【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障3系列】【3-20】

balapupu

今天是第二期小分队的最后一贴了，pupu就陪大家走到这里啦~~时间过得好快，不知不觉3个系列就过去了，在此首先要感谢我们发帖组的队员们：很邻家，mahaofei001，Sophia001，shelvey，starking0410，gray0505，感谢你们利用你们的宝贵时间各种找资料，给大家提供这么多好的素材去提高自己的阅读水平，我想一路走来大家都有各自的收获。原本想3站完好好写一个总结感谢贴的，但是本人命运多舛吧，3站还是木有上7，哎。。小队长木有做好带头作用，但是，pupu不会放弃，尽管现在是大四党，申请时间很紧，我要先开始申请了，但是我一定会努力到上7的那一天，这些勇气的来源就是我们小分队这个家庭，在此要还要感谢那些没发帖，但是坚持回帖，坚持参加群里讨论的dreamer们：小白老师(因为你，我们每晚十点都会有语法大课堂，大家都学到很多东西，不光是语法，还有你对梦想不懈的坚持，真的很打动我们），糊糊（你的越障我是真心佩服，你现在也是我们的明星啊~哈哈~），ZZ，熊熊，winkle，瓜瓜，BPC. Cindy,j酱酱，Elroy(木有你们的支持，就不会有现在的pupu，也不会有我们这个团结的小分队）,对了，还有感谢bat的友情支持我们的语法事业，我觉得dreamer这个次形容我们在贴切不过，出国这条艰辛的路，既然我们选择了，无论再苦再难都要走下去，G只是我们出国道路上一块小小的石头，如果我们连这个都战胜不了，我们在美利坚的土地上也会过的很艰辛。还是那句话，虽然第二期结束了，pupu这个队长要下岗了，但是小分队一直都在，这个家庭的大门永远为大家敞开，我们会在以后的日子里，在美国的日子里，继续陪伴大家奋斗~~各位~~加油！！！


【速度】
                                                                           Taking Fund-Raising To a New Level
1.
All of the nonprofit groups whose solicitations fill up your mailbox at this time of year badly want you to like them.
So they try to learn a little bit about you before they lick the envelope. “If you don’t want your organization to be perceived as an annoying fly,” David Lamb wrote in a 2009 position paper on fund-raising strategy, “your best bet is to do some research to find out what plucks the heartstrings of your most capable prospects.”
And how does this play out, for example, when you actually need those heartstrings repaired? Mr. Lamb’s employer, a software company calledBlackbaud, helps hospital fund-raisers sniff out your net worth at the same time the doctors are evaluating your chest pain.
In a presentation posted on the Web titled “Grateful Patient Basics,” the company urges fund-raisers to “take advantage of the captive audience” by sending hospital admissions lists to the development office for a wealth screening within hours of when the patients are admitted. No, they will not turn up at your bedside the next morning with a capital campaign solicitation. But solicitousness is a possible result, including more visits from hospital staff and a special effort to make your stay as comfortable as possible.
This is not illegal. Much of the data that fund-raisers gather is scattered about in the public domain. But what exactly are they looking for? And if it creeps you out to have yet another category of strangers rustling up full dossiers on you, how do you stay off their radar?
BIG GAME If you’re merely affluent, you’re probably not a target for most prospect researchers. That said, if you give generously to any single cause, there’s a good chance that someone who works there is going to try to find out your capacity for future donations.
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2。
PAST DONATIONS If you’ve given to organizations in the past and they listed you as a donor, you can pretty much bet that some electronic robot somewhere is scraping that information and dumping it into a database for other fund-raisers to see. Blackbaud’s dossier on me picked up most donations, though it had an extremely wide (and for a fund-raiser, possibly misleading) estimated dollar range for the biggest one.
And if you think you can cheat on one alma mater for a few years and redirect your household philanthropy budget elsewhere without them knowing about it, you are probably mistaken.
WEALTH INDICATORS If you’re an artist or a documentary filmmaker or a stay-at-home parent and you and your schoolteacher spouse make a four- or five-figure donation, that raises eyebrows. A skilled fund-raiser will then poke around for information on, say, your maiden name or any family foundations with either of your names attached to them.
WINDFALLS Anyone can comb Securities and Exchange Commission filings for stock holdings, and fund-raisers have been doing this for years. To give them a lift, a service called WealthEngine offers daily monitoring of stock trades and helpfully sends out an e-mail alert to development professionals when senior executives cash out.
PEER PRESSURE Fund-raising researchers sometimes call in their best-connected constituents, directors or staff members to talk a bit about who might be capable of giving (or giving a whole lot more). So even if you keep your vacation photos off Facebook, your friends and neighbors who know something about your income or spending could well tell others who want you to redirect some of that money to various causes.
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3.
CREDIT DATA You knew this was coming, right? Some of the credit reporting agencies are happy to sell the data they can legally sell to fund-raisers or those that service them.
Equifax and its IXI subsidiary collect asset data from over 95 financial institutions and then use it to model household portfolio sizes down to what is known in the industry as the “ZIP-plus-four” level, a micro-neighborhood that may include as few as seven homes.
Because we tend to be a lot like our neighbors financially, these estimates turn out to be a good barometer for giving capacity, especially when IXI combines it with Equifax data on spending patterns among the locals. Jim Walkley, the group vice president for consumer markets at IXI, is quick to note that all personally identifiable individual names and addresses are stripped out of its estimates before service providers like Blackbaud get hold of them.
“Laws that govern asset and credit-related data are very specific,” added Lawrence Henze, managing director for Blackbaud’s Target Analytics operation, which serves nonprofit groups. “There isn’t anyone with an ounce of sanity that would try to buck those laws.”
TRIAGE Nurses sort emergency room patients according to the urgency of their condition, and Blackbaud sees no reason hospital fund-raisers, for instance, shouldn’t behave similarly.
Its service, according to marketing materials on its Web site, helps in “identifying your best potential major and planned gift prospects while they’re still under your care, while they are forming an opinion about you, and while they are most amenable to developing personal relationships with your development staff. After all, it’s the responsive, one-to-one, individualized attention that makes all the difference.”
Not every hospital development officer is up for this sort of thing. Some can’t afford the service or don’t have the time or staff to follow up while a patient is still under the institution’s care.
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4.
Others are uncomfortable, or their board members are. “Some people will be creeped out by it, I’m not going to lie to you,” Mr. Henze said.
The privacy laws around this are clear. Fund-raisers are not supposed to know why someone was in the hospital, though patients are free to talk about it, and development employees sometimes find ways to encourage them to do so.
But they would be crazy to approach patients at their hour of greatest vulnerability. And even if they did it once, the blowback would be so fierce that they wouldn’t last long in the job if they kept it up.
Most people are surprised when they first hear about the data mining going on behind the scenes in any semi-sophisticated fund-raising apparatus. But those who are offended by it are not being particularly realistic, or stopping to think about how rabidly they Google many new acquaintances in their own personal and professional lives.
Development professionals are all about lowering their cost of raising a dollar. If buying data allows them to save time and focus their pitches, then everyone wins.
As for the aggressiveness of the data gathering, think about it this way: the people who raise the money are selling a cause, something they believe in way more fervently than, say, the sales staff at Best Buy believes in plasma televisions. So of course they’re going to do everything possible to capture more than their fair share of whatever it is you have to spend. Expecting anything less strikes me as a sort of backhanded insult to the people who do that work.
Then again, I would feel that way given that I’m on the board of a synagogue that needs to raise money and have a sibling who’s a professional fund-raiser.
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5.
In any event, there is plenty you can do to make the work of prospect researchers much harder. You can simply give anonymously. There are also things that wealthier families with foundations can do to disguise their doings; I’ve linked to a guide that the wealth management firm Ballentine Partners has published from the online version of this column.
If you want to shield your assets, David Scott Sloan, a lawyer and co-chairman of the private wealth services group at Holland & Knight in Boston, suggests purchasing homes and other assets through a limited liability corporation. States may have differing rules about whether you need to disclose who the manager is, though.
Mr. Sloan is also a fan of a something called a nominee trust that is available to Massachusetts residents and something that second-home buyers sometimes use. Here, the true owners need not appear on any public filings, though you’ll need a friend or a lawyer to serve as trustee.
As for messing up the works with Equifax and the like, one way to do that is to get your mail at a post office box. That could render the ZIP code asset tracker useless.
And then there’s this: You could politely say no to everyone who asks for money, volunteer your time instead and divert a secret annual amount to an investment account where it can compound over your entire life. Once you’re dead, your executor can then divide it up and spread it around according to instructions in your will.
“By the time we find out about it, unless we have a good medium, we’re not going to be able to contact you,” said Mr. Henze of Blackbaud. “We’re aggressive, but we’re not quite that aggressive.”
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[越障]
                                          Critics Picks: The Top Music of 2011
DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.
(MUSIC)
I'm Doug Johnson. Today on the program: some favorite songs of top music critics for two thousand eleven. We also play music from some of the top selling artists.
But first we tell about someone working to increase the number of African American women in a specialized industry.
(MUSIC)
The Ormes Society
DOUG JOHNSON: Comic strips and comic books are popular in the United States. What makes comics different from other printed media is that they use pictures to tell a story. Most of the stories are funny or filled with action.
For years, very few African American characters have appeared in comics. The number of African Americans producing comics also is small. And, the number of African American women involved is even smaller. But Cheryl Lynn Eaton is hoping to change that. Barbara Klein has more.
BARBARA KLEIN: Cheryl Lynn Eaton has been a lover of comics since she was a child. She formed an organization called The Ormes Society in two thousand seven. She hopes the group will help to increase interest in comics among African American women.
CHERYL LYNN EATON: "The Ormes Society is an organization dedicated to promoting black women as creators, artists and writers, as consumers of sequential art and comics and the organization was named after Jackie Ormes, who was the first African American female cartoonist."
Artist Jackie Ormes made comics from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties. Her work was published in two leading African American newspapers of that time: The Pittsburgh Courier and The Chicago Defender. Cheryl Lynn Eaton first learned about her work in a report by comic book historian Tim Jackson.
CHERYL LYNN EATON: I was just amazed that there was this black woman in the forties and fifties, basically going against the trend; creating comics about black women as they loved and how they actually lived, and how they actually looked, which is completely different from what other creators were doing at the time."
Ms. Eaton says most of the images that other artists were producing at the time were very offensive to African Americans.
CHERYL LYNN EATON: "Works that demonized African Americans and exaggerated their features in horrific ways and projected them as ignorant, unintelligent, and unable to be heroes. And here Jackie was producing works that had women who were doing things who were heroic and funny and witty and smart and it was just very important to know about this woman."
Jackie Ormes created a number of characters, but the most famous were two sisters named Patty Jo and Ginger. The two were from an upper class family. They were fashionable and intelligent. They often discussed the social and political issues of the day.
In the years since she organized the Ormes Society, Cheryl Lynn Eaton has found a number of African American women who love comics as much as she does. And, she says the number of African Americans in comics is growing, mostly because of the Internet.
CHERYL LYNN EATON: "Black cartoonists don't have to wait for Marvel and DC to come to them. Basically, it helps them to distribute their art without having to have a serious monetary input. So you don't need a lot of money to publish your art on the web you don't need a lot of money to obtain a following." (:17)
Diamond Comic Distributors, the leading supplier of comics, reported nearly three hundred forty million dollars in sales in North America during the first ten months of the year. Cheryl Lynn Eaton says she hopes to persuade other African Americans to work in the industry.
Top Music of 2011
DOUG JOHNSON: This week we are taking a look ... and a listen ... to the music that came out during two thousand eleven. This was a good year for female artists. Most critics place Adele, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and others high on their list of best recordings. Electronic music also saw a jump in popularity. And, billions were made by artists on tour, even during troubled economic times.
Come along with us has our two thousand eleven musical tour.
(MUSIC)
The British singer Adele is at the top of most critics' best singles list. Spin, Rolling Stone and Billboard magazine each named her song "Rolling in the Deep" as the best song of the year.
"Rolling in the Deep" tells the story of a woman rejected by her boyfriend. The song expresses her anger as she realizes the man was not what he appeared to be.
(MUSIC)
Finally I can see you crystal clear
Go ahead and sell me out and I'll lay your ship bare
(MUSIC)
Spin magazine compares the song to the Bible story in which the ancient Israelites destroy the walls of Jericho by blowing their trumpets.
Rolling Stone magazine chose Adele's record album "21" as the best of the year. Number two on the list was "Watch the Throne," the joint effort by Kanye West and Jay-Z. Spin placed "Otis," a single from that album, at number seventeen on its twenty best songs of the year.
(MUSIC)
The website Pitchfork.com chose its forty favorite music videos of two thousand eleven. One of them was from the folk rock group Fleet Foxes. "The Shrine/An Argument" is a beautifully animated video filled with human-like and animal-like creatures all wearing masks. The animation is mostly in red, brown and other earthy colors. It opens with a deer mourning the death of a loved one. The animal leans close to the body and then pushes it off a cliff.
"The Shrine/An Argument" is a song in three movements. Here is part of the first.
(MUSIC)
Florence and the Machines made many of the "best" lists of two thousand eleven. "Ceremonials," the group's second album, was released October thirty-first. New Musical Express, or NME.com, included the song "Shake It Out" on its fifty best tracks list.
(MUSIC)
Billboard.com released a list of the top twenty-five tours of the year. The list is based on tickets sales.
Taylor Swift had the top selling country music tour, coming in at number five on Billboard's list. But it was another country singer, Jason Aldean, who had a break-out year. Fifty of his shows were sold out. His album "My Kinda Party" also sold more than two million copies, more than any other country album this year.
We leave you with the song that Billboard called a set list essential for Jason Aldean's current tour. Here is "See You When I See You," from "My Kinda Party."
(MUSIC)
DOUG JOHNSON: I'm Doug Johnson. Our program was written by June Simms and Caty Weaver, who was also our producer.
Join us again next week for music and more on AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.
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xeyyxzty

zz42050524

先顶后做~~~~~1'44
1'48
1'36
1'11
1'09

shelvey

占位阅读

Jane412

我也好久木来了 也和pupu一样开始要申请了 大四党。。。。不过还是要并轨准备二战的。。。
占个位 这段时间的美好纪念~~~

fox0923

bala说的好伤感，让我忍不住~~
不管怎样，我们大家永远都在一起，然后一起到米国相聚~目标在，希望就在！

南瓜0729

我也好伤感的说 大家都要加油呢~1'22
1'04
1'18
1'13
最后一个忘记计时了

抓抓sandra

感谢大家这两个月的努力，小分队才继续了下来~~~深深Bow一个。。

铁板神猴

2.11
2.11  
2.05  
1.54  
1.48  

我回来了，居然结束了……好伤感  之前很不好意思掉队了，今后会继续跟着小分队练下去的！

linhan50

2'31
2'39
2'54
2'31
2'14
7'28     先讲comic的起源发展，举了个例子，后面不知道是分心了还是什么的，不知道在说什么，忘了很多，最后写了某两人的专辑卖得很好