【每日阅读训练——速度越障5系列】【5-13】

daisyの小夢想

A New Book on Stealing Rembrandts and Other Artworks
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FAITH LAPIDUS: I'm Faith Lapidus.
MARIO RITTER: And I'm Mario Ritter with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we learn about a famous stolen art case and visit the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. We also learn about a technology that uses human energy to power devices like cell phones and computers.
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FAITH LAPIDUS: Last month, a small drawing by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn was stolen from a hotel in southern California. The drawing was valued at more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The artwork mysteriously reappeared a few days later in a California church.
However, there are not always happy endings with other cases of stolen art.
In March of nineteen ninety, two men wearing police officer's clothing entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The men used handcuffs and tape to restrain security guards. The thieves stole thirteen artworks, including three by Rembrandt. The stolen pieces also included works from Johannes Vermeer, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.
The artworks were said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. None of them has ever been found. This remains the largest case of art theft in American history.
MARIO RITTER: Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg wrote a new book about the history of thefts of Rembrandt works. The book is called "Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists."
Mr. Amore is a security expert. He currently heads security and the theft investigation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Mr. Mashberg is an investigative reporter. Their book explores many interesting facts and stories about the world of art theft.
As part of his work on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum case, Mr. Amore says he began learning everything about Rembrandt thefts over the past century.
ANTHONY AMORE: "The first step was to research old police records, talk to federal agencies, look at old archived newspaper articles. And then, reach international organizations, Interpol and the rest. And then, through those, especially for older thefts that happened decades ago, I found that art thieves were willing to speak about what they had done."
FAITH LAPIDUS: Mr. Amore teamed up with Mr. Mashberg to write a book about the subject. Mr. Amore says they made interesting discoveries about art thieves in general.
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ANTHONY AMORE: "These guys were involved in all kinds of theft. They were also familiar with robbing things like banks or pharmacies, armored car robberies, home invasions."
FAITH LAPIDUS: Mr. Mashberg says they also discovered something interesting about Rembrandt works.
TOM MASHBERG: "And we were really shocked to discover that there had been eighty-one robberies involving Rembrandts in the last one hundred years. He left behind at least a thousand works in the United States, Europe, Canada, and other parts of the world. His name is so familiar even to the most common criminal."
FAITH LAPIDUS: Rembrandt is one of the most stolen artists of all time, second only to Pablo Picasso. Mr. Mashberg says the way art is shown openly in museums makes it easier to steal.
TOM MASHBERG: "When you go into a museum, you don't want to see armed guards everywhere. You don't want art to be behind Plexiglass and you don't want to hear alarms go off every time you get within a couple of feet of a famous painting."
MARIO RITTER: Art theft takes place more often than one might imagine. Mr. Mashberg and Mr. Amore tell about several thefts in their book. In one case, Mr. Mashberg says criminals burned a painting by Rembrandt to avoid getting caught.
But Mr. Amore notes that in eighty percent of theft cases, the works are found unharmed. Mr. Mashberg says that unlike diamonds or gold, stolen art has little value on the open market. The art is too recognizable to be sold in the art world without attracting attention. So, criminals have a difficult time selling what they have stolen.
TOM MASHBERG: "We have several cases in the book where the thieves just gave up and left the paintings off in a public place, like a train station or a park and then called police and said why don't you just go pick it up. It's too much trouble."
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This has not been the case for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But Tom Mashberg and Anthony Amore are hopeful that the Rembrandts stolen more than twenty years ago will be recovered. And, they say that based on history, stealing art does not pay.
FAITH LAPIDUS: For the first time, an American museum is holding an exhibit about the career of Korean artist Lee Ufan. The exhibit opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City earlier this summer. The show is called "Marking Infinity." It brings together seventy of the artist's paintings, sculptures and drawings.
Lee Ufan was born in Korea, but has lived and taught in Japan. In addition to being an artist, he is a philosopher and a writer. His work is simple and direct. For example, his sculptures involve carefully placed stones and pieces of steel. His paintings are limited to one or two colors, often with repeated shapes.
Mr. Lee spent three weeks setting up his artworks at the Guggenheim Museum. He united examples from fifty years of his art into one statement. Many works are in the central room of the museum, which is in the shape of a spiral. The shape is a good choice for an artist who explores infinity in his work. Something that is infinite is unlimited and endless.
MARIO RITTER: Alexandra Munroe is the Guggenheim's expert on Asian Art. She says that ideas of change have influenced the work of Lee Ufan.
ALEXANDRA MUNROE: "What is at the essence of his art is uncertainty and things that are not fixed and things that are open and scattered, and open to our interpretation and open to our experience and infinite."
MARIO RITTER: Mr. Lee grew up during the Korean War. The political changes he witnessed during the nineteen sixties also influenced his work. He became the leader of an artistic movement in Japan called Mono-ha, or the "School of Things." He wanted to create a new kind of art that celebrated natural objects. This was art that paid attention to time and space and how an observer experiences the artworks.
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ALEXANDRA MUNROE: "And there is another very important idea that you see both in his sculptures and his paintings, which I call the ethics of restraint. He's interested in the relationship between making and non-making."
FAITH LAPIDUS: Lee Ufan likes to work in series. A series of sculptures or paintings will explore a similar idea. For example, several paintings at the exhibit are called "From Point." In one work, the artist put blue paint on a brush. He touched the brush to the surface of the painting repeatedly in a straight line. Slowly, the paint disappears from the brush and the mark becomes lighter and lighter. The brushwork suggests movement and the passing of time. The work is a painting, but it also is like a performance because it shows the actions made by the artist.
The Lee Ufan exhibit continues at the Guggenheim Museum until the end of the month.
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MARIO RITTER: Scientists in the United States are working on a technology that uses human energy to power devices like cell phones, laptop computers, and GPS systems. Tom Krupenkin teaches electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. He and his team want to reduce dependence on costly and polluting batteries. Instead of using batteries for power, they have turned to human beings.
TOM KRUPENKIN: "We humans are actually very powerful machines."
MARIO RITTER: Professor Krupenkin and his team have placed a device in a shoe that collects and stores energy from human motion and turns it into electricity. One part of this device is an energy harvester. It has two small containers filled with thousands of very small drops of liquid. These droplets get pushed back and forth as a person walks.
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TOM KRUPENKIN: "So it is essentially a flow of a fluid through flexible plastic tubes with embedded electrodes which are covered by a special material that we invented. These actually directly convert it into electric power. Now, the output of this energy is stored in a regular rechargeable tiny battery of the style that we have in cell phones."
FAITH LAPIDUS: The team has also developed a system to permit use of the stored energy by common mobile devices. It does not require connections with wires, and can be used to create a wireless signal. A cell phone that uses the wireless "hotspot" from the shoe would use much less power than if connected to a wireless telephone network.
The devices are about the size of a credit card. Professor Krupenkin says the system is always powered. So unlike a traditional battery, this energy harvester never needs to be recharged.
The professor says he does not expect this invention to replace traditional batteries. But it will help reduce dependence on them. He says the technology would be useful for people in some rural areas where there is no electrical power. He expects to have a commercial product on the market within the next two years.
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MARIO RITTER: This program was written and produced by Dana Demange with reporting by Faiza Elmasry, Behnam Nateghi and Rosanne Skirble. I'm Mario Ritter.
FAITH LAPIDUS: And I'm Faith Lapidus. You can find our programs online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at 51voa.com Join us again next week for EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English.
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From VOA:
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/A-New-Book-on-Stealing-Rembrandts-and-Other-Artworks-43016.html





U.K. Researchers to Test "Artificial Volcano" for Geoengineering the Climate
An experiment starting next month in the U.K. will pump water one kilometer into the air to test a new climate-cooling method that eventually could deliver sunlight-reflective sulfate particles into the stratosphere
Next month, researchers in the U.K. will start to pump water nearly a kilometer up into the atmosphere, by way of a suspended hose.
The experiment is the first major test of a piping system that could one day spew sulfate particles into the stratosphere at an altitude of 20 kilometers, supported by a stadium-size hydrogen balloon. The goal is geoengineering, or the "deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment" in the words of the Royal Society of London, which provides scientific advice to policymakers. In this case, researchers are attempting to re-create the effects of volcanic eruptions to artificially cool Earth.
The $30,000 test, part of a project called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE), is inspired by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. That volcano spewed 20 million tons of sulfate particles into the atmosphere, cooling Earth by 0.5 degree Celsius for 18 months. If the British feasibility tests are successful, the balloon-and-hose contraption could be used to inject additional particles into the stratosphere, thereby reflecting more of the sun's energy back into space, and hopefully curbing some of the effects of global warming.
"This is one of the first times that people have taken geoengineering out of the lab and into the field," lead scientist Matthew Watson said Tuesday during a press conference in London. "We are still decades away—and I do mean decades—from doing real geoengineering." Watson said his team still needs to determine which substances would work best at reflecting light, how much is needed to have an effect, and the possible unintended consequences of injecting the particles into the atmosphere, such as acid rain, ozone depletion or weather pattern disruption.
October's tests will mainly focus on whether the balloon-and-hose design could be an effective method to deliver the sunlight-reflecting particles. At an airfield in Norfolk, England, that is no longer in use, a helium blimp will hoist a regular pressure-washer hose one kilometer off the ground. An off-the-shelf pressure washer will pump up 1.8 liters of tap water per minute, to a maximum of 190 liters, says Hunt, which will evaporate or fall down to the ground locally. The researchers will monitor the performance of the system, and use the data to design the larger 20-kilometer-high setup.
In the past scientists have proposed similar atmospheric delivery methods using guns, airplanes, rockets and chimneys. In 2009 Russian scientists even tested airplane delivery on a small scale. But Hugh Hunt, a SPICE engineer at the University of Cambridge, said the balloon-and-hose design appears to be the most cost-effective option. Even when scaled up, the team expects the simple design to cost around $5 billion, in comparison with the $100 billion needed to launch thousands of high-altitude aircraft.
The water tests are expected to be harmless, but several environmental groups have criticized the plan—and geoengineering in general. Last year, the United Nation's Convention on Biological Diversity issued a statement forbidding geoengineering research that may impact biodiversity. The U.K. accepted that statement, but the SPICE experiment does not violate any international agreements due to its small scale, says Jason Blackstock, a physicist at Canada's Center for International Governance Innovation.
Nevertheless, the Canada-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC) is calling the tests internationally irresponsible. In a written statement, they called on the British government to shut down the project, adding: "This experiment is only phase one of a much bigger plan that could have devastating consequences, including large changes in weather patterns such as deadly droughts."
Alan Robock, a Rutgers University meteorologist, shares some of those concerns. He has created computer simulations indicating that sulfate clouds could potentially weaken the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing rain that irrigates the food crops of billions of people. It is premature to conduct such field experiments, Robock says. More computer modeling should be done first, he adds, to determine how injected particles might interact with the ozone layer and the hydrologic cycle.
Whereas Hunt agrees that such research is lacking, he said that the team needs real measurements in order to see if the tethered balloon design is viable. "If not now, then when would you start?" he asks. "This year, next year? Or maybe wait until a large block of ice falls off of Greenland? My choice is to have all the tools carefully thought through, so that we don't have to rush into anything."
To avoid dangerous climate change, some scientists estimate that global CO2 emissions must be cut by at least 80 percent by the end of the century. Geoengineering will not help achieve that long-term target, but the cooling effects of large sulfate clouds are nearly instantaneous, making geoengineering potentially valuable in the event of acute climate crises such as the melting of Arctic sea ice, which could further accelerate global warming over the decades.
The researchers made it clear in Tuesday's press conference that they do not advocate using geoengineering as an excuse for humanity to continue recklessly emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. "[Geoengineering] should be considered as an emergency remediation while we wean ourselves off carbon," Watson said. "The question you have to ask is, is it worse without mitigation or with it? And that answer isn't obvious yet."
From Scientific American

jxgzcly

1:40
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1:12

障碍,5:15. 这篇比较和胃口~ 放慢速度读了,时间还可以,不过,中间一半想到鹤源聊天内容,走神了~

PS: 这周两室友710.750,而且,其中一个木有看一点鸡精,我表示我相当有动力了.

fox0923

1'44"
1'36"
1'46"
1'31"
1'18"

我们的速度是越来越“越障”了，看来大家的水平都有提高很多阿~~加油加油~~

抓抓sandra

啊啊..速度越来越可怕了..TAT
中午回来做~

superbat28

回归回归~~~
1min42s
1min18s
1min27s
1min10s
54s

果然脑子跟不上啊。。痛苦。。

zhangwenrui

1'42''
1'35''
1'15''
58''
52''


障碍5'05''

第一次加入阅读小分队啊。。。
108求给力阿

ccmoom

1m20s
1m28s
1m18s
1m22s
57s
 脑袋真有点转不过弯了。

抓抓sandra

1 01:28
2 01:03
3 01:13
4 00:59
5 00:40
被虐到习惯了~哈~
其实今天的速度难度很刚好~

抓抓sandra

05:15

• An geoengineering project of pumping water to 20 kilometers high is under way. The aim is to mock the process of volcano eruption and to study the process in this way.
  
• The meaning of this project: scientists claimed that this would be the first REAL geoengineering experiment.
  
• Settings in this project: Scientists who propose this project choose hose over air crafts and helicopters, for that using hose is the most cost effective way among all.
  
• Opinions towards this proposal of project vary. A Canadian organization oppose to it, saying that the project is internationally irresponsible. After all, the consequences are not all known.
  
• Therefore, Hunt is planning to take the project in the most careful way. He believes that it should be conducted someday, but only when the timing is mature.
  

bananazoo

1:52
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还需focus~