery other than a childlike bracelet made of coloured thread with a single gold charm, a tiny Arabic coffeepot or dallah. It retails for $82 in the museum shop.
The QMA is a government body, but it remains wholly a family affair. In her first major interview, Sheikha Mayassa explains: “The QMA is very much my father's baby. He wanted to create something…to connect with the community, to create a culture dialogue within society. We report directly to him. The nice thing about my father is that he doesn't interfere in the day-to-day business. We present the strategy, and once he agrees with the strategy and the vision we are given the authority and freedom to go ahead and execute them in the way we think fit.”
The QMA is not part of the Culture Ministry, though they do co-operate. The museum agency works with local franchises of foreign universities, such as University College London, on arts administration and museum management. It recruits heavily from abroad, especially at a senior level. The director of the public-arts programme is a Dutchman, Jean-Paul Engelen, who came from Christie's. Edward Dolman, Christie's one-time British chief executive, runs Sheikha Mayassa's office. The director of the MIA is 32-year-old Aisha Al Khater, the first Qatari woman to gain a degree in music. But the four specialist curators below her are all foreign. Two more are about to join them, an expert on manuscripts and another on coins.
The QMA budget is not made public. Decisions on funding and acquisitions are taken by a small group at the top of the organisation. (Although she did not say so in her interview)Sheikha Mayassa insists these remain secret for fear their ideas might be stolen by such states as Sharjah or Saudi Arabia. For those outside this inner circle decisions can seem arbitrary and confusing. Two MIA directors left after a relatively short time and earlier this month Wassan al-Khudairi announced that, after just a year as the head of Mathaf, she too was returning to academic life.
Attracting local audiences is a priority, the Sheikha says. The MIA, with its grand, forbidding approach (pictured), is not welcoming to the tens of thousands of migrant workers who flock to Qatar from Pakistan and other parts of South Asia. To help counter that, the QMA aims to open up its museums more to schoolchildren. It also wants to encourage local artists and to commission sculpture and photography by both Qatari and international artists for the new airport that opens in December and the vast new Sidra medical centre that will be finished probably next year.
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[More]
In addition to the Islamic and modern Arabic art museums, which now fall under the QMA, a new interactive museum of sport and the Olympics is slowly taking shape to coincide with Qatar's hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2022. The biggest project, though, is the construction of a national museum for Qatar, which will open in 2016. Its French architect, Jean Nouvel, has used the local desert rose as a motif for the exterior walls. Twelve interior galleries will tell the 300,000 Qataris their national story, from prehistoric times through to the development of their pearl industry and the discovery of oil and gas, exploring local traditions about the desert, food, fishing, falconry and folklore.
The QMA is very good at borrowing from other museums. The MIA version of the “Gifts of the Sultan” show that started last year in Los Angeles includes objects from Russia's Hermitage museum that the American exhibition did not have. A Qatari version of the British Museum's new “Haj” show will very likely have objects from the Topkapi Palace museum that were blocked by the Turkish authorities. In response to a British block on taking home two major art works that the QMA bought at auction in London, the Qataris have skilfully negotiated long-term loan agreements with two British museums that will also provide help in training Qatari staff.
Whereas nearby Abu Dhabi is franchising outlets of the Louvre and the Guggenheim, Qatar is growing its own museums. Sheikha Mayassa's use of its Islamic and Orientalist collections to explain the region's history makes sense. Less clear is why she has been buying Western art. Over the past seven years the Al Thani family is estimated to have spent at least $1 billion on Western painting, sculpture and installations, including the last privately held version of Paul Cezanne's “The Card Players” for over $250m—a record price for a work of art. That acquisition, which took place in early 2011 but was reported only last month, is just the latest in a series of purchases that includes some of the very best works made by Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, a number of them bought for record prices. Speculation about the Al Thanis' art buying has been fuelled by the family's blank refusal to confirm or deny any of the rumours and its reluctance to clarify whether its acquisitions are private or on behalf of the state—or even to explain how they might benefit Qatar's citizens.
Sheikha Mayassa is keen to bring some big names to Doha. A Murakami show at the Palace of Versailles in 2010 led to the Japanese artist's Doha retrospective. Mr Hirst's show at Tate Modern in London, which opens on April 4th and which is costing the QMA more than ￡2m to sponsor, will give rise next year to a Hirst show in Qatar, another first for the region.
In order for the QMA to be more than a rich girl's plaything, Sheikha Mayassa will have to do better than put expensive foreign baubles on display in her homeland. She needs to be far more innovative and focused in choosing between the hundreds of exhibitions the QMA gets offered. Last year's showing at the MIA of German Baroque from Dresden made no sense. Cai Guo-Qiang's evocative exploration, now at Mathaf, of the ancient links between China and the Gulf is new and original
An absolute monarchy like Qatar is a hard place in which to encourage the daring, irreverence and subversiveness that is the hallmark of a truly artistic nature. Not everyone in Qatar is persuaded of art's importance. The local blogosphere is full of suggestions that the country would do better with a Formula One racetrack or another football stadium. And the recent sudden announcement that Qatar University would switch to teaching in Arabic instead of English is a sign that conservative nationalists have real power here. In her introduction to the Tate's Hirst catalogue, Sheikha Mayassa writes that “Art—even controversial art—can unlock communication between diverse nations, peoples and histories.” The years ahead will test her resolve—Qatar's too.
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发表于 2012-11-3 19:10:08
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谢谢elen！