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【社会科学-科技】 Technology and Jobs （472字 精读 必做篇）
INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.
For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. The millions freed from the land were not consigned to joblessness, but found better-paid work as the economy grew more sophisticated. Today the pool of secretaries has shrunk, but there are ever more computer programmers and web designers.
Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits. Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.
Why be worried? It is partly just a matter of history repeating itself. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital; later on, labour reaped most of the benefits. The pattern today is similar. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.
Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets, innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.
Source: The Economist
【社会科学-科技】 Lung Cancer Screen Could Be Easy-pee-sy （530字 3分25秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Imagine getting screened for early-stage lung cancer simply by taking a deep breath from an inhaler, and then peeing into a cup.
Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor of health sciences and engineering at M.I.T., described how that might be possible in a TED talk she gave in 2016:
“What if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself, and send a signal to the outside world? It sounds a little bit like science fiction. But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that.”
Bhatia’s idea was to invent non-toxic nanoprobes that doctors could put inside your blood or lungs or gut to detect tiny tumors, when they’re easier to treat, before they grow big enough to spread throughout the body and damage vital organs.
“I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip.”
In 2017. Bhatia’s team reported a proof-of-concept experiment in Nature Biomedical Engineering that demonstrated nanoprobes like this working to detect early-stage ovarian cancer in mice.
And now the group has refined this technology further to create a screening test for lung cancer that is more sensitive than the CT scans used today. The team of Harvard and M.I.T. researchers described their work in the April 1st issue of Science Translational Medicine.
Lung cancer accounts for nearly a quarter of all cancer deaths in the U.S. each year, in large part because most cases of lung cancer are not caught until after the disease has already spread to other sites.
Yet when lung cancer is caught and treated early, the majority of patients survive the disease for at least five years. But CT screening for lung cancer is not widely used around the world because it’s expensive and more than 90 percent of positive tests turn out to be benign growths, not cancer. So this kind of screening leads to a lot of unnecessary and invasive biopsies.
In Bhatia’s study, which was done on mice genetically engineered to develop lung tumors very similar to those seen in people, the nanoprobes were able to detect tumors about 50 times smaller than other screening methods. And it produced no false positives.
The nanoprobes are designed to release reporter molecules when they come near certain kinds of lung tumors. Once released, the reporters pass into the blood, get filtered out by the kidneys, and then exit the body in the urine.
The group is now working to repackage the nanoprobes into a form that could be inhaled as a powder or through a nebulizer. If that succeeds, then the technology will have to proceed through several years of clinical trials before it could be used to screen people for lung cancer.
“And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they’ve started growing…and that this would lead to earlier treatments and that we could save more lives than we can today with early detection.”
Source: Scientific American
【社会科学-科技】 Could Air Conditioners Help Cool the Planet？ （240字 1分38秒 精听 选做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Air-conditioning and fans account for a full 10 percent of the world's electricity usage. Or to put it in another way, "It's a lot of air you pump around."
Roland Dittmeyer, a chemical engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Another thing that takes a lot of pumping air around, he says? Carbon capture, "because the concentration of the CO2 in air is evidently quite low." Even though it’s enough to cause climate change, it’s only 400 parts per million.
So, he says, why not retrofit air conditioners with modules that capture carbon? Several companies already make materials that strip carbon dioxide from the air. You'd then need to convert that captured CO2 into hydrocarbons—an energy-intensive process. But Dittmeyer's vision is that we'd use clean, carbon-free renewable energy to power that step.
Do this on a large enough scale and you could produce significant amounts of this synthetic, renewable oil. Dittmeyer and his colleagues calculated that if you outfitted the AC system of the Fair Tower, a large skyscraper in Frankfurt, with these carbon-capture devices, the building’s units alone could produce an estimated 15,000 barrels of synthetic oil a year.
The full write-up, in the journal Nature Communications, is called "Crowd oil, not crude oil."
If the idea gets traction, it could transform the devices that cool our homes and offices into machines that help cool the planet—or at least stop warming it up while chilling us down.
Source: Scientific American
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-5-22 22:28:31
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