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BARBARA KLEIN: I'm Barbara Klein.
MARIO RITTER: And I'm Mario Ritter with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we learn about three Americans who died recently. Eugene Nida had a big influence in making Christianity's holy book, the Bible, available in hundreds of languages. Betty Skelton set height and speed records as a pilot and racecar driver. And Michael Hart helped invent the electronic book and the online library called Project Gutenberg.
BARBARA KLEIN: Eugene Nida was a language expert, a Baptist religious worker, and a Bible historian. He worked for the American Bible Society for fifty years. Mr. Nida is widely considered the father of modern Bible translation. He helped translate the world's most popular book, the Bible, into two hundred languages.
Eugene Nida was born in Oklahoma City in nineteen fourteen. He studied two ancient languages, Greek and Latin, in college, then completed a master's degree program in New Testament Greek. He later received a doctorate degree from the University of Michigan in linguistics. Mister Nida began working for the American Bible Society in nineteen forty-three. That same year, he also became a Baptist clergyman.
MARIO RITTER: Eugene Nida was known for developing a new method of Bible translation, called "functional equivalence." He believed that language in Bible translations had to be understandable and culturally meaningful to the people reading them. Before Mr. Nida, different language versions of the Bible were mainly the product of western religious workers. The workers often had limited knowledge of other languages. So their translations were often based on an exact word-by-word translation.
Mr. Nida developed Bible translations that honored the original Greek and Hebrew writings. But they also sounded natural and made use of a culture's own linguistic expressions. （字数287）
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BARBARA KLEIN: Mr. Nida traveled all over the world, teaching native translators about his method. He believed that translation was impossible without cultural understanding. One of his most difficult projects involved producing an Inukitut version of the Bible. Inukitut is the language of the Inuit people who live in the Arctic area. This project lasted twenty-four years.
The Bible is filled with stories that take place in warm places, often with deserts. Biblical stories involve animals like camels, donkeys and sheep. Yet the Inuit Bible had to be understood by a people who live in a climate of snow and ice. The animals they knew were walruses and seals.
Mr. Nida also learned that, in parts of Africa, sheep are considered damaging and problematic animals. So, Bible stories about sheep and shepherds had a very different meaning there than in the west.
MARIO RITTER: Mr. Nida also worked on creating the Good News Bible. This English language Bible was written in simple, modern English. It was aimed at non-native English speakers, but also became hugely successful with native English speakers.
Eugene Nida died on August twenty-fifth at the age of ninety-six. In all, he wrote more than forty books about languages, translations, and Biblical studies. He once said that it did not matter in what language a person reads the Bible. He said the goal was to "read it, understand it, and be transformed by its message."
BARBARA KLEIN: Betty Skelton was often called "The First Lady of Firsts" because of the many records she set. She grew up in Pensacola, Florida, watching airplanes flying to and from a nearby navy base. As a child, she persuaded her parents to let her take flying lessons. By twelve, Betty made her first flight alone, although she was not legally permitted to do so until she turned sixteen. By sixteen she earned a permit to fly a plane and, two years later, received a commercial license. （字数324）
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MARIO RITTER: During the nineteen forties, female pilots were mostly barred from commercial and military flying. So Betty Skelton decided to use her flight skills in aerobatics, performing difficult turns, drops, and other exercises. She began performing and competing around the country.
She won the International Feminine Aerobatic Championship for three years in a row, starting in nineteen forty-eight. She and her little Pitts Special plane the "Little Stinker" became famous.
BARBARA KLEIN: Dorothy Cochrane is an aviation expert at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. She has studied and worked with Betty Skelton.
DOROTHY COCHRANE: "Betty was such a wonderful aerobatic pilot that she really set the bar high for other women to follow behind her and she was a great role model for them. She really was as good as some of the men."
BARBARA KLEIN: Ms. Cochrane says Betty Skelton flew during a period when men and women aerobatic pilots competed separately. And she set the example when later women did compete and win against men.
DOROTHY COCHRANE: "She also became the first woman to perform the inverted ribbon cut. And that's a very tricky thing to do."
BARBARA KLEIN: This flying trick involved using her plane's propeller to cut a ribbon held between two tall sticks. Betty Skelton did this while flying about three meters off the ground—upside down.
MARIO RITTER: Once Ms. Skelton had made her mark flying, she moved on to racecars. She became the first female test driver in the racecar industry. She set several land speed records. She also set a cross-country record, driving from New York to California in under fifty-seven hours. And, she became one of the top women advertising experts working with General Motors in support of the company's Corvette car. （字数：298）
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DOROTHY COCHRANE: "She loved speed, that's part of who she was and that was part of her attraction to aviation. And then when she did all she could in aviation, she moved on to automobiles. She still had a beautiful red corvette that she was driving around the retirement community that she lived in, passing some of the golf carts that other people were driving."
MARIO RITTER: Ms. Skelton died in August at the age of eighty-five. Visitors to the Washington area can see her "Little Stinker" plane at the Smithsonian Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. The small red and white plane hangs high in the air above the entrance to the museum. And as its former owner would have liked, the plane is hanging upside down.
BARBARA KLEIN: Michael Hart is widely credited as the inventor of the first electronic book, or e-book. He also helped create Project Gutenberg, the first and largest free library on the Internet.
Mr. Hart was born in nineteen forty-seven in Tacoma, Washington, but grew up in Illinois. His father was a professor of Shakespearian literature and his mother was a mathematician.
MARIO RITTER: Michael Hart first became interested in the idea of information sharing while studying at the University of Illinois in the early nineteen seventies. He had permission to use the university's mainframe computer. This huge machine was connected to a network of other computers. He later estimated that the time given to him on the computer network was worth about one hundred million dollars. So, he wanted to come up with a project that was valuable enough to justify the cost of the technology.
BARBARA KLEIN: After attending an Independence Day celebration, Mr. Hart received a free copy of the Declaration of Independence. He decided to type the words of the document on the computer and share this text with the computer network. He decided that this was worth a hundred million dollars, because in the future hundreds of millions of people could use his copy of the Declaration of Independence. （字数343）
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This event marked the beginning of Project Gutenberg. Over the next ten years, Mr. Hart added the Bible, William Shakespeare's plays and other texts to the project's storage system.
MARIO RITTER: Mr. Hart said the goal of Project Gutenberg was to support the creation and spreading of e-books free of cost to computer users. He said this effort aimed to "break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.
Greg Newby is the head of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. He says Mr. Hart's philosophy behind the project was about helping people.
GREG NEWBY: "He had this idea that through literacy, through access to literature really, people could become literate. And then through literacy people could become educated, and through education people could empower themselves to have more successful lives and eventually participate in making the world a better place."
MARIO RITTER: Today, Project Gutenberg contains more than thirty six thousand books. Most are no longer protected by copyright laws. Others are still protected by such laws, but were donated with the permission of the copyright owner. Project Gutenberg depends on volunteers to enter new books into its collection.
BARBARA KLEIN: Michael Hart once said that the Gutenberg Project represented a complete system change. It lets a person share his or her favorite book with millions of people.
GREG NEWBY: "Michael really was someone that sacrificed the ability to have what probably would have been a successful and, if he desired traditional career, to electronic books and to these principles of literacy and freedom of access to information."
BARBARA KLEIN: Mr. Hart died earlier this month at the age of sixty-four. He once told a newspaper that there were only two things in the world that were truly free and in endless supply. He said these were the air we breathe and the texts on Project Gutenberg. （字数307）
越障~~~有点长。。。
Difference Engine: Disaster waiting to happen
LAST weekend’s vigilance against potential terrorist attacks was an impressive demonstration of America’s resolve to prevent events of September 11th 2001 from ever happening again. From your correspondent’s hillside perch above Santa Monica Bay, he watched National Guard F-16 jets make repeated sweeps across the ocean by Los Angeles International Airport and then on to the huge port complex of Long Beach and San Pedro, while a Navy P-3 Orion maritime-surveillance aircraft circled overhead. The cacophony was deafening but reassuring. Angelinos slept easier that night.
Yet, further down the coast, 6m citizens of southern California and south-west Arizona, along with their cousins across the Mexican border, were just recovering from a man-made disaster that had plunged their sweltering world into darkness—shutting down schools, hospitals, offices, factories, shops and restaurants, as lighting, air-conditioning and other essential equipment ceased to function.
Beaches in San Diego had to be closed to the public because raw sewage had seeped into the sea. Passengers on trains stuck between stations and trapped in lifts had to be rescued by the police. Flights from San Diego International Airport were cancelled because of the lack of runway lighting. With traffic lights out of action and petrol stations unable to pump, motorists abandoned their vehicles and added to the gridlock that ruled the roads. By great good fortune, no-one died or was seriously injured. But normal life, for those so affected, ground to a miserable and unnerving halt.
The difference between the two events could not have been more stark. One was all about preparedness and professionalism. The other was a forceful reminder of the chaos wrought by personal negligence and institutional neglect. “We don’t need no lousy terrorists to cause mayhem,” San Diegans must have reflected afterwards. “We can manage just fine by ourselves.”
The power outage that swept across a large swathe of the American south-west on September 8th was the region’s worst cascading blackout in 15 years. It started at the North Gila substation near Yuma, Arizona, where a utility employee “was doing some work” on faulty equipment. Something happened (still under investigation) to cause the substation to shut down, disconnecting a 500kV transmission line connected to it and disrupting the electricity supply to Yuma’s 90,000 residents.
The immediate power shortage at Yuma caused the current—which normally flows along the grid’s key Southwest Power Link from Arizona to California—suddenly to reverse its direction. The result was a violent fluctuation in line voltage that fed back through the grid to trip switches at substations throughout the San Diego area. Altogether, some 15 power stations in the region shut down automatically to protect themselves from voltage swings—the biggest being the 2,200MW San Onofre nuclear power plant up the coast near San Clemente.
With the San Onofre plant disconnected and the umbilical cord from Arizona effectively severed, the delicately balanced grid serving San Diego and its adjacent counties quickly became unstable. Such problems would normally be resolved by ratcheting up the output of surrounding power stations. But with so little base-load capacity in the area, standby plants for meeting peak demand could not be spun up fast enough to stabilise the voltage. The overloaded grid promptly crashed, causing blackouts to spread across the region and into Mexico. The lights did not come back on until the following morning.
The wind was blowing at only 8mph and the sky was partially overcast. So, California’s lauded sources of renewable energy were of little help. If anything, they were part of the problem. Critics point out, with some justification, that California’s energy strategy of focusing on conservation and expanding intermittent sources of renewable energy—while ignoring the urgent need for more base-load generating capacity close to big cities—was the primary cause of the grid failure.
The wider issue is that the original voltage spike which triggered the monster outage should have been isolated at the Yuma substation in Arizona. The two official bodies responsible for overseeing the distribution and reliability of bulk power in the United States—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)—have launched an inquiry to learn why that did not happen. Their report will no doubt apportion blame and recommend changes in maintenance procedures. But few expect it to address the underlying problem. Both FERC and NERC are only too aware of the structural reasons why the American grid has become so fragile. They are equally aware of how intractable to solution those reasons are.
As elsewhere, the electrical-power industry in America has changed over recent decades from a collection of heavily regulated regional monopolies to a complex, competitive, national, free-market business. In the process, electricity has become a commodity, with futures and contracts traded by participants just like any other commodity business. Independent power providers and transmission companies construct their own facilities, often paid for with bonds backed by future revenue streams. Retailers sign up customers, buy the electricity from wholesalers around the country, and bill users for it.
Managing supply and demand, once the prerogative of the utilities’ planners, has become a process shaped largely by an energy company’s appetite for risk. Meanwhile, independent system operators who schedule the dispatches of electricity have become, effectively, asset managers—using market-clearing prices to equilibrate between bids by suppliers and those from retailers.
By and large, such changes have made energy markets more efficient. For consumers, the competition created by deregulation has kept a lid on electricity prices. But it has had downsides, too. One of the biggest is the way it has removed what little spare capacity the grid once had. In the power industry’s new competitive environment, transmission companies operate their lines at near full capacity, leaving little room for those threatening fluctuations in voltage caused by accidental outages.
Compounding matters further is the way long-distance transmission lines connecting utilities around the country are being used differently these days. Before deregulation, such links were employed largely for emergencies—for when, say, a utility found its voltage dipping precipitously and a brownout imminent. Today, long-haul power lines are frequently made to handle more power than they were designed to, as wholesalers sell their electricity over longer and longer distances. The juice that comes out of a plug in clean-energy California can easily have come from a dirty coal-fired plant in Wyoming or West Virginia.
As a result, the grid now suffers far greater fluctuations in electricity flow than ever before. The continual cycling of power plants up and down to meet demand from elsewhere in the country causes generating and transmission parts to heat up and cool down repeatedly. No surprise that they then wear out faster. Meanwhile, the amount of money the American power industry spends on maintenance has declined steadily, by 1% a year since 1992. With the grid’s most critical components—the transformers at substations—now typically 40 years old, there are serious consequences for the stability and reliability of the grid as a whole.
Another downside of deregulation has been the decline in investment. As the independent power providers, the electricity retailers and the utilities have no responsibility for the grid’s main links, they have little incentive to maintain them properly. And as long as it is possible to purchase electricity elsewhere, there is little further incentive—as in the case of San Diego—to add more capacity locally. More and more blackouts sweeping the country are therefore inevitable.
Will the so-called “smart grid” improve matters? It could do the opposite. All the smart grid does is add a communications layer to the local electricity-distribution network—so consumers can see at a glance how much electricity they are using at any time of the day, and how much it is costing them. Alerts sent by the utility at peak periods will allow customers to cut back their consumption and save money—or have it cut back for them to reap extra rewards. The real aim, of course, is to save the utility from having to invest in additional capacity.
What is rarely mentioned in all the proselytising about the smart grid is that it adds a vast layer of hackable points to the network—some 440m by 2015, according to Lockheed Martin’s Energy and Cyber Services. Every smart meter in the home will be a hackable device. The same goes for all the routers at substations. As the saying goes, if you can communicate with it, you can hack it. Today, you can cut off the power to someone’s home by shinning up the nearest electricity pole and throwing a switch at the top. Once smart meters become widespread, you will be able to do that remotely, from the far side of the world.
But evil-doers from afar might not stop at that. Instead of switching off the power, they could run the voltage up and down to wreck sensitive electronic equipment, such as computers and television sets. And they could do that not just on single homes, but on whole communities and even to routers in substations—in an attempt to take transformers offline, if not actually fry them. As we saw last week, the failure of just one substation in Yuma was enough to bring a whole chunk of the American south-west to its knees. Unless the grid is made more robust and secure, the threat to the country—from terrorist or technician—can only become more severe. |
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发表于 2011-9-22 22:05:09
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发表于 2011-9-22 22:22:05
