【每日阅读训练——速度越障6系列】【6-2】

fox0923

速度
N.Y. Worker Accuses State of Illegal GPS Spying
By Kim Zetter
September16, 2011
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/ny-gps-spying/


计时1（342 words）
A New York state worker has accused government officials of violating the state constitution after they installed a GPS tracker on his private car and recorded its whereabouts for a month.
The state Department of Labor placed the device secretly onthe worker’s car without a warrant and tracked the vehicle 24 hours a day,including on weekends and during a week long family vacation, in order to findevidence of time-sheet violations.
But Michael Cunningham, in a petition filed last year that was heard this week in court, said officials went too far in their surveillance of him and his family and violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Cunningham learned of the surveillance onlya year after it was conducted when the state charged him with misconduct,citing evidence from the GPS tracking to show that he had claimed pay for hour she hadn’t worked. He was fired from his management job last year.
The New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on his behalf last December, asking the state Supreme Court of Albany County to invalidate the use of such surveillance and order a new labor hearing for Cunningham without the data.


The organization cited a May 2009 New York State Court ofAppeals ruling that police must obtain a warrant before using a GPS device totrack criminal suspects. The federal Supreme Court is set to weigh in on lawenforcement’s use of the devices in its upcoming term.
“Your boss can’t sit in the backseat of your car and watchyou, your wife and your children 24 hours a day, but that’s exactly what the Department of Labor did to Mr. Cunningham,” NYCLU Executive Director DonnaLieberman said at the time of Cunningham’s filing. “The courts have alreadyprohibited police from using GPS devices to track people without a warrant.We’re confident they will hold the government agencies to the same standard.The only thing scarier than having a police officer secretly track you ishaving your boss secretly track you.”

计时2（263 words）
Cunningham, 60, was Director of the Staff and Organizational Development for the state Department of Labor, where he worked for 30 years,when he was fired last year. He asserts that the state agency had long had it out for him after he blew the whistle on supervisors in 2004 for trying topressure employees into attending a prayer breakfast that was sponsored bythen-Gov. George Pataki.
Cunningham had reported Mary L. Hines, deputy commissioner for administration and public affairs, to the inspector general’s office after she sent an e-mail to other officials attempting to increase worker attendanceat the breakfast. Cunningham said he was subsequently subjected to various punishments from his supervisors in retaliation for his action.
It was the Inspector General’s office that placed the GPSdevice on his BMW in 2008 after his supervisors at the Department of Labor requested it. According to court documents, investigators placed the device onhis car (.pdf) on June 3, 2008, while it was parked in a state parking lot, inorder to determine in part if Cunningham was properly reporting his absences from work.
On June 11, investigators downloaded data from the deviceand replaced it with a new tracker. They did the same on June 20. Unknown to Cunningham and his family, the device tracked their car movements at night, onthe weekend and during a vacation they took to Massachusetts between June 30and July 3. The device stopped tracking the family’s movements on July 3, but remained on the car another five days before it was removed on July 8.

计时3（301 words）
It wasn’t until nearly a year later in March 2009 that the Department of Labor issued a notice of discipline against Cunningham, citing 13 charges of misconduct. More than half the charges accuse Cunningham of saying he was at a certain location at a certain time when he wasn’t — for example,saying he was at a conference one time, when he was at home instead.
Some time prior to a January 2010 hearing on the charges,Cunningham learned of the surveillance when the department revealed it planned to introduce GPS evidence as the basis for the majority of the misconduct charges against him. Despite attempts to disqualify the surveillance data,Cunningham was fired in August 2010.
Shortly after the NYCLU filed its petition last year, the state’s attorney general moved to have the case removed to the appeals court.At a hearing this week before the Appellate Division Third Judicial Department,Kate Nepveu, an assistant solicitor general, acknowledged that the GPS tracking was intrusive, but said that Cunningham had a pattern of misconduct and that the round-the-clock surveillance was justified because he claimed he worked odd hours at his job.
But the NYCLU disagreed.
Lead attorney on the case, NYCLU Senior Staff Attorney Corey Stoughton, told Threat Level that they weren’t disputing that the Department of Labor had cause to investigate Cunningham’s where abouts, just the tactic officials used to do it.
“They can have all the cause they want, there can be aslam-dunk case in theory, but nonetheless the government simply doesn’t have the power to track the movement of people and their families in their private cars 24 hours a day just to uncover more evidence of workplace misconduct,” she said.
The case is now awaiting a ruling from the appeals court,which sets no time table for its opinions.

计时4 （347 words）
By VOA
2011-9-16
A man stand outside a small store in Camden, New Jersey,which has the highest poverty rate in the nation.
This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
A new report says the poverty rate in the United States lastyear was the highest since nineteen ninety-three. The official rate was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in two thousand nine.
Poverty meant yearly income, or earnings, of less than twenty-two thousand three hundred dollars for a family of four.
The recession lasted from December of two thousand seven to June of two thousand nine. Since two thousand seven, the poverty rate has increased more than two and a half percentage points.
The new findings did come as a surprise to Michael Ferrellof the Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, DC.
MICHAEL FERRELL: "Unless there's a turn around within the economy in the very near future, it's most likely to get worse."
The Census Bureau says median household income fell morethan two percent from two thousand nine to two thousand ten. Median means half earned more and half earned less. Last year, the median income was about forty-nine thousand dollars. The Census Bureau says more than forty-six million people were living in poverty. It was the largest number since estimates beganin nineteen fifty-nine. They included more than one-fourth of blacks and Hispanics, twelve percent of Asians and about ten percent of non-Hispanic whites.
Some economic measures were unchanged. Women in full-time,year-round jobs continued to earn an average of seventy-seven percent as much as men did.
The number of people without health insurance rose fromforty-nine million to almost fifty million last year. But the rate -- 16.3percent -- was about the same as in two thousand nine.
Most Americans who have health insurance get it through their employers. Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute says people age eighteen to twenty-four are the least likely to get insurance plans through their employers. But she says young people are facing fewer barriers because ofthe nation's new health care law.

计时 5（342 words）
ELISE GOULD: "Health reform played a key role in stemming the fall of work place coverage for young adults. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as health reform, included provisions that allowed young adults up to age twenty-six to secure health insurance coverage through their parents' employer-sponsored health insurance policies."
Experts say the biggest driving force of poverty is unemployment. About fourteen million Americans are unemployed. Millions more have stopped looking for work or wish they could work more hours.
Las Vegas, Nevada, is famous for its casinos and hotels. Butthe city was hit hard by the recession and the housing market crash that helped cause it. Former construction worker Richard Scanlon is disabled, but he saysmany able-bodied friends are out of work.
RICHARD SCANLON: "Ten, fifteen years ago, if you couldn't get a job in Vegas, you weren't looking for one. Now it's tough."
Family Promise is a national group that helps people getjobs and housing. Director Terry Lindemann says Family Promise of Las Vegasworks with religious organizations that offer short-term housing.
TERRY LINDEMANN: "We bring together Catholics,Protestants, Jewish congregations, Muslims, to open up their congregations atnight to be overnight shelters."
Cassendra Waller is a mother of two. She got help to move into a new apartment.
CASSENDRA WALLER: "When you get a job and you're making a minimum wage, how do you pay a babysitter for two kids every day? I wound up homeless several times. And this is the worst I've seen the homeless inVegas."
Stephen Brown is an economist with the University of Nevada,Las Vegas. He says the city is starting to get more visitors again. But he saysthat will not solve the bigger economic issues.
STEPHEN BROWN: "So what we really need is for the forces that were pushing population to Las Vegas in the past to resume. And that really means that the whole US economy needs to get moving again."
And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I'm SteveEmber.


越障 （1314 words）
DifferenceEngine: Shining beaconsSep 9th2011, 7:44 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES

IT USED to be said that there was one sure way of preventing baldness. Unfortunately, the cure was worse than the condition. Castration would certainly ensure a full head of hair for life. Eunuchs aside, though, most balding men put up with their luck of the draw. Only three out of seven men reach old age with most of their hair intact.


Having lost his own hair in his mid-twenties, your correspondent considers baldness a perfectly normal state of affairs. Today, it has become even fashionable—thanks to the vogue among twenty-something males for shaven heads. He has shunned all the so-called treatments—from toupees and transplants to minoxidil, finasteride and dutasteride. And while never actually fostering it, he has basked shamelessly in the myth that bald men are somehow smarter and more virile than their hairier brethren.


The biggest drawback of being bald is that, lacking any padding on top, unseen obstacles can cause ugly cuts and bruises of the scalp. Climbing in and out of cars, getting up suddenly from an airline seat, painting ceilings, trimming hedges, tinkering around the garage have all taken their toll over the years of your correspondent's pate. Frosty weather or bright sunshine are not much fun, either. The answer has been to invest in a variety of hats—from baseball caps to crash helmets. One consolation is that your correspondent has not paid for a haircut in decades. And as far as he is concerned, shampoo is a women's thing.


It was long thought that nature's only instance of neogenesis—spontaneous regrowth of hair where the follicles have become dormant—was the velvet that grew on stags’ newly formed antlers in spring. Since the 1970s, however, evidence has mounted that neogenesis is more widespread in the animal world, and not entirely uncommon in humans. That has spurred researchers around the globe to look for genetic solutions for baldness. An effective cure would be worth billions to any drug company that brought one to market.


The typical “male-pattern baldness”—where the hairline recedes from the temples and a patch develops on the crown, and spreads until only a rim of hair remains—is related to hormones known as androgens, especially one called dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Androgens play an important role in developing the male sexual organs before birth and during puberty. They regulate hair growth as well as sex drive. Male-pattern baldness is caused by follicles in the scalp becoming sensitive to DHT and shrinking—shortening their life span and preventing them from producing hair.


In most mammals, hair tends to grow in cycles involving an active phase lasting three to six years, a regression over the course of a couple of weeks, followed by a resting phase of several months. At any given time, up to 90% of the follicles on a healthy human scalp are in the growth phase and fewer than 10% are resting.


Why do more men go bald than women? Females tend to suffer an overall thinning of hair later in life, but without the receding hairline or bald patch on the crown. Ironically, men get their susceptibility to baldness largely from their mothers. The effect is linked to genes on the X-chromosome—the most important being an androgen-receptor gene. Because the versions of these genes that promote baldness are recessive (ie, capable of producing their traits only when not masked by the presence on a sister chromosome of more active variant of the genes in question), both of a woman's X-chromosomes would need to have a set of defective genes in order to express the typical pattern of male baldness. That would be most unlikely. Men, however, have but a single X-chromosome in their cell nuclei, so such masking is not possible.


In men, about 5% of the free testosterone floating around their bodies is turned into DHT by an enzyme found largely in the scalp and prostate gland. DHT is a particularly potent androgen, with three times testosterone's affinity for binding to androgen receptors. Apart from attacking follicles in the scalp, DHT also plays a leading role in the development of benign prostatic hyperplasia (enlarged prostate) and even prostate cancer itself.


That is not to say bald men are statistically more likely to get prostate cancer than non-bald men. But drugs designed originally to treat enlarged prostate glands—by inhibiting the enzyme that converts testosterone into DHT—have turned out to be useful for arresting the loss of, and even regrowing, hair on balding heads.


A synthetic anti-androgen called finasteride (marketed by Merck as “Proscar” and “Propecia”) has been approved in America for treating both enlarged prostates and male-pattern baldness. Another DHT-inhibitor called dutasteride (marketed by GlaxoSmithKline as “Avodart”) has been approved only for treating enlarged prostates. However, being at least three times more potent than finasteride, dutasteride is frequently prescribed “off label” for both baldness and prostate cancer as well.


Apart from the risk of impotence, depression and other side effects, the main problem with taking DHT-inhibitors such as finasteride and dutasteride for baldness is that their therapeutic benefits are reversed once a person stops using them. Any hair gained or maintained is lost within six months to a year. The same goes for over-the-counter baldness preparations such as minoxidil ("Rogaine", etc), except their effect lasts only a month of two after ceasing use.


All is not lost, however. Scientists have been aware for years that stem cells can be used to grow new hair-producing follicles. People with male-pattern baldness have no shortage of stem cells in their follicle roots. Being dormant, however, the stem cells there cannot stimulate the growth of fresh hair. A race has been on to find the molecular signals that switch the follicles back into action.


As it turns out, mammalian skin—because it is constantly being regenerated—is a particularly handy tool for studying stem cells. During the body's early development, stem cells in the skin develop along three different pathways, differentiating into hair follicles, into sebaceous glands for secreting fat to lubricate and waterproof the skin, and into the epidermis itself. How the stem cells are guided to their different destinations by molecules called transcription factors holds the key to a cure for baldness.


Last week, Valerie Horsley and her colleagues at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, reported that cellular signaling capable of regenerating dormant follicles comes from a transcription factor which regulates precursor cells that form the skin’s fatty layer beneath the epidermis. When hair dies, the thick fatty layer that contains the sebaceous glands in the scalp shrinks, and has to be thickened up before the follicles can spring back into action. Dr Horsley's team has identified a type of stem cell—known as the adipose precursor cell—that plays a crucial part in creating new fat cells. These produce molecules called platelet-derived growth factors that are capable of switching on dormant follicles.


Basing its studies on mice incapable of producing fat cells, the Yale group injected adipose precursor cells from healthy mice into the defective ones. A four-fold increase in the number of precursor fat cells was subsequently detected in the skin surrounding the dormant follicles. Places where the precursor cells were injected also started churning out 100 times more growth factor than surrounding cells. Two weeks after the injection, 86% of the dormant follicles were sprouting hair. The question now is whether the work on mice translates into similar effects in humans.


Over the decades, your correspondent has often pondered what he might do if an effective baldness cure—as opposed to a mere temporary treatment—became available. The padding would certainly be welcome. But it would not be just passport pictures and driving licences that would need to be changed. A whole persona would have to be reinvented. That sounds like a huge hassle for anyone whose identity, for better or worse, has long since been established.

bananazoo

睡前，banana英勇的前来抢沙发~坐的真舒服~
糊糊，晚安~不对，糊糊那边是午安~
1'32
1'06
1'37
1'33
1'33

fox0923

睡前，banana英勇的前来抢沙发~坐的真舒服~
糊糊，晚安~不对，糊糊那边是午安~

-- by 会员 bananazoo (2011/9/25 1:27:47)

恩，恩，bana早睡，起来有精神看越障！有点长~~

diyangyang

羊羊先占第三排再去看速度~嘿嘿~
banana太快了...

1'11
0'55
1'03
1'24
1'20
今天的速度材料羊羊很喜欢~嘿嘿~
正好上课做presentation能用到~~

fox0923

1'35"
1'10"
1'25"
1'37"
1'25"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
又重新编辑了一下，这次应该没有连词了吧，刚才读得我自己头晕脑胀的~~逻辑的文字编辑也是这样~~所以想想还是不能亏待了咱们小分队的成员阿~~

ykelly123

1:20
1:05
1:16
1:33
1:30

为什么这几天读这么慢阿！！！！

ykelly123

啊啊啊今天的越障好越障。。
我对science和天文真的是= =还是business 好懂。。
写个大概吧。看了我10分钟看不懂！

-introduction to hair lost. bold man's daily life, for example, sun light, painting, etc
-current treatment and drugs for baldness.
-why men are more likely than women to become bald. genetic, X 染色体, etc
-stem cell research

失忆。。。。

fox0923

其实狐狐对一些生词也查了查，才开始读得。

superbat28

占楼T T~~~~~真心痛苦。。。
我，就...自抽去了...又木有读文章...

吐槽：被SC区一个小姑娘气死了T T~~~被选校折磨死了……   吐槽完毕。

不要管bat了~~~    大家加油！！！