【Native Speaker每日综合训练—34系列】【34-05】科技

cherry6891

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Part I: Speaker

Your Driving Data Can Reveal Your Routes

Insurance companies have for years offered a compelling tradeoff to their customers: they track your driving habits, you save up to 30 percent off your bill for driving safely. But researchers now say that consumers may be giving up too much privacy in the deal.

If you install the tracking device in your car, insurers like Allstate and Progressive can gather information about when you drive, your starts and stops and your speed.
To avoid spooking customer fears about Big Brother, most of these devices do notinclude GPS. But computer scientists say they don’t need GPS to get a pretty good idea of where you’ve been.

In separate experiments, researchers at the University of Denver and Rutgers University wrote algorithms that use a driver’s starting point along with the tracking data to estimate where that driver traveled.

Are drivers worried their data could be used as evidence in criminal investigations or to catch philandering spouses? Nah. Surveys find that most people think highly of their skills behind the wheel. And they’d rather cut their rates than keep their privacy.

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/black-box-car-data-can-reveal-routes/

[Rephrase 1, 1:16]

cherry6891

Part II: Speed

article 2

Does Thinking Fast Mean You’re Thinking Smarter?

time2

In 1884, at his specially built Anthropometric Laboratory in London, Sir Francis Galton charged visitors three pence to undergo simple tests to measure their height, weight, keenness of sight and “swiftness of blow with fist.” The laboratory, later moved to the South Kensington Museum, proved immensely popular—“its door was thronged by applicants waiting patiently for their turn,” Galton said—ultimately collecting data on some 17,000 individuals.

One measure that deeply interested Galton, who is recognized as “the father of psychometrics” for his efforts to quantify people’s mental abilities (and scorned as the founder of the eugenics movement because of his theories about inheritance), was speed. He believed that reaction time was one proxy for human intelligence. With a pendulum-based apparatus for timing a subject’s response to the sight of a disc of paper or the sound of a hammer, Galton collected reaction speeds averaging around 185 milliseconds, split seconds that would become notorious in the social sciences.

For decades other researchers pursued Galton’s basic idea—speed equals smarts. While many recent tests have found no consistent relationship, some have demonstrated a weak but unmistakable correlation between short reaction times and high scores on intelligence tests. If there is a logic to the link, it’s that the faster nerve signals travel from your eyes to the brain and to the circuits that trigger your motor neurons, the faster your brain processes information it receives, and the sharper your intellect.

Psychologist Michael Woodley of Umea University in Sweden and his colleagues had enough confidence in the link, in fact, to use more than a century of data on reaction times to compare our intellect with that of the Victorians. Their findings call into question our cherished belief that our fast-paced lives are a sign of our productivity, as well as our mental fitness. When the researchers reviewed reaction times from 14 studies conducted between the 1880s and 2004 (including Galton’s largely inconclusive data set), they found a troubling decline that, they calculated, would correspond to a loss of an average of 1.16 IQ points a decade. Doing the math, that makes us mentally inferior to our Victorian predecessors by about 13 IQ points. [381]

time3

The Victorian era was “marked by an explosion of creative genius,” Woodley and his colleagues write. There was, after all, the first world’s fair, the rise of railways, anesthetics and tennis. While environmental factors can surely boost specific skills (some researchers thank better education and nutrition for increases in IQ over the last few decades), Woodley appears to argue, from the biological perspective, our genes are making us dumber.

Critics, however, aren’t as quick to agree on our apparent downward mental trajectory. Whether or not we’re dumbing down, they argue, resurrecting old data from independent studies with different protocols is not the best way to find out. Reaction times are known to vary depending on how much a study emphasizes accuracy, whether participants practice in advance and the nature of the test signal itself. Some researchers now think that other measures of reaction times are more telling. They look at the variability in response time rather than the average, or they add decision making, so you react to a flash of light only if it is, say, red.

As a society we certainly equate speed with smarts. Think fast. Are you quick-witted? A quick study? A whiz kid? Even Merriam-Webster bluntly informs us that slowness is “the quality of lacking intelligence or quickness of mind.” But we also recognize something counterintuitive about accepting full-stop that people who react faster are smarter. That’s why, even though athletic training improves reaction time, we wouldn’t scout for the next Einstein at a basketball game. Intelligence probably has a lot to do with making fast connections, but it surely has just as much to do with making the right connections.

Even the perception of speed can be deceptive. When things come easily or quickly, when we don’t have to struggle, we tend to feel smarter, a concept termed fluency. In one study, Adam Alter and fellow psychologists at New York University asked volunteers to answer a series of questions typed in either a crisp, clear font (a fluent experience) or a slightly blurred, harder to read version (a disfluent one). The people who had to work harder ended up processing the text more deeply and responding to the questions more accurately. [383]

source：

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/does-thinking-fast-mean-youre-thinking-smarter-180950180/#EWGX18xhszICcf4y.99

article 3

The 20 Best Small Towns to Visit in 2014

From country music to herbal cocktails to horseshoe crabs to Rodin, our third annual list takes you to cultural gems worth mining

time4

1. Chautauqua, NY

Chautauqua, on a long, skinny lake in the southwestern corner of New York State, is the sort of bucolic place where folks like to go for slow-lane vacations, but there's much more to it than ice-cream cones and ferry rides. Something important happened here in 1874 that changed the way Americans think about leisure time—the first Chautauqua Assembly. Originally a training ground for Methodist Sunday school teachers, it went on to demonstrate the role of learning in the perpetuation of democracy. It was, President Theodore Roosevelt said, "the most American thing in America."

The leafy 750-acre lakeside campus of the Chautauqua Institution draws 8,000 people for its nine-week summer season, and thousands more attend art openings and performances of the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, the Opera Company and the School of Dance. Yet the classes and lectures are still the main attraction. Last summer Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg discoursed on how the law is treated in opera. This summer: global hunger, the democratic future of Egypt and the filmmaker Ken Burns on American consciousness. "Our founders didn't see 'happiness' as a pursuit of material wealth in a marketplace of things," says Burns, "but a celebration of lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. Chautauqua is that marketplace."

A participant's summer day might start with coffee and a doughnut at Food for Thought café overlooking the pansy beds of Bestor Plaza, and then a walk out to the lake to hear "Rock of Ages" piped over the colony from Miller Bell Tower. The 10:45 lecture is a high point, held in the 4,000-seat amphitheater, an 1893 landmark outfitted in later years with a booming pipe organ. In the afternoon there's golf, swimming, a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle book talk or a class on subjects such as the CIA, classical Greek or garden composting. Pack your slippers and take ballet.

Though the gathering welcomes believers of all faiths and nonbelievers, too, credit the Methodists for the concept, which spread across the country, seeding "Daughter Chautauquas" as far afield as Pacific Grove, California. Thus "chautauqua," lowercase c, refers to any uplifting group instruction, preferably conducted under a radiant blue sky. [361]

source:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/20-best-small-towns-to-visit-in-2014-180950173/

article  4

Sugar doesn’t make kids hyper, and other parenting myths

time5

Baby shoes didn’t feature prominently into Baby V’s wardrobe for quite some time. Tiny Chuck Taylors are adorable, obviously, but I questioned their utility for a baby who didn’t use her feet except as wiggly pacifiers. So Baby V spent a lot of time barefoot — a fashion statement that I didn’t really consider until she started toddling around in public.

Well-meaning observers were quick to tell me that I needed to get that baby some nice stiff shoes. Hard soles will help her get the hang of walking and protect her delicate baby feet, I was told. But when I started looking into this advice, I actually found the opposite is true: These days, people recommend that babies learning to walk wear soft, flexible shoes, or better yet, go barefoot. The minimalist footwear allows the nascent walkers the most sensory feedback from their sweet little feet as they move across the earth.

I offer the shoe advice as just one tiny glimpse into the life of a parent of a young kid. Over the last year, I’ve come to learn that much of the advice I’ve heard, while well-intentioned, might just be wrong. Or at the very least, questionable. So here are my top five parenting myths (shoes didn’t make the cut), with a little dash of science. [233]

time6

1. Sugar makes kids hyper.
Lots of parents swear that a single hit of birthday cake holds the power to morph their well-behaved, polite youngster into a sticky hot mess that careens around a room while emitting eardrum-piercing shrieks. Anyone who has had the pleasure to attend a 5-year-old’s birthday party knows that the hypothesis sounds reasonable, except that science has found that it’s not true.

Sugar doesn’t change kids’ behavior, a double-blind research study found way back in 1994. A sugary diet didn’t affect behavior or cognitive skills, the researchers report. Sugar does change one important thing, though: parents’ expectations. After hearing that their children had just consumed a big sugar fix, parents were more likely to say their child was hyperactive, even when the big sugar fix was a placebo, another study found.

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons not to feed your kids a bunch of sugar, but fear of a little crazed sugar monster isn’t one of them.

2. Listening to Mozart makes babies smarter.
My colleague Rachel Ehrenberg busted this “Mozart Effect” myth in her 2010 feature. The original observation, that 10 minutes of classical music made college students briefly perform better on a paper-folding task, was twisted so out of context that the governor of Georgia used tax money to buy a classical music CD for every baby born in the state.

Many babies adore music, and there’s evidence that suggests music might help soothe babies. There’s also evidence that playing an instrument might be beneficial to brain development, as Ehrenberg points out. But scientists haven’t found that classical music makes your baby smarter. So play music to your child because she loves it and you love it, not because you’re looking to grub a few extra IQ points. [319]

source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/growth-curve/sugar-doesn%E2%80%99t-make-kids-hyper-and-other-parenting-myths

cherry6891

Part III: Obstacle

Top 10 cosmological discoveries

[Paraphrase 7]

Talk about making a cosmic ripple. This week’s report ofgravity waves from the Big Bang is the biggest cosmological news of the century. It’s the science news equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane or F5 tornado. If the new results hold up, the understanding of the universe will have taken a bigger leap for humankind than hopping around on the moon. And the BICEP2 result will join an illustrious list of Page One–worthy discoveries that have advanced modern science’s knowledge about the cosmos. My top 10 (P.S. Theories, for example general relativity or heliocentrism, do not count as discoveries):

10. Cosmic microwaves are black body radiation (COBE, 1990)
To most experts, the faint glow of microwave radiation pervading the universe seemed like good evidence for the Big Bang. If so, though, that radiation should show a precise pattern for its intensity at various wavelengths. If the radiation deviated from that pattern, known as a black body spectrum, then perhaps some non-Big Bang cause was responsible. In 1990, though, measurements by the COBE satellite showed that the cosmic microwave radiation matched the black body spectrum perfectly. Opposing the Big Bang was no longer tenable.

9. Comic microwave background anisotropies (COBE, 1992)
Everybody knew that the microwave background couldn’t be completely smooth — otherwise there would be no galaxies today. The small seeds of matter that eventually grew into galaxies would have left an imprint in the temperature of the radiation, causing slight temperature differences (anisotropies) between different points on the sky. COBE was the first satellite to detect those differences and measure how big they were, crucial clues to piecing together the history of the universe. In presenting the images during the announcement of the finding, George Smoot of the COBE team said it was like looking at God.

8. Space is flat (BOOMERanG, 2000)
In a great victory for balloon science, the BOOMERanG project (which flew around the South Pole and came back to its starting place) measured the angles between ripples in the cosmic microwaves and concluded that the geometry of space was very close to perfectly Euclidean — in technical terms, “flat.” Showing that space on the whole was flat helped confirm the discovery of dark energy (see No. 5). (Without dark energy, there wasn’t enough matter and energy in space to make it flat.)

7. Quasars (Maarten Schmidt, 1963)
It was a great surprise at the time to find bright objects literally on the outskirts of the visible portion of the universe. Quasars seemed like stars (quasistellar) but were too far away to see unless they harbored some enormously energetic phenomena. Quasars beamed radio signals or other electromagnetic radiation across the universe, providing a new source of information on events transpiring in the cosmos.

6. Dark matter (Fritz Zwicky, 1931)
Zwicky noticed that the motions of galaxies in the Coma Cluster could not be explained by gravity if the only matter in the cluster was visible (that is, giving off light). He deduced that a lot of the matter in the universe was dark. “If this … is confirmed,” he wrote, “we would arrive at the astonishing conclusion that dark matter is present with a much greater density than luminous matter.” Only much later did scientists realize that not only was most of the matter in the universe invisible, it was also of some type totally unlike the ordinary matter, composed primarily of protons and neutrons, found on Earth.

5. Dark energy (Saul Perlmutter et al, Brian Schmidt et al, 1998)
Another shock to the cosmocommunity came from two independent teams in 1998. Data from distant supernovas showed their brightness wasn’t quite right if the universe’s expansion had slowly been decelerating, as most experts had long believed. Instead, the universe is expanding faster and faster. Accelerated expansion implies that something in space — now called dark energy —is pushing the cosmos apart. A new entry to this Top 10 list will have to be made whenever anybody figures out what the dark energy actually is.

4. Primordial gravity waves (BICEP2, 2014)
By far, the top cosmological discovery of the 21st century. So far, at least. Besides confirming that gravity waves really do exist (thereby further validating general relativity), this discovery provides as sure a sign as you can get that inflation instantly after the Big Bang set the stage for the future evolution of the cosmos. This discovery may also turn out to imply the existence of an infinity of parallel universes, as most versions of inflation require that our universe is just one of many big spacetime bubbles — a multiverse. Ours would surely still be the best of all possible bubbles, though.

3. Cosmic microwave background radiation (Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, 1964)
It was discovered by accident when Penzias and Wilson found out that no matter how much they cleaned their radio antenna, it still recorded static from everywhere in space. That static was the echo of the birth of the universe, literally the smoke from the Big Bang gun, in the form of microwaves. That radiation was leftover from the Big Bang fireball — very hot at the beginning, but now less than 3 degrees above absolute zero (kelvins). Very cold.

2. Island universes (Edwin Hubble, 1925)
In a sort of historical precedent for the notion of the multiverse, Hubble showed that some of the fuzzy patches of light known as nebulae were not clouds within the Milky Way galaxy, but entire galaxies (“island universes”) unto themselves. Previously the standard view, articulated most forcefully by Harlow Shapley, held that the Milky Way, home to Earth and sun, made up virtually the entire universe. But Hubble, using the most powerful telescope available, detected a star in the Andromeda nebula that varied in brightness on a regular schedule. Such “Cepheid variables” had been used by Shapley himself to gauge the distance scale of the Milky Way, so he had to concede when Hubble showed that Andromeda was vastly far beyond the Milky Way’s outskirts.

1. Universe is expanding (Hubble, 1929)
Others had figured out that the universe might be expanding. But Hubble, using data collected by Vesto Slipher and Milton Humason, published the definitive analysis establishing that the cosmos actually is growing bigger. It was the greatest intellectual upheaval in the human conception of the cosmos since Copernicus. Displacing this one from Number One on the list would require something really radical — like maybe the multiverse. [1103]

source:
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/top-10-cosmological-discoveries

TaoRs92

沙发~~~~thx~~~

今天运气比较好……



time:2:11.16
The lab that measure people's phsical data.Popular and moved.
Then this person turned to people's mental condition and intelligence.He thinks that people's reaction time is related with their intelligence.
Many used his basic idea and find the corelation between the reation time and the intelligence.(brain,nerve)
Futher study finds that human's IQ is lossing generation after generation.
________________
time:2:18.23
People found that our gene make us dumper.
But this conclusion is open to arugement.Because the data and the way of researchs may have some problems.The conclusion is not based on reliable evidence.
Also it is not right to put connection between quick reaction time and intelligence.
The example of the experiment in NY University.Do slower and think deeper,the volunteers do better.
________________
time:2:06.08
The introduction of C.
What people always do there?Slow-lane vacation.Also it helped people to learn in the perpetuation of democracy(special significance.)
Normal activities in the vacation provided by C.
________________
time:1:13.22
People always think that babies should wear shoes to protect their feet.But the author thinks this is a myth.Babies are better feel the earth on flexible,soft shoes,or barefeet.
There are other misunderstanding the author is going to pick out.
__________________
time:1:31.12
1 Sugar can not change babies' behavior.
2 Listening to Mozert's music can not make babies smarter.It can help babies' brain development,sooth babies,but can not make them smarter.
_______________
time:6:34.95
10 outstanding cosmological discoveries.
10 black body radiation--good evidence of the big bang--microvaves match the specturm that is the pattern of the influence of the big bang
9 background A--the differncecs between microwave background
8 space is flat--help confirm the discovery of dark enegry
7 quasers--like stars,but very far way
6 dark matter--invisble,the majority of the universe
5 dark energy--push the cosmos apart,the universe expand
4 gravity wave--confirm the inflation after big bang/multiverse
3 microvave background radiation--like the big bang gun,very cold
2 island universe--not clouds,but entire galaxied unto other glaxies
1 the universe is expanding

cherry6891

地下室 哈哈

Obstacle  8:30

Top 10 cosmological discoveries in the past century

1 2 COBE detected the differences of comic microwave background

3 space is flat by measuring the angles between ripples in the cosmic microwaves

4 Quasars are found on the outskirts of the visible portion of the universe

5 dark matter is present with a bigger density and it composed primarily of protons and neutrons

6 primordial gravity waves imply the existence of an infinity of parallel universes

7 static,the result of radiation, was the echo of the birth of the universe

8 island universes

9 Hubble published that the cosmos is growing using date and definitive analysis

Article 2 4:30

G put forward that reaction time stand for intelligence.- no consistent relationship, just the logic to the link is faster circuit trigging motor neurons- a group compare our intellect with victorians which call into question of fast-paced lives are sign of productivity

--intelligence has relationship with fast connection but it should be the right connections

Article2 3:00

Introduce the C which is not only slow-lane vacations but also the place stands for American spirit

好有画面感的描述

Article4  3:00

Parents tried to buy baby shoes but later they found that they are wrong,and then she list top five parenting myths:

1 sugar doesn’t make kid hyper 2 listening to M can soothe babies but can not make it smarter

捉妖

占。mark【关键词：快不是聪明】            

Time 2:
It is believed that reaction time is a measure of intelligence.
Tht link between reaction time and intelligence.
Our IQ has declined, 13 points lower than in V period.

Time 3:
V is a very creative period and emerged a lot of creativities.
Reaction time varies depending on a lot of factors, such as the acuracy of the question.
Practically, people reacting fast are not necessarily smart, since a fast reacting basketball player would not likely to be a scientist with great inventions or explorations.
the speed of action is not reliable.

疏离无罪

LS的一个比一个凶残

Speaker: Computer scientists said that they can track someone's route through driving data from a tracking device without GPS.

02:05
Galton thouthgt that people's mental ability is about speed.The reaction time was one important factor in IQ.Other researchers push this idea to speed equals smarts.However,no evidence is showed about this.And our IQ is declining now with fast-paced life.

02:01
However,smart is more than making fast connections,it is also about making right connections.

01:50
Chautauqua in NY is one of the best small towns in America.It changed americans' thought about leisure time and spread the operas.


01:23
01:15
Two myths about children:1 sugar can not make kids hyper,it just change parents' expection.2 classical musica can not make kids smarter.

04:03
Main Idea: Top ten cosmological discoveries
10 Cosmic microwaves are black body radiation 9 Comic microwave background anisotropies 8 Space is flat
7 Quasars 6 Dark matter5. Dark energy  4 Primordial gravity waves 3 Cosmic microwave background radiation 2 Island universes 1 Universe is expanding
好像没什么能总结的。。

jenniferlyy125

Day 49

------speaker  

Insurance companies provide tradeoff to customers, and they track driving habits by giving customers 30% off the bill. However it seems that customers give too much privacy to insurance companies. The information of when you drive, your starts and ends, your speed, and even where you travel are known or predictable to insurance companies, without installing GPS. However drivers are not worried that their data will be used in criminal evidence, and they would rather choose to cut rates rather than keep privacy.

------speed

1.2’14

2.2’42

3.2’23

4.1’27

5.1’53

----obstacle

5’42

Top ten facts of the cosmology.

小蘑菇开始打怪

啦啦啦首页！！
---------------
谢谢楼主！！

time:2:01

according to G, the faster we react to the problem, the smarter we are

many scientist follow the idea of G, however, many of them do not come up with simultaneous finding

there is a troubling decline that the scientist calculated our respondence is worse than people decade ago, but we are clearly smarter than them

time3:2:39

W thinks that out genes are making us dumber

it is useless to use old data to do some research, because definition of reaction time is unclear and the way people got tested various

in modern society, it seems related that people who would react fast is smart

the recent research suggests that the harder the work people is going on, the faster and more accurate people finish

time4:2:43

C is the place the most American in America

in there people will refresh their attitude to recreation

ever summer day, there will be a lecture which would push the night to peak

time5:1:16

some advice you got may be wrong, for example, baby should wear soft shoes for them to practice walking

time6:1:33

some wrong ideas about breeding a baby

it is not related that the more sugar a baby eat, the more possible he will hyperactive

listen to classic music will make baby smarter is wrong, a government even use tax money to buy a classical music CD for every baby born in the state…incredible

time7:6:15

there may be multiverse because the universe is expanding

dark energy is something important to the development of universe but no one could find out what it is

the space is flat

there may be another Earth in the universe…

所以今天这是来自星星的你科普篇嘛。。。

xiaofan0205

这是抢不到首页的节奏了…………


Speaker:
You can save up to 30 percent off your bill for letting your insurance company to track your driving habit, but it may also give up too much privacy in the deal. But are drivers worried about it? No, they'd rather cut their rates.

Time2: 2'55"
Time3: 3'08"
People used to believe that reaction time was one proxy for human intelligence, but new findings call into question this belief. Intelligence probably has a lot to do with making fast connections, but it surely has just as much to do with making the right connections. The people who had to work harder ended up processing the text more deeply and responding to the questions more accurately.

Time4: 2'35"
Chautauqua is the sort of bucolic place where folks like to go for slow-lane vacations, not because it's ice-cream cones and ferry rides, but because it changed the way Americans think about leisure time.

Time5: 1'39"
Time6: 2'08"
The author heard two different theory about baby shoes when she considered about it. This leads her to talk about her top five parenting myths: sugar makes kids hyper, listening to Mozart makes babies smarter. All of these are wrong, or at least questionable.

Obstacle: 7'46"
This article talks about top 10 worthy discoveries such as dark matter, quasars, and island universes, which have advanced modern science's knowledge about the cosmos. The Number One one the list is that universe is expanding, which eatablished by Hubble in 1929.