【Native Speaker每日综合训练—32系列】【32-03】 科技

疏离无罪

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

Part I: Speaker

Alex Wissner-Gross: A new equation for intelligence

[Rephrase 1]

[Dialog,11:48]


Source:Ted
http://new.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence#t-685477

疏离无罪

Part II: Speed

Article 2:

Toxin in seafood causes kidney damage in mice at levels considered safe for consumption

[Time 2]

Chemical that can accumulate in seafood and is known to cause brain damage is also toxic to the kidneys, but at much lower concentrations. The findings, which come from a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN), suggest that officials may need to reconsider what levels of the toxin are safe for human consumption.

The world's oceans contain algae that produce certain chemicals that can be harmful to humans and other living creatures. Many of these chemicals are considered neurotoxins because they cause damage to the brain. The neurotoxin domoic acid, also called "Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning," is a very stable, heat resistant toxin that is becoming more prominent in coastal regions, likely due to environmental changes. It can accumulate in mussels, clams, scallops, and fish, and the FDA has set a legal limit of domoic acid in seafood based primarily on its adverse neurological effects.

Because domoic acid is cleared from the body by the kidneys, P. Darwin Bell, PhD, Jason Funk, PhD (Medical University of South Carolina), and their colleagues looked to see if the toxin might also have detrimental effects on these organs. By giving mice varying doses of domoic acid and the assessing animals' kidney health, the team found that the kidney is much more sensitive to this toxin than the brain.

"We have found that domoic acid damages kidneys at concentrations that are 100 times lower than what causes neurological effects," said Dr. Bell. "This means that humans who consume seafood may be at an increased risk of kidney damage possibly leading to kidney failure and dialysis." While the findings need to be verified in humans, the researchers would like to see increased awareness and monitoring of domoic acid levels in all seafood. They say that the FDA may also need to reconsider the legal limit of domoic acid in food due to its kidney toxicity.

【319】

Source:Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140207083619.htm

Article 3:

Vultures Know Where Animals Go to Die

[Time 3]

The word vulture conjures up visions of boughs laden with crook-neck birds or silhouettes circling in the sky, patiently waiting for death to come to some poor creature. We say “the vultures are circling” to signal that someone is in danger of failing and their competitors are getting ready to swoop in. It turns out that these popular depictions of the world’s most unloved birds are pretty accurate. Vultures really are … well, vultures.

For decades, scientists believed that the vultures in Africa’s Serengeti-Mara ecosystem followed the most abundant food supply—the 1.3 million wildebeest migrating between Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park and Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. But it turns out that vultures aren’t concerned with how many wildebeest are in a given area. Instead, vultures haunt areas where animals are more likely to die.

Vultures are the only obligate scavengers, and they feed primarily on the decaying flesh of animals that died as a result of starvation or disease. The birds have to be able to scan large areas and quickly detect carrion before it is snatched up by hyenas or jackals or decomposed by microbes. Because of their efficient, low-energy soaring flight, vultures can forage over extremely large areas, but researchers didn’t understand how the birds decided where to search.

【227】

[Time 4]

To learn how vultures select habitat, Corinne Kendall of Columbia University and her colleagues outfitted 39 birds from three vulture species with GPS transmitters and tracked their whereabouts over the course of several months.

Wildebeest are abundant in the study region throughout the year, but the vultures’ behavior varied with the season. Members of all three species followed the herds only during the dry season—that’s when wildebeest are more likely to die from starvation and drowning.

During the wet season, birds from two of the vulture species preferred to hang out in relatively dry, brown areas. Since rainfall and the availability of edible plants have major impacts on the survival of wildebeest and other ungulates, these parched landscapes are where animals are likely to die.

Focusing their attention on death traps rather than following the migrating herds might not be a great long-term survival strategy, unfortunately. Conservationists are concerned that vultures apparently rely on resident ungulate species during the wet season. Those species are rapidly declining throughout Kenya and in particular in the Masai Mara National Reserve. Food availability is important to a vulture’s survival—especially a chick’s. Two of the species in the study, the White-backed vulture and Ruppell’s vulture, have been up-listed to endangered by the IUCN Red List, while the third species, the Lappet- faced vulture, remains vulnerable.

【233】

Source:Slate

http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/02/04/vultures_know_where_animals_go_to_die_feeding_strategies_by_season.html

Article 4:

Sail-Backed Dimetrodon Had a Nasty Bite

by Brian Switek

[Time 5]

Dimetrodon had a mouth full of novelty. Most conspicuous were several different tooth types in the sail-backed protomammal’s jaws – incisor-like teeth for gripping, stabbing canines, recurved rear teeth for shearing through flesh, and even hidden teeth on the roof of the mouth to pin struggling prey. This combination of features, shared by other members of the sphenacodontid group to which Dimetrodon belonged, originated with such predators as they thrived between 298 and 272 million years ago. And particular species of Dimetrodon even added a new wrinkle to the enamel-based armaments. As described by University of Toronto Mississauga paleontologists Kirstin Brink and Robert Reisz in a new Nature Communications paper, Dimetrodon is the earliest known land-stalking carnivore to have bitten through flesh with serrated teeth.

At a glance, the skulls of Dimetrodon look quite similar. Their main difference is in size. But the teeth of Dimetrodon are a different story. Details in enamel and dentine, Brink and Reisz report, distinguish three different kinds of cutting edges that distinguish smooth-toothed biters from those capable of a saw-edged chomp.

The oldest and smallest species in the study, Dimetrodon milleri, had teeth with straight cutting edges. Sharp, sure, but not especially well-suited to cutting through skin and muscle. By the time of the later, larger Dimetrodon limbatus, though, these carnivores had evolved small serrations in the enamel along the cutting edges of some of the teeth. The teeth of Dimetrodon grandis were even more specialized for cutting. Teeth in this last and largest species of Dimetrodon had prominent denticles along the slicing surface  that created a serrated edge similar to that of predatory dinosaurs. Dimetrodon just happened to evolve “ziphodont” teeth about 40 million years earlier.

【287】

[Time 6]
While the three species of Dimetrodon in the study don’t represent a direct evolutionary line, the connection between true serrated teeth and larger body size hint at an ancient arms race between competing predators and their prey.

Dimetrodon wasn’t the only predator around in the Early Permian. Other sphenacodontids, some with very similar skull anatomy, were after the same pool of protomammals, reptiles, and amphibians. This could have driven Dimetrodon to take up a different diet, Brink and Reisz hypothesize, and the changes to their teeth and body size hint that these distant cousins of ours were targeting larger prey with tough hides.

Big, serrate-toothed Dimetrodon evolved at a time when their herbivorous victims were also becoming larger. Barrel-bodied, pin-headed protomammals called caseids proliferated during this time, Brink and Reisz point out, and the sail-backed edaphosaurids, as well as amphibians called diadectids, also underwent an increase in body size. Damaged bones show that Dimetrodon weren’t above eating their own kind, either, and so it’s possible that the serrated teeth of species such as Dimetrodon grandis gave these carnivores the literal edge they needed to expand their menu options.

For now, though, the connections between body size, serrated teeth, competition, and prey availability remain murky. Brink and Reisz stress that further testing and investigation is needed to understand this new aspect of a familiar, but still mysterious relative of ours. From tooth to sail, we’re still getting to know Dimetrodon.
【249】

Source:Nationalgeographic

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/07/sail-backed-dimetrodon-had-a-nasty-bite/

疏离无罪

Part III: Obstacle

Article 5:

Phones, Browsers, and Search Engines Get a Privacy Overhaul

Small companies are showing that the technology we rely on can be redesigned to protect our data—and that consumers are interested.

[Paraphrase 7]

As the reach of the Internet has grown, so has the medium’s favored business model: targeted advertising. Signals recording our activity are harvested as we browse the Web and, increasingly, as we use our smartphones. That information is used to build profiles that help advertisers target ads, and opting out is rarely easy.

Some small companies are now redesigning smartphones and Web browsers to give people more control over that kind of data collection. The founders of these startups claim that many people want an alternative to the data-slurping status quo, and that services such as search engines can be run profitably without harvesting much data.

Blackphone, a smartphone to launch next month, is perhaps the most ambitious of these projects. The Android handset will function like a regular smartphone but has a series of modifications to protect the privacy and security of its owner. Blackphone is a joint venture between Spanish smartphone manufacturer Geeksphone and Silent Circle, a company that Phil Zimmerman, inventor of the PGP encryption software (see “An App Keeps Spies Away from Your Phone”), founded to make apps that encrypt voice calls and text messages.

Javier Agüera, cofounder and chief technology officer of Geeksphone, stresses that the device is not intended to be “NSA-proof.” Rather, Blackphone is designed to let people decide whether companies that profile consumer behavior will be permitted to collect information about their Web browsing or physical movements.

To that end, the Web browser on the Blackphone will, by default, block ad-tracking technology served up by websites. The Wi-Fi functionality will also be modified so that the handset won’t be tracked by the beacons starting to appear in stores to collect information on how often customers visit and where they have been previously. Silent Circle’s software will also be built into the handset so that calls and text messages to other users of Blackphone or Silent Circle’s services will be encrypted.

“We are making a device that puts privacy first and tries to give control back to the end user to decide what information they share,” says Agüera. “Maybe some people want to benefit from personalized advertisements, but we think you should have a choice.”

People tend not to get that choice today on the Web. Efforts to develop a standard way for people to signal to all websites that they don’t wish to be tracked have foundered, while opt-out schemes offered by ad industry groups and companies such as Google are clunky and little known.

That situation was one reason WhiteHat Security, which offers security for website operators, released its own Web browser for Macs last year, says the company’s cofounder and chief technology officer, Jeremiah Grossman. The browser, called Aviator, blocks online ads and the tracking technology used to profile Web surfers. It also prevents embedded multimedia elements such as Flash videos from playing automatically on Web pages. Aviator is based on Chromium, the open-source browser developed by Google that is the basis of the company’s own browser, Chrome.

“I wish we didn’t have to make this thing, but we had to because the market was not responding to people’s need,” says Grossman. Google and Microsoft lead the market for Web browsers, and both companies are heavily invested in online ads. Even Firefox, developed by the nonprofitMozilla Foundation, has a connection to the ad industry, because the bulk of the foundation’s funding comes from Google. In 2012, Google paid $274 million to make its search engine Firefox’s default.

“We’re not anti-ads; we’re pro security and privacy,” says Grossman, who last year showed how online ad networks can be used to distribute malware at large scale (see “Web Ads Used to Launch Online Attacks”).

Aviator was originally developed by WhiteHat for internal use, but Grossman decided to release it publicly after repeatedly being asked by friends and business contacts for tips on how to stay safe and private online. It has been downloaded tens of thousands of times so far, and a version for Windows is due for release in the next few months.

Grossman has not looked into making money on Aviator. But Blackphone and others are betting their companies on the prospect of profits to be made from privacy-protecting technology and more private versions of mass-market consumer services.

Cloud storage company Pogoplug, for instance, launched a cheap device last year that can anonymize and block ads from a home Internet connection (see “Online Anonymity in a Box, for $49”). And a crowdfunded startup called Adtrap offers a $129 device that prevents ads from appearing on any computer or mobile device on a home Wi-Fi network.

Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the search engine DuckDuckGo (see “As Google Tinkers with Search, Upstarts Gain Ground”), which makes a point of retaining minimal data on peoplecompared with Google, says being privacy-centric is no barrier to profitability. “It is a myth that you need to track people to make money,” says Weinberg, though he declines to say whether DuckDuckGo’s ad revenue is enough to make it profitable. “If you type in ‘mortgage,’ you get a mortgage ad,” he says of his search engine. “We don’t have to know, or store, anything about you to do that.”

DuckDuckGo has seen usage more than double since the revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year, and the company now serves 4.3 million search queries every day. Weinberg is convinced that enough consumers care about what happens to their data to support other companies like his. He says, “I think in almost every category you could have a more private alternative, where the privacy policy says we’re going to store the minimum amount of information we need instead of the maximum amount possible.”

【1009】

Source:MIT Technology Review

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524046/phones-browsers-and-search-engines-get-a-privacy-overhaul/

疏离无罪

沙发~~~~自己坐 好不好意思的感觉
Ace 不是自己的帖子 沙发也是我的~~~
Speaker:To know what is intelligence,we should understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.Intelligence is a kind of force to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open.The urge to take control all possible futures is more fundamental principles than fighting against human.Goal-seeking is like an investment to achieve other futrue diversity.A long-term drive to increase future freeom of action.Intelligence is a physical process that resists future confinement.

01:06
Toxin chemical in sea food is harmful to human brain and kidney.

01:20
Vultures eat decaying flesh of animals and they always go to area where animals are more likey to die.

01:16
Vultures' behavior varied with the season.They followed herd in dry season and fly to dry areas in wet season.But the number of vultures is declining since the food they rely on in wet season is declining too.

01:49
Dimetrodon is the earlist known carnivore to have serrated teeth.Then describe three kinds dimetrodon and their teeth.

01:24
Although this three kind of dimetrodon do not show the evolve line,they shows that dimetrodons really change their teeth  and body size to fit the enviornment and thier preys.

07:04
Main Idea:Many small companies are releasing their products to prevent privacy.
Now many internet companies are collecting consumers' data to send targeted advertising.All these ads depend on data and signals that record our actitvity.
A new phone called blackphone will be released which can control data collection process and consumers can decide to whether to turn it on by themsevles.
Another stopping ads software is aviator.But the maker of this software said that it is not anti-ads,it just protect privacy.Many similar softwares and protects are coming out since the maret for this is empty and the demand is large.
And tracking people is not necessary to make money,other choices exist.

AceJ

赤果果的被挤到了板凳上

Speaker
A new equation for intelligence
Intelligence, what is it? I undertook a program to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.
Causal Entropic Forces, what can you do with this?

Speed
Toxin in seafood causes kidney damage in mice at levels considered safe for consumption
Time2: 1'48" domoic acid damages kidneys at concentrations that are 100 times lower than what causes neurological effects

Vultures Know Where Animals Go to Die
Time3: 1'29" vultures aren’t concerned with how many wildebeest are in a given area. Instead, vultures haunt areas where animals are more likely to die
Time4: 1'27" People studied how vultures selected habitats and found that they were facing very dangerous living conditions

The word vulture conjures up visions of boughs laden with crook-neck birds or silhouettes circling in the sky, patiently waiting for death to come to some poor creature.
Vultures are the only obligate scavengers, and they feed primarily on the decaying flesh of animals that died as a result of starvation or disease

Sail-Backed Dimetrodon Had a Nasty Bite
Time5: 1'46" Dimetrodon is the earliest known land-stalking carnivore to have bitten through flesh with serrated teeth.
Time6: 1'49" the connection between true serrated teeth and larger body size hint at an ancient arms race between competing predators and their prey.

Obstacle
Phones, Browsers, and Search Engines Get a Privacy Overhaul
Time7: 6'58"
Blackphone is designed to let people decide whether companies that profile consumer behavior will be permitted to collect information about their Web browsing or physical movements
The browser, called Aviator, blocks online ads and the tracking technology used to profile Web surfers

苏错

谢谢疏离~~~沙发。。板凳。。。我是地板！

Speaker:
Try to understand fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.
Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence and
accomplish a model version of task.
Irony:a cybernetic revolt.
the urge to take control of all possible futures is amore
fundamental principle than that of intelligence.
Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process.
Speed:
Time2:1'57
Officials need to reconsider the safe levels of the toxin because
it is reported that chemical in seafood will damage kidney with a
lower concentration.
Time3:1'11
Vultures, scavengers, are always ready for dying animals.
Researchers doesn't know how they decide where to search.
Time4:1'10
Vultures' choice depend on the season,especially resident
ungulate species during the wet season.
Time5:1'34
Three types of  smooth-toothed biters for Dimetrodon in history.
Time6:1'15
The relationship between body features and environment that Dimetrodon
once lived is still needed to be found out.
Obstacle:6'54
Search companies put privacy first and give alternatives for
user to decide what information they share.

Talitha

thank you...

2:2'43:319:113
-scientists discovered that toxin in seafood will not only damage brain but also kidney at much lower concentration.

3:2:223
Vulture consumes only on dead bodies. They search on large area. scientists do no understand how vulture knows where to search.

4:scientists track vultures by putting GPS on them. scientists discovered vultures follow herds during dry season where they can find dead animals and look for dry areas in wet season.

sherlock1992

I'm coming! Thx, 疏离！
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ieveline

谢谢楼主

Speaker
Very instereting topic.
Speaker said the intellegince is maximum future option.
Speed
1--01:49
Kidney is much more sensitive to domoic acid than brain
Scientist team has found this in experment with mice.
The finding need to be verified in humans.
And FDA may need to reconsider the legal limit of domoic acid in food.
2--01:47
vultures aren’t concerned with how many wildebeest are in a given area. Instead, vultures haunt areas where animals are more likely to die
Vulture effiecient,low-energy soaring flight helps them forage over extremly large area.
But we still don't know how decided where to search
3--01:37
Scientists track the birds.
They found the birds floowing the herd in dry seaon, and stays in dry area in wet seaon.
4--02:10
A lot of unknow words...
Information about the teeth in dimetrodon and their function.
5--01:46
Some factors may influence the evolution of teeth, such as body size, serrated teeth, competition and etc.

Obstacle--06:12
Apps for smartphone and web brower are two examples to show people are working on protecting pravicy information from target-ad.
There are another device there for home wifi to keep ad, autoplay-flash.

MAGGIEHE1993

首页~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~谢谢楼主~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~牙齿那篇生词好多。。。
time2: 1min 59"
       Scientists have found that nerotoxins found in sea food can also be toxic to kidney and suggest that FDA should reconsider
       the legal limit of domoic acid due to its kidney toxicity.

time3: 1min 38"
       Vultures feed primarily on the decaying flesh of animals that died as a result of starvation or disease and haunt areas
       where animals are more likely to die.

time4: 1min 33"
       A study conducted by researchers of Columbia University showed that vultures are likely to haunt areas where animals are
       most likely to die.

time5: 2min 25"
       Dimetrodon had a mouth full of novelty.

time6: 2min 07"
       The study shows that the connection between true serrated teeth and larger body size hint at an ancient arms race between
       competing predators and their prey.

Obstacle: 7min 48"
          As we browse the Web and use our smartphones, our information is used to build profiles that help advertisers target ads.
          Some small companies are now redesigning smartphones and Web browers to give people more control over that kind of data
          collection. Blackphone is an example.
          The CTO of the company stated that Blackphone is designed to let people decide whether companies that profile consumer
          behavior will be permitted to collect information.
          People know little about opt-out schemes offered by ad industry groups and companied such as Google.
          Several companies are providing similar devices that can protect users' privacy.
          Weinberg says being privacy-centric is no barrier to profitability.