【Native Speaker每日综合训练—45系列】【45-16】科技

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内容：伊蔓达 编辑：SOLEDAD

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今天的文章是从经济学人近期期刊中精选的好文章，Speed练习的内容涉及animal culture, computer vision 以及Electricity-free air conditioning这样的cool idea.Obstacle文章是讲Digital privacy。Enjoy and have fun~

Part I: Speaker

Poorer Kids May Be Too Respectful at School
December 3, 2014 |By Erika Beras

Kids from different economic backgrounds behave differently in classrooms. For example, working class kids are less likely to ask for help from teachers than are their middle class counterparts. And when they do ask for help, they're less aggressive about it. That's according to a study that followed students from the third grade through the fifth, published in the journal American Sociological Review. [Jessica McCrory Calarco, Coached for the Classroom: Parents' Cultural Transmission and Children's Reproduction of Educational Inequalities]

Part of the difference in how kids act comes from the guidance they've gotten at home. As a rule, working class parents coach their kids to work out problems on their own. And if the kids did ask for help, it was in subtle ways like sitting quietly with a hand raised. Middle class kids? Their parents urged them to be proactive, even to interrupt their teachers for help.

The result is that teachers were more likely to attend to the assistance-seekers and louder class-participators. Which left working class kids behind and magnified inequalities. So the working class child's behavior, which they and their parents see as respectful, could impair their success in the classroom. And prevent them from joining their classmates in higher social classes.

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/poorer-kids-may-be-too-respectful-at-school/

[Rephrase 1, 1:22]

ROLEDAD

Part II: Speed

Left or right wing?
To great tits, tradition seems important
Dec 6th 2014 | From the print edition

[Time 2]
IN THE days when milk was delivered each morning to the doorstep of almost every house in Britain, enterprising great tits sometimes learned to peck through the foil bottle-tops to get at the goodies beneath. These avian pioneers were quickly imitated by others, with the result that cream-pillaging populations emerged in several parts of the country. Cream-pillaging was one of the first recognised examples of animal culture: the transmission of behaviour from one individual to another, so that it persists down the generations. But, oddly, it was never followed up experimentally in the wild, to understand the nuances of the process.

That has just changed, with the publication in Nature of an experiment which Lucy Aplin of Oxford University conducted in nearby Wytham Wood probably the most intensively studied habitat on the planet. Most of the great tits in this wood are known individuals, and are fitted with transponders so that they can be followed around. Dr Aplin was thus able to track in some detail how behaviour spreads, and also how tits, like people, often seem pressed into social conformity.

Wytham has several subpopulations of great tits, each living in its own neck of the wood. Dr Aplin captured two males from each of eight of these areas, to act as her initial experimental subjects. Instead of milk bottles, she and her colleagues used specially devised boxes that, if manipulated correctly, deliver a tasty mealworm to a tit. Each box has a sliding door at the front, painted blue on the left and red on the right. Opening it either way will yield a worm, but the captured tits did not know this. Those from two of the subpopulations were taught, by letting them watch how a savvy demonstrator bird did it, that sliding the door leftward was a rewarding behaviour. Those from three other subpopulations were taught to slide it rightward. Those from the remaining three parts of the wood were taught nothing, and acted as controls. The team then scattered the wood with boxes, 250 metres apart, and released the captured birds whence they had come.
[342 words]

[Time 3]
In the areas where the released birds knew how to open the boxes, the others quickly learned to do so. After the boxes had been out for 20 days over the course of a month, three-quarters of the resident tits had opened a box at least once, almost always using the method introduced by the re-released males. In one of the three control areas, half managed it, by copying birds who had worked the mechanism out by trial and error. But in the other two controls, only a pitiful 9% and 31% of the tits opened a box even once.

These results suggest that, for great tits, traditions are easy to create. To find out how persistent such traditions are, Dr Aplin and her colleagues came back nine months later (a period in which, on average half the resident tits had died and been replaced by other individuals) and put some of the boxes out again. They found three things. First, enough tits in each area remembered the old days well enough to raid the boxes, thus enabling others to learn how to do so. Second, the tradition of whether to open to the left or to the right was preserved. Third, tits that had moved (as some did) from an area with a different tradition changed their behaviour to conform with local practice.
Why that should be, Dr Aplin does not know. But it suggests that, like human beings, great tits are conformists at heart.
[246 words]

Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21635451-great-tits-tradition-seems-important-left-or-right-wing

Turing, the changes
Google revamps how it tests whether a website visitor is human
Dec 5th 2014 | SEATTLE | Science and technology

[Time 4]
IN THE end, the robots won. On December 3rd, Google announced that it was radically changing its ReCAPTCHA system, the sort of prove-you're-a-human-and-not-automated-software test that has become all but ubiquitous online. In April, Google researchers published a paper showing that their computer-vision software could decipher their own squashed and twisted images 99.8% of the time.

For many, it comes as little surprise that algorithms can now nearly always beat a CAPTCHA. This is a tortured acronym that stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart", and refers to a notional test devised by Alan Turing, a British code-breaker and computer-science pioneer, in which humans test a machine to see if it can think. CAPTCHAs are the reverse, administered by a machine to make sure the user is of the thinking sort.

It was inevitable that computer-vision research would advance to a point that CAPTCHA text that was in any way legible to humans would also be legible to the machines they had taught. In 2009, Luis von Ahn, the founder of ReCAPTCHA (the sort that presents two images, one of which is designed to make the user extract useful bits of text from an image, such as a scan of a newspaper page or a house number in a photograph), told The Economist that "it will be possible for software to break text CAPTCHAs most of the time within five years." He was spot on.

The April paper came out of work on text recognition in images from the firm's Street View archive, and of course on ReCAPTCHA's arms race to defeat increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence. Vinay Shet, the product manager for the service, said that the outcome was proof that decrypting squiggly text alone was no longer enough to separate the men from the 'bots. However, Mr Shet says, Google had already developed a sophisticated risk-analysis system that could do the same job by different means.
[322 words]

[Time 5]
The solution which may seem fantastically simple by comparison to some of the textual hoops web denizens have had to jump through in recent years is to ask a user to check a box that reads, quite simply, "I'm not a robot". From particulars that arise in the act of visiting the page and checking the box, the firm's software can acquire a host of signals of humanity. Dr Shet was loth to share the recipe for the test's secret sauce, but it surely includes parameters about the connection, such as the network address from which the browser summoned the page. The sum of those attributes may be enough to pass the test; if not, it will also offer pictures of cats, dogs and turkeys for users to identify, which 'bots are poor at matching. Computer vision has come far, but still has some way to go with certain visual tasks that humans find simple.

No doubt the robots will get better, for getting past CAPTCHAs is big business. Firms that want to purchase large blocks of event tickets stand to make much in the resale market, as do the people who wish to register enormous numbers of email accounts only to sell the bogus addresses to spammers. So it is that Google's latest move, as with so much of online security, is just the next stage of a cat-and-mouse game. But the firm is active on both sides; the artificial intelligence systems that the new CAPTCHA system aims to thwart are being taught how to think about, for example, what a cat is by seeing which picture real humans choose.

With what amounts to billions of CAPTCHA solutions already processed and billions more to come, Google is breeding the next generation of bots that will fool the systems it has just deployed. Who knows what hoops real humans will eventually have to jump through just to get seats at the theatre.
[322 words]

Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21635694-google-revamps-how-it-tests-whether-website-visitor-human-turing-changes

A cool idea
New materials may change the way temperatures are regulated
Nov 29th 2014 | From the print editio

[Time 6]
AIR conditioning is a transformative technology. It has made the world's torrid climes pleasanter to live in, and enabled the siesta-free working habits of the temperate regions to move closer to the equator. But cooling buildings takes a lot of energy. Heat must be pumped actively from their interiors to their exteriors. Fully 15% of the electricity used by buildings in the United States is devoted to this task. If an idea dreamed up by Aaswath Raman of Stanford University and his colleagues comes to fruition, that may change. Dr Raman has invented a way to encourage buildings to dump their heat without the need for pumps and compressors. Instead, they simply radiate it into outer space.

The idea, described in this week's Nature, is both cunning and simple. Outer space is very cold (about 3°C above absolute zero) and very big, so it is the perfect heat sink. Earth radiates heat into it all the time. But this is compensated for by the heat the planet receives from the sun. To encourage one part of Earth's surface (such as an individual building) to cool down, all you need do in principle is reflect the sunlight which falls on it back into space, while also encouraging as much radiative cooling from it as possible.

To try to turn principle into practice Dr Raman has made a material which reflects 97% of sunlight while itself radiating at a wavelength of between eight and 13 microns (or millionths of a metre), which is where the atmosphere is most transparent. Production of the material is made possible with modern manufacturing methods. It consists of four layers of silicon dioxide interspersed with three of hafnium dioxide. Each of these seven layers is of a different, precisely defined thickness, ranging from 13 to 688 nanometres (or billionths of a metre). It is backed by a layer of silver 200 nanometres thick, to act as a mirror.

The result, a sheet with a total thickness of less than two microns, is the photonic equivalent of a semiconductor: it does to light what a semiconductor does to electricity, namely manipulates its energy levels. Since, optically speaking, energy levels correspond to wavelengths, such an arrangement can be tweaked to reflect some wavelengths and preferentially emit others. And that, in choosing the layers' pedantically exact dimensions, is just what Dr Raman and his colleagues have done.
[397 words]

[The rest]
Polythene plan
They worked out on a computer how thick those layers needed to be to reflect pretty much the entire solar spectrum while, at the same time, shedding infra-red light at the frequency which can most easily escape from Earth into outer space. And then they made it, to see if it works.

It does. Mounted on a silicon wafer to keep it flat, held in a specially designed box made of Mylar, polythene, polystyrene, acrylic and wood, to minimise the conduction of heat into it from its surroundings, and then left outside on a sunny, albeit rather wintry Californian day, the photonic sheet settled down to a temperature 4.9°C cooler than its surroundings. If it were thermally connected to those surroundings, rather than isolated from them, that temperature difference would disappear, but the result would be to cool the surroundings slightly.

Turning this discovery into a useful device will be a journey down a long road. Dr Raman and his colleagues have, however, taken the first step by working out that they should be able to replace the hafnium dioxide (which is expensive) with titanium dioxide (which is cheap). They will probably need to replace the silver, too, though the cost of silicon dioxide, also known as sand, is not so much of a problem.

The process will also have to be scaled up. And it will work only on those parts of a building (mainly the roof) that have a clear view of the sky, and thus of outer space, so it will not replace air conditioning completely. But the idea of even part of a building's cooling system being electricity-free is an attractive one, so this may be the start of something really cool.

Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21634992-new-materials-may-change-way-temperatures-are-regulated-cool-idea

ROLEDAD

Part III: obstacle

Cryptography for dummies
To the alarm of some lawmakers, scrambling data becomes easy as encryption turns into the default option on digital devices
Nov 29th 2014 | From the print edition

[Paraphrase]
A CAMPAIGN by American and British lawmakers and security officials to get social-media companies to take more responsibility for handing over information about criminals and terrorists using their networks gathered pace this week. It is happening because, following the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former American spy, technology companies are beefing up the encryption of data to protect users' privacy, making it more difficult for law-enforcement agencies to find out what people have been up to online.

In Britain, a report into the jihadi-inspired killing of a soldier in London said websites such as Facebook provide a safe haven for terrorists to communicate. Such statements echo similar concerns made in America. James Comey, the director of the FBI, has said the encryption of computers, smartphones and other digital gadgets largely benefits paedophiles, criminals and terrorists.

This is not how technology firms see it. Apple and Google, for instance, say they are making their mobile operating systems more secure because people and businesses want their data to be protected. This encryption is not only robust but often cannot be disabled. Moreover, it may require little or no effort on the part of a user to render data stored on their devices or being sent to another person impossible for all but the most determined governments or criminal organisations to retrieve.

This is a big change. In the past built-in security, if provided, was often easily subverted. Most devices and software came with the doors wide open and only geeks knew how to shut them. Now, although plenty of users may not be aware of it, spying on them is getting harder.

This is not universal. Applications and data that are stored online in the cloud, for instance, might still be accessible by third parties, although the links to and from them have been locked down. Routinely encrypting attachments in e-mails also remains something of a work-in-progress.

Many of the elements used to provide this greater level of privacy have long been available for users of specific systems. Apple, for instance, has encrypted all data passing through its FaceTime and iMessage applications since their inception.

Securing it
Now WhatsApp, an instant-messaging service with more than 600m users, has adapted a highly regarded open-source system called TextSecure for its app running on Android-based devices. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, provides the new security in a routine update which reduces almost to zero the possibility of messages being intercepted or decrypted. Moxie Marlinspike, one of TextSecure's developers, says the software was designed to be simple to add to apps. WhatsApp now plans to extend it to devices using other operating systems.

Earlier this month, Facebook itself launched what it describes as an experiment to improve access to its service using the Tor network, which makes it possible to surf the internet virtually anonymously. Such connections are already possible but Facebook says it wants to make them more secure. This could appeal to users in countries such as China and Iran where access to Facebook is blocked.

Protecting information stored on a device is also becoming easier. Apple and Microsoft have offered full-disk encryption (FDE) for their desktop operating systems for years, in which a user's login or other token unlocks an encryption key that is then used for all data read from and written to a disk drive. Destroy the key, and the disk's data is unreadable for ever. FDEs were fiddly and slow, but now can be turned on during a software upgrade with only a mouse click. Faster processors and custom-made chips also eliminate slowdowns. Android, Apple's iOS and other mobile platforms adopted similar forms of encryption a few years ago but the protection has only recently become complete.

The new level of security builds on efforts by hardware- and software-makers to divorce themselves from the ability to decipher or recover users' data from mobile devices. As Tim Cook, Apple‘s boss, said recently: If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can't provide it. It's encrypted and we don't have a key.

Apple's Touch ID fingerprint-recognition on iPhones or iPads is a further example. Rather than having its data reside in the normal memory of those devices, or have it sent to a secure repository in the cloud, Apple developed custom circuitry it calls Secure Enclave. This incorporates into its processors a way to stash scrambled data into a one-way memory cache that neither the operating system (nor Apple) can directly access.

Bruce Schneier, a veteran American cryptographer and security expert, says robust, configuration-free encryption by itself is not new. Rather it is the additive effect of its much broader implementation by more and more people that makes the change powerful. This is being driven, he believes, by people and companies paying more attention to what is happening to their data following Mr Snowden's revelations about the extent of the surveillance programmes run by America's National Security Agency. There have also been reports of snooping by firms, invasion of privacy by criminals and lax treatment of payment details and personal data.

This heightened public concern about privacy has overcome stalled efforts in some corners of the internet to deploy encryption, validation and anti-tampering options that had been left idle. Often cost and complexity were cited as reasons by companies not to bother, except for e-commerce, financial transactions and health data. As Mr Schneier notes, the Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security standards used to protect web-browsing for e-commerce date back to the late 1990s, and have been strengthened continuously since. (Separate and significant flaws in various software implementations of the standard across all major operating systems were found and fixed in 2014, most before being exploited.)

Now secure web-browsing is about to go much further. On November 18th the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy advocacy group, announced the formation of a new consortium with members including Cisco, which makes networking equipment, Mozilla, producer of the Firefox browser, and Akamai, a leading cloud-computing and content-delivery network. The group has created a standardised process called Let's Encrypt for websites and other online services to secure their systems automatically and at no cost. The service, planned for release in mid-2015, will offer a simple installation process in which web operators will apply to receive digital certificates that can be used to prevent the interception of information when it is passing between a web browser and an internet server.

Closed by default
Let‘s Encrypt will also renew a digital certificate on its expiration without any administrative intervention common failing even for large e-commerce and content sites. One of the project's leaders, Peter Eckersley of EFF, says of Let's Encrypt and other efforts, that  is Within a year or two, if we complete these projects successfully, internet users should have their browsing, their e-mail and their messaging encrypted in most or all cases by default.

While clamping down on the passage of unencrypted data makes monitoring or intercepting it harder for profit or malicious intent, not all avenues will be closed to the FBI and others. WhatsApp and iMessage offer end-to-end or peer-to-peer encryption, but a secure web interaction still terminates on a server somewhere in a data centre, where the data is decrypted to be acted upon. Apple, for instance, sets up encrypted connections by default to its e-mail servers, but the e-mail itself may be read by those at Apple with access, and turned over if required to authorities armed with the necessary legal niceties. Likewise, data stored in the cloud passes to and from Dropbox, Google Drive and other services with strong encryption and is scrambled when it is stored. But those services encrypt the data on their servers using keys that they control, not their users.

The EFF's Mr Eckersley says that the various efforts now in place, along with improvements that are coming and those planned for the future, do not prevent interception by authorities or others completely. Rather, we might have a chance to protect everyone else who isn't being targeted for surveillance, he adds.
[1371 words]

Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21634993-alarm-some-lawmakers-scrambling-data-becomes-easy-encryption-turns

yang8291890

Speed:
3:27        tits 山雀
2:12        conformists 墨守成规者
3:18
3:01
3:26     pedantically exact dimensions 学究式地确切的尺寸

ROLEDAD

[speaker]
Working class kids are less likely to ask for help from teachers than are their middle class counterparts, which could leave working class kids behind and magnify inequalities.

[Speed]
Time2:
Cream-pillaging was one of the first recognized examples of animal culture, but it was never followed up experimentally in the wild.
Dr Aplin's research tracked in some detail how behavior spreads, and also how tits often seem pressed into social conformity.
Her experiment take wytham for comparative trials, two of the subpopulations were taught to watch how a savvy demonstrator bird, three other subpopulations were taught to slide it rightward and the remaining three parts of the wood were taught nothing.

Time3:
The results of the experiment suggest that for great tits, traditions are easy to create, and Dr Aplin's further study shows that other three things determine how persistent such traditions are: enough tits in each area remembered the old days and enabled others to learn; the tradition of whether to open to the left or to the right was preserved; behavior whether change.

Time4:
Because it will be possible for software to break text CAPTCHAs most of the time, , Google had already developed a sophisticated risk-analysis system that could do the same job by different means.

Time5:
Google is breeding the next generation of bots that will fool the systems it has just deployed

Time6:
Dr Raman has invented a way to encourage buildings to dump their heat without the need for pumps and compressors. Instead, they simply radiate it into outer space.

Rest:
Turning this discovery into a useful device will be a journey down a long road, although the start of something really cool.

[Obstacle]
This heightened public concern about privacy has overcome stalled efforts in some corners of the internet to deploy encryption, validation and anti-tampering options that had been left idle and The new level of security builds on efforts by hardware- and software-makers to divorce themselves from the ability to decipher or recover users' data from mobile devices.
However, a secure web interaction still terminates on a server somewhere in a data centre, where the data is decrypted to be acted upon.

cyndichiang

Speaker
Different behaviors between children from working-class and those from middle-class
Children from working-class are less likely to ask for help from teachers and less aggressive than do those from middle-class because working-class parents coach their children work out on their own whereae middle-class parents expect their children to be active in class and even interrupt teacher.
Turns out that teacher prefer assistance-seekers so that the quite children are more easily fall behind and this inactivity would prevent working-class children from joining their higer social class counterparts
Obstacle: 5'49''
Some improvements on digital privacy and security  were made by various companies.
However, some authorities or others still can intercept users' information

smallchange306

thanks for sharing! 文章超赞！
speed
2'40
1'39
2'14
1'48
2'37
obstacle
8'50
Facebook, for example, provieds palce for terriost to communicate
But Co. like FB said they have do their best to improve the users private information
Securiting it
   App, FB, etc have to do sth to protect their users private, alt users may not aware it
they still need to do more things about it

obstacle经常是读懂了全文，但是等到读到最后一句话的时候前面的基本已经忘嗮了~~

Alpha4Dream

第一次做练习哈哈小试一下  会看看别人的帖子看看大家的经验的~

Time 2                 00:07:17.26 科学家对大山雀的行为产生兴趣，设计了一个experiment
Time 3                 00:02:52.23 介绍这个experiment的结果以及科学家最后的猜想
Time 4                 00:05:47.13 现在计算机的发展使用验证码分别使用者是人还是机器越来越困难
Time 5                 00:04:16.13 新的发明应对这种科技的进步也在进行着，就像猫和老鼠一样，一方面公司在研究怎么发现更有用的方法，一边借鉴对方的方法
Time 6                00:06:13.55 发明不用电的方法代替空调
The rest        00:05:24.76 具体的实施方法
[Paraphrase]        00:21:55.02 现在互联网隐私变得越来越安全，科技的不断发展使得窃取隐私变得越来越不可能。虽然作者最后仍然提到了出于法律角度，仍有一部分的权利机构可以看到隐私。

Jiayouqin

谢谢 伊蔓达 和 SOLEDAD!

Speaker:

Different manners of asking help from teacher of working class and middle class kids lead to more inequality, because working class kids are less likely to ask for help, and when they do ask for help, they tends to do it more respectfully. This leads to teachers pay more attention and give more help to middle class kids.

T2: 2’40’’
T3: 2’00’’
T4: 1’59’’
T5: 2’30’’
T6: 2’15’’
The rest: 1’45’’

Obstacle: 7’41’’

The author discussed the development of data security, the advance of encryption in different companies and different platforms, and the motivation of developing encryption is from NSA. But it is still possible for authorities or others to intercept the data of someone who is targeted. The effort is to protect general public who should not be targeted.

545171086

time 2: 2'25
time 3: 1'36
time 4: 2'36
time 5: 1'49
time 6: 2'32