【Native Speaker每日综合训练—41系列】【41-05】科技

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Part I: Speaker

Narcissists Self-Involved Enough To Recognize Their Narcissism
The simple question “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist” is about as good at identifying narcissists as a forty-question clinical assessment. Erika Beras reports.

Here’s an easy way to find out if someone is a narcissist. Just ask them. That’s according to a study in the journal PLoS One. [Sara Konrath et al.: Development and Validation of the Single Item Narcissism Scale (SINS)]
Researchers posed the following question to more than two thousand people: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist.”
The researchers also provided participants with a definition of narcissist: egotistical, self-focused and vain. Not traits most people would want to be associated with – unless of course you’re a narcissist.
A small percentage of the study subjects said they were. Most said they were not.
Then, researchers had the volunteers fill out a lengthy narcissism clinical assessment. Those who had rated themselves high on the narcissism scale also scored high on the assessment.
After eleven rounds of tests, the researchers concluded that when the full forty-question clinical questionnaire could not be done, the Single Item Narcissism Scale, or SINS, “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist,” was a valuable tool.  
Seems that there isn’t much mystery when narcissists themselves are asked to self-identify. Yes, they may be narcissists—but they aren’t clueless.

—Erika Beras

Source: Scientificamerican
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/narcissists-self-involved-enough-to-recognize-their-narcissism/  

[Rephrase 1, 1:29]

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Part II Speed

1833 Meteor Storm Started Citizen Science
BY Dan Vergano   30 Auguest 2014

[Time 2]

The science of shooting stars owes much to a storied episode of crowdsourcing, a new historical report shows, kicked off by a stunning 1833 meteor shower.
Astronomers have increasingly turned to “citizen science” in the Internet era, setting up everyday folks to look for everything from alien worlds to the Milky Way’s galactic gas bubbles. But in a new Endeavour journal report, Mark Littmann and Todd Suomela of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville show that there is nothing new about the practice, with one Yale astronomer pioneering crowdsourced astronomy well over a century ago.
The astronomer, Denison Olmsted, was awakened by neighbors on November 13, 1833, and walked into the cold November night to see a sky filled with shooting stars, 72,000 or more per hour. It was the November meteor shower we now call the Leonids, but at the time, no one knew what caused the display or where meteors came from. But because of the number of shooting stars filling the heavens—20 a second—Olmsted saw clearly a pattern that had escaped other astronomers.
“Olmsted realized for the first time that they came from one point, one he first called the radiant,” Littmann says. Astronomers today still use the radiant to name meteor showers The Leonids take their name from their seeming origin in the constellation Leo, the Lion. And the Perseids seen in early August every summer take their name from their origin in the constellation Perseus.

[243 words]

[Time 3]

Citizen Science Starts
But Olmsted didn’t stop with that discovery. “Just as dawn was brightening the sky, causing the meteors to disappear from view, Olmsted rushed inside and dashed off a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper,” says the study.
“As the cause of ‘Falling Stars’ is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible,” Olmsted wrote to readers, in a report subsequently picked up and pooled to newspapers nationwide. Responses came pouring in from many states, along with scientists’ observations sent to the American Journal of Science and Arts.
“This was a seminal moment in American science journalism, really in science journalism worldwide,” says Littmann, author of The Heavens on Fire The Great Leonid Meteor Storms. “Until then, the newspapers were mostly political rags, filled with opinion, but here they did a very good job of dispassionately reporting on the meteors, calming people down that it wasn’t ‘The End of Days.’”
The responses also let Olmsted make a series of scientific breakthroughs, ending the 1,200-year grip of Greek philosopher Aristotle on explanations for meteors, which he saw as bubbles of gas lofted high into the sky and ignited. Olmsted’s contemporaries suspected the bodies were electrified by lightning.

[221 words]

[Time 4]

Aristotle’s Last Gasp

Instead, Olmsted’s crowdsourced observations showed that meteor showers were seen nationwide and fell from space under the influence of gravity. The crowd also noted that the showers had appeared before in yearly cycles, something that had eluded scientists, but not European farmers, for centuries.
Olmsted realized that the meteors must be smacking into Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. He estimated their speed at about 4 miles per second (6.4 kilometers per second), which he thought was fantastically fast. If he had been less conservative in the calculation, the observations from the crowd would have suggested their actual speed, about ten times faster. Because he didn’t realize that friction, instead of conventional burning, was firing up the shooting stars, Olmsted calculated their size as very large, up to a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide instead of the pinprick-size comet dust particles they actually are.
He did get their altitude nearly correct, triangulating the height of the fireballs with another scientific observer in New York at 30 to 50 miles (50 to 80 kilometers) high. He also surmised they originated from a body in a very elongated orbit around the sun, but it would not be until 1867 that astronomers made the connection between meteors and the dust left behind in comet tails, linking the trail of comet Tempel-Tuttle to the Perseids.
“He was ahead of his time, a remarkable guy, not least in using crowdsourcing for the first time, as far as we know, in mass media,” Littmann says. “Meteor astronomy really began with this shower.”
Every 30 years or so, particularly in 1966, the Leonids have produced remarkably strong showers as a reminder of the 1833 event, although they have declined overall as the comet-tail cloud spawning the meteors has thinned over time. The Leonids are expected to peak around November 16 and 17 this year.

[309 words]
Source: newswatch
httpnewswatch.nationalgeographic.com201408301833-meteor-storm-started-citizen-science


Pulses to the brain bring memory gains
Cooperation in regions of the brain improves associations between words and faces
BY LAURA SANDERS  29 Auguest, 2014

[Time 5]

Zaps to the head can enhance people’s memory by coaxing brain regions to work together. The brain stimulation method called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, helped healthy people recall words paired with faces, neuroscientist Joel Voss of Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago and colleagues report in the Aug. 29 Science.
In TMS, an electromagnetic coil placed on the head produces small electrical currents that stimulate nerve cells close to the brain’s surface. A logical location for stimulation would be the hippocampus, a brain structure important for memory. But the hippocampus is buried too deeply in the brain to be reached with TMS. The researchers instead turned to a spot near the top left surface of the brain’s wrinkly outer layer that’s known to work closely with the hippocampus.
In the study, 16 healthy subjects underwent functional MRI scans to pinpoint the exact coordinates of this spot. Participants received stimulation at the brain location for 20 minutes for five days. About 24 hours after their last stimulation, participants saw pictures of faces paired with spoken words. About a minute after first learning the pairs, participants better remembered which word went with each face than when they hadn’t been stimulated, the team found.
The technique might be useful for people who suffer from disorders that come with memory loss, the authors propose.

[221 words]
Source sciencenews
httpswww.sciencenews.orgarticlepulses-brain-bring-memory-gains


Were Neandertals cave artists, too
BY Michael Balter  1 September, 2014

[Time 6]

One of the biggest debates in archaeology is whether Neandertals were capable of the kind of abstract and symbolic expression that prehistoric modern humans demonstrated in abundance—for example, by painting animal images on the walls of caves like Chauvet and Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. Possible evidence for Neandertal art was reported a couple of years ago in the Spanish cave of El Castillo, but researchers are not sure whether Neandertals or modern humans painted a red disk on its wall 41,000 years ago—right around the time that modern humans entered Europe. Now, archaeologists working at Gorham’s Cave, a former Neandertal haunt on the coast of Gibraltar, report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have found this crosshatched pattern etched into the hard rock floor of the cave (see photo above). The pattern was deeply incised using some sort of stone tool and was found under archaeological layers dating back at least 39,000 years—but containing stone tools that only Neandertals made. The image is somewhat reminiscent of a 75,000-year-old geometric pattern found at Blombos Cave in Africa, and indeed the Gorham’s team argues that it is proof positive that Neandertals were just as capable of abstract thought as modern humans. The claim is likely to attract some skepticism, however, from archaeologists who have argued that such simple patterns are poor evidence for complex symbolic expression.

[237 words]
Source sciencemag
httpnews.sciencemag.orgarchaeology201409were-neandertals-cave-artists-too

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Part III: Obstacle

Satellites: Make Earth observations open access
Freely available satellite imagery will improve science and environmental-monitoring products, say Michael A. Wulder and Nicholas C. Coops.
BY Michael A. Wulder& Nicholas C. Coops | 2 September, 2014

[Paraphrase 7]

Changes in land cover affect the global climate by absorbing and reflecting solar radiation, and by altering fluxes of heat, water vapour, carbon dioxide and other trace gases. Detailed assessments — regional, global, daily and seasonal — of land use and land cover are needed to monitor biodiversity loss and ecosystem dynamics and to aid in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
Satellite imagery is the best source of such data, especially over large areas. Observations need to be extensive, regular and consistent to establish baselines and trends. But today, most satellite observations have limited coverage and compatibility, because they are controlled by the diverse objectives of national space programmes. In many cases, satellite data are restricted or charged for.
A new era of open-access satellite data has arrived. In 2008, the US Geological Survey (USGS) released for free to the public its Landsat archive, which dates back to the 1970s and is the world's largest collection of Earth imagery. Greater computing power is also enabling scientists to manipulate big data representing larger areas and with greater sophistication, to produce multibillion-pixel composite maps of land cover and change across regions, continents and the globe. Monitoring land-cover change in near-real time is now a reality.
Obstacles remain. Data coverage in the Landsat archive is variable, in both space and time (see 'Global coverage'). And few people have enough computing power and bandwidth to download and manipulate the data. Decision-makers remain largely unaware of the vastly improved opportunities for environmental monitoring offered by the latest methods, and so are not yet using such data to their full potential.
Scientists and policy-makers can support the shift to open-access satellite data, and coordinate efforts to deliver the detailed global monitoring required by international climate change and emissions-reduction programmes. Further, governments should open up their national satellite image archives and integrate compatible data to fill gaps. And satellite imagery from future missions should be freely accessible to all to promote innovation and use.

Landsat is the longest-running civilian Earth-observing programme. The United States launched the first satellite in 1972, when public interest in space missions was high. In 1982, Landsat 4 began to deliver more-detailed imagery (with a spatial resolution of 30 metres, now considered a benchmark for historical analyses) and spectral channels at visible, near- and shortwave-infrared wavelengths, to track the unique signatures in reflected light of different types of vegetation.
The latest in the unbroken series of Landsat satellites is Landsat 8, launched in 2013, which measures Earth's surface with a resolution of 15–100 metres from visible to infrared wavelengths. Landsat data were archived from the outset, but early observing strategies and limitations to on-satellite storage and downlink capacity resulted in uneven global coverage.
Access policies have changed over the years. In the 1980s, Landsat observations were commercialized. Fewer images were acquired and prices rose, reaching thousands of dollars each and curtailing use. When Landsat 7 was launched in 1999, it collected images across the globe more systematically. Redistribution of purchased images became permissible, and users formed consortia to bulk buy and share raw images and products.
Usage rocketed in 2008, when Landsat made its images free. More than a million images were downloaded in the first year, compared with a previous annual high of about 25,000 images sold. More than 20 million images have been downloaded since the archive opened and the rate continues to increase.

Data revolution
The mass of satellite data is fuelling a revolution in processing and analysis techniques. Cloud cover, the bane of optical remote sensing, can be overcome by building composite images. Over a period, clean pixels are selected, avoiding the requirement that entire images be clear. This approach is transforming continental and global-scale monitoring.

Cycles of disturbance and growth can also be captured by tracing clean pixels through time. Landscape changes after a fire can be checked against expectations for vegetation recovery, for instance. And logical sequences — such as transitions from young forest to old — can be included with greater confidence in models and projections.
Advances in visualization and distributed cloud computing are also changing the game. For example, the powerful parallel processing facilities of the NASA Earth Exchange and the Google Earth Engine can handle large volumes of geospatial and remotely sensed data. Such central facilities allow users to bring algorithms to the large data sets while minimizing duplication of storage and processing efforts. Developing regions such as Africa, which lack computing power and infrastructure, can also benefit from such shared platforms if they have the partnerships and bandwidth to access them.
When the archive was opened, there were more Landsat images outside it than in it. Many images were retained by the global network of receiving stations. An effort to consolidate these has added more than 3 million images to the repository since 2010; agreements are in place for a further 2 million to be ingested.
Future coverage should be much better. Landsat 8 can collect more than 700 images per day — 14 times as much as in the 1980s. In April 2015, it should be joined by the first European Sentinel-2 satellite, which will map Earth's land area every 10 days. A second Sentinel-2 satellite is scheduled to be launched two years later. The three satellites together will image global land area twice a week.
Sentinel-2 also has a free and open data policy, although at present the data will be publicly available for only four months after collection. This strategy would limit access to wide timespans of data and could result in incomplete repositories and multiple versions of data with different calibrations.

International strategy
Governments and the remote-sensing community should now seize the opportunity to develop a unified strategy for land monitoring.
First, as much historical imagery as possible should be deposited in the Landsat archive or an equivalent open repository. Leading Earth-observation nations whose satellites have sensors that complement Landsat should explore opportunities to add their data to the global pool. Second, the Earth-observing community and governments should commit to making future satellite programmes open access whenever possible. We urge the European Space Agency to consider ways to widen access to Sentinel-2's images. Alternative delivery mechanisms, such as a third-party archive and distribution site, could make data available to a broader array of users, allowing the intended science benefits to be reached.
Earth-observation projects need to become more like meteorological programmes, with standard imaging specifications and internationally agreed complementary satellite launches to ensure continuous coverage. The costs and difficulties in integrating national programmes for international benefit are significant. The benefits of open access demonstrated by the Landsat programme justify and encourage these efforts. We urge the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites interagency forum to continue facilitating communication between space agencies, commercial entities and scientific and operational data users towards establishing a more unified programme.
The remote-sensing community must advocate the development and maintenance of data archives and innovative processing methods. Best-practice approaches and standards can be developed by the Group on Earth Observations, a voluntary partnership between governments and international organizations to promote global collaboration around Earth observations, and offshoots such as the Global Forest Observation Initiative. To facilitate the use of data from differing sensors, scientists and data distribution centres should offer users calibrated data in widely compatible, analysis-ready formats.
Finally, researchers, policy-makers, non-governmental organizations and land managers need to use and promote more widely the capacity of the satellite archives for capturing and characterizing past and present changes in land cover and land use.

[1200 words]
Source: nature
http://www.nature.com/news/satellites-make-earth-observations-open-access-1.15804

slave918

手机码字不容易

t2
scientists begin to learn citizen science due to a meteor shower.

t3
newspaper support this newly passion to learn meter.
t4

although findings of O are not totally correct, he is still a pioneer.
T5
a stimulation better the memory.

T6

the finding of wall picture shows that N may have the ability to think abstractly. However, some archeologists opposed this idea

ghj699

Time2 1'59''
Time3 1'34''
Time4 1'41''
Time5 1'34
Time6 1'40''
Obstacle 10'22''

cherry6891

41-05
speaker: a research about wether narcissism person realize they are by asking two questions :to what extend u realize u are narcissism and ask them their definition of narcissism .  
Time2 the science of shooting start kicked off by stunning meteor shower
Time3 Olmsted discovered and explain the appearance of meteor shower
Time4 Olmsted's contributions to the meteor astronomy, some of his caculation of factors of meteor is not correct
Time5 plus to the brain better the memory in the brain
Time6 wether N were capable of abstract and symbolic expression ?
Possible evidence was found several years ago but they do not know who caved them
Recently one team found incised pattern in the wall of cave but the just this simple painting are poor evidence of symbolic expression
Obstacle
Function of satellite-- get the pic and information
Date revolution in the processing and analysis technology
Seek international cooperation

Ginni

speed
1'04
0'57
1'30
1'12
1'15

obstacle
6'13
changes affect climate--solar radiation
statellite imagery --best source--but restricted
new era open--access to data
obstacles remain--get data
open-access
a programme--landsat
landsat8
policies changed few and share
images free, 2008

date--techniques
cycles-- tracing clean pixels
advances--change game
future--better
sentinel free and open data

data--broader to users
continuous coverage
community-- development and maintenance
use and promote

chenlang4869

TIME1-4 5'33
The meteor astromony really began with the 1833 falling show by Olmsted. Instead of just writing down the meteor notes , he gave some estimation which was nearly correct of the metero falling.
TIME5 1';33
the TMS technology helps healthy people remember better.
TIME5 6 1'46
THE scientists hold that the Neandertals were as capable of abstract experession  as modern people, accroding to the prehistoric paintings . However this conclusion has raised skeptism to some other researchers.

obstacle 11'29
Previously the datas of satellites were not for free use  to the scientists or public . USGS now has released a free access the data of Landsat. However ,the obstacles still remain.
The freely access of satellite archive promotes the data revolution.And now the goverments around the world should seize the opportunity to developte a unified stratedy of land monitoring. All the entities concernint the use of huge data from the satellites should promote the satellites imagery data for land use and land cover more widely

HolliHuang

time2&time3-3'20
time4-1'19
time5-1'31
time61'22
time7 satellite imagery is the best way to monitor with restrict.New Way to achieve the target of gelobal converage..

NativeStudy菌

ZOEYZHANG114 发表于 2014-9-3 02:14
thank you. Enjoy reading. keep posting. Good day.

yeah, enjoy reading, and it's good for you to write down some sentences about the passage to help you summarize the idea~
why don't you give a try?