【Native Speaker每日综合训练—35系列】【35-03】文史哲

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Part I: Speaker

Hidden miracles of the natural world

[Rephrase 1]

[Dialog: 07'23]

Transcript:

Audio:

Source: TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_hidden_miracles_of_the_natural_world#t-59624

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Part II: Speed

A parent and child arrive at school on Nov. 5, 2012, in New York City.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

What's the Hardest Part of Parenting?

Quora Contributor

This question originally appeared on Quora.

[Time 2]
Answer by Eivind Kjørstad, father of three:

Opportunity cost. The hardest thing about any choice is that to choose one thing always without exception means pushing away other things.

Even though I've never regretted my choice to become a parent (I have three kids), I sometimes feel jealous of people who made different choices in life—even though I'd not want to swap with them.

Saying yes to children has meant saying no to a whole lot of other things that I care about. There's been less travel. Less time for one-on-one romance. Less money for fun. Less concerts. Fewer musicals. Fewer visits to friends. Fewer long walks. Less working out. Fewer books read. Fewer letters written, and so on.

This isn't unique to children: Making any big choice means saying yes to one thing and saying no to a whole lot of alternative things you could have been doing instead.

I'm pretty hungry for a lot of what life has to offer. In an ideal world, I would want to say: "Yes to all of the above!" But the real world doesn't work like that. And that's hard.

* * *

Answer by Clare Celea, mother since 2008:

The fear. When they're tiny, you're afraid they'll die. You constantly check their breathing.

As they get older and stronger, you're still afraid that something will happen to them, but you also fear that you aren't "doing it right"—you'll somehow parent them wrong or fail to give something they need or accidentally instill some terrible habit or belief in them that will mess them up as adults.

It's hard to have faith in yourself and in your own ability to be a good parent. It's particularly difficult because you won't know whether you've succeeded until it's much too late to do anything about it.

That's the hardest thing about parenting.
[312 words]

* * *
[Time 3]
Answer by Jonathan Brill, startup specialist, seller, marketer, maker of really good waffles:

Energy. There's the father I want to be, and then there's the father I am. I believe the difference between these two people is energy.

I think I have a pretty good idea of what's roughly right in terms of guiding my kids along the fine line of showing them how to do things and letting them figure it out themselves. One could argue each extreme, but you quickly run into diminishing returns. What seems to be good is modeling a few times and then letting them mostly do it, with the occasional reminder to nudge them back on track.

That can apply to focusing on homework, getting dressed in the morning, eating in a timely manner, socializing with others in respectful and constructive manner, and more. In my best moments, I'm great at this. One morning, my 5-year-old was a little frustrated at having to wear an outfit she didn't like. We talked about it for a few minutes, there was a hug, she felt better about it, and then she stepped up and put the scratchy stockings and the frilly Christmas dress on. High fives!

But there's an alternative reality where I'm busy getting dressed or cooking breakfast or responding to an email where I'm just looking for the quick win. In those moments, I can't get down on one knee and calmly and patiently walk her through the rationalization of why it makes sense to wear scratchy stockings, so I just remind her directly and authoritatively of her obligation to do what she's supposed to do, and we move quickly to an escalating game of carrot or stick. That's way easier and not nearly as constructive. Sure it gets the job done, but man does it feel like I'm shorting her the opportunity to figure things out and make her own decisions.

I need like one extra hour and about three more gigawatts per day, maybe a flux capacitor for emergencies, and we're good.
[340 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/04/12/what_s_the_hardest_thing_about_being_a_parent.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

Pants or skirt, this room is available to whoever needs it.

Photo by James Knopf/Thinkstock

Sex-Segregated Public Restrooms Are an Outdated Relic of Victorian Paternalism

Ted Trautman

[Time 4]
It's easy to think of the push for gender-neutral public restrooms as an issue that matters only to transgender people—after all, they're the ones left holding their bladders when the stress of constantly using the "wrong" bathroom gets to be too much. But as a straight man, gender-neutral bathrooms matter a lot to me, too—in part because I want the trans community to enjoy the same privileges I do, but also because nothing irks me more than seeing a long line snake out from the women's room while the men's room sits vacant, or vice versa. This affront to queuing theory and common sense is never more irksome than when the bathrooms in question serve just one person at a time. In such spaces, the concepts of a "men's room" and a "women's room" are completely imaginary; the room belongs to whoever is in it, although that philosophy didn't impress the two older women waiting for me when I exited "their" one-toilet restroom at a McDonald's last summer, nor did it stay the manager they'd convinced to escort me Big Mac-lessly to the parking lot.

The world is full of people who agree with my elderly antagonists; most recently they've challenged "potty parity" movements at Wesleyan University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and also in cities like Washington, D.C., which mandated in 2006 that all single-occupancy public bathrooms be labeled as unisex and recently stepped up its enforcement efforts with a Twitter campaign to report violators. Opponents often complain that unisex toilets take facilities away from men and women and hand them over to the transgender minority, when in fact they are available to everyone. Yet the law often takes the narrower view: Many states follow the guidelines laid out in the Uniform Plumbing Code, which stipulates that “separate toilet facilities shall be provided for each sex,” with exceptions for very small businesses as measured in square footage and/or customer traffic. In the eyes of the law in these places, a business with two unisex toilets can be considered to have no toilets at all, since neither facility explicitly serves men or women.
[360 words]

[Time 5]
Such laws date back to 1887, according to Terry S. Kogan, a University of Utah law professor and a contributor to the book Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. One hundred and twenty-seven years ago, Massachusetts passed the first law mandating gender-segregated toilets, and many states quickly followed suit. Many of those laws have never been substantially modified, with obvious exceptions in progressive enclaves like D.C. and San Francisco, meaning that much of the United States' toilet-related building codes reflect a literally Victorian prudishness that we might mock in other contexts.

These laws arose due to a confluence of several disparate contemporary movements, Kogan explains in Toilet. The centralization of labor in factories led to the centralization of human waste at work sites, which was carried away by recently developed plumbing technology that had itself been invented in response the newly realized germ theory of disease and the consequent sudden push to improve sanitation. Women's growing presence in the factory workforce, and in public life more generally, triggered a paternalistic impulse to "protect" women from the full force of the world outside their homes, which manifested itself architecturally in a bizarro parallel world of spaces for women adjacent to but separate from men's—ladies' reading rooms at libraries, parlors at department stores, separate entrances at post offices and banks, and their own car on trains, intentionally placed at the very end so that male passengers could chivalrously bear the brunt in the event of a collision. The leap from parlors and reading rooms to ladies-only restrooms was not hard to make, although Kogan admits that "it is not at all obvious what led regulators to conclude that separating factory toilet facilities by sex would protect working women." His research suggests that sex segregation was seen by regulators at the time as "a kind of cure-all" for the era's social anxiety about working women.

The laws that still regulate many of our public toilets are simultaneously very old and very new: old in that they were created in an era scarcely recognizable to a modern American, and yet new in that the practice of sex-segregated pooping and peeing as a matter of course is scarcely more than a century old, a tiny fraction of human history. Either way, we must ensure that our public toilets serve everyone before we can wash our hands of them—presumably under a faucet with a motion sensor.
[406 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/11/sex_segregated_public_restrooms_an_outdated_relic_of_victorian_paternalism.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

A familiar hillside.

Photo of Windows XP.

The Most Famous Desktop Wallpaper Ever Is a Real, Unaltered Photo

Lily Hay Newman

[Time 6]
Everyone has seen the Windows XP desktop image called Bliss. It's been ubiquitous for 13 years. And you've probably always thought that the serene hillside is kind of corny and probably fake. Nothing is that idyllic.

But apparently it's real! And to commemorate the end of support for Windows XP, Microsoft made a video about the photographer who took the iconic picture

Chuck O'Rear got the image in Napa Valley, north of San Francisco. He took it on a Mamiya RZ67 camera with color Fuji Film and a tripod. O'Rear explains in the video:

There was nothing unusual. I used a film that had more brilliant colors, the Fuji Film at that time, and the lenses of the RZ67 were just remarkable. The size of the camera and film together made the difference and I think helped the Bliss photograph stand out even more. I think if I had shot it with 35 millimeter, it would not have nearly the same effect.

O'Rear visits the original site, talks about the dangerous, winding roads in the area, and discusses the process he went through to sell Microsoft the photo. Even then, before anyone in the public had ever seen it, Microsoft valued it so highly that O'Rear couldn't find a courier service willing to take the liability of transporting it. Eventually Microsoft paid for a plane ticket so he could carry the photo himself to their offices.

I don't know about you, but hearing this story makes me feel bad about assuming it was a lame Photoshopped piece of nothing all these years.
[262 words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/11/charles_o_rear_is_the_photographer_who_took_the_windows_xp_wallpaper_photo.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

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Part III: Obstacle

An iPad in Shanghai, September 2013.(Carlos Barria / Courtesy Reuters)

Net Gain

——Washington Cedes Control of ICANN

Stacie L. Pettyjohn  |  April 10th, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]
For over a decade, the United States has promoted a free and open Internet as a central tenet of its foreign policy. To date, this has most visibly involved shaming governments that limit access to online content and developing tools that help individuals circumvent censorship and surveillance. Perhaps even more important, though, have been Washington’s efforts to ensure that the Internet remains regulated by public as well as private stakeholders -- not just governments alone.

The latest debate over Internet governance centers on the relationship between the United States and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private, nonprofit organization that manages domain names and Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses. Since its creation, ICANN has been under contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, giving Washington a critical say in how the Internet is regulated. Last month, the department announced plans to let its contract with ICANN expire in 2015 and transition toward a “global multi-stakeholder model,” the details of which are still being developed. This has led to criticism that Washington is naively giving up its long-standing role as a guarantor of Internet freedom. The move, however, is a shrewd one. Handing over control of ICANN will defuse mounting criticism of Washington’s outsized influence on Internet governance -- and head off efforts by repressive states that want to expand their own.

Understanding the full impact of the decision requires some context. At the broadest level, Internet governance involves managing the technical architecture of cyberspace, which was imbued by its original designers with an open infrastructure and nonproprietary standards. Until his death in 1998, one of them -- Jon Postel, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California -- single-handedly ran the domain name system, which matches IP numbers to Web site addresses. (Although the U.S. government funded the Internet in its infancy, it gave up control over its development early on.) The Internet’s rapid growth, however, quickly outstripped Postel’s capacity to administer it. In 1998, the Clinton administration stepped in by establishing ICANN, a nonprofit organization under contract with the Commerce Department.

To this day, ICANN’s primary mission is to guarantee that anyone who enters a Web address anywhere in the world will be directed to the appropriate site. It does so by assigning and coordinating the unique identifiers (IP addresses and URLs) that link computers together, thereby ensuring that the Web really is a worldwide network. Notably, ICANN preserved some of the Internet’s original characteristics by creating an inclusive organization that invites all stakeholders -- including the tech community, civil society, the private sector, and governments -- to participate in consensus-based policymaking. This model has largely worked; it remains difficult for any one stakeholder or type of stakeholder to dominate decisions, which ultimately preserves Internet openness.

ICANN is not the only organization responsible for managing the Web. The Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, and the World Wide Web Consortium, among other groups, contribute to developing and maintaining open technical standards. All have played an important role in assuring that the Internet runs smoothly. None, however, has been as controversial as ICANN. Although some nations had objected to U.S. oversight of ICANN in the past, a growing number of states are now voicing opposition to the arrangement. Specifically, they have demanded that ICANN’s regulatory powers be transferred to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In effect, the move would shift responsibility for managing the domain name system from a nonprofit inclusive of a variety of stakeholders to an international organization dominated by national governments.

China and Russia have spearheaded the drive to wrest control of the Internet from ICANN. Their primary goal is to dilute U.S. influence over the Internet by empowering other states, namely, themselves. They also see an opportunity to facilitate censorship and surveillance. Simply put, having a greater say in managing the Internet’s “central chokepoint” would almost certainly enhance their ability -- and that of other authoritarian states -- to control what their citizens can see and say online. If they manage to empower the ITU at the expense of ICANN, Beijing and Moscow could marginalize ICANN’s nongovernmental stakeholders and legitimize repressive practices such as blocking Web sites and building closed national intranets. Not surprisingly, nations that heavily monitor and censor the Internet, including Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, have been the strongest supporters of this initiative.

Although the United States has successfully fended off efforts to hand over power to the ITU in the past, the National Security Agency surveillance scandal has revived calls for modifying the current structure of Internet governance. Of course, recent revelations about NSA spying have nothing to do with ICANN. But they have fed the perception that Washington has too much power over a major global good and bolstered the case for radical reforms -- giving authoritarian states an opportunity to usurp control over the Internet’s existing technical standards. Outraged by reports of extensive NSA spying, even liberal states such as Brazil and Germany have considered nationalizing pieces of the Internet’s infrastructure. The European Union, which still supports the current open model, has also joined the chorus of critics who want to internationalize ICANN. The NSA backlash could thus tip the scales in the critics’ favor.

The outcome of this latest struggle over Internet governance will have enormous implications: It will determine whether the Internet remains open, united, and transparent, or becomes closed, balkanized, and subject to opaque national controls. Counterintuitive as it may seem, Washington’s decision to sever its ties to ICANN might have been the best way to guarantee openness, especially since the Commerce Department has stipulated that it will not implement the decision if Internet regulation falls to a government-led or government-only organization. This approach appears to be working, as many countries -- including some former critics -- have welcomed Washington’s announcement. Had the United States kept its fist clenched around ICANN, it would have undermined faith in the multistakeholder model of Internet governance and empowered the ITU. Instead, Washington has disarmed critics and helped ensure that the Internet will remain open and free.
[1051 words]

Source: ForeignAffairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141122/stacie-l-pettyjohn/net-gain