【Native Speaker每日综合训练—30系列】【30-07】文史哲

jay871750293

Official Weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471


Hi~ my dear little partners~
Since this is the first Sunday in 2014 and my first shot in new year, I would like to offer some relaxing and interesting article.

There are three passages in Speed part. First of all, let’s travel to a very cold destination to see what funny ways people will spend their vacations there. And don’t forget to send me a post card if you will go there. Next, we will find a much more intriguing and surprising research concerning some famous writers. (Honestly speaking, I can recognize few of them…囧) Finally, let’s return to the romantic and poetic world of love and source the true meaning of it.
In the Obstacle part, a not far distant dream is displayed.

In the end, hope every one of you can delight in reading these materials and taking your own enjoyment and joy. If possible, pass to your happiness to others and embrace a warmer and kinder new year~

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Part 1 Speaker

What are managers for?

[Rephrase1]


[Dialog 6'05]

MP3:

Transcript:

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservic ... in_management.shtml

jay871750293

Part 2 Speed

Article 1(Check the title later)
Swimming in Ice, Sleeping in Snow: Winter Vacationing in Kemi, Finland

DEC. 17 2013 9:14 AM By Ella Morton

[Time2]

Does your ideal vacation involve sub-zero temperatures, survival suits, cream of smoked reindeer soup, and being able to see your breath in your hotel room? Then meet your dream destination: Kemi, Finland.

Located on the Bothnian Bay in the Lapland region, Kemi is home to around 23,000 people. Every winter, visitors flock to the town to experience its two star attractions: the Sampo, a 250-foot icebreaking ship, and LumiLinna, a castle built out of snow.

From 1961 to 1987, the Sampo served as a government vessel, carving paths through the frozen Baltic Sea so that shipping operations could continue during winter. In 1988, the newly retired Sampo became a tourist ship. Between late December and mid-April you can climb aboard for a four-hour cruise of the frozen sea. Watching and hearing the ship smash through the surface ice is novel enough, but then comes the real highlight: donning a bright red survival suit and floating in the frigid water. (Swimming is optional — if the idea doesn't appeal, you can settle for a walk on the ice.)

A night at the LumiLinna snow castle is the obvious way to cap off the Kemi experience. The castle’s offerings are diverse: admire the dramatically lit ice sculptures while dining on cream of smoked reindeer soup at the 150-seat restaurant, then christen a child in the attached ice chapel before stripping down to socks, underwear, and a warm hat and jumping into a fleece-lined sleeping bag in one of the private hotel rooms. The in-room temperature is 23 degrees Fahrenheit, but the sleeping bags are warm enough to induce sweating if you're clothed — hence the staff’s recommendation of an underwear-and-woolly-hat ensemble.)
[Words: 277]
Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/12/17/kemi_finland_where_you_can_swim_in_ice_and_sleep_in_a_snow_castle.html

Article 2 (Check the title later)
Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized
by Maria Popova

[Warm up]

The early bird gets the literary worm … sort of.

“In both writing and sleeping,” Stephen King observed in his excellent meditation on the art of “creative sleep” and wakeful dreaming, “we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.”

Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits — after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. The challenge, of course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to find, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who make masterful visualizations of cultural phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify — and, together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible to visualize such a correlation.
[Words: 191]

[Time3]

First, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. Many came from two books — Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson — as well as from the Paris Review interviews and various collections of diaries and letters.

We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author.

One important caveat is that there is an enormous degree of subjectivity in assessing a literary — or any creative — career, but since all information visualization is an exercise in subjective editorial judgment rather than a record of Objective Truth, we settled on a set of quantifiable criteria to measure “productivity”: number of published works and major awards received. Given that both the duration and the era of an author’s life affect literary output — longer lives offer more time to write, and some authors lived before the major awards were established — those variables were also indicated for context.

Lastly, I reached out to Wendy MacNaughton — illustrator extraordinaire and very frequent collaborator — and asked her to contribute an illustrated portrait for each of the authors.

The end result — a labor of love months in the making — is this magnificent visualization of the correlation between writers’ wake-up times, displayed in clock-like fashion around each portrait, and their literary productivity, depicted as different-colored “auras” for each of the major awards and stack-bars for number of works published, color-coded for genre. The writers are ordered according to a “timeline” of earliest to latest wake-up times, beginning with Balzac’s insomniac 1 A.M. and ending with Bukowski’s bohemian noon.

The most important caveat of all, of course, is that there are countless factors that shape a writer’s creative output, of which sleep is only one — so this isn’t meant to indicate any direction of causation, only to highlight some interesting correlations: for instance, the fact that (with the exception of outliers who are both highly prolific and award-winning, such as like Bradbury and King) late risers seem to produce more works but win fewer awards than early birds.

Please delight in drawing your own conclusions or merely in taking some voyeuristic enjoyment:

[Words: 417]
Source: Brain pickings
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/16/writers-wakeup-times-literary-productivity-visualization/

Article 3 (Check the title later)
What Is Love? Famous Definitions from 400 Years of Literary History

by Maria Popova

[Time4]

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.”

After those collections of notable definitions of art, science, and philosophy, what better way to start a new year than with a selection of poetic definitions of a peculiar phenomenon that is at once more amorphous than art, more single-minded than science, and more philosophical than philosophy itself? Gathered here are some of the most memorable and timeless insights on love, culled from several hundred years of literary history — enjoy.

Kurt Vonnegut, who was in some ways an extremist about love but also had a healthy dose of irreverence about it, in The Sirens of Titan:

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Anaïs Nin, whose wisdom on love knew no bounds, in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953:

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.

Stendhal in his fantastic 1822 treatise on love:

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. … there are no age limits for love.

C. S. Lewis, who was a very wise man, in The Four Loves:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
[Words: 345]

[Time5]

Lemony Snicket in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid:

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

Susan Sontag, whose illustrated insights on love were among last year’s most read and shared articles, in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980:

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

Charles Bukowski, who also famously deemed love “a dog from hell,” in this archival video interview:

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.

Ambrose Bierce, with the characteristic wryness of The Devil’s Dictionary:

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Katharine Hepburn in Me : Stories of My Life:

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.

Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, he of great wisdom, in The Conquest of Happiness:

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky puts it even more forcefully in The Brothers Karamazov:

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a letter to his ten-year-old daughter explaining the importance of evidence in science and in life:

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
[Words: 375]

[Time6]

Paulo Coelho in The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession:

Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.

James Baldwin in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, 1948-1985:

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Haruki Murakami in Kafka on the Shore:

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Airman’s Odyssey: Night Flight / Wind Sand & Stars / Flight to Arras:

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Honoré de Balzac, who knew a thing or two about all-consuming love, in Physiologie Du Mariage:

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Louis de Bernières in Corelli’s Mandolin:

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

E. M. Forster in A Room with a View:

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

English novelist Iris Murdoch, cited by the great Milton Glaser in How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer:

Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.

But perhaps the truest, if humblest, of them all comes from Agatha Christie, who echoes Anaïs Nin above in her autobiography:

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
[Words: 457]
Source: Brain pickings
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/01/what-is-love/

jay871750293

Part 3 Obstacle

Article3 (Check the title later)
This High-Speed Train Picks Up Passengers Without Having to Stop

December 27, 2013

[Paraphase7]

If there’s one staple of the holidays that doesn’t exactly fill people’s hearts with joy, it’s the delays and agonizing waiting times that many have come to accept as the inevitable drudgery of the year-end travel season. You’d think we could come up with something to ease the pain.

A physicist, for instance, demonstrated that simply altering the process of how passengers are boarded onto airplanes can cut boarding times in half. Then there are, of course, the more grandiose game-changing ideas. A supersonic passenger jet in development is rumored to go from London to Sydney in as little as four hours. And, the supersonic “Hyperloop“ transport tube, drawn up by Space X and Tesla Motors’ CEO Elon Musk, would hypothetically blast riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minutes. The task of turning such promises into reality, however, will require the collective acumen and financial backing from some of the biggest players in the industry, as is currently the case with the supersonic jet, a collaboration between Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream and NASA.

One particularly intriguing proposal that futuristic-minded engineers have batted around since the 1960s is the notion of a high-speed train that can transport and pick up passengers at various stops along the route without ever having to actually, you know, stop. A true express train from say, New York to Los Angeles, would offer a much shorter overall commute time and, without the constant stop-and-go, cut down significantly on fuel costs for train operators, which maybe—just maybe—would translate to lower fares for all.

So how would such a rail system work? Though various designs have been laid out and simulated, the principle behind each concept, from the 1969 blueprint of the ”AT 2000” train to more contemporary models, is the same. While the train is moving at a constant peak speed, awaiting passengers are able to get onboard through an adjoining vehicle that docks to the high-speed train. Once the transfer is finished, the vehicle disengages as the main train stays in continuous motion.

UK-based design firm Priestmangoode has put forth a scheme called “Moving Platforms,” in which city train or subway networks would be re-configured so that passengers can load onto a local train. That local train moves in a loop, which at certain points runs parallel to high-speed rail routes. The tracks and individual cabins would be built so that, as the high-speed and local train move alongside each other, a link can be secured momentarily, creating a kind of transfer gate for passengers to get on and off. To expedite the process, boarding passengers would be admitted using a RFID (radio-frequency identification) system that automatically scans and confirms their secured seat for the trip.

“There are big doors, there are wide doors, they’re all the same level so you can seamlessly go between the two vehicles quite peacefully; there’s no hurry,” company director Paul Priestman told CNN, adding that the two trains “stay docked for the same amount of time that it would stop at a station.”

However, the most difficult challenge about implementing such a system, besides cost, is that it involves having to essentially rework the infrastructure of entire public transportation systems of numerous cities just to accommodate connections for those who travel by high-speed rail. Futurist blog iO9 foresees a logistical “nightmare,” especially when it comes to the potential for mishaps that snowball, like mechanical breakdowns coupled with missed connections and people carrying lots of luggage.

A less elaborate approach, unveiled in 2007 by Taiwanese designer Peng Yu-lun, allows passengers to make transfers through a pod module that sits atop a nesting structure positioned right above incoming trains. As the train moves through the station, the module would initially latch onto the front car and then slide along to the end car where it stays firmly attached until it reaches the next station. Upon arrival, it is then dislodged so that leaving passengers can disembark. The moving train will also simultaneously pick up another pod full of passengers at this location. Like Priestman’s concept, there are no plans to further develop the idea.

“The big problem,” according to the news site Taiwan Headlines, ”is just precisely how the special boarding and alighting cars will be joined and detached from the main train. Peng says that those are questions that will require participation from experts in order to solve.”

Judging from the status of these pie-in-the-sky projects don’t expect any major overhauls to our inefficient travel methods for a while. If there’s anything I’ve learned throughout my time covering innovation, it’s that while there are numerous ways our lives can be optimized, any potentially positive improvement inherently involves costs and risks that investors often simply aren’t willing to take. But on the bright side, we do now have a wide selection of mobile devices like tablets, smartphones and e-readers to keep us occupied during the most cumbersome of journeys.
[Words: 834]
Source: Smithsonian
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/12/this-high-speed-train-picks-up-passengers-without-having-to-stop/

kimwang53

等了好久终于等到今天~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LX有版权咩？

2.12
1.53

小鱼上树

LS你表学我好伐~

30-07

Speaker

Boss us around-someone to look up to-make important decisions-rundepartment-people skills-keep everything working smoothly-false title

2 277 1min52

Kemi, finland-a small town with two star attractions: a250-foot icebreaking ship, and a castle built out of snow.

4 345 2min06

Love definitions in literary history-love someone around tobe loved-acceptance-like fever-the only not get hurt is lock your heart up

sherlock1992

Speaker:
what are managers for?
manager is a job of well-paid, stressful-demanding, and inspirational.
Q: who was the world highest paid football manager in 2012?
A:  the manager from Real Madrid.
>good manager: make important decision, good organizational skills, people skills, approachable, deal with things quickly and fairly, keep work smoothly.
>bad manager: hierarchy.
>some job titles relating to managers are false,  they just conceal what they really do.
train manager: sell tickets.
office : an administrator
IT : a technician.

Speed:
1'38''
1'19''
3'02''
2'36''
2'08''
2'44'' 好诡异的love~               

Obstacel-5'15''
MI: future ways to reduce the waiting time at stops.
one idea is to rebuild the way of boarding for passagers.
e.g. 1960s, a non-stop high-speech train. Passagers can get on board in the assistance of adjoining vehicle that docks to the high-speech trains.
e.g. UK. loop, parallel.
Both the two above, besides cost, involves the rebuilt of infra. of PTS.
e.g. 2007,  putting passagers in and out through a pod module atop a nesting structure right above incoming trains.->sync between the cars and the trains is the crux.
Granted investors may not consider these ideas regarding to costs and risks, the situation now is not so terrible owing to the prosperity of electronic entertainment market.

Changpoyu

加油完成作業

我是不是回帖的節奏和樓上不太對

Day 2014.01.06
Time 2:2'08"76
The visitor place in Finland ,the ice castle a dream place introduce the history and what you can do
Warm up 1'28"21
No,自述
Time 3:3'26"31

疏离无罪

首页  末班车   为啥我觉得今天的字体怪怪的
这些作家每一个认识的，文学素养太低了

Speaker:good managers :make important decision, good organizational skills,good people skills deal things quickly     bad managers:hiearchy trying to do many things at the same time  manager is a people whokeep everything smoothly .Sometimes job title mislead the work of some people.

01:07
Introduce a vacation destination that is in cold enviornment.

01:46
A study about the relationship between the sleep and the reward and producitivity of writers.The data shows that  late risers seem to produce more works but win fewer awards than early birds.

01:35
01:38
02:01
Some poeic definations about  love.

05:40
The most awful thing in hloliday is the delay and agonizing waiting times.One possible solution is to reduce the time passengers need to get on the vehicle.So a moving platform system was raised.This system alows trains to pick passengers without stop,just keeping peak speed.
But besides money ,this system need to rework entire old public transportation system.It;s almot impossible.
Another idea that use pod to pick passenger was raised ,too.But it still has many problems.
Innovation always need costs and risks.What we need is just to wait.

irenetopia

1:49
The FEMI, the coldest hotel in the world every year,tourists go here to enjoy the unique journey, some equipments in the hotel and the development of the hotel.
1:19
Creative sleeping
Sleeping habits and literature productivity are correlation. Although these data is hard to quatify.but the scientist still experiment with his team to visualize the correlation
2:40
They collect some wake-up time of people and the published work and reward these people get, to analysis the correlation. They found the variable indicates the context.
But they also found sleep is only the small element to effect the literature,only highlight the interesting correlation.
1:36
Some people talk about love
It is a thing that wo give more than get. Love can promote you to do the things
Just like the work , the different between the work and the people who do it ,is enjoy.
1:28
Still some people talk about what is love
And you can find some outside things to feel the inside love, there are visiable evidence to display what is love.
1:47
Love is uncontrolable,madness,love is a curious though ,but love is only if you see someone looking ridiculous that you realize how much you love them.
5:12
The high speed train development,some design about it and if it can into use, what changes will happen. The problem is how the special boarding and alighting cars will be joined , they need some vechicle experts to solve it

irenetopia

为什么回复发不上去。。。打卡