【每日阅读训练——速度4系列】【速度4-3】&【越障4-3】

daisyの小夢想

4系列~~ 继续往上爬爬爬~~


每日阅读汇总贴 http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_RC/thread-562296-1-1.html
逻辑姊妹篇：http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_CR/thread-580862-1-1.html


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At America's Best Workplaces, Good Design Reigns Supreme
If you’re a chief executive today, odds are your mind is on talent and corporate culture. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2011 Annual Global CEO Survey, attracting and retaining talent is “at the top of the agenda” for execs everywhere. The global war for talent was a hot topic this year at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos.
One critical component of corporate culture is a company’s workplace—its physical environment for its treasured talent. Yet most CEOs ignore, overlook, or just don’t get that.
We at Kahler Slater, a global design enterprise, set out to study the physical environments of the Best Companies to Work For in America: 150 organizations, small, medium, and large, recognized by the Great Place toWork Institute. (Our own enterprise is proud to have been among them for seven years running.) These best companies are unsurpassed in attracting and retaining talent and in financial performance—and our research found that they reinforce their cultures in their physical environments. The way they do so shows four common characteristics. Here are those characteristics, presented in the form of questions to ask yourself about your own workplace:
1. Is there external and internal brand alignment?
The most successful brands are more than sets of products or services. They are experiences born of an emotional engagement between a company and its customers. At the best companies that experience is also expressed internally. For employees, the dots connect. The brand is aligned internally and externally.
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At Mattel, for example, where “play” is the toymaker’s brand, employees shuttle between buildings in a Hot Wheels van and showcase their favorite toys in their personal workspace. At Cascade Asset Management, an environmentally minded recycler of computer components, sustainability reigns supreme, from a wholly green headquarters to employee nameplates handmade from recycled computer pieces. And at JM Family Enterprises, a top owner of Toyota dealerships, the corporate campus bows to Japanese culture, with Japanese gardens, architecture, and artifacts.
2. Is the spirit of your culture visible?
Through countless choices, both big (office location) and small (interior signage), the spirit of a company’s culture lies in plain sight. At the best companies that spirit starts with first impressions—often from the outside in—and stays clear and consistent throughout the work environment.
For instance, Genentech, the biotech giant, has its South San Francisco headquarters on DNA Way, a nod to the company’s roots in genetic research, and outdoor banners there put human faces on lives changed by the work of Genentech employees. At Dixon Schwabl, a full-service ad agency, the playful company culture is displayed by a cool slide connecting two office floors. (For many years, the agency also had a padded Primal Scream Room, for conquering creative blocks.) And at the online retailer Zappos the open, non-hierarchical culture insists on cubicles for everyone—from Call Center reps to the CEO—and the “fun and a little weird” workspaces convey true individuality.
3. Are there gathering spaces for celebrating and building camaraderie?
There is no corporate culture without community, without people coming together to connect, celebrate, and create a spirit of camaraderie. At the best companies, gathering spaces are fundamental, just as is a town square in a village or a student union on a college campus. Some companies have large spaces, ideal for all hands meetings, while others have smaller spaces, adaptable and multifunctional.
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At Ultimate Software a basketball court now occupies the H.R. software leader’s atrium lobby, the result of a wager won when employees met a mega sales goal set by their sports-minded CEO. (The “UltiCourt” also serves as a lobby and reception area and is a favorite spot for company-wide gatherings.) Sage Products, a health care manufacturer, built a large indoor and outdoor café to hold gatherings that bridge its business and manufacturing groups to bring all the employees together as one “family.” And at McWhinney, a real estate development company, an adjacent nature preserve has inspired the creation of a stunning outdoor gathering space, complete with grills for celebratory cookouts.
4. Is there visual storytelling that evokes pride and engages and recognizes people?
Visual storytelling is a powerful tool. At the best companies, environmental branding evokes company pride, engages and recognizes employees, and expands on the cultural narrative.
For instance, at Rackspace, a cloud computing company, employees created the world’s largest word-search puzzle—certified by Guinness World Records—to highlight the firm’s values on a grand scale. At Sherwin-Williams, the paints and coatings giant, a museum-style tour of the company’s history graces the headquarters lobby, recognizing employees through the decades for their innovations and accomplishments. And at SnagAJob.com, a leading job site for hourly workers, the organization’s clearly defined core values (such as “Collaborative means checking our egos at the door”) appear on brightly colored, carefully placed signs. They are vibrant visual cues for employees on what it really means to walk the talk.
So, does your workplace fully reflect and reinforce your company’s culture? As long as you’ve got talent on your mind, you should—and must—get physical.
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From Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2011/07/15/at-americas-best-workplaces-good-design-reigns-supreme/


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Learn to 'Do the Right Thing' for Your Startup


Did you ever wonder how a new entrepreneur knows how to “do the right thing” for his business? Most experts believe that the essence of doing the right thing is ethics. Translating that into business value, a study byWirthlin Worldwide concluded that 80% of customers still base a good portion of their buy decision on their perception of that firm’s ethics.
Ethics are generally defined as a set of societal standards that encompass the norms of the community. These norms are not genetic, and they have to be learned. At the base of these are moral values, but in my view most of the rest are gleaned from experience, parents, and formal education.
In the real world, the latest updates come from good business books, like the new one by David M. Shedd, “Build a Better B2B Business.” This one focuses on the generic attributes, as well as specific processes, which add up to the ethically right thing for most businesses.
The generics include integrity and honesty, as well as the above mentioned moral values. The specifics for business include providing leadership in building the business, but also in contributing to the greater good:
1.    Communicate your values and business goals. Doing the right thing for the business starts with defining core values. Then create business goals to tackle the few critical issues and opportunities for the business. To be effective, communication has to be two-way and continuous, to keep the “right thing” as “top of mind” for all team members.
2.    Align the organization to your values and goals. Ensure everyone is in alignment to live the values and focus on and execute the goals. Make the tough decisions to ensure the success and profitability of the business, and make the tough personnel decisions to put the right people in the right positions, giving them the training they need.
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3.    Manage priorities for the short-term as well as the long-term. Just as people must manage their personal and work responsibilities, so, too, must companies balance their priorities. Prioritize on the constraint in the business – that which is important, not on what is most urgent.
4.    Endeavor to beat, not meet, industry standards. Doing the right thing is not just “getting by,” or squeezing within the letter of the law. It means knowing and living by the spirit of the law, as well as not waiting for new laws and regulations to fix problems. The same is true of employee standards, and social responsibilities.
5.    Create winning teamwork. Leading people to do the right thing as a team is one of the most challenging things to teach and coach. Making a team work well requires constant communication, demonstrating accountability, ensuring motivation, recognition, and continual learning.
6.    Look at yourself from your customer’s perspective. The right thing is for every business leader to value every customer and realize the importance of each in building the business. Your appreciation of your customers and focus on delivering value to them is a pre-requisite to customer satisfaction, growth, and success.
7.    Balance work and life. We are all in business to be successful, but we are all people too. Another way to send a strong message about doing the right thing is to step up to the thorny “quality of life” issues, including balancing one’s work and personal life, work at home, and providing the right health, social, and spiritual needs.
Since ethical behavior is the base, the traits to foster this must always be sought out and nurtured. These traits include day-to-day work consciousness, enhanced discipline to foster a combined business and ethical acumen, and empathy for a high level of engagement. This insures that everyone is joined together, feeling a common imperative to do the right thing and make the right decisions.
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自由阅读
So don’t assume that “doing the right thing” comes naturally, and doesn’t require any effort. Yet the evidence indicates that a startup which consistently does the right thing has a competitive edge, and a higher success rate. Are you ready and willing to be the role model for the ethics of your team and your company?


From Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2011/05/17/learn-to-do-the-right-thing-for-your-startup/




Human beings and dogs
Man’s best friend
Scientific research throws new light on a very old partnership


THE relationship between people and dogs is unique. Among domesticated animals, only dogs are capable of performing such a wide variety of roles for humans: herding sheep, sniffing out drugs or explosives and being our beloved companions. It is hard to be precise about when the friendship began, but a reasonable guess is that it has been going strong for more than 20,000 years. In the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche region of France, which contains the earliest known cave paintings, there is a 50-metre trail of footprints made by a boy of about ten alongside those of a large canid that appears to be part-wolf, part-dog. The footprints, which have been dated by soot deposited from the torch the child was carrying, are estimated to be about 26,000 years old.


The first proto-dogs probably remained fairly isolated from each other for several thousand years. As they became progressively more domesticated they moved with people on large-scale migrations, mixing their genes with other similarly domesticated creatures and becoming increasingly dog-like (and less wolf-like) in the process. For John Bradshaw, a biologist who founded the anthrozoology department at the University of Bristol, having some idea about how dogs got to be dogs is the first stage towards gaining a better understanding of what dogs and people mean to each other. Part of his agenda is to explode the many myths about the closeness of dogs to wolves and the mistakes that this has led to, especially in the training of dogs over the past century or so.


One idea has governed dog training for far too long, Mr Bradshaw says. Wolf packs are supposedly despotic hierarchies dominated by alpha wolves. Dogs are believed to behave in the same way in their dealings with humans. Thus training a dog effectively becomes a contest for dominance in which there can be only one winner. To achieve this the trainer must use a variety of punishment techniques to gain the dog’s submission to his mastery. Just letting a dog pass through a door before you or stand on the stairs above you is to risk encouraging it to believe that it is getting the upper hand over you and the rest of the household. Mr Bradshaw argues that the theory behind this approach is based on bad and outdated science.


Dogs share 99.6% of the same DNA as wolves. That makes dogs closer to wolves than we are to chimps (with which we have about 96% of our DNA in common), but it does not mean that their brains work like those of wolves. Indeed, the outgoing affability of most dogs towards humans and other dogs is in sharp contrast to the mix of fear and aggression with which wolves react to animals from other packs. “Domestication has been a long and complex process,” Mr Bradshaw writes. “Every dog alive today is a product of this transition. What was once another one of the wild social canids, the grey wolf, has been altered radically, to the point that it has become its own unique animal.” If anything, dogs resemble juvenile rather than fully adult canids, a sort of arrested development which accounts for the way they remain dependent on their human owners throughout their lives.


But what makes the dog-wolf paradigm especially misleading, Mr Bradshaw argues, is that until recently, the studies of wolves were of the wrong wolves in extremely artificial conditions. In the wild, wolf packs tend to be made up of close family members representing up to three generations. The father and mother of the first lot of cubs are the natural leaders of the pack, but the behavioural norm is one of co-operation rather than domination and submission. However, the wolves on which biologists founded their conclusions about dominance hierarchies were animals living in unnaturally constituted groups in captivity. Mr Bradshaw says that feral or “village” dogs, which are much closer to the ancestors of pet dogs than they are to wolves, are highly tolerant of one another and organise themselves entirely differently from either wild or captive wolves.


Dogs are not like nicely brought-up wolves, says the author, nor are they much like people despite their extraordinary ability to enter our lives and our hearts. This is not to deny that some dogs are very clever or that they are capable of feeling emotion deeply. But their intelligence is different from ours. The idea that some dogs can understand as many words as a two-year-old child is simply wrong and an inappropriate way of trying to measure canine intellect. Rather, their emotional range is more limited than ours, partly because, with little sense of time, they are trapped almost entirely in the present. Dogs can experience joy, anxiety and anger. But emotions that demand a capacity for self-reflection, such as guilt or jealousy, are almost certainly beyond them, contrary to the convictions of many dog owners.
Mr Bradshaw believes that it is difficult for people to empathise with the way in which dogs experience and respond to the world through their extraordinary sense of smell: their sensitivity to odours is between 10,000 and 100,000 times greater than ours. A newly painted room might be torture for a dog; on the other hand, their olfactory ability and their trainability allow dogs to perform almost unimaginable feats, such as smelling the early stages of a cancer long before a normal medical diagnosis would detect it.


The latest scientific research can help dogs and their owners have happier, healthier relationships by encouraging people to understand dogs better. But Mr Bradshaw is also fearful. In particular, he deplores the incestuous narrowing of the gene pool that modern pedigree breeders have brought about. Dogs today are rarely bred for their working abilities (herding, hunting, guarding), but for a very particular type of appearance, which inevitably risks the spread of physical and temperamental abnormalities. Instead, he suggests that dogs be bred for the ideal behavioural traits associated with the role they will actually play. He also worries that the increasing urbanisation of society and the pressures on couples to work long hours are putting dogs under huge strain. He estimates that about 20% of Britain’s 8m dogs and America’s 70m suffer from “separation distress” when their owners leave the house, but argues that sensible training can teach them how to cope.


“Dog Sense” is neither a manual nor a sentimental account of the joys of dog-ownership. At times its rigorously research-led approach can be slightly heavy going. A few more jolly anecdotes might have leavened the mix. But this is a wonderfully informative, quietly passionate book that will benefit every dog whose owner reads it.


From the Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21525353

DREAMNENGNENG

很好的阅读材料
辛苦lz啦

裤裤melo

1.1:30
2.1:27
3.1:28
4.1:20
5.1:20

最近大家都要考试了吧~加油哦~~~

superbat28

mark下...休息下…然后继续我的modifier之旅。。

fox0923

我也要休息了，晚安了，大家，不对，是你们的午安~~明早头脑清醒了再看！

superbat28

80s
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sigh...

fox0923

67"
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喜欢第二篇速度，好多公司成功的例子哦。。。

fox0923

7‘50“

The dogs are one of the most beloved animals for human, but when has this started? This has to traced back to cave painting in France, it shows a boy and some proto-dogs.
At the beginning, the painting shows that the proto-dogs separate from human, and then gradually the dogs become less wolf like and get closer to human.
The Difference between wolf and dog
-Unlike wolves, the dogs can be separated and have masters. However, the wolves have to live together, most of them are spread to 3 generations. The dogs has 99.6% DNA as similar as wolves, but dogs' brains do not like wolves'. The wolfs like cooperative, the dogs can be trained, and human become their masters by using the special punishment corresponding to their behaviors. For example, the human can command the dog to pass by a door,etc..
-The dogs live in the village are pretty much likely the same as the pets than as the wolves.
The dogs' intelligence
-The dogs' intelligence are different from human, they are actually less intelligent than human although they might know the words better than children. They can only perceive the present things yet not the past things, but they can also show the emotions as well.
The dogs are endangered.
-Many dogs are trained and treated as home dogs, but they start to loss skills such as hunting, etc...This is not a good sign when people only choose them thru appearance, it will make dogs depressed. The research shows that 20% of dogs are depressed. Thus, the breed of dogs will be changed to artificial appearance than their original breeds.
Future:
- Dog owners should be more informative to understand dogs to benefit them more.

daisyの小夢想

76s
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嘻嘻 两篇速度都是AI的好素材啊 我特意挑的~~

9:06
about some wrong impression on dogs.
1. dogs are different from other domesticated animals. Their relationship with human is more close, and has been established since 20000years ago.
evidence: in the CC cave, the painting featuring a boy and a dog
2. P dogs are different from other types of dogs. After migration, their genes have been transformed and they gradually became dog-like.
3. JB is interested in what makes dog become dog-like.
a. Dogs resemble wolves at 99.6%. What makes dogs to be dogs?
b. but the knowledge that dogs should be punblished to be good and kind is wrong.
origin: wolves have clove family relationships. It's like a cooperation. The oldest is the leader. And the others listen to the leader.
So dogs are the same. example: village dogs can be extremely tolerant.
3. About intelligence.
The knowledge that some dogs can understand human beings as two-year-old babies do is wrong.
The intelligence of dogs are different from that of human.
And they can only feel three types of emotions.
4. about olfactory system
Dogs smelling ability makes them to be able to do a lot of things.
5. The significance of the research on dogs