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亲爱的GMATer 们：
最近复习逻辑，发现自己想啊想的有很多题都想不通。
通常就是发一个题在帖子上半天才会有回应，并且讨论的积极性不太高。
要是有这样一个讨论小组，并且每天监督就好了，几个人一起讨论，不同的意见来帮助大家提高就好了。
怎么讨论呢“？
就是各自把自己的复习中遇到的迷惑的觉得讲不通的题，拿出来大家一起研究，每天固定个时间，讨论个一两个难题怪题。
相信多讨论一些，会对逻辑有新的看法，对GMAT 的出题思维也会新的认识。
真心求讨论队友，真心想跟战友共同进步。有意者留言，可建群或在线讨论。。
Official weibo: http://weibo.com/u/3476904471
Article 1
Who Has The Right To Know Where Your Phone Has Been?
[Rephrase 1]
[Dialog, 4:00]
Transcript
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=241415668
Source: NPR
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/29/241415668/who-has-the-right-to-know-where-your-phone-has-been
Part II: speed
Article 2
First There Was IQ. Then EQ.
But Does CQ — Creative Intelligence — Matter Most?
In his new book Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum argues that creativity is an undervalued skill that anyone can cultivate. Not just for artists and musicians, creative intelligence (or CQ) is the secret sauce that separates winners and losers in business too.
[Time 2]
In his new book Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum argues that creativity is an undervalued skill that anyone can cultivate. Not just for artists and musicians, he argues, creative intelligence — or CQ for short — is what separates the winners and losers of the business world as well. The author, a professor at Parsons The New School for Design in New York, recently spent a few minutes explaining how each of us can go about cultivating our own CQ.
What is creative intelligence?
Taking original ideas and scaling them into the creation of new products and services. I really believe that we are all born with a capacity to be creative, and we get it beat out of us in a lot of the schools that we go to. We have to relearn it, and it’s not that hard.
How can we be more creative?
Creativity is all about making connections and seeing patterns. It’s not a light bulb that goes off in your head. Before that light bulb goes off, lots of things are happening. Lots of ideas. We need time to step back and make connections between those things. We need to stop being hyper connected and deliberately take a moment to be mindful about what we’re doing.
People often associate creativity with solo artists, but you argue that collaboration fosters creativity more often than working alone. How so?
Creativity is social. When you read books about creativity today, the narrative of creativity is that it is a brain function or it’s a genius thing. It is rare and comes out of the individual. But when you look at almost all the innovations that are meaningful in our lives today, like Facebook and Google, they’re all done by two or three people. All the innovators have a buddy.
[311words]
[Time 3]
Yahoo recently announced a controversial ban on working from home on the grounds that being physically together improves speed and quality. Does this argument hold water?
Creativity comes out of small teams of twos and threes and fours and fives and sixes. That’s quite different from having thousands and thousands of people in the same place at the same time. You can also put technology in people’s homes that allows them to communicate with small teams to be social and creative. It’s probably not really required to have everyone in the office, but you do need certain people interacting.
Why don’t old-fashioned brainstorming sessions work for generating new ideas in companies?
When you go to a lot of brainstorming sessions, you have people throwing ideas out that have absolutely no relation to the specific topic at hand. In these kinds of environments, people hold back their best ideas. They’re not going to share it with strangers. It doesn’t work. Instead you need “magic circles,” small teams of people who trust each other, are familiar with each other, and play together. That’s where you get some really great originality that has value.
You cite Groupon as an example of a creative company, thanks to its popular daily deal strategy, but it just fired its CEO amid big losses. What gives?
People were saying, “Give me 50% off, sure.” But whether they go back again and again is something very different. It turned out people didn’t want to do that. Groupon seems to have plateaued at a certain level, and it’s possible that they can’t go beyond that level. It’s still a successfully creative company. It just means that it’s a company that’s not going to grow all that much larger, and its stock price isn’t going to go much higher.
[331 words]
[Time 4]
What is the “economy of creativity” and why do we need to pay more attention to that instead of mere efficiency?
The true source of economic activity is creativity. It’s coming up with new things that give us fat profits. That is more beneficial to shareholders in the long run, generates more jobs, and is better for all of us than an economy based on efficiency. We should go back to the origins of capitalism and accept the fact that creativity is the source of economic value and creativity drives capitalism.
Dell became a top PC maker because of its efficiency. Now it’s struggling. Did putting efficiency first compromise its creativity?
No. The great creative model of Dell was its efficiency. It was brilliant. Just go online and you could create your own computer, made to order. It was wildly successful until it wasn’t. I think it’s failing because it doesn’t allow you to create the products you want to create today. No one wants to create a computer any more.
They don’t realize that their creative model wasn’t about computers. It was about everything. If they allowed us to put together the things we wanted to put together, like an iPhone or another smart phone, it would be wildly successful. They think they are a computer company, and they’re not. They’re a creative assembly company.
What’s the best way to get out of a creative rut?
Find a creative friend to play with either at work or outside work. Read my book. Travel. See something that’s dramatically different and think about it. Disconnect every day for 20 minutes and think about what you’re doing and how you can do it better. Think about your creativity and then go back in.
[317 words]
Source: Time
http://business.time.com/2013/03/05/first-there-was-iq-then-eq-but-does-cq-creative-intelligence-matter-most/#ixzz2j7kxOUFq
Article 3
Robot recruiters
How software helps firms hire workers more efficiently
[Time 5]
The problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. In the case of hiring American workers who toil by the hour, number-crunching has uncovered some surprising correlations.
For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.
It could just be coincidence, but some analysts think that people who bother to install a new browser may be the sort who take the time to reach informed decisions. Such people should be better employees. Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, pored over nearly 3m data points from more than 30,000 employees to find this nugget.
Some 60% of American workers earn hourly wages. Of these, about half change jobs each year. So firms that employ lots of unskilled workers, such as supermarkets and fast-food chains, have to vet heaps—sometimes millions—of applications every year. Making the process more efficient could yield big payoffs.
[230 words]
[Time 6]
Evolve mines mountains of data. If a client operates call centers, for example, Evolv keeps daily tabs on such things as how long each employee takes to answer a customer’s query. It then relates actual performance to traits that were visible during recruitment.
Some insights are counter-intuitive. For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better. Likewise, many HR departments automatically eliminate candidates who have hopped from job to job. But a recent analysis of 100,000 call-center workers showed that those who had job-hopped in the past were no more likely to quit quickly than those who had not.
Working with Xerox, a maker of printers, Evolv found that one of the best predictors that a customer-service employee will stick with a job is that he lives nearby and can get to work easily. These and other findings helped Xerox cut attrition by a fifth in a pilot programme that has since been extended. It also found that workers who had joined one or two social networks tended to stay in a job for longer. Those who belonged to four or more social networks did not.
There is no point asking job-seekers if they are honest. But surveys can measure honesty indirectly, by asking questions like “How good at computers are you?” and later: “What does control-V do on a word-processing programme?” A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople.
Algorithms and big data are powerful tools. Wisely used, they can help match the right people with the right jobs. But they must be designed and used by humans, so they can go horribly wrong. Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business recalls a case where the software rejected every one of many good applicants for a job because the firm in question had specified that they must have held a particular job title—one that existed at no other company.
[376 words]
Source ：Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21575820-how-software-helps-firms-hire-workers-more-efficiently-robot-recruiters
Article 4
Impress Your Foreign Boss
[Paraphrase 7]
Enrique Llamas couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Lacking confidence? Not a team player? Not willing to contribute to group discussions? Enrique had thought he was all of those things. So why did he receive such a negative performance evaluation? Enrique felt hurt by the news and wanted to figure out where things could have gone wrong.
Enrique had started his job as a consultant at a firm in Houston, Texas, a few months earlier and was very keen on making a positive impression with his superiors. But this was Enrique’s first experience working abroad, and he wasn’t entirely sure how to do that. In Mexico, where Enrique was from, he knew exactly what to do. To succeed, a young consultant should get along with others, do good work, and respect his boss. Enrique figured that the same things mattered in the U.S., so that’s what he did. He worked long hours and made sure that his work was top quality. Interestingly, that did not seem to be a problem in his performance review.
What was a problem, however, was the fact that he was not a “team player” and was “unwilling to contribute in team discussions.” That was only partially true, Enrique thought. With peers, he was quite willing and able to participate, but when his boss and his boss’s boss were in the room, Enrique did what he would have done in Mexico: let his superiors guide the meeting and be available to help or contribute if asked. Enrique was very concerned about this negative evaluation and was also highly motivated to succeed. What could he do to improve things going forward?
If you think that it’s hard to impress your boss in your native culture, imagine what it’s like in a different culture where the way you’d naturally make a positive impression falls flat. That was certainly the case for Enrique and is also the case for hundreds of thousands of professionals in the world who work for bosses with very different expectations for how to make a positive impression. Consider, for example, the case of an employee from China working for a Brazilian manager in Brazil. In China, employees are typically valued for their formality, reserve, and self-control, but in Brazil, it would be close to the opposite. The Brazilian professional culture is quite informal and emotionally expressive. People will typically call each other by their first name at work and often by their nicknames. This is true with colleagues and even with bosses. In many Brazilian companies, there is little formal protocol, and the atmosphere is light and casual, often with a great deal of joking among colleagues. So, imagine someone from China trying to get to know and ultimately impress her Brazilian boss — and how challenging it might be to make this switch.
So how do you impress a foreign boss? The good news is that you start with what you’d typically do in your native culture: do great work, show loyalty to your boss and to the organization, and help your boss accomplish his or her professional goals. The challenging part, however, is that the way in which you accomplish each of these tasks can vary quite significantly across cultures. For example, “doing great work” in some cultures can mean listening carefully to what your boss tells you to do and then performing a given task in a very precise and accurate manner. In other cultures, it might mean something completely different, like taking the initiative, volunteering for assignments, thinking outside of the box, and being an independent producer that your boss can always count on. You can see how these different images of effectiveness can be in great conflict. So, the first key piece of advice when trying to impress a foreign boss is to step outside of your own cultural comfort zone and work hard to learn how to impress in the local context you’re in.
The second piece of advice is to get to know your boss. Not all foreign bosses are the same. That should be obvious, but it’s something people often overlook in a foreign culture because they are blinded by the most obvious difference — national culture — when the reality is that many other differences matter as well. For example, regional culture can play an important role in determining your boss’s expectations. What impresses in Manhattan may not necessarily impress in Sioux City, Iowa. Industry culture matters as well. What impresses at Morgan Stanley might not necessarily impress at Facebook or Caterpillar, or at that small advertising agency down the road. Finally, personal experience also matters a great deal in determining a boss’s expectations.
Imagine two American bosses: one, a “local” who grew up in the United States, speaks only English, and who has spent his entire career working for American companies; and the second, a “cosmopolitan,” who lived and worked for a decade in Asia, and possesses a strong working knowledge of Mandarin. Do you think these two would necessarily have the same expectations of a foreign-born worker trying to impress?
When impressing a foreign boss, the devil is in the details. Don’t underestimate cultural differences, but also don’t be blinded by them. Consult with colleagues, find a cultural mentor, and do your own careful observations. In short, customize to your context, and your work will pay dividends in any cultural environment.
[938words]
Source：Hbr-global
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/05/impressing-your-foreign-boss/
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发表于 2013-7-9 23:21:25
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