【每日阅读训练——速度越障6系列】【6-13】

daisyの小夢想

今天的越障应该是joelee很久之前给我的文章~~thanks, joe^^

昨天发的IPONE的文章，今天看到乔教主离世的消息，悼念，珍惜当下。

Apple Announces A New Phone And Voice Recognition, But Not The iPhone 5
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Today was widely expected to bring the announcement of the iPhone 5 — maybe with a bigger screen, a different home button, or a differently shaped case — at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California.
It didn't.
That's not to say Apple didn't say anything of note at its rather lengthy presentation. Not at all. But the big game-changing piece of new hardware didn't come to pass. Aficionados waited, wondering and chattering on liveblogs and on Twitter to see if it would come at the end in Apple's traditional "one more thing" fashion.
It didn't.
The rumors that did come true:
iPhone 4S. The new phone is the iPhone 4S, which Apple is selling on the basis of a better processor, better graphics, and an improved camera, but the same body as the iPhone 4.
Siri. The other thing the iPhone 4S has is Siri, a technology Apple acquired that originated with a popular app called Siri Assistant. It allows you to communicate with your phone by asking it natural-language questions. It's integrated with other functions like calendar, mapping, texting, and checking the weather, andthose who love it refer to it as "artificial intelligence."
World phone. The iPhone 4S will work on both GSM and CDMA networks. If you're not a tech-head, what that means is that your phone will work around the world. If you travel a lot overseas, you're likely very familiar with this phenomenon. If you don't, and if you already have a phone that works where you live, this won't mean a whole lot to you.
Sprint. Sprint will now carry the iPhone, and that's a huge development for Sprint customers who have held off on getting smartphones because Sprint's smartphones were Androids, or for those who have an Android phone or would prefer an iPhone. It's not the first time this has happened — it's essentially a replay of when the iPhone finally came to Verizon. But it takes the iPhone even farther away from one of its original, key limitations, which was the inability to use the carrier of your choice.
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Other stuff. Yes, "other stuff." There were other announcements today: Better integration with cloud services, operating system upgrades (which actually weren't new today), and upgrades to other Apple devices, including changes to theiPod Touch and iPod Nano.
So what does this mean to you?
For current iPhone devotees. For the people who already love their iPhones, the focus is on getting them to upgrade. The temptations are supposed to be the faster processor, better camera, and Siri, but there doesn't necessarily seem to be any one giant thing that current users will absolutely have to have. Moreover, one of the writers at Mashable mentioned during their liveblog that if the iPhone 4S has the same body as the iPhone 4, nobody is going to know you have one, which takes a bit of the naked-competition aspect out of the need to upgrade.
For users of other smartphones. If you have an Android phone, there aren't a lot of obvious reasons in this release to switch to an iPhone — unless, that is, you have Sprint or you really, really want to try Siri.
For non-smartphone users. If you haven't gone to a smartphone before, Apple doesn't seem to be focusing on any particular reason why this would be your moment. (Unless, as stated before, you have Sprint and have been holding out for the iPhone rather than an Android phone). But still, every time there's a new release, a certain number of people decide that this is when they're going to jump.
There's one exception, though: Apple announced that if you don't need the newest and niftiest, the prices on existing iPhones will drop — the iPhone 3GS will be free with a new contract. Dropping the amount of money a consumer has to choke up in order to get into a new kind of technology is sharply reminiscent of the recent drops in Amazon's Kindle prices, and could have the same ability to tempt newbies who don't demand high-end versions of anything.
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It's important to keep in mind, I think, that much of this depends on what you personally require in a phone, and it doesn't need to come down to "brilliant" versus — pardon the indelicacy — "sucks."
Just as there are people who are firmly committed to the Apple model, there are people who can't stand it. Apple acts as a kind of curator of the technology used by the people who own its products: It only has one high-end phone at a time (with adjustments for the amount of storage space), and that's the phone you get. Apple decides what will be on it, what will be left off of it, and what it's decided you don't need anymore. Apple people love this quality — it makes everything simple, it makes everything work out of the box, and as long as you stay within the Apple universe, their products are famous for working together very easily.
By contrast, Android phones vary in size, features, price — you choose your own compromises. As a personal example, I greatly prefer a physical keyboard rather than a touchscreen, and I don't mind that it makes the phone thicker. It's strictly a preference. There are still Android phones that have physical keyboards — you have that choice.
At the same time, while my Android phone is very much integrated with Google, it's not integrated as smoothly with as many different things out of the box as the iPhone is.
So some of this comes down to something elemental: How you want to relate to technology. Price and carriers will never convert all the Android people to Apple, any more than they would convert all the Apple people to Android.
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Voice recognition is the same way. Apple loves Siri, and so do a lot of the people who use it — they love the way you can ask it for directions or ask it in natural language whether you have a meeting on Friday. Me? I don't talk to my phone. I don't need to talk to my phone. Buttons are fine. They are clear. I know I'm not being misunderstood. I'd worry too much — what if it didn't actually hear me? What if it thought I said Thursday? How much do you trust your phone?
Speaking of trust, Apple is also promoting a feature called "location sharing" that would let you find other people using their iPhones. It has parental controls, meaning that your kids can't turn it off. It's about as close as you're going to get to a LoJack for your children. That would be the upside. The downside would be that you'd better know the capability well and how to use it and how to turn it off.
There's some adjusting of expectations going on: Gizmodo calls the iPhone 4S only a "minor update," and The New York Timesreported that Apple stock was almost immediately down.
The proof, as always, will come with Apple's ability to sell a new product to new customers and convince the people who cannot live without their iPhones that they can't live without this one, either.
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From NPR:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/10/04/141046950/apple-announces-a-new-phone-and-voice-recognition-but-not-the-iphone-5




Comedian Samantha Bee Makes A Parenting Meal Of 'Eating Over The Sink'
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A discussion on today's All Things Considered between host Guy Raz and comedian Samantha Bee begins with his noting that she has reduced parenting to the words "vomit" and "urine."
Samantha Bee is first and foremost a mother of three kids five years old and under, but you may know her best as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Now, she and friend Allana Harkin are running a blog at Babble.com calledEating Over The Sink, all about the ups and downs of raising kids. It's not your typical parenting advice blog.
Bee is not looking for parenting disciples. "If you took anything away from this blog in terms of parenting techniques," she says, "I really don't know what to tell you. It is not intended for that purpose." Married to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones, Bee uses the blog to talk less about how to parent than about what parenting is like for her. She reads from a recent blog postabout sitting on a long flight next to a businessman who wasn't too pleased to be seated next to kids. "If he had quills, he would have shot them at me," she notes.
Samantha Bee may not be dispensing parenting advice, but she admits to some similarities between herself and the much-publicized idea of the "tiger mother." She's sort of a tiger, she says, "but more the weary tiger. The one you see on the nature specials who's just laying on her side in the sun and her cubs are running rampant all over her, pulling on her ears and chewing on her toenails."
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自由阅读
As life-changing as she clearly has found parenthood to be (or at least flight-changing), Bee says it hasn't changed her approach to comedy. "It hasn't changed my sense of humor at all," she says. What stands out are the things that seem funny, sometimes in retrospect. She recalls that she and Jones, as new parents under the influence of "mountains of books," believed they had to keep their house very warm, "or the baby would die." How hot did they make it? "Eighty-six or 87," she remembers, "so that the baby never had to wear clothing. I mean, none of us did. Wecouldn't wear clothing." Perhaps you'd expect the family to clue them in, but Bee says the grandmothers braved the heat with "Bjorn Borg sweatbands."
Ultimately, Bee expresses some fondness for the looser parenting of the 1970s when, she says, "we just put our babies in cages and smoked over them. Kind of like The Ice Storm with babies."
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From NPR:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/10/03/141015424/comedian-samantha-bee-makes-a-parenting-meal-of-eating-over-the-sink









What went wrong with economics
——And how the discipline should change to avoid the mistakes of the past


From: Jul 16th 2009, the economist


OF all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”
In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
In its crudest form—the idea that economics as a whole is discredited—the current backlash has gone far too far. If ignorance allowed investors and politicians to exaggerate the virtues of economics, it now blinds them to its benefits. Economics is less a slavish creed than a prism through which to understand the world. It is a broad canon, stretching from theories to explain how prices are determined to how economies grow. Much of that body of knowledge has no link to the financial crisis and remains as useful as ever.
And if economics as a broad discipline deserves a robust defence, so does the free-market paradigm. Too many people, especially in Europe, equate mistakes made by economists with a failure of economic liberalism. Their logic seems to be that if economists got things wrong, then politicians will do better. That is a false—and dangerous—conclusion.
Rational fools
These important caveats, however, should not obscure the fact that two central parts of the discipline—macroeconomics and financial economics—are now, rightly, being severely re-examined. There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it.
The first charge is half right. Macroeconomists, especially within central banks, were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles. Financial economists, meanwhile, formalised theories of the efficiency of markets, fuelling the notion that markets would regulate themselves and financial innovation was always beneficial. Wall Street’s most esoteric instruments were built on these ideas.
But economists were hardly naive believers in market efficiency. Financial academics have spent much of the past 30 years poking holes in the “efficient market hypothesis”. A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions.
So there were caveats aplenty. But as insights from academia arrived in the rough and tumble of Wall Street, such delicacies were put aside. And absurd assumptions were added. No economic theory suggests you should value mortgage derivatives on the basis that house prices would always rise. Finance professors are not to blame for this, but they might have shouted more loudly that their insights were being misused. Instead many cheered the party along (often from within banks). Put that together with the complacency of the macroeconomists and there were too few voices shouting stop.
Blindsided and divided
The charge that most economists failed to see the crisis coming also has merit. To be sure, some warned of trouble. The likes of Robert Shiller of Yale, Nouriel Roubini of New York University and the team at the Bank for International Settlements are now famous for their prescience. But most were blindsided. And even worrywarts who felt something was amiss had no idea of how bad the consequences would be.
That was partly to do with professional silos, which limited both the tools available and the imaginations of the practitioners. Few financial economists thought much about illiquidity or counterparty risk, for instance, because their standard models ignore it; and few worried about the effect on the overall economy of the markets for all asset classes seizing up simultaneously, since few believed that was possible.
Macroeconomists also had a blindspot: their standard models assumed that capital markets work perfectly. Their framework reflected an uneasy truce between the intellectual heirs of Keynes, who accept that economies can fall short of their potential, and purists who hold that supply must always equal demand. The models that epitomise this synthesis—the sort used in many central banks—incorporate imperfections in labour markets (“sticky” wages, for instance, which allow unemployment to rise), but make no room for such blemishes in finance. By assuming that capital markets worked perfectly, macroeconomists were largely able to ignore the economy’s financial plumbing. But models that ignored finance had little chance of spotting a calamity that stemmed from it.
What about trying to fix it? Here the financial crisis has blown apart the fragile consensus between purists and Keynesians that monetary policy was the best way to smooth the business cycle. In many countries short-term interest rates are near zero and in a banking crisis monetary policy works less well. With their compromise tool useless, both sides have retreated to their roots, ignoring the other camp’s ideas. Keynesians, such as Mr Krugman, have become uncritical supporters of fiscal stimulus. Purists are vocal opponents. To outsiders, the cacophony underlines the profession’s uselessness.
Add these criticisms together and there is a clear case for reinvention, especially in macroeconomics. Just as the Depression spawned Keynesianism, and the 1970s stagflation fuelled a backlash, creative destruction is already under way. Central banks are busy bolting crude analyses of financial markets onto their workhorse models. Financial economists are studying the way that incentives can skew market efficiency. And today’s dilemmas are prompting new research: which form of fiscal stimulus is most effective? How do you best loosen monetary policy when interest rates are at zero? And so on.
But a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.

yuantengxuanwu

占沙发来读喽

natashajjy

天天一次阅读训练，有益身心健康啊

fox0923

1‘22“
1'30"
1'16"
53"
1'10"
自由
44“

john stewart 的show，超级clever，funny，糊糊最爱！

UlysessHope

我猜就会发 发布会的 果然是！

fox0923

10'20" ----越障的一篇，怎么感觉我记得逻辑框架这么散啊？

- As the economic bubble begins, the disappointed situation has been explained from the human behavior to sumal wrestling. Who should be blamed?
- The politicians seem to rely on the economists, if the economists die, then the politicians won't know what to do.
- Some people think the politicans would stand up if the economists fail, but the fact is opposite.
- The economists are the people who start this recession, they concern more about the inflation and ignore the bubble situation. They don't know how to fix this problem, and the economist professors
Blinded
-  The macroeconomists make a standard model for economy, but they fail to make sufficient room for any blemish.
How to fix it?
- Many countries offer short term banking rates down to zero, and only small number of politicians still hold different opinions, some of them are becoming supporters without any opposed ideas.
- We need to regulate the economic rules. For economists, they should understand more about fiance and become more specialized; for professors, they should think more deeply.

diyangyang

1'12
1'13
0'51
0'44
0'58
自由
0’37

好久没练咯...羊羊还是比较喜欢阅读不喜欢逻辑

南瓜0729

1'42
1'30
1'25
1'03
1'25

很邻家

1'46
1'38
1'22
1'10
1'16
44''
8'20

抓抓sandra

1  01:18
2  01:34
3  01:13
4  00:59
5  01:17