【Native Speaker每日综合训练—38系列】【38-14】 科技

zxppx

内容：ZXPPX 编辑：ZXPPX

公益申请名额，每月一名

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Part I: Speaker

Software Finds Best Parts of Boring Video
Machine-learning researchers are developing software that automatically searches through long videos to create edited summaries, or personalized trailers. Larry Greenemeier reports

Your New Year’s resolution to start recording every single thing you do, aka life-logging, seemed like a fun idea. But now even you don’t want to sit through all the footage of last week’s family barbeque to figure out how the dog got out of the yard.

Thankfully, you won’t have to. You’ll run a computer program that evaluates hours of insipid images and automatically culls together the most interesting moments into a personalized trailer.

At least that’s what machine-learning researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are promising with LiveLight. It’s an automated system for summarizing unedited video. LiveLight’s algorithm can analyze footage from Google Glass, for example, and pick out unique activity while skipping over parts that are repetitive or where nothing happens.

The researchers see several uses, such as analyzing long stretches of video from surveillance and traffic cameras to find an intruder or the cause of an accident. It could also be an alternative to video search engines, something computer scientists have been working on for years without much success.

Google helped fund the development of LiveLight. Let’s hope they make it a one-click option on all YouTube videos.

—Larry Greenemeier

Source: Scientificamerican
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/software-culls-boring-video/

[Rephrase 1, 1:23]

zxppx

Part II: Speed

Supercooled livers last for days
Solution that protects rat livers from freezing could extend transplant window for human organs.
BY Sara Reardon | 29 June 2014

[Time 2]

When a human donor organ becomes available, transplant surgeons have only about 12 hours to collect and transplant the tissue before it breaks down. But a slow-cooling method that first chills rat livers and then drops the temperature to below freezing — allowing them to be stored in a 'supercooled' but non-frozen state — keeps them fresh for three days. If the method works for human organs, it could drastically increase the number that are available for transplantation.

Researchers have attempted to freeze organs for decades to provide more time to transport and match them to recipients. But the combination of freezing and thawing irreparably damages cells, especially if ice forms inside them. So medical engineer Korkut Uygun, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues developed a method that aims to skip the ice-forming stage of freezing altogether.

First, the team flooded rat livers with oxygen and a combination of chilled chemicals, including a glucose-like compound called 3-O-methyl-d-glucose that protects the cells against freezing. This slowly cooled the livers to 4 °C, and the researchers then stored and preserved them at –6 °C without freezing them.

Three days later, the team reversed the process by gradually bringing the stored livers back up to body temperature and transplanted them into rats. All rats that received transplants of supercooled livers survived for at least three months, whereas rats that received three-day-old livers preserved using current approaches all died. The research is published online today in Nature Medicine.

[245 words]

[Time 3]

Uygun says that with a bit of tweaking — such as adjusting the rate of cooling — the method should scale up to larger organs, including human ones, and would not be limited to livers. “All organs are fair game,” he says.

Because the US Food and Drug Administration has already approved most of the technique's chemical components for use in humans, Uygun hopes to begin clinical trials within two to three years after tests in larger animals.

The preservation method could allow researchers to rescue organs that would otherwise have been discarded; according to some estimates, this could make at least 5,000 extra organs available to patients per year. And physicians would have the option of shipping organs much farther, even to other countries, to people waiting for a transplant.

“I think it’s a remarkable advance,” says cryobiologist Gregory Fahy, chief scientific officer at cryopreservation company 21st Century Medicine in Fontana, California. However, he cautions that several issues still need to be resolved — for instance, vigorous jostling of the supercooled organs during transportation could cause them to freeze by disrupting their steady temperature-suspended state, and large organs might be more difficult to cool evenly.

But the potential is vast. Fahy believes that the last major advance in organ preservation, the creation in the 1980s of a chemical solution called UW (after the University of Wisconsin, where it was developed), contributed to a big spike in the number of transplants. “I would anticipate something similar to that would happen here,” he says.

[251 words]
Source: nature
http://www.nature.com/news/supercooled-livers-last-for-days-1.15465


Rhythm is heard best in the bass
Better detection by the brain could explain why low-pitched notes carry the beat across musical cultures.
BY Philip Ball | 30 June, 2014

[Time 4]

Lead guitarists usually get to play the flashy solos while the bass player gets only to plod to the beat. But this seeming injustice could have been determined by the physiology of hearing. Research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that people’s perception of timing in music is more acute for lower-pitched notes.

Psychologist Laurel Trainor of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and her colleagues say that their findings explain why in the music of many cultures the rhythm is carried by low-pitched instruments while the melody tends to be taken by the highest pitched. This is as true for the low-pitched percussive rhythms of Indian classical music and Indonesian gamelan as it is for the walking double bass of a jazz ensemble or the left-hand part of a Mozart piano sonata.

Earlier studies2 have shown that people have better pitch discrimination for higher notes — a reason, perhaps, that saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register. It now seems that rhythm works best at the other end of the scale.

Keeping time
Trainor and colleagues used the technique of electroencephalography (EEG) — electrical sensors placed on the scalp — to monitor the brain signals of people listening to streams of two simultaneous piano notes, one high-pitched and the other low-pitched, at equally spaced time intervals. Occasionally, one of the two notes was played slightly earlier, by just 50 milliseconds. The researchers studied the EEG recordings for signs that the listeners had noticed.

That detection by the brain showed up as a characteristic spike of electrical activity, known as a mismatch negativity (MMN), produced by the brain's auditory cortex about 120–250 milliseconds after the deviant sound reached the ear. It is a known indication that the brain senses something wrong — a kind of 'huh?' response that Trainor and her colleagues had previously investigated to detect listeners’ responses to 'errors' in pitch.

The researchers found that the MMN signals were consistently larger for the mistiming of a lower note than for a higher note. They also measured the participants’ ability to adjust their finger-tapping to deviant timings of notes, and found that it was significantly better for the lower notes.

The MMN does not depend on conscious recognition of a timing error — in fact, participants were told to watch a silent film during the tests and to pay no attention to the sounds they heard. And although Trainor says that “the timing differences are quite noticeable”, the MMN response precedes any conscious awareness of them.

[422 words]

[Time 5]

Turn it up
The researchers also used a computer model to find out how the ear responds to their test sounds and found that the signal from the auditory nerve connected to the cochlea, a portion of the inner ear that is central to hearing, provided a less clear indication of the timing of a high-pitched note than a low note. The team suggests that the differences arise at a fairly early stage of cognitive processing.

Cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna says that the study “provides a very plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception.”

The results are surprising, says cognitive musicologist Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam, but “there are plenty of alternative interpretations”. For instance, the tone quality of the note, known as timbre, could be important: “The use of a piano tone could be contributing to the difference observed,” he says. “Different timbres should be used to prove it's really the pitch that causes the effect.”

Fitch adds that for louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that “they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance.”

[236 words]
Source: nature
http://www.nature.com/news/rhythm-is-heard-best-in-the-bass-1.15481


Magnetic bubbles could shield astronauts from radiation
Solar storms' dangers would lessen on long space trips
BY MEGHAN ROSEN | 30 June, 2014

[Time 6]

Deflector shields aren’t just for the starship Enterprise. One day, giant magnetic bubbles could protect spacecraft on long voyages.

By gathering charged particles floating through space, the bubbles could form a force field that flicks away radiation. If successful, the idea could offer scientists a solution to one of NASA’s stickiest problems: how to shield astronauts from harmful cosmic rays and solar eruptions.

Storms on the sun catapult charged particles into space at tremendous speeds, says plasma physicist Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England. “If you’re on a spaceship in transit to Mars,” she says, “these charged particles can smash through the hull and smash your DNA.”

[111 words]
Source: sciencenews
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/magnetic-bubbles-could-shield-astronauts-radiation

zxppx

Part III: Obstacle

Data check: U.S. producing more STEM graduates even without proposed initiatives
BY Jeffrey Mervis  | 30 June, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]

The United States appears to be on pace to meet the Obama administration’s goal of churning out more college graduates in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

That conclusion, based on an analysis by ScienceInsider of recent education statistics, may surprise many people. And it is unlikely to cause scientific organizations to hold a ticker tape parade or the White House to issue a self-congratulatory press release.

That’s because the growth has occurred despite the failure of Congress to approve most of the new programs and hefty federal investments recommended by high-profile panels and requested by the White House. The news also comes with a caveat: The goal has been a moving target, and the total includes those with a 2-year degree. So some may take issue with the analysis that follows.

U.S. academic and business leaders have long argued that the country needs a larger tech-savvy workforce to maximize economic growth. The current campaign began in earnest in 2005 when a coalition of pro-research organizations issued a report titled Tapping America’s Potential (TAP). It called for a doubling, by 2015, of the number of STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded annually by U.S. institutions.

The doubling would mean an increase from 200,000 a year to 400,000, the report explains. Curiously, it chose 2001 as its baseline year—meaning the decadal doubling would actually occur over 14 years (remedial math, anyone?). If the number rose at a steady pace, by 2015 there would be 1.1 million more STEM graduates than would have been the case under previous production levels.

Six months later, a prestigious panel assembled by the National Academies warned Congress that retaining U.S. global competitiveness would require more and better STEM teachers. Its report, called Rising Above the Gathering Storm (RAGS), resulted in a 2007 law that promised to augment STEM teacher training (as well as double research funding in the physical sciences). Congress didn’t keep its promise, however. And RAGS didn’t address whether additional STEM-trained workers were needed, although it said that the 10,000 additional elementary and secondary school STEM teachers that would be trained would touch “10 million minds.”

The Obama administration saw a link, however, and its President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) issued two related reports that, together, recommended increasing both the number of STEM teachers and the number of STEM graduates. In particular, its 2012 report, Engage to Excel, called for producing “one million additional college graduates with bachelor or associate degrees in STEM fields” over the next decade.

For PCAST, the clock started in 2010, when the number of such graduates stood at 300,000. President Barack Obama has cited the reports frequently in lobbying Congress for increasing federal investments in STEM education, including a mention in his 2011 State of the Union address of the need for more STEM teachers.

Neither the PCAST report nor the TAP report explains how or why it chose a particular number of additional STEM graduates as a goal. And both reports are supply-driven rather than demand-driven; that is, they address the production of STEM graduates but not the likelihood of their finding good jobs. That’s a sore point for those who argue that the nation is actually producing too many graduates in many STEM fields, which keeps wages low and creates underemployment.

Leaving aside those points, however, an analysis of data compiled by the National Science Foundation (NSF) shows strong evidence of the desired growth despite the general lack of action on the reports. Specifically, the number of degrees awarded annually in the natural sciences and engineering—NSF’s equivalent of what is normally defined as a STEM field—grew from 241,000 in 2000 to 355,000 in 2012 (see graph). In absolute terms, the 2012 figure is 114,000 more than the 2000 figure. Even if that number grows no larger for the rest of the decade—an extremely conservative estimate, most would say—the additional number of STEM graduates in the overall workforce would exceed the 1 million goal set explicitly by the PCAST report and implicitly by TAP.

(Those who think the augmented number of graduates should be based on a strict 10-year span may want to start with the 263,000 STEM graduates produced in 2002. Using that base year, the size of the expanded pool falls just shy of the 100,000-a-year level needed to add 1 million over a decade.)

To be sure, these totals use PCAST’s definition of a college degree, which encompasses both the bachelor’s and associate level. The split is roughly six or seven to one: In 2012, for example, there were 53,000 associate degrees in STEM fields out of the total of 355,000 graduates. (Four-fifths of the 2-year STEM degrees awarded were in computer science.)

The PCAST report does not suggest what rate of growth is preferred. In particular, it doesn’t opine on whether spikes and troughs matter. However, front-loading the increase makes it much easier to achieve the overall goal.

For example, a surge of 100,000 graduates in the first few years—say, an extra 40,000 the first year, and then an additional 60,000 in the second year—would then require only miniscule increases in subsequent years to achieve the target. In contrast, flat production for the first several years would require a huge leap in output in the latter years of the decade.

It turns out that the steady rise in actual production over the past decade may also get you where you want to go. Based on the NSF data, that seems like a reasonable bet—even if it runs counter to the conventional narrative. For whatever reason, it appears, U.S. students are finding their own way to a STEM degree.

[1000 words]
Source: news.science
http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2014/06/data-check-u-s-producing-more-stem-graduates-even-without-proposed-initiatives?rss=1

wnj2611339

沙发~~~谢谢楼主!

---

----Speaker
Main idea: Scientists are developing an automatic system that can summarizes unedited videos.
Details:  such system can automatically pick up the most interesting moments, and skip the parts that are repetitive or nothing happened.
Apart from making personal trailors, such technology can also be used in analyzing traffic cameras to find the cause of an accident, or video search engines.

----Speed
[Time 2] 1'30''
Research in rats showed that restoring liver in a 'supercooled' but non-frozen state was a more effective method.
[Time 3]1'15''
Such method could apply for larger organs too, and has could save more lives. Although several issues need to be noticed, the potential of the method is vast.
[Time 4]1'59''
Today's research showed that people have better sense of timing in music for lower-pitched notes.
EEG was used to study the music sign that listeners have noticed, and MMN was used to detect the signs of music that listener responses as 'error'.
[Time 5] 1'15''
The researchers found that it's the cochlea of the inner ear that has a better indication of the timing of a high-pitched note than a low note.
Scientists are identifying the reasons behind, and one reason is that people can feel the resonance from the bass in the music.
[Time 6] 0'51''
Giant magnetic bubbles could protect spacecraft on long voyages.

----Obstacles 11'34''
The number of STEM degrees is increasing with the pace that will meet the Obama administration’s goal, and the calling for doubling this number is actually taking effects.
Besides, more and better STEM teachers are required, and their number is recommended to increase together with the number of STEM degrees.
Neither the PCAST report nor the TAP report gives reasons why to set such goal with a specific number, and the production of STEM graduates may outweigh the number of positions in the job market.
The PCAST report does not prefer to set a specific rate of growth.
To be clearer, the total number includes both the bachelor’s and associate level.
In this case, U.S. graduates are finding ways to get a STEM degree.

hawk！！！

刚刚做完今天的。。。科技真心可怕 = =
明早起来做~ 谢谢LZ~~
Speaker: a new software can find the interesting moment in a boring video
Time2-Time3:
describe the technology -> the tech's importance -> how it works -> describe the importance in detail: remarkable
Time4:
a phenomenon: people seem have better pitch discrimination for higher notes -> scientists did research to full understand the situation
Time5:
another method to tackle this problem. what it found, surprising
Time6:
summary, potential use of magnetic bubbles -> how it works -> its usage( NASA's hardest problem, protect us from radiation)
Obstacle:
despite some program are failed to pass the congress, the number of STEM students is rising. ->different way to calculate the number …. -> the promotion is not demand side but supply side -> the actual performance of these students
结构好晕。。。
        word        time        speed
60        245        61        241
60        251        74        204
60        422        143        177
60        236        67        211
60        111        59        113
60        1000        323        186

疏离无罪

先占～～～～～～～～

Speaker: A program can scan hours of images and find out interesting moment in them.And it also has several other usage.

01:28
Scientists found out a new method to keep organs in supercooled situation to store the organs for three days.

00:57
The tech only can keep rats' organ now.But scientists will keep developing this tech to use it on larger organs such as humans'.

02:06
Experiments showed that people people have better pitch discrimination for higher notes and rhythm is best heard in lower-pitched notes.

01:13
The team suggested that the differences arise at a fairly early stage of cognitive processing.

00:34
Giant magnetic bubbles could protect spacecraft on long voyages and protect astronaut from radiation.

05:45
The Obama adminstration and the Congress suggested that the United States need more STEM teachers and graduates and workforces to keep its competitiveness in the world.
However,data showed that the number of STEM graduates has raised quickly since 2001.And too many STEM graduates lead to low salary and unemployment.
The PCAS and the Congress do not know whether they need more STEM graduates and what rate of growth is preferred.
US students are finding their own way to a STEM degree.

ffffionabear

占~~感谢卤煮~~
————感谢！！！嘿~你的作业~不，是你的作业~(￣_,￣ ) ~~~#作业天天见~~#~~~进击的阅读小分队~~~\(^o^)/~——————————————————
[speaker]
Scientists have created a computer program called Livelight which can automatically pick out unique and interesting part of a long video,analyzing its value,and then integrates the most valuable part into your personal trailer.
[speed]
1'55
New technology of "supercooling",which preserve the donated organ cool but not freezing by slow-cooling system,can extend the quality guarantee period of the organ,making it more possible to match the recipients.
1'42
That technology would be a remarkable advance in transplant surgery,although there are still some obstacle waiting to solve,such as avoiding transporting damage and cooling the larger organ evenly,the future of it is bright.
2'27
People's perception of timing are more depend on the low-pitched notes than lead guitar.
1'49
The inner ear provided more clear indication of the timing of a low-pitched note than a high note.People use the low-pitched note to keep rhytm.Take an extreme example of a deaf people,they can literally feel the beat by turning up the bass loud.
44'
The magnetic bubbles may solve the biggest problem of space exploration
4'07
main idea:The US tends to churn out more college graduates in STEM fields to meet president Obama's goal.
debates:
1.Many reports showed both the STEM graduates and teacher are doubling in recent years,which might go beyong the country needs and lead to low wages and unemployment.
2.No one had explained why they chose additional STEM graduates as a targey,those researches are more likely driven by supply,not by demand.
solution:From the data,students may find the balance of STEM degree and future job.

小蘑菇开始打怪

早~~谢谢ppx~~~
----------------------------

speaker:

a new software can edit the video and pick out the most interesting part

the other usage of the software

time2:

scientists find a method to keep the liver alive in supercooled environment

the method will drastically increase the number of human organs that are available for transplantation

the description of the method and method works better than the current one

time3:

the bright future and the advantage of the new method

some problems about the method such as during the shipping, it is hard to keep the temperature constantly

time4:

psychologist’ finding explains why in the music of many cultures the rhythm is carried by low-pitched instruments while the melody tends to be taken by the highest pitched

the tech the scientist used to monitor the brain signals

participants can feel the timing difference

time5:

researchers used a computer model to find out how the ear responds to the test sounds

the further contribution of the finding

time6:

the magnetic bubbles could solve the problem of how to shield astronauts from harmful cosmic rays and solar eruptions

time7:

the number of STEM degree increases steadily

more students graduated in STEM field means more unemployment

there is also a demand for teachers in STEM degree

the Congress does not approve the investments in STEM field

醒醒Shine

[speaker]
video, automated system, cull useful moments

[time2-3]
1 study: liver of rat, transplant, 3 days success
2 suggest: scale up to big animal
3 significant:some cautions bust still hopeful

[time4-5]
1 opinion: low-pitcheed rhythms > high
2 study1: to prove the opinion
3 study2: how this work,conginitive progress
4 other possibility: resonance

[time6]
magnetic bubbles may oneday protect spacecraft on long voyages

catapult 导弹发射
smash 猛击，打碎捣烂，大获成功的书或电影

[obstacle]
1- US STEM graduates increase recent 10years a lot
2- even gov. didn't much help(have proposed but much of them didn't work well)
3- conclusion: STEM find their own way to grow


科学文献的一个特点，我的感受： 先提个学术小成果或结论，然后介绍实验怎么做的，再说专家们如何评价好坏、影响力、作用和价值，最后自己也来谦虚一下有哪些不足但总体而言还是看好前景的。恩，就酱。今天有两篇都这个赶脚。√ 果然是严谨。

Talitha

2:2'25
new method of preserving rat livers my extend transplant window for human organs. author talks about old method and then new method.

3:2‘14
the new supercool method may work on larger organs. More researches needs to be done to solve problems with larger organs. However, it is still a huge achieve and full of potentials

4:3'30
Lead guitar usually has the chance to play solo. However, researchers found that the low notes produced by bass actually easier to be noticed by brain. author continue with the detail of experiment.

5: 1'48
researches found that  the signal from the auditory nerve connected to the cochlea provided a less clear indication of the timing of a high-pitched note than a low note. author suggests that there may be alternative that cause the result. deaf people may feel the bass rhythm.

6: 50
By gathering charged particles floating through space, the bubbles could form a force field that flicks away radiation.