【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障5系列】【5-10】

fox0923

今天木有搞错，是我了，终于的！

速度


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Chinese New Year celebrations mark Year of Dragon
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Published: 22 January, 2012, 20:02


Chinese New Year celebrations began throughout the world on Sunday. Colorful parades and spectacular fireworks will usher in the Year of Dragon, which symbolizes courage and prosperity.
New Year is the most important holiday in China. Millions of people take part in festivities lasting 15 days, with extravagant parades and other cultural performances.
Another famous tradition of the holiday, also known as Spring Festival, is the little red envelopes given to children on the first day of the New Year containing money from their parents, grandparents and other relatives.
Outside China, the holiday is widely celebrated in South-East Asia with the largest celebration taking place in Singapore.
In Western cities with significant Chinese populations the holiday is celebrated too. New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto and Los Angeles see large Chinese New Year parades with fireworks. In Sydney, more than 600,000 people attend the celebrations in Chinatown.
The holiday does not fall on the same day every year. The Chinese follow a lunisolar calendar, so the New Year always changes, its date falling either at the end of January or the beginning of February.
According to the Chinese Zodiac, the upcoming year is the Year of Dragon which comes after the Year of Rabbit and is followed by the Year of Snake. Among the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac, the Dragon is the only imaginary animal.


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Indian authorities demand censorship from Google and Facebook
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Published: 14 January, 2012, 22:52


The Indian government has sanctioned the prosecution of 21 web companies, including giants Google and Facebook, for publishing offensive content, warning that it will block the websites “like in China” if no pre-moderation takes place.
An Indian judge ruled that some content available through the sites conflicts with “national harmony, integration and national interest."
Justice Suresh Kait, of the Delhi High Court, said India is ready to take drastic measures if they do not develop mechanisms to regulate “offensive and objectionable” material on their web sites. “Like China, we will block all such websites,” Kalit warned.
Other web giants facing charges include Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube.
A complaint against websites hosting images considered offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians was brought to court by a private petitioner. The case was initiated by Vinay Rai, a journalist, who considered that Google, Facebook and other web companies are responsible for the content on their webpages.
Google responded by saying that it cannot pre-moderate everything uploaded by individual users.
"We cannot control a billion minds. Some are conservative, some are liberal and some write all the defamatory and obnoxious articles on web pages. There is a procedure for getting them removed," said former  Solicitor General Mukul Rohatgi representing Google India.
Nevertheless, authorities insist that all web content must be pre-moderated. Last year the country adopted new legislation according to which companies bear responsibility for user content posted on their websites.
If web companies fail to follow the law, they may face the same repressions as they do in China, which probably has one of the most sophisticated censorship regimes in the world. Internet usage is controlled through a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. The system is filtering specific key words and politically sensitive subjects.
Thus in 2009 Chinese authorities blocked Facebook and Twitter, presumably for containing social or political commentary. Google search requests are also censored for the country’s 500 million internet users.




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The Chinese want to buy Yahoo!
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Published: 29 December, 2011, 21:33


After buying up all of the world’s available resources, China is looking for a new array of assets to swipe under their rug. Now the Far East has set its aims on the Internet and is looking to begin with buying what’s left of Web giants Yahoo!
Alibaba Group, the Hangzhou-based computer company, has retained former Reagan administration Secretary of Staff Kenneth Duberstein’s lobbying firm, Duberstein Group Inc., to help ink out a deal between the Chinese e-commerce corporation and the search engine giants.
Silicon Valley’s Yahoo! owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, but the Chinese firm’s CEO, Jack Ma, has discussed not just buying out their stake but absorbing Yahoo! as a whole. Earlier this month, Ma told Bloomberg News that talks of a deal had been put on hold due to “political issues,” but by putting a former White House insider inside the discussions, tensions could be smoothed between the two sides to enough of a point to sign the papers.
"The national security concern is sometimes just an excuse for commercial concerns for any country, but certainly for the United States," Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting, tells Reuters. "I don't think there should be a big concern (for Alibaba buying Yahoo). Users may share or keep as much data as they like.
"If they subscribe to Yahoo and (they know) Yahoo is owned by a Chinese company, they are going to have to make the decision themselves," Natkin adds.


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Washington’s relationship with Beijing has been on better terms in the past than it has in recent months, so the move to install Duberstein into the equation could certainly be considered a smart move to make the deal, which is estimated to come at a cost of around $18 billion. The Financial Times reports that major Chinese tech companies have tried to absorb American IT corporations in the past, only to be blocked. Duberstein’s pull in Washington could make this deal a done one in a matter of weeks, however.
Duberstein’s other clients include Goldman Sachs and BP America, whose reputation in Washington is all but infamous.



Anonymous to publish Stratfor emails
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Published: 29 December, 2011, 22:58


A treasure-trove of top secret correspondence between security firm Stratfor and millions of contacts is about to be published, a move that hackers say will serve as a smoking gun for several committed crimes.
Activists belonging to the loose-knit online collective Anonymous infiltrated the internal servers of Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, earlier this month and published an array of information on the company’s clients, including credit card data, log-ins and passwords. Less than a week after the first bits and pieces were put online, those close to the hack say that millions of emails linking the firm to high-profile customers will soon be made publically available.
Since news of the hack made it to the Web on Christmas Eve, the number of emails obtained has rose from nearly 3 million to now around 5.5 million.
In preparation for the dump of data, Stratfor has said that they will continue to keep their website offline while they look into the hack. The company has repeatedly reached out to its customers, who subscribe to analysis reports on the Web, to apologize for the breach of information. Though they have downplayed the incident and apologized incessantly, a further delay in launching the site suggests that the hack could have been more severe than first though.


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"As part of our ongoing investigation, we have also decided to delay the launching of our website until a thorough review and adjustment by outside experts can be completed," Stratfor says in an email.
While the investigation opens up, operatives with Anonymous have credited themselves for the attack, a campaign waged under its Antisec campaign that targets mainstream and allegedly corrupt corporations and exposes them for their lack of online protection. Anonymous op Barrett Brown wrote on the web earlier this week that, “among many other things, a widespread conspiracy by the Justice Department, Bank of America and other parties to attack and discredit WikiLeaks and other activist groups” helped draw the hacktivists towards disrupting Stratfor. As a result of the hack, he said the data obtained “includes correspondence with untold thousands of contacts who have spoken to Stratfor's employees off the record over more than a decade.”
“The Stratfor operation may yield the most revelatory trove of information ever seized by Anonymous,” Brown added in a tweet on Christmas Eve.
Brown said to RT this week that subscribers to Stratfor’s emails should not be concerned over the hack, but rather “It is any of their past email correspondents who might have revealed information that could come back to haunt them who should be concerned for their reputations in such cases, as they might be shown to be culpable for anything that negatively affects the public.”
To the Daily Mail, Brown adds that the emails could “provide the smoking gun for a number of crimes of extraordinary importance.”
“People talking off the record to a think-tank are going to disclose a lot of information. Their identities are likely to be in the emails,” adds Brown.
Anonymous operatives close to the hack say that the emails are expected to be released this week and are in the process of scouring the millions of pieces of correspondence before they are published.











越障


Flu research and biological warfareNo end to complications
Jan 21st 2012, 17:56 by J.P.

IN DECEMBER boffins around the world were taken aback by an odd request. The American government called on the world's two leading scientific publications to censor research. As we reported at the time, Nature (a British journal) and Science(an American one) were about to publish studies by two separate teams which had been tinkering with H5N1 influenza, better known as bird flu, to produce a strain that might be able to pass through the air between humans. The authorities fretted that were the precise methods and detailed genetic data to fall into the wrong hands, the consequences would be too awful to contemplate. They therefore suggested that only the broad conclusions be made public; the specifics could be sent to vetted scientists alone.
A furore duly erupted, fanned by fears of a pandemic that would make the "Spanish flu" of 1918, which may have claimed up to 100m lives, look like a mild case of the sniffles. On January 20th the teams' leaders, Ron Fouchier of Rotterdam's Erasmus Medical Centre and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, bowed to public pressure. In a joint statement published in Nature and Science and signed by 37 other leading flu experts, they announced a voluntary 60-day moratorium on all similar research. The aim of the self-imposed suspension, they explained, is to give organisations and governments time "to find the best solutions for opportunities and challenges that stem from the work".
For a start, that means figuring out a way to disseminate the sensitive nitty-gritty to the right researchers, a condition that Nature and Science said must be met if they are to redact the controversial papers. It also involves deciding how, if at all, future research should be carried out. These and other topics will be discussed at a summit, hopefully to be held in February under the auspices of the World Health Organisation in Geneva. The signatories are betting that this way they will prevent heavy-handed regulation from stifling their field.
Even before interested parties convene in Switzerland, though, fierce debate has already got under way. In the January 19th issue of Nature, ten experts, including Dr Fouchier, weigh in on the matter. Science launched a similar policy forum. One immediate conclusion is that flu researchers are deeply split among themselves. Some are frustrated by what they see as overblown misgivings by the National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), created in the wake of the Anthrax attacks of 2001 to advise America's health department, which asked the two journals to withhold the latest research. Others praise the NSABB's intervention as prescient.
One prominent critic, Peter Palese, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, recalls his own work on the reconstruction of the Spanish-flu virus in 2005. At the time, the NSABB held its nerve, apparently concluding that the benefits of full disclosure outweigh the risks. Dr Palese points out in Nature that his success prompted many researchers to flood into the field. The resulting surge in papers revealed that the virus is vulnerable to existing seasonal flu vaccine and common flu drugs, allaying fears that mischief-makers would conjure it up and wreak havoc. Making it difficult to publish results would have discouraged new entrants and held back progress. Unhampered discussion of Dr Fouchier's and Dr Kawaoka's work would, he says, doubtless prove equally fruitful.
The two groups in Rotterdam and Madison have shown that viruses containing haemagglutinin, a protein which causes red blood cells to clump together, from H5N1 strains can be passed through the air between ferrets (as flu goes, ferrets and humans are very much alike). They also identified the genetic markers of the lethal strain. Such information is crucial if an effective vaccine and drugs are to be developed. And it enables health authorities to monitor outbreaks of bird flu for the dangerous mutations and so nip a potential pandemic in the bud. "The more danger a pathogen poses," Dr Palese writes, "the more important it is to study it (under appropriate containment conditions), and to share the results with the scientific community."
Others disagree. Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, and Donald Henderson, of the University of Pittsburgh, argue in Science that H5N1's human fatality rate, a staggering 60% for the 570-odd recorded cases, means that any benefits flowing from the research are dwarfed by the risks. Although some research is warranted, they concede, there is no need to share the mutation data "outside of a small select group of established researchers already working within the WHO network".
Such work, say many, should only be done in the most secure facilities: those rated "biosafety level 4". Both Dr Fouchier's and Dr Kawaoka's labs are graded a notch lower, at "level 3, enhanced", like the one where Dr Palese revived the 1918 virus. Others go further. In a spine-chilling editorial on January 7th, entitled "An Engineered Doomsday", the New York Times implored scientists to destroy the deadly H5N1 strains in the name of safety.
The odds of that happening are long. In a statement sent to Science, the WHO says that research like Dr Fouchier's and Dr Kawaoka's is "an important tool for global surveillance efforts". The organisation also reportedly worries that limiting access to relevant findings would be difficult to square with its recently updated pandemic influenza preparedness framework. That agreement, which stipulates that countries which provide virus samples should also receive the benefits of research, was preceded by four years of rancorous debate. If anything can be said for certain, then, it is that the gulf between those in favour of tighter controls and those against will be hard to bridge in two months.

Jane412

foooooooooooooooxy~~~~~

沙发~

铁板神猴

呀 被Jane同学超越了

xinnono

铺一下地板~ 好久没做过前排座啦~

xinnono

检讨, 最近速度越障有些松懈, 今天越障内容本来挺感兴趣的, 结果无数次走神, 中断阅读...

this is a follow up story on the h5n1 research content censor issue.
the two doctors did that series of research on how to make a non-airborne virus airborne. the virus was stored with high security. people were debating whether the progress on the deadly virus should be made public, or censored.
the teams from all around the world held a meeting on Jan 20th for this issue. they pledged to have a 60-day suspension on all related researches, to give organizations and governments time to find a proper way to propagate the situation.
blabla, 失忆中..
some believe it should be public, otherwise, it'll halt the new entrants to the research, and with the history of past disaster, it could be too late by the time people make it public.
others believe it's totally wrong to have this under research. nytimes had an editorial appeal to destroy the virus, to avoid engineered doomsday.
some argue that there's no reason to expose the research progress outside of the research teams.
WHO published an agreement that efforts on the research can help with the global tracking efforts. and whichever country that provides virus sample would benefit from the research.

fox0923

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xinnono

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fox0923

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-- by 会员 xinnono (2012/1/24 6:17:05)

nono起得好早啊~~传受一下经验吧~~

xinnono

1'31
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-- by 会员 xinnono (2012/1/24 6:17:05)

nono起得好早啊~~传受一下经验吧~~

-- by 会员 fox0923 (2012/1/24 6:44:56)

我不在国内呀~ 其实我是夜猫子, 每天早上10点才爬起来呢~
糊糊今天起得才是早...

babybearmm

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我觉得那个Stratfor email比越障还难啊，没怎么看懂.....一会儿再读读

越障 10'56''

This passage mainly discusses: to what extent shall the research data on such pandemic viruses (such as H5N1) be disclosed? Two options: 1) Shared by everyone? Or 2) limited to those researchers who work intensively on related scientific project within WHO's framework.

Recently published Nature and Science, 37 experts signed a 60-day suspension on the data disclosure (?) on H5N1 to discuss where shall they go and how shall the system work.

1) Most people (e.g., Dr. F) hold that the data should be shared. Reasons below:

   Current findings on H5N1 include:
    a. (pathology) found that H1N1 has haemaglutinin that makes red cell clump
    b. (genetics) identified the genetic characteristics that define the disease-causing strains of H5N1.

    The disclosure (publication) of these findings is beneficial because:
    a. such data is definitely the prerequisite for the development of H5N1 vaccines/drugs
    b. this data will facilitiate public health authorities to monitor H5N1 pandemic and take corresponding actions

    Also, to allow the research data to be published would act as an incentive to drive more and more scientists into this field, thus would foster the research in this field.

2) Others (e.g., Dr. O) disagree; they contend that data should only be shared to those researchers who work intensively on related scientific project within WHO's framework. Their reasoning (focused on the risk issue):
Studies on H5N1 should strictly follow WHO's guidelines (e.g. only in labs classified as Biosafety Level 4).  Therefore, disseminating detailed research data (such as the DNA sequence of the viral strain) does not make sense.  Outsiders are not encouraged to jump into this field, and thus are not in need of this kind of research data.

WHO is in favor of the 1st view (to share the data), because the countries that provide the samples (for scientific research) deserve knowing the results.