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今天强推的是听力,上周听到这个就想着这周要和大家分享,友情提示:吃饭的时候就不要听了哈,speed第二篇文章是关于赌博输赢问题,对于一个从未赢钱的我来说很好奇,越障讲MBA嗒,大家enjoy~
Part I: Speaker
Article 1: Poop Train
[Rephrase 1]
[Dialog, 22:54]
Source: http://www.radiolab.org/story/poop-train/Part II: Speed Article 2: To Increase Savings, Link Them to Gambling
[Time 2]
Unlikely as it seems, gambling might help people save. Peter Tufano of Harvard Business School and Tim Flacke of the Doorways to Dreams Fund have piloted a program with eight Michigan credit unions that turns savings accounts into a game. The more people squirrel away, the better their chances of winning small cash prizes each month. At the year’s end, one account holder gets $100,000. In 2009, the first year of this trial (called Save to Win), 12,000 people opened accounts and saved about $7 million.
Tufano is still studying the results, but he believes that the $7 million—which averages out to $583 per person—comprises savings by individuals who otherwise would have saved less, if anything at all. He says he’s also taking a close look “to make sure that the accounts are not giving rise to new gambling behavior.”
Will we soon be seeing similar programs across the U.S.? Right now, it’s unclear. The lottery-linked savings concept has been stymied in the U.S. by laws that prohibit banks from offering products like this. That’s in spite of the fact that the approach can be traced back at least 300 years to programs in other countries, Tufano points out. Accounts that yield lower interest rates in exchange for chances to win prizes or cash are well established in Britain and in many developing nations, and studies suggest they’ve improved savings.
Tufano has spoken with credit unions and legislators outside Michigan that are watching the pilot with interest, especially given that lottery players are concentrated in lower-income households—the ones that have the most difficulty saving. “The average American household spends $500 a year on lottery tickets,” he says. “As a society we’re tremendously excited about lotteries, so we should be happy with lotteries in which people save money.”
[300 words]
Source: http://hbr.org/2010/04/to-increase-savings-link-them-to-gambling/ar/1
Article 3: How Often Do Gamblers Really Win?
[Time 3]
The casino billboards lining America's roadways tantalize with the lure of riches. "Easy Street. It's Only a Play Away," screams one in Arizona. "$7.1 Million Every Day. We're a Payout Machine," reads another.
But how often do gamblers really win? What are the chances that a gambler will win on a single day or over a longer period? Don't bother to ask the casinos. Although they gather vast quantities of data about their customers for marketing purposes, including win and loss tallies for many regulars, casinos keep such information a closely-guarded secret.
Now, thanks to an unprecedented trove of public data detailing the behavior of thousands of Internet gamblers over a two-year period, The Wall Street Journal can provide some answers.
On any given day, the chances of emerging a winner aren't too bad—the gamblers won money on 30% of the days they wagered. But continuing to gamble is a bad bet. Just 11% of players ended up in the black over the full period, and most of those pocketed less than $150.
The skew was even more pronounced when it came to heavy gamblers. Of the top 10% of bettors—those placing the largest number of total wagers over the two years—about 95% ended up losing money, some dropping tens of thousands of dollars. Big losers of more than $5,000 among these heavy gamblers outnumbered big winners by a staggering 128 to 1.
[236 words]
[Time 4]
The analysis comes from a database containing anonymous records of 4,222 Internet gamblers who wagered on at least four days on casino-style games of chance such as blackjack, roulette and slots. They played between 2005 and 2007 on websites run by a major European online gambling concern, Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment PLC.
Bwin made the information available to gambling-addiction researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School, who posted much of the data on the Internet. Bwin says there's no reason to believe a more current sample of customers would show significant differences.
Although the online Bwin customers differed in some ways from those typically found in a U.S. casino, their win and loss patterns should be roughly similar because the games are similar, said Robert Hannum, a University of Denver specialist in gambling mathematics.
To check, the Journal asked Puneet Manchanda of the University of Michigan and Hee Mok Park of the University of Connecticut to analyze a private gambling database to which they have access, detailing two years of play by 18,000 holders of loyalty cards at a Native American casino in the northwestern U.S.
The researchers found similar patterns: Only 13.5% of gamblers ended up winning, versus 11% among Bwin customers, and the ratios of big losers to big winners were similarly large.
The Bwin data also offer a peek at the economics of the casino industry that only insiders normally glimpse. Among the findings is an extreme reliance on revenue from a small number of gamblers.
Of the 4,222 casino customers, just 2.8%—or 119 big losers—provided half of the casino's take, and 10.7% provided 80% of the take.
[271 words]
[Time 5]
Such revenue concentration long has been quietly acknowledged in the casino industry, but the Bwin information may be the first to show it with hard public data.
The issue is a sensitive one in the industry because gambling critics often cite revenue concentration as one sign that casinos exploit gambling addicts, which executives dispute.
"Politically, we don't want to talk about it being more concentrated than other industries," said Andrew Klebanow, a marketing specialist who has consulted for dozens of casinos. He said the Bwin results are in line with his own estimates, based on confidential casino data, that many U.S. casinos get about 90% of their revenue from 10% of customers. (The two professors found that 9.3% of the gamblers at the Native American casino produced 80% of the group's revenue.)
Jim Kilby, a former professor who has written three books on casino management, said the scant number of winners among Bwin customers was surprising even to him, and should be educational to gamblers.
Although gamblers know the house has an edge, he said, "the average person doesn't understand the math" of the multiplier effect: "Casino games are nibbling machines, and the more nibbles you have, the bigger your losses."
The Bwin data clearly show that. The lightest gamblers—the 10% of customers who placed the fewest wagers over the two years—also had the highest winning percentage. About 17% of them ended up in the black—tough odds but still better than the dismal 5.4% winning percentage of the heaviest gamblers.
[253 words]
[Time 6]
Among the whole group of 4,222 gamblers, just seven won more than $5,000 (€3,698) over the two years, while 217 lost more than $5,000. That's a 31-1 ratio of big losers to big winners.
Gambler No. 1357078, a Swiss man who was 56 years old when he opened his account, was a classic heavy gambler. He played an average of three days a week, typically placing more than 1,000 bets per day and averaging $9 per bet. He lost on 84% of the days he gambled, and over the two years gambled away more than $110,000.
Unless they cheat, about the only way gamblers can win at games of chance is to get lucky and then stop gambling.
That's how No. 1381787 emerged as the biggest overall winner. A 56-year-old Slovenian man, he typically placed only a few modest bets per day. Then he struck gold, twice winning more than $14,000 within 10 days. After suffering a partial setback, he stopped playing on the Bwin site, netting about $22,000.
A separate Bwin database covers poker play. Poker is partly a game of skill, and the outcomes reflect that. About one-third of the poker players classified as "most involved" by the Harvard researchers ended up winning money over time, while just 10% of the rest ended up in the black.
Despite the slim chance of winning shown by its own data, Bwin has been enticing gamblers on one of its sites to "play for huge rewards on classic casino games," adding "the odds are certainly in your favor!"
Joachim Haeusler, Bwin's responsible gaming manager, said the company provides entertainment and people shouldn't gamble "based on the idea to get rich, because they won't."
[282 words]
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304626104579123383535635644.html?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks
Part III: Obstacle
Article 4: Change management -The MBA is being transformed, for better and for worse
[Paraphrase 7]
THE master of business administration is one of the success stories of our time. Since it was first offered by Harvard Business School (HBS) in 1908, the MBA’s rise has seemed unstoppable. Having conquered America, it reached Europe’s shores in 1957 when INSEAD, a French school, launched a programme. In the past couple of decades, Asia, South America and Africa have succumbed. Today, it is the second most popular postgraduate degree in America (after education).
Whereas 40 years ago, American colleges graduated similar numbers of lawyers and MBAs, nowadays nearly four times as many students pass out with a business-school master’s degree than with a law-school one (see chart). Although demand among Americans is plateauing, the slack has been taken up by emerging markets, particularly in Asia. India now has around 2,000 business schools, more than any other country. China has fewer, but their numbers are growing quickly. It has an estimated 250 MBA programmes, graduating around 30,000 students each year. This is less than half the number it will need over the next decade, according to Hao Hongrui of DHD, a consultancy.
Yet for all its success, these are demanding times. For a start, MBA candidates are beginning to question the return on investment of such expensive programmes. Business schools claim their graduates are less concerned than they once were about earning fabulous salaries. Instead of trumpeting the number of students who get high-paying jobs in finance, they now reel off examples of those who join non-profits or launch social enterprises. This fits the socially-aware image they wish to portray after the financial crisis.
However, there is a whiff of post-hoc rationalisation in this. Data from our latest ranking of full-time MBA courses (see article), show that the average basic salary of graduating students is now $94,000, around $1,500 less than it was five years ago. And yet our survey of business-school students suggests that they are more focused on the size of their pay-packets than those who enrolled before the crisis.
As salaries have fallen, tuition fees have risen. At Chicago, our top-ranked school, two years’ tuition costs $112,000, an increase of around $17,000 since 2008. Harvard’s prices have risen by nearly $25,000. A degree that once let the brightest students name their starting salaries now warrants a careful cost-benefit analysis.
Concentrate!
The MBA is changing in other ways, too. The days in which students study a broad set of management skills, with little specialisation, are numbered. Most business schools now encourage students to concentrate on one area, such as finance. An increasing number of MBA courses are tailored to particular industries, such as health care, luxury goods or, in one case, wine and spirits management.
This is partly because students now have to have a clear career plan before they apply to business school. Competition for plum summer internships, the most common route to a post-MBA job, begins on the first day of school. Such is the focus on finding the right job, laments Sunil Kumar, dean of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, that students sometimes forget to savour the academic experience.
Business schools are expanding in other ways too. University administrators are wont to view them as cash cows and allow them to graze on other faculties accordingly. For years, they have been poaching professors from economics departments. Now they also woo psychologists and sociologists to teach softer subjects such as leadership and organisational behaviour. And their scope seems to be expanding.
“Big data” is currently one of the hottest study areas. York University in Canada, for example, recently launched a Master’s in Business Analytics. It recruits students with solid quantitative backgrounds, such as mathematicians and engineers, who spend half their time poring over mathematical models and half taking MBA classes. It is not enough to be a top-notch statistician nowadays, says Murat Kristal, director of the programme. Firms want people who can also understand the business implications of their analysis.
Perhaps the most disruptive influence on MBAs will be educational technology. Many institutions, from leviathans such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school to relative tiddlers such as Grenoble in France, now make some of their courses available free of charge as “massive online open courses”, or MOOCs. It is uncertain what long-term effect this will have. Roger Martin, the recently departed dean of Toronto’s Rotman school, clearly remains unconvinced: “Giving away your product? In what way is that a business?”
Instead, it is more likely disruption will be from better distance-learning technology. Demand for mass-market, paid-for but cheap online MBAs, delivered by institutions such as the University of Phoenix, is not new. However, it has been rarer for prestigious, traditional universities to offer distance-learning MBAs. This is changing. Top-ranked schools are spending heavily to equip themselves for this. Chicago, for example, has built video studios at its American campus so that students on its foreign campuses, in London and Singapore, do not miss its best tutors’ lectures.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has gone further. It is one of the first top-ranked schools to offer a full-time MBA programme entirely at a distance. It has just enrolled 500 students in the second intake of its MBA@UNC programme, an online MBA that can be completed in 18 months. This is close to double the number it enrolls for its campus-based version. Interestingly, it typically costs a little more than attending Chapel Hill, partly because the technology has not come cheap. Yet students are signing up because they prefer not to give up their jobs, or because they cannot move to the campus for other reasons.
The tipping-point
Douglas Shackelford, the programme’s director, says that online classroom technology has now reached a tipping-point, whereby it is at least as good as a real classroom. Classes on the programme are limited to 15 students, spread across the globe, all of whom can interact. It has also allowed UNC to employ the best tutors whether or not they are in North Carolina. Professors lecture from India, France and across America. All lectures and class discussions are available in perpetuity, to be rewatched before exams or even after students graduate. Yet Mr Shackelford thinks he is only scratching the surface: “In 10 years we will look back and be embarrassed it was so simple.”
This may come at a cost, however. As students get more choice, so business schools, perhaps for the first time, will be forced to compete on price, says Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who coined the idea of disruptive innovation. Many will find they do not have the resources, so there could, thinks Mr Christensen, be many casualties. Students might celebrate; business schools may prefer to keep the champagne on ice.
[1121 words] Source: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587780-mba-being-transformed-better-and-worse-change-management
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