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~~~大家加油哇~~~
Don't Forget: Tips for Remembering
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First, the bad news: A study from University College London published last month found that brain function—including reasoning, memory and vocabulary—can start deteriorating as early as age 45. But don't despair. For those of any age who are constantly forgetting names, numbers and shopping lists, there are some mental tricks to help boost recall. "Max Your Memory" (DK) by Pascale Michelon contains dozens of exercises and tips for remembering things like faces and keys and…what was it, again, that we were looking for?
Get out a watch, a pen and a piece of paper, and try these exercises using techniques from the book.
The journey method, which can be useful in remembering to-do lists, uses visualization: You take a mental walk through a familiar environment, like your house, creating a link between each item on your list and various points on your walk. Later, when you need to recall your list, you travel along your mental path and "see" the items. The more surreal the images are, the more memorable they will be. In this exercise, use the journey method to memorize all the sports offered by a new local fitness club so that you can tell your friends about it. When you're done, cover up the pictures and write down as many American cities as you can think of in two minutes. Then try to recall the sports.
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GET ORGANIZED
Organizing information is a good way to remember it; creating groups can serve as a cue for later recall. In this exercise, imagine that you are at a casino. You want to take a break and leave your chips with a friend, but you also want to make sure that he doesn't gamble away any of them while you're gone. Take two minutes to memorize the chips, and to boost your recall, try ordering them by ascending value. Cover up the chips and write down the names of 10 movies you've seen in the past year. Then try to remember all the chips.
PICTURE THE NUMBERS
With the number-association system, you convert numbers into concrete objects, making them easier to visualize (and remember). You could do this by associating each digit with an object that rhymes with the number (one/bun, two/shoe); an object that looks like the written number (one/candle, two/swan); or an object that has meaning associated with the number (one/sun since there's only one sun, two/eyes). When you need to remember a string of numbers, come up with a picture that involves each associated image. In this exercise, come up with an association system and memorize the security codes of these credit cards. After a five-minute break, try to recall all four.
MAKE CONNECTIONS
With the link system, you use your imagination to create associations between objects (again, the more unexpected, the better). Say you want to remember to buy cheese, candles and paper napkins for a friend's party—spend a few seconds thinking of that friend with a paper napkin tucked into her shirt and blowing out 100 candles on a giant Gouda cheese. Here, take two minutes to link all four items. Cover up the items and recite the multiplication table for four up to 64. Then try to recall the four words. Try again after 30 minutes and one hour.
It's a puzzle that has long plagued scientists: How to easily measure sleepiness before we notice it ourselves. Researchers in labs around the world are making headway and envisioning a future in which testing sleepiness is considered part of general good health.
The hunt is on for a so-called biomarker, a characteristic or substance—or, more likely, several substances—in the body that will indicate if someone is sleepy and, if so, how sleepy. These researchers want to measure acute sleepiness in order to identify the risk of "performance failure" before it happens. That could apply to a morning commuter about to nod off on the freeway, a surgeon preparing for a complicated procedure or a pilot settling into the cockpit before a trans-Atlantic flight.
Research is also looking at chronic sleepiness, which people can feel after just days of less-than-adequate sleep. A growing number of studies have found that not sleeping enough night after night raises the risk of health problems, including obesity, diabetes and heart disease. A biomarker could change the way people view the role sleep plays in their overall health, says Paul J. Shaw, an associate professor of neurobiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "If people knew they were sleepy, they might say 'I'm going to turn off Leno and go to bed.' "
This area of sleep research is in the early stages, and actual biological tests are likely years away. It holds the promise of helping the average person make what could be crucial health decisions. How bad is it to pull an all-nighter before a big presentation? Is consistently getting less than seven hours of sleep a nuisance—or a serious health risk? If people had a firm measure of how much sleep they need, they could take steps to ward off drowsiness.
Researchers already have identified some potential biomarkers related to sleepiness. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania studying pairs of identical and fraternal twins have found six proteins in the blood that change relative to sleepiness. Dr. Shaw has found that the enzyme amylase, which is present in human saliva, rises in sleep-deprived flies.
People who are sleepy have slower reaction times, decreased attention and problems learning and processing information. What makes sleepiness especially dangerous is that most people are generally not aware of how sleepy—and how impaired—they actually are. A driver, for example, may not know he is too drowsy to drive until he actually veers off the road. "The brain is not quite fully awake and alert and not fully asleep," says David F. Dinges, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of a sleep lab that is researching the effects of sleep deprivation on healthy people.
A pivotal 1997 study published in the journal Nature showed that being awake for 24 hours resulted in the equivalent level of cognitive impairment as having a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.1%. In the U.S., it is illegal for adults to drive with a concentration of .08% or above.
Most adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. But about a quarter of those age 19 to 64 say they get less than seven hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation's 2011 Sleep in America poll.
In recent years, scientists have proven something that may seem obvious to anyone who has encountered those lucky enough to feel fine after an all-night work session or red-eye flight: People vary dramatically in how well they handle a lack of sleep. The reason is likely partly genetic. Dr. Dinges's lab at the University of Pennsylvania has identified three genes that may be associated with vulnerability to sleep loss. The ability to pinpoint who handles sleep loss poorly brings up ethical issues. For example, for positions that involve a lot of travel or long hours, would companies want to screen candidates for their natural ability to weather sleep loss?
In another Penn lab, Nirinjini Naidoo has been analyzing plasma samples from a subset of 56 pairs of identical twins and 42 sets of fraternal twins who were kept awake for 36 hours. Her lab has divided participants into two groups: Those who seem resistant to the cognitive effects of sleep loss and those who fall apart. She has identified 110 proteins that change markedly in the resistant group and 53 proteins in the sleepier group. "We're looking for things that make you feel worse and those that may be protective," says Dr. Naidoo, associate professor, Division of Sleep Medicine.
Dr. Shaw in St. Louis has found that amylase, an enzyme that breaks down starches, rises in flies that are sleep deprived. Like humans, sleepy flies don't learn well and will sleep more than usual when they have the chance.
In Dr. Shaw's experiment, flies were observed in a T-shaped maze: To the left, there was a light-filled vial (flies like light) that also contained quinine (flies don't like its bitter taste). To the right, there was a dark vial. In the experiment, sleepy flies never learned to override their attraction to light to avoid the quinine—and head right instead of left.
The problem with amylase as a biomarker is that multiple factors affect its levels. "If you eat a sandwich, it goes up," Dr. Shaw says. "We're going to need a panel of markers, each of which is going to be imprecise on its own."
Meanwhile, researchers are working on other ways to identify sleepiness before people are so impaired that they get into trouble. In some small studies, Edward Haeggstrom, a professor of applied physics at the University of Helsinki in Finland, has found that balance changes can predict how long people have been awake. "The longer you've been awake, the more you sway. They are bigger sways with less control," Dr. Haeggstrom says. He says he became interested in the link between sleepiness and balance during his military service in Finland during the early 1990s: He noticed sleepy soldiers swayed when standing in formation.
There's more evidence for the link between sleepiness and the speed of eye blinks. As people get sleepier, they have an increasing number of slow eyelid closures. Many studies have concluded that these slow eyelid closures can accurately predict when someone is becoming impaired by sleepiness.
Some entrepreneurs are using this science in actual products. Optalert Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia, has developed eyeglasses equipped with an infrared sensor that continually measures the position and velocity of the wearer's eyelids. It uses that information to give its customers, which include mining and trucking companies, a score for each driver in real-time.
Anything over a five out of a 10 means "people are not fit to be driving," says Murray Johns, Optalert's founding director and chief scientist. The company plans to introduce a model for individual drivers within the next two years.
Some car companies, including Mercedes and Toyota's Lexus, are adding features they say can help sleepy drivers. Mercedes' "Attention Assist" technology senses steering wheel movements and the position of the driver via a sensor in the steering column.
If a driver's head lingers too long on the head rest or there are erratic steering movements, for example, an alarm will go off and the message "Time for a break?" will appear on the dashboard with a picture of a coffee cup.
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The rise of state capitalism
The spread of a new sort of business in the emerging world will cause increasing problems
OVER the past 15 years striking corporate headquarters have transformed the great cities of the emerging world. China Central Television’s building resembles a giant alien marching across Beijing’s skyline; the 88-storey Petronas Towers, home to Malaysia’s oil company, soar above Kuala Lumpur; the gleaming office of VTB, a banking powerhouse, sits at the heart of Moscow’s new financial district. These are all monuments to the rise of a new kind of hybrid corporation, backed by the state but behaving like a private-sector multinational.
State-directed capitalism is not a new idea: witness the East India Company. But as our special report this week points out, it has undergone a dramatic revival. In the 1990s most state-owned companies were little more than government departments in emerging markets; the assumption was that, as the economy matured, the government would close or privatise them. Yet they show no signs of relinquishing the commanding heights, whether in major industries (the world’s ten biggest oil-and-gas firms, measured by reserves, are all state-owned) or major markets (state-backed companies account for 80% of the value of China’s stockmarket and 62% of Russia’s). And they are on the offensive. Look at almost any new industry and a giant is emerging: China Mobile, for example, has 600m customers. State-backed firms accounted for a third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment in 2003-10.
With the West in a funk and emerging markets flourishing, the Chinese no longer see state-directed firms as a way-station on the road to liberal capitalism; rather, they see it as a sustainable model. They think they have redesigned capitalism to make it work better, and a growing number of emerging-world leaders agree with them. The Brazilian government, which embraced privatisation in the 1990s, is now interfering with the likes of Vale and Petrobras, and compelling smaller companies to merge to form national champions. South Africa is also flirting with the model.
This development raises two questions. How successful is the model? And what are its consequences—both in, and beyond, emerging markets?
The law of diminishing returns
State capitalism’s supporters argue that it can provide stability as well as growth. Russia’s wild privatisation under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s alarmed many emerging countries and encouraged the view that governments can mitigate the strains that capitalism and globalisation cause by providing not just the hard infrastructure of roads and bridges but also the soft infrastructure of flagship corporations.
So Lee Kuan Yew’s government in Singapore, an early exponent of this idea, let in foreign firms and embraced Western management ideas, but also owned chunks of companies. The leading practitioner is now China. The tight connection between its government and business will no doubt be on display when the global elite gathers in the Swiss resort of Davos next week. Among Westerners there, government delegates often take the opposite view to those from the private sector: Chinese delegates from both sides tend to have the same point of view, and even the same patriotic talking-points.
The new model bears little resemblance to the disastrous spate of nationalisations in Britain and elsewhere half a century ago. China’s infrastructure companies win contracts the world over. The best national champions are outward-looking, acquiring skills by listing on foreign exchanges and taking over foreign companies. And governments are selective in their corporate holdings. Overall, the Chinese state has loosened its grip on the economy: its bureaucrats concentrate on industries where they can make a difference.
Let a thousand mobiles bloom
Yet a close look at the model shows its weaknesses. When the government favours one lot of companies, the others suffer. In 2009 China Mobile and another state giant, China National Petroleum Corporation, made profits of $33 billion—more than China’s 500 most profitable private companies combined. State giants soak up capital and talent that might have been used better by private companies. Studies show that state companies use capital less efficiently than private ones, and grow more slowly. In many countries the coddled state giants are pouring money into fancy towers at a time when entrepreneurs are struggling to raise capital.
Those costs are likely to rise. State companies are good at copying others, partly because they can use the government’s clout to get hold of their technology; but as they have to produce ideas of their own they will become less competitive. State-owned companies make a few big bets rather than lots of small ones; the world’s great centres of innovation are usually networks of small start-ups.
Nor does the model guarantee stability. State capitalism works well only when directed by a competent state. Many Asian countries have a strong mandarin culture; South Africa and Brazil do not. Coal India is hardly an advertisement for efficiency (see article). And everywhere state capitalism favours well-connected insiders over innovative outsiders. In China highly educated princelings have taken the spoils. In Russia a clique of “bureaugarchs”, often former KGB officials, dominate both the Kremlin and business. Thus the model produces cronyism, inequality and eventually discontent—as the Mubaraks’ brand of state capitalism did in Egypt.
Rising powers have always used the state to kick-start growth: think of Japan and South Korea in the 1950s or Germany in the 1870s or even the United States after the war of independence. But these countries have, over time, invariably found that the system has limits. The Chinese of all people should understand that the best way to learn from history is to look at its long sweep.
But it may take many years for the model’s weaknesses to become obvious; and, in the meantime, it is likely to cause all sorts of problems. Investors in emerging markets, for instance, need to watch out. Some may be taking a punt on governments as much as companies. State-capitalist governments can be capricious, with scant regard for minority shareholders. Others may find their subsidiaries or joint ventures in emerging markets pitted against state-backed favourites.
Another concern is the impact of the model on the global trading system—which, at a time when the likely Republican nominee for president wants to declare China a currency manipulator on his first day of office, is already at risk. Ensuring that trade is fair is harder when some companies enjoy the support, overt or covert, of a national government. Western politicians are beginning to lose patience with state-capitalist powers that rig the system in favour of their own companies.
For emerging countries wanting to make their mark on the world, state capitalism has an obvious appeal. It gives them the clout that private-sector companies would take years to build. But its dangers outweigh its advantages. Both for their own sake, and in the interests of world trade, the practitioners of state capitalism need to start unwinding their huge holdings in favoured companies and handing them over to private investors. If these companies are as good as they boast they are, then they no longer need the crutch of state support.
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发表于 2012-2-7 20:15:36
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楼主
终于好了，为什么总是自动复制，RP问题。。。。。大家可以做了~~~
