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[阅读小分队] 【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障25系列】【25-16】科技

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发表于 2013-9-30 21:54:53 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
Official Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471


Part I:Speaker

Jack Andraka A promising test for pancreatic cancer

【Rephrase 1】

[Dialog, 10:18]

Mp3:

Transcript:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_pancreatic_cancer_from_a_teenager.html



Part II:Speed


Kind Hearts Are Healthier
Volunteering improves cardiovascular health

  
【Time 2】
Doing good for others warms the heart—and may protect the heart, too. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia asked 106 high school students to take part in a volunteering study. Half of the students spent an hour every week for 10 weeks helping elementary students with homework, sports or club activities. The other half of the students did not participate in volunteer work.

Using questionnaires and a medical examination both before and after the 10-week period, the researchers found that students who volunteered had lower levels ofcholesterol and inflammation after the study. Those who did not volunteer showed no such improvements.

The health benefits did not correlate to a specific volunteer activity—such as sedentary homework help versus athletics—nor did they link to improvements in self-esteem. But the researchers did find that students who reported the greatest increases in empathetic and altruistic behavior after their volunteering experience also exhibited the most pronounced improvements in heart health. Although more research is needed to untangle how health benefits and altruistic behavior are intertwined, psychologist and study author Hannah Schreier hypothesizes that their findings may reflect a “spillover” effect. “Keeping others motivated could improve your own motivation for healthy behaviors,” Schreier says.

Nice at Every Age
IN CHILDHOOD
Behaving kindly—cooperating, sharing and consoling others—may predict academic success years later, in adolescence.


AS A PRETEEN
Performing acts of kindness may boost happiness and popularity—and reduce the chances of being bullied.


IN ADULTHOOD
Spending money on others is linked to greater increases in a person's happiness than spending on oneself.
(words:261)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kind-hearts-are-healthier



Study Finds Most Drug Commercials Misleading
Ads for over-the-counter drugs are worse than those that require a prescription

  

【Time 3】
“Don’t Rasp Your Throat With Harsh Irritants, Reach for a LUCKY instead,” reads one Lucky Strike Cigarettes ad from the 1930s. It’s almost beyond belief today that a cigarette company could get away with an ad touting its product as beneficial for the throat, but according to a new study, the days of false and misleading commercials are far from over.


Researchers at Dartmouth College, in N.H., and the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to check up on what drug companies say in their U.S. TV commercials. Their findings suggest a frequent disregard for the truth. Sixty percent of prescription drug ads and 80 percent of over the counter drug ads were found to be misleading or false.

“There were cases of blatant lying, but these half-truths form more than half of our analysis,” said study author Adrienne E. Faerber.

Faerber became skeptical of the assertions made in drug commercials when Claritin moved from a prescription-only drug to a product you could buy over the counter, suddenly the commercials made, “six times more claims for the benefits of the drug,” she said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for ensuring prescription drug ads be factual, is well aware of the problem and actively solicits help from viewers.

“The FDA encourages everyone to watch and let the FDA know if they see misleading or unbalanced prescription drug promotion,” said FDA spokesperson Andrea Fischer.

In a paper published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine earlier this month, Faerber randomly chose 84 prescription drug commercials and 84 over the counter drug commercials, which aired during the nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN between 2008 and 2010. Analysts identified each ad’s major claim and subsequently evaluated its authenticity. The claims were classified as “objectively true” if there was evidence to support it, the commercial didn’t exaggerate the evidence, and if no important details were left out. It was deemed “misleading” if the claims were exaggerated or if important details were omitted, and “false” if there was no evidence to back the claim.

Ziv Carmon, a professor of marketing at Insead business school in Singapore is surprised by Faerber’s findings, “I would expect firms to be careful when it comes to what they say, especially when it comes to products like pharmaceuticals,” he wrote in an email.

One of the repeat offenders, said Faerber, were erectile dysfunction drugs. “The various drug companies phrase it differently, but they all play on the idea of being “ready” when the moment is right,” but Faerber said readiness is about more than a physical reaction, it’s an emotional state – especially where sex is concerned. “They implied more than a physiological response.”
(words:448)


【Time 4】
Fischer said the FDA works to prevent misleading information and outright fallacies in drug commercials “through comprehensive surveillance,” adding that “drug companies are required to submit all advertisements and other promotional materials at the time they make them public.”


The FDA doesn’t block or grant permission for an ad to air but instead reviews the ad once it’s live and notifies the drug companies when it spots an untruth. In a letter dated July 31, 2013 to Merz Pharmaceuticals about an ad for Naftin, an antifungal cream, the FDA pointed out that while the ad discloses the common adverse reactions to the drug, it omits warnings of local adverse reactions. This led the FDA to conclude that Merz misleadingly implies that Naftin is safer to use than it actually is. As of Sept. 27, 2013, Merz had not corrected its web page to reflect the FDA’s concerns and did not respond to a request for comment.

Faerber’s results showed that it was more common for an over the counter drug to be misleading or false than a prescription drug. The reason why remains unclear, but the FDA oversees prescription drug ads while the Federal Trade Commission is responsible for over the counter drugs.

“The FTC is more reactive and the FDA is proactive,” said Faerber, “The FTC is also less specialized.” Faerber suggests that it might help if the FDA and FTC were to coordinate efforts for the first few months after a drug is declassified for over the counter sale.

Carmon’s own research investigates consumer attitudes towards drug commercials. Somewhat ironically, his most recent study, published in the journal Psychological Science, indicates that if drug companies are more upfront about side effects it helps their sales. He compared consumer perception of an ad that included a truthful warning versus the same ad, but omitting the warning. He found that initially, the reaction to ads with warnings was detrimental to the drug’s appeal.

However, after a few days the situation changes. In the long run, Carmon said, the warnings themselves become less prominent in customers' minds. What’s left is the perception of trust, he said, along with increased product appeal, and sales.
(words:362)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=study-finds-most-drug-commercials-misleading
  


Newfound biological clocks set by the moon
Marine organisms have rhythms dictated by tides, lunar cycle


【Time 5】
The sun exerts hegemony over biological rhythms of nearly every organism on Earth.  But two studies now show the moon is no slouch. It controls the cadence of at least two different biological clocks: one set by tides and the other by moonlight.
  
The clocks, both discovered in sea creatures, work independently of the circadian clock, which synchronizes daily rhythms with the sun. The studies demonstrate that the moon’s light and its gravitational pull, which creates tides, can affect the behavior of animals.
  
“The moon has an influence, definitely,” says Steven Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, who was not involved with either study. “Clearly for these marine organisms, it’s very powerful and important.”
  
Scientists established decades ago that circadian clocks govern people’s daily cycles of such things as hormone levels, blood pressure and body temperature. Nearly every organism, including single-celled creatures, has some version. Circadian clocks are composed of protein gears. In a loop that takes roughly 24 hours, levels of some proteins rise and then fall, while others fall and then rise. Sunlight sets the clocks, but once a clock is set it will keep running, even when scientists keep organisms in constant darkness.
  
Other rhythmic behaviors occur on longer time frames, such as reproductive cycles that seem to follow the moon, annual patterns like hibernation and blooming cycles, and multiyear events like the emergence of cicadas every 13 to 17 years. Other periodic activities happen on shorter timescales, such as behavior of coastal organisms coordinated with tides. Researchers have debated whether these behaviors were really timed by an internal clock that would keep ticking if the cues used to synchronize it disappear.
  
“What is biologically true and what is myth needs to be carefully untangled,” says Kristin Tessmar-Raible, a molecular neurobiologist at the University of Vienna. She and colleagues describe a lunar clock in a marine worm in the Oct. 17 Cell Reports.
(words:322)


【Time 6】

That unraveling of fact from fiction can take a long time. It took about nine years for Charalambos Kyriacou of the University of Leicester in England and his colleagues to establish that the speckled sea louse, Eurydice pulchra, has a clock that times the tides. Before the tide goes out, the creatures bury themselves in the sand to keep from being swept out to sea. When water levels rise, 12.4 hours later, the sea lice emerge to forage. When kept in dark, still water in the lab, the animals’ swimming patterns still follow the rise and fall of the tides, indicating that the rhythm is under control of a tidal clock within the sea lice, the researchers report in the Oct. 7 Current Biology.

  
The scientists’ work has taken on a rhythm, too, one dictated by an organism that lives for only a few months and doesn’t breed in the lab. Each spring and summer, the researchers fish the marine crustaceans out of high tides. Winters are spent analyzing the animals’ behavioral data and genetic material.
  
Some researchers had speculated that Eurydice’s tidal rhythms might stem from a pair of out-of-phase circadian clocks, generating the roughly 12-hour tidal rhythms. Others thought an independent clock could drive tidal rhythms.
  
So the researchers disabled genes that make two of the molecular gears in the crustaceans’ circadian clock. “It doesn’t matter what you throw at the circadian clock — you can hit it with a hammer — and the tidal rhythm is unaffected,” Kyriacou says. That is evidence that the tidal clock uses different protein gears than the circadian clock does.
  
As Kyriacou’s group prepared to publish its results, Tessmar-Raible and her colleagues were simultaneously reporting their discovery of a lunar clock in a marine worm, Platynereis dumerilii. The worms spawn on a monthly cycle set by moonlight, the team found.
  
Like the tidal clock in the crustaceans, the worms’ lunar clocks kept on ticking when the researchers dismantled the circadian clock. That finding indicated the monthly cycles are under control of an independent timing mechanism.
  
The discoveries raise the possibility that many other organisms, including humans, may have multiple timers, says Charlotte Helfrich-Förster, who studies biological clocks at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Such clocks could be behind women’s monthly menstrual cycles; recent studies have also shown that sodium levels have a monthly rhythm and that people’s sleeping habits may follow lunar cycles (SN: 08/24/13, p. 15).
  
The researchers are now trying to find the molecular gears that run the new clocks.
(words:419)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/353530/description/Newfound_biological_clocks_set_by_the_moon


Part III: Obstacle


3,000 Years of Human History, Described in One Set of Mathematical Equations

【Time 7】
Most people think of history as a series of stories—tales of one army unexpectedly defeating another, or a politician making a memorable speech, or an upstart overthrowing a sitting monarch.


Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut sees things rather differently. Formally trained as a ecologist, he sees history as a series of equations. Specifically, he wants to bring the types of mathematical models used in fields such as wildlife ecology to explain population trends in a different species: humans.


In a paper published with colleagues today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he presents a mathematical model (shown on the left of the video above) that correlates well with historical data (shown on the right) on the development and spread of large-scale, complex societies (represented as red territories on the green area studied). The simulation runs from 1500 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E.—so it encompasses the growth of societies like Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt and the like—and replicates historical trends with 65 percent accuracy.

This might not sound like a perfect accounting of human history, but that’s not really the goal. Turchin simply wants to apply mathematical analysis to the field of history so that researchers can determine which factors are most influential in affecting the spread of human states and populations, just as ecologists have done when analyzing wildlife population dynamics. Essentially, he wants to answer a simple question: Why did complex societies develop and spread in some areas but not others?

In this study, Turchin’s team found that conflict between societies and the development of military technology as a result of war were the most important elements that predicted which states would develop and expand over the map—with those factors taken away, the model deteriorated, describing actual history with only 16 percent accuracy.

Turchin began thinking about applying math to history in general about 15 years ago. “I always enjoyed history, but I realized then that it was the last major discipline which was not mathematized,” he explains. “But mathematical approaches—modeling, statistics, etc.—are an inherent part of any real science.”

In bringing these sorts of tools into the arena of world history and developing a mathematical model, his team was inspired by a theory called cultural multilevel selection, which predicts that competition between different groups is the main driver of the evolution of large-scale, complex societies. To build that into the model, they divided all of Africa and Eurasia into gridded squares which were each categorized by a few environmental variables (the type of habitat, elevation, and whether it had agriculture in 1500 B.C.E.). They then “seeded” military technology in squares adjacent to the grasslands of central Asia, because the domestication of horses—the dominant military technology of the age—likely arose there initially.
Over time, the model allowed for domesticated horses to spread between adjacent squares. It also simulated conflict between various entities, allowing squares to take over nearby squares, determining victory based on the area each entity controlled, and thus growing the sizes of empires. After plugging in these variables, they let the model simulate 3,000 years of human history, then compared its results to actual data, gleaned from a variety of historical atlases.

Although it’s not perfect, the accuracy of their model—predicting the development and spread of empires in nearly all the right places—surprised even the researchers. “To tell the truth, the success of this enterprise exceeded my wildest expectations,” Turchin says. “Who would have thought that a simple model could explain 65% of variance in a large historical database?”

So why would conflict between societies prove to be such a crucial variable in predicting where empires would form? “To evolve to a large size, societies need special institutions that are necessary for holding them together,” Turchin proposes. “But such institutions have large internal costs, and without constant competition from other societies, they collapse. Only constant competition ensures that ultrasocial norms and institutions will persist and spread.”

The model shows that agriculture is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a complex society, he says—these states can’t form without farming, but the persistent presence of competition and warfare is necessary to forge farming societies into durable, large-scale empires. Conventional analyses of history could come to this same conclusion, but they wouldn’t be able to demonstrate it in the same mathematically-based way. Using this approach, on the other hand, Turchin’s group could remove the influence of warfare and see the model’s accuracy in describing real historical data plummet.

Of course, there are limitations to viewing history through math—humans are more complicated than numbers. “Differences in culture, environmental factors and thousands of other variables not included in the model all have effect,” Turchin says. “A simple general model should not be able to capture actual history in all its glorious complexity.”

Still, the model is a unique and valuable tool. Going forward, Turchin’s team wants to develop it further—adding more nuance (such as including the quality of agricultural productivity, rather than merely toggling if farming exists in a given area or not) to improve on that 65 percent accuracy. Additionally, they’d like to expand the model, applying it to more recent world history and also pre-Columbian North America, if they can find relevant historical data.

Based on his experiences so far, Turchin thinks they’ll be successful in developing a model that better reflects the the rise and fall of civilizations. “It turns out that there is a lot of quantitative data in history,” he says, “you just have to be creative in looking for it.”
(Words:931)
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/09/3000-years-of-human-history-described-in-one-set-of-mathematical-equations/



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发表于 2013-9-30 21:56:16 | 显示全部楼层


1.39
help others is good for your heart health

2.53
most of the commercial ads about medicine are misleading

2.37

2.05

2.49
(后面这篇好难。。明早起来精读上作业!)
发表于 2013-9-30 22:43:24 | 显示全部楼层
谢谢change 来得早不如来得巧

Time1:  1m25s
  A survey show that volunteer work help people more healthy.
Time2: 2m55s
  A study team find that 80 percent of the united states drug commercials are misleading, and that the effect is often exaggerate 6 times .
ime3: FDC and FTC should get together to effort the counter drug.
        In the long run, customer is becoming more smart in choosing drug when be warned by truthful side effect.
Time4: 1m53s
      Study show that beside solar clock,  the lunar clock also play a role in animals’ clock life.
Time5: Like the marine worms and any other animals, human ‘s body is possibly responsible to lunar clock .

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Obstacle: 5m09s
A team view the history as not a series of story , but a mathmatica equlity.  
This is the first time use a model  and included many factors to describe history.
This team found that an area’s prosper or not ,war or not correlate with many factors, and remove this factors , everything change.
This model is not perfect because human not data but complex animal, we cant use math model to give explanation.
However , Until now this model is unique and important to study the humans life.
There are lots of data in history ,we can take advantage of them to reflect the fall and rise of civilization .      

That unraveling of fact from fiction can take a long time. 从虚幻的想象,到事实的证明是需要很长时间的。




发表于 2013-9-30 22:48:15 | 显示全部楼层
首页,楼上XDJM真快,感谢change

01:34
Doing volunteer activities can be good to heart health.

02:26
Most of the commerical ads on drugs are misleading.FDA has already taken action.

02:34
But FDA and FTC do not work well on this aspects because of their own attribution.They should work together to solve this problem.Why and how drug companies do this.

02:02
The moon can also affect animals' biological clocks ,especially marine animals' ,as the sun does.Which aspects can the moon affect.

02:16
Researchers studied the sea louse to reach their findings of tidal clock.
Another team finded a lunar clock in worms.These discoveries showed that animals may have more than one timers in the body.

06:53
Main idea:Use mathematical model to explain the history
T built a model to explain the population trends in the history.
Aim of the model:Which factor affect the spread of human most and Why the complext society emerge here rather than other places.
result:1 conflict 2 development on military technology
T use an example in his model to explain this in detail. Competition is the main driver.Agriculture is a necessary but not sufficient factor.
But this model still has some disadvantage:Human are so complex that the number and math can not explain and calculate all things.
Obstacle的结构写的好凌乱
发表于 2013-9-30 23:16:09 | 显示全部楼层
MARK! thanks, change!



T2-1′40″<261>
T3-2′42″<448>
T4-2′09″<362>
T5-1′49″<322>
T6-2′16″<419>
Obstacle-5'22''
发表于 2013-9-30 23:34:23 | 显示全部楼层
谢谢CHANGE!!!

感觉今天的speed有点长,还是我没睡醒呢

TIME 2  1'31
TIME 3  2'35
TIME 4  3'21
TIME 5  3'15
TIME 6  2'56
TIME 7  

发表于 2013-10-1 00:00:35 | 显示全部楼层
占~~~~~~

________________
Obstacle
04:50
A mathematical model that correlates with historical data to explain population trends in humans
发表于 2013-10-1 00:05:49 | 显示全部楼层
我居然被甩到了二环????
@kim 你居然悄悄坐了个沙发
@晓野 楼下的同学早上好
25-16
1 10min18
Really inspiring
2 261 1min07
Research procedures- conclusion- different ages
3 448 1min40
4 362 1min34
5 322 1min32
Two rhythmic human behaviors affected by the moon
6 419 1min51
Unraveling-That unraveling of fact from fiction can take along time.
                    -Thechild unraveled grandma's knitting.
More research to find behaviors following moon clock
7 931 4min24
Turchin’s background makes him view things in a differentway- try to study human history with math technique- how can some countriesspread- his model can explain 65% of historical conflict- this model has some limitations but amazing
发表于 2013-10-1 00:28:08 | 显示全部楼层
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
-----------------------------------------------------------------
@小鱼~~楼上的小鱼早上好呀~


掌管 6 00:06:15.73 00:19:27.67
掌管 5 00:02:56.96 00:13:11.94
掌管 4 00:02:25.86 00:10:14.98
掌管 3 00:02:43.35 00:07:49.11
掌管 2 00:03:25.31 00:05:05.75
掌管 1 00:01:40.44 00:01:40.44
发表于 2013-10-1 02:19:10 | 显示全部楼层
大家依然占的好欢快=..=2环也占一个吧
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