Suzanne Presto December 18, 2012 【Time1】 With NASA's retired shuttles mothballed in museums, 2012 saw a new kind of spacecraft blaze its own path toward the International Space Station.
In May, the Dragon space capsule — developed, owned and operated by California-based SpaceX — was launched from atop a Falcon-9 rocket, becoming the first private craft to dock with the ISS.
A feat achieved by only a few governments, the docking, says SpaceX chief Elon Musk, signaled more than a mere technological breakthrough.
"This was a crucial step," Musk said of the unmanned mission that was completed in conjunction with NASA. "It makes the things in the future, and the ultimate path toward humanity becoming a multi-planet species, much, much more likely."
Designed to carry cargo or crew, the Dragon capsule is slated for a manned test within three years.
Also working with NASA, Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has developed the Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo craft, has a planned 2013 demonstration flight to the space station.
At Kennedy Space Center for SpaceX's second successful ISS mission in October, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said these partnerships spur innovation and benefit the U.S. space program.
"We're handing off to the private sector our transportation to the International Space Station so that NASA can focus on what we do best — exploring even deeper into our solar system, with missions to an asteroid and Mars on the horizon," he said.
NASA officials have said the agency, via partnerships, is on track to launch astronauts from the United States within five years. 【250】
【Time2】 Presently constructing the Space Launch System, the largest rocket ever built, NASA engineers are also developing the Orion capsule, a craft designed to take astronauts 15 times farther than the International Space Station.
With Orion's unmanned trial mission set for 2014, interest in NASA's next generation vehicles has been growing.
"I'm glad to see the whole space program is going on because, I don't know, it seemed to me at least that all was kind of dead," said teenager Andrew Clancy at an April science festival in Washington. "But it's alive and well and looks great."
Acting as a lead investor that offers expertise and advice in addition to funding, NASA has secured contracts with three U.S. companies that are working on vehicles for manned missions to low-Earth orbit. Boeing, for example, is working on its Crew Space Transportation-100 capsule, which is designed to carry seven people and land on the ground. SpaceX is also developing vehicles similar in shape to late 20th century lunar capsules.
Nevada-based Sierra Nevada Corporation, however, is developing a winged spacecraft called Dream Chaser, whose shape more closely resembles a plane or a retired space shuttle.
"It's the same contest we played out in the 1950s — wings versus gumdrops [capsule-shaped vehicles]," said Howard McCurdy, a public affairs professor at American University in Washington. "Nobody knows at this stage which is the superior technology." 【228】
Environmental Change Heightens Migration Concerns Steve Norman Last updated on: December 20, 2012 [attachimg=640,360]112105[/attachimg] 【Time3】 There has always been some form of migration due to changes in climate, but scientific research reveals the number of so-called environmental migrants is growing.
“Whether it's on account of natural disasters or impacts of climate change, people are moving away from areas as they become wetter or drier, or as temperatures increase." said Jane McAdam, author of Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law.
A compilation of four years of research, her book critically examines whether states have obligations to protect people displaced by climate change,
"Most environmental migration is within countries rather than across borders, but governments rarely determine who is on the move or why," said McAdam, who is also Director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at Australia's University of New South Wales.
McAdam's research offers several reasons that prompt internal migration – primarily from rural to urban areas.
“People may say it's for work or because climate change has made it difficult to maintain a farm," McAdam said. "They may also say the move is for family reasons."
In Bangladesh, McAdam interviewed people living in the slums of Dhaka who offered a variety of stories about why they had come to the capital.
"They often cited changing weather conditions as the underlying reason for them leaving rural areas for the city," McAdam said. "In Bangladesh, where many areas are prone to heavy flooding, people have hardly any choice but to move to a region where they can feel safer."
For some people, moving is not an option. “Those who are so marginalized or under-resourced may be among the most vulnerable of all,” McAdam said. 【279】
Study Maps Areas of Stagnating Crop Yields Steve Baragona December 20, 2012 [attachimg=640,360]112106[/attachimg] 【Time4】 The demand for food crops is growing, but experts say the world’s harvests are not keeping pace.
A new study pinpoints exactly where crop yields are falling behind. The authors describe it as “actionable intelligence” on where more investment is needed to help secure the world’s food supply.
The United Nations says there will be 2 billion more people to feed by 2050. And people are becoming richer and eating more meat, which takes more grain to produce; and demand for plant-derived biofuels is growing.
But while the need for food crops in increasing, the new study found productivity has flattened out or declined on 43 percent of the world’s rice-growing land, and 44 percent of its wheat fields.
"Where are we heading?"
That raises a serious question, according to lead author Deepak Ray at the University of Minnesota.
“If huge tracts of rice and wheat areas are not improving," he asks, "then where are we actually heading in terms of reaching that target of feeding 9 billion humans?”
Overall, Ray says, the new study found yields were stagnant or fell on about a quarter to two-fifths of the world’s farmland growing rice, wheat, corn or soybeans. Those four crops account for about two-thirds of the world's caloric consumption. Other studies have warned that crop yield increases are not keeping up with demand. But Ray says they have been too vague to act on.
“When you say, for instance, wheat yields are not increasing anymore in India, it doesn’t really say much. It doesn’t say where it is not increasing.” 【260】
【Time5】 County by county
So Ray’s team pored over decades of official figures and detailed statistics, “to figure out what is happening in each county, for example in the United States, or in each municipio in Brazil or in each district in India... It takes a long, long time, obviously.”
It took three years, in fact. But in the end, the group produced detailed maps that can be used to zero in on where yields are increasing and where they are not.
But Ray says this is really just the beginning.
“This data set can be used to answer many other questions like, ‘Where are we going from here?’ What we have only shown is where we are right now.”
Next, Ray says, researchers need to figure out why yields are not improving in these areas and what needs to change.
"Good news"
Kostas Stamoulis, director of the Agricultural Development Economics Division at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, says the study identifies areas where improvements would have a substantial impact.
“There is significant untapped potential to increase yields to accommodate future demand," he says. "This is good news. Let’s put it that way.”
And Stamoulis says in many cases tapping that potential is a matter of applying what is already known.
“The technologies exist, he says. "We have to provide farmers with market access, infrastructure, risk management practices that will incentivize them to use those technologies.”
And as the demand for food crops grows, Stamoulis says the time to invest in farmers is now. 【254】
【Obstacle】
Human intelligence Cleverer still Geniuses are getting brighter. And at genius levels of IQ, girls are not as far behind boys as they used to be Dec 22nd 2012 [attachimg=595,335]112107[/attachimg] SCIENCE has few more controversial topics than human intelligence—in particular, whether variations in it are a result of nature or nurture, and especially whether such variations differ between the sexes. The mines in this field can blow up an entire career, as Larry Summers found out in 2005 when he spoke of the hypothesis that the mathematical aptitude needed for physics and engineering, as well as for maths itself, is innately rarer in women than in men. He resigned as president of Harvard University shortly afterwards.
It is bold, therefore, of Jonathan Wai, Martha Putallaz and Matthew Makel, of Duke University in North Carolina, to enter the fray with a paper that addresses both questions. In this paper, just published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, they describe how they sifted through nearly three decades of standardised tests administered to American high-school students to see what had been happening to the country’s brightest sparks.
They draw two conclusions. One is that a phenomenon called the Flynn effect (which weighs on the “nurture” side of the scales because it describes how IQ scores in general have been rising over the decades) applies in particular to the brightest of the bright. The other is that part, but not all, of the historic difference between the brainiest men and women has vanished.
The three researchers drew their data from Duke University’s Talent Identification Programme, TIP, which is designed to ferret out especially clever candidates early on: all the participants had scored in the top 5% of ability when confronted with exams designed for much older students. TIP, in turn, draws on three national exams: SAT, EXPLORE and ACT. Altogether, Dr Wai, Dr Putallaz and Dr Makel looked at data from 1.7m children. Those data spanned the years between 1981 and 2010.
In the general population boys are well known to do a bit better than girls in maths. Girls, in turn, edge out boys on tests of verbal reasoning. The result is similar overall IQ scores. Among the best young mathematical brains, however, that equality does not pertain. Here, boys do a lot better at maths than girls—but less better than they used to, as the researchers discovered.
In the early 1980s, the ratio of males to females in the top 0.01% of maths scores in SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, was around 13 to 1. By the early 1990s it had fallen to four to one. After this, however, it remained obstinately unaltered (see chart). The other two tests, both of which post-date the period in which the SAT shows those huge changes, indicate less lopsided sex ratios of between two and three to one. But neither shows girls making much recent progress towards equality. [attachimg=290,281]112108[/attachimg] Nurturing talent
This study is not perfect. Its most interesting result rests on data from just one of the three sets of exams it looked at and its sample sizes are, necessarily, small. But it chimes with the findings of a much older investigation, carried out in 1983 by a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University, which also discovered a male-to-female sex ratio of 13:1 among the most able young mathematicians.
Why a dramatic rise in the aptitude of America’s brightest young female mathematicians should then be followed by two decades of stagnation is not obvious, and, not being experts in mine-clearance, the researchers offer no hypothesis. It is clear that the rise itself must be “nurture” of some sort—possibly a change in teachers’ attitudes towards girls who are interested in maths—but the subsequent stasis could have either explanation. A line of reasoning in favour of “nature” is that put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University. This connects the extreme systematising patterns of thought which make a good mathematician with the preponderance of men among those with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that does not harm a person’s general intelligence. But the disparity could equally well be the result of some as-yet-unelucidated difference between the ways girls and boys are brought up.
The nature of the beast
That such unelucidated environmental influences can have real effects on IQ is eloquently illustrated by the Flynn effect. This phenomenon, brought to the world’s attention in the 1980s by James Flynn of the University of Otago, in New Zealand, is that average IQs around the world have been rising at the rate of 0.3 points a year for the past eight decades. Using the TIP data, Dr Wai and his colleagues showed that this is as true of the brightest youngsters in American society as it is of lesser mortals, suggesting that even they can have their abilities boosted by whatever is causing the Flynn effect. Once again, the changes seem to be mainly in mathematics. Scores in the brightest children’s verbal-reasoning and reading abilities demonstrate no clear trend, but all three national tests show sustained improvements in their mathematical ability over the past three decades.
No one knows what causes the Flynn effect. Theories range from better nutrition, via a more stimulating general environment (thanks to such things as television, radio, the internet and video games), to the phasing out of lead in petrol and paint. What is clear is that it cannot be a change in gene-given ability, which is what most people mean by “nature” in this debate, because too few generations have passed for natural selection to have had any meaningful impact. 【905】
【Christmas Gift】 Monkey brain area keeps count of kindnesses The primates have an altruistic 'tally chart' that keeps track of social rewards and gifts. Becky Summers 23 December 2012 [attachimg=374,435]112109[/attachimg] Monkeys might not be known for their generosity, but when they do seem to act selflessly, a specific area in their brains keeps track of these kindnesses.
The discovery of this neuronal tally chart may help scientists to understand the neural mechanisms underlying normal social behaviour in primates and humans, and might even provide insight into disorders such as autism, in which social processing is disrupted.
Steve Chang and his colleagues from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, used electrodes to directly record neuronal activity in three areas of the brain prefrontal cortex that are known to be involved in social decision-making, while monkeys performed reward-related tasks.
When given the option either to drink juice from a tube themselves or to give the juice away to a neighbour, the test monkeys would mostly keep the drink. But when the choice was between giving the juice to the neighbour or neither monkey receiving it, the choosing monkey would frequently opt to give the drink to the other monkey.
The researchers found that in two out of the three brain areas being recorded, neurons fired in the presence or absence of the juice reward only. By contrast, the third area — known as the anterior cingulate gyrus — responded only when the monkey allocated the juice to the neighbour and observed it being received. The authors suggest the neurons in the ACG respond to and record the act simultaneously. The study's results are published today in Nature Neuroscience1. “This is the first time that we have had quite such a complete picture of the neuronal activity underlying a key aspect of social cognition. It is definitely a major achievement,” says Matthew Rushworth, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK.
The anterior cingulate gyrus is known to be a region that is specialized for social decision-making in primates, and it is located in the same area of the brain as that associated with the generation of feelings of empathy in humans.
Being nice
“The great complexity of human social interactions and the huge variation in what we find rewarding compared with other primates prompts questions about whether the anterior cingulate gyrus operates similarly in the human brain,” Matthew Apps and Narender Ramnani, who work on neuroimaging and human cognition at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, told Nature in an email.
Through the development of a specific part of the brain that experiences the reward of others, social decisions and empathy-like processes may have been favoured during evolution in primates to allow altruistic behaviour. “This may have evolved originally to promote being nice to family, since they share genes, and later friends, for reciprocal benefits,” says Michael Platt, a neuroscientist from Duke University who is a co-author of the paper.
The authors suggest that the intricate balance between the signalling of neurons in these three brain regions may be crucial for normal social behaviour in humans, and that disruption may contribute to various psychiatric conditions, including autistic spectrum disorders. 【541】作者: 2012Michelle 时间: 2012-12-24 23:25
沙发自己占！
来作业了，不过速度没有写回忆，偷懒了。
【12-5】 Time1-1'28" Time2-1'13" Time3-1'18" Time4-1'27" Time5-1'23" Obstacle 4'45" Main Idea: Human intelligence has changed its ability level between women and men in the past decades. Author attitude: Neutral Artical structure: 1) Research back ground introduction. 2) Main finding in the research: -- Flynn effect -- historic difference between women and men. -- Use examples to explain the new findings in the research. 3) Conclusion: the human intelligence in women has increased more than men, and the general level has also increased. Additional reading: 2'52"作者: yangreat 时间: 2012-12-24 23:25
哇！感谢！作者: 涂涂Claire 时间: 2012-12-25 00:02
哦~~又有作业做了~~大米是假扮圣诞老人么？半夜发作业给大家~~
————————————————————————交作业———————————————————————— Time 1: 2'10" NASA has a new technology breakthrough, it seems human being is one step close to multi-planet species. Time 2: 1'17" New OC is building with higher speed and maned, inspiring the next generation astronauts. There are also other new crafts is in processing. Time 3: 1'33" Climate change make the people leave the area suffer from flood, drought and temperature increase. They tend to migrant from rural to urban to make a living. But those people not able to migrant were the ultimate victim. Time 4+Time 5: 3'08" Researchers study the actual change in food demand and supply, country by country, and set up a map to show the details according to the data set.
Obstacle: 7'14" Human intelligence always along with the contradiction between nature and nurture, especially on the gender difference. The man pointed out the aptitude difference between boys and girls in math become the headmaster of Harvard. Three people began to conduct experiment and come up with two conclusion. 1. Flynn Effect and 2 boys better than girls but not than before. The challenge about the experiment in sample size, but other experiment draw similar conclusion. Flynn effect illustrated the nurture influence in IQ, but how to explain Flynn effect is still not sure.作者: miffyhui 时间: 2012-12-25 07:43
1'08" 58" 1'25" 1'15" 1'07" 4'42" 2'15"作者: 铁板神猴 时间: 2012-12-25 09:11
我比较喜欢“科技”话题诶~ 不过……猴子饮水图好搓啊…………
今天补一下前两天作业，占了明天来读哈~ 多谢大米姐^^ Merry Christmas! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- the monkey article is even a christmas gift! haha~ 1'18'' 1'14'' 1'22'' 1'20'' 1'14''
5'10'' 2'50''作者: 263602973 时间: 2012-12-25 09:26
1‘31 an American private space flight development would benefit to the American space program innovation. 1'39 the obstacles of space program development.(没记住重点……） 1'45 the migrant because of climate change increasing recently, from rural to city, some example to improve the hypothesis. 2'13 some main kinds of food plant yields decreasing, or not increasing in a same pace with the population increasing 1'43 the map of crops yield have been made and expected to be used in the farming in the future.
8'23 human intellegence research,focus on the difference in IQ of all human beings between several decades and the difference between girls and boys, and all of these can be explained by the Flynn Effect.作者: 阿菜hrf 时间: 2012-12-25 10:15
感谢大米的平安夜礼包！祝圣诞快乐！ 59'' 51'' 1'06'' 50'' 58''速度略微有些简单啊 6‘28'' 越障有点晕，没抓住结构啊作者: frankiepn 时间: 2012-12-25 10:41
1'34 1'25 1'37 1'35 1'28 obstacle5'34作者: alun1987 时间: 2012-12-25 12:17
科技文大好，圣诞快乐吖~~！
1'10 1'19 1'19 1'30 1'10
越障： Main idea: A study finds that girls who have high IQ do better on mathematics than they used to.
Details about the study: >>Generate data from three national test scores, aiming at measuring the ability of mathematics, verbal reasoning and reading comprehension. >>From 1980s to 2010s >>The most brightest 5% youngsters in America, divided by boys and girls
Findings: >>Flynn effect >>Among the brightest ones, boys perform much better than girls in Maths, but the gap have been curtailed drastically.
Reason analysis: >>Flynn Effect——average IQ has increased May be better nutrition, the developed technological environment... >>Dramatic rise in young female mathematicians May be the change in attitudes of teachers towards girls, but it could have either explanations.
Conclusion(?): Flynn Effect seems to be related to the increasing average IQ, but the reason of the effect is still unknown. In addition, the significant improvment in Maths ability cannot be explained clearly by this effect（感觉完全理解错了……）作者: forazure 时间: 2012-12-25 12:33
【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障12系列】【12-5】科技
[出勤次数：18(5 of S12) 连续出勤次数：9]
Speed: 1. Word: 250 Time: 1’58” Rapiddevelopment of private Space Flight and its far-reaching meaning 2. Word: 228 Time: 1’56” Severalprojects aiming at this field 3. Word: 279 Time: 2’45” Environmentalchange leads to more migration concerns. 4. Word: 260 Time: 2’ Thedemand for food crops is growing, but experts say the world’s harvests are notkeeping pace. 5. Word: 254 Time: 2’ Countyby county – Maps significance || Good news || To invest more …
Obstacle: Word: 905 Time:7’47” Main Idea: Introduction of a new paperconcerning whether variations in it are a result of nature or nurture, andespecially whether such variations differ between the sexes. Author'sattitude: Neutral作者: xiaod265 时间: 2012-12-25 17:51
错过了整整一个11系列，又回来了。之前看了“如何练习阅读小分队？”的讨论，觉得自己之前在做10系列的时候，真真的没有抓住阅读小分队的精髓，所以，这次，决不能只是简单的计时打卡，用中文简单的总总越障了！就像大米在讨论里说的“不管是速度练习还是越障练习，对文章的把握是首要的，而不是跟别人比速度。读完每一段问问自己是不是真的看懂了？看懂了多少？”Anything worth doing, worth doing well!
Time1: 130 words/min The first private craft will be docked to the ISS, with the help from some authority in US, signaling that the scoop of human activity will be enlarged.
Time2: 129 words/min Several measures about private space craft are proceeding.And some companies have planed their own products about space craft, and secured by NASA.
Time3: 152 words/min Stating a status quo about mirgation in mostly areas, and pointing out, among reasons of migration, the environment is a mainly force to human being.
Time4: 137 words/min While the population in increasing, the yields of crop, such as grain, wheat, and soybean, in the worldwide are stagnating even decreasing.That is the crop yields are not keep up with demand in the near future.
Time5：154 words/min Specilaist are doing a study to get to know the basic informations about where the crop yields are not increasing so that they can find solutions to improve the yields and invest to the crops grow.
Obstacle: 133 words/min Mainly talking about the human intelligence variations from sex. At begining, author state some commonsense in civic mind. Then, author examplifies several studys by researcher and their conclusion, citing a new issue: nature or nurture. And then, the articla mainly cited the studies' outcome and to answer the issue. In the end, summarizing the consequences by study, the artical did not conclude a clear conclusion, actually.作者: annaliang2008 时间: 2012-12-25 20:35
1'33 1'30 2'00 2'04 1'32 6'53 main idea:the topic-IQ and gender,then sited a research to show that boys are better in math, and girls are better in verbal, but boys show a decreas trend in math compare with several years ago,and the researcher can not find the reason, girls have improverment in math 3'47作者: zhaobingd 时间: 2012-12-25 21:56
2‘32 2’15 2‘26 2’01 1‘57 7’37作者: pirate舟 时间: 2012-12-26 12:17
2‘04 1’26 1‘59 1’53 1‘17
7'03作者: 特里凡得琅 时间: 2012-12-28 07:05
1'55 Dragon Capsule lauched, which is the first private lauch in the world It is a good start for humanity to be a multi-planet species
1'53 NASA is developing a new space plan,including Orion Capsule Interests in NASA plan has growing US companies like Boeing,Sierra also involved in the plan
1'32 Environmental migration is growing Mr Mcdam reveals that the migration is often occured in the countriy. Example, In Dhaka, people move to city since the heavy flood make them difficult to live in the villages.
2'03 the increase of crop yields did not catch up with increase of population of the world.
1'35 Reseachers has made a map to know where the crops increase or not country by country It is just a start, they wand to know what shall be done in the places where the crop doesn't increase Concerned U. N officer said that the investment in agriculture is much more required right now
Obstacle 6'29作者: ENJ0Y 时间: 2012-12-28 15:06
thx a lot and a late merry christmas~~~
Difference between sexes leads to a phenomenon-male gets high scores in math than female.
2 conclusion: 1, Flynn effect. 2, historic difference between male and female.
1980-2010, 1.7m students: maths man>woman but 程度低了 verbal woman>man top 0.01% in math score 1980: 13:1 1990: 4:1
圣诞礼物 关于猴哥的
3:50, 541
two tests: 1, drink juice itself/give away to neighbour->drink 2, give juice to neighbour/neither receive it->give juice to other
conclusion: like human, monkey have altruistic behavior.作者: zycooper 时间: 2013-1-3 16:17
1:30 250 a craft which could carry cargo and crew to space after the old shuffles were retired had been launched into the space. And then the designer who also work for NASA talked about it.A private company made this craft and this kind of craft will help the development of exploring the outspace. 1:20 228 some kinds of new crafts are disscuessed in the passage. 1:44 279 an envrionment-change-cause migration is presented in the passage and a professor talked about it with pointing the reason of this phenomenon.employ a example that the horrible envrionment condition made it different to maintain a farm in india. 1:22 260 a crisis of food chain is around the corner.And a professor talked about it and analysis this crisis. 1:19 254 不知道咋回事走神了。。考试的时候最怕这了！！！
obstacle 905 6:01 this passage talks about two conclusions accroding to a study. the report shows that the bias in mathematics between males and females is becoming smaller and smaller but still exist. and the author employs some data to explains some gaps among other areas such as reading and comprehesion.
christmas gift---- danke 541 words 3:01 this passage talks about a study between a specific area in monkeys' brains and the monkeys' behavior. tha author employs some data and quotes some researches to explains this finding.
