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随着第二期小分队的步伐走进了第三期阅读小分队，这还要感谢我们的马教授，确实很喜欢这个小分队的风格，所以决定继续参与，希望可以为后面考试的同学帮到阅读上的忙。大家加油了！话不多说，今天选了关于物理方面的内容可能会有些生涩，算是锻炼大家的耐力和忍力了，但是只要坚持阅读一定会有收获的。
现在改好了，如果大家还有什么疑问要跟我说啊~~~
速度1 （334 words）
Words from the Dictionary of American Regional English
After half a century of studying jib-jabbing, linguists have just finished the nation's most ambitious dictionary of regional dialects
? By Abigail Tucker
?
On to Z!” reads the tombstone of Frederic Cassidy, the first editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). He started the project in 1962, and the dictionary’s last words (Sl-Z) will finally be published this month. Thanks to DARE, we will always know that a “gospel bird” once meant a chicken, “long sugar” was molasses, a “toad-strangler” (a.k.a. “duck-drownder,” “belly-washer” or “cob-floater”) was a heavy rainstorm and “Old Huldy” was the sun.
The dictionary includes some 60,000 entries, based in part on thousands of interviews conducted from Hawaii to remotest Maine. Researchers asked locals a series of 1,600 vocabulary-prompting questions. They flashed pictures of indigenous flora and fauna and got their subjects to jib-jab, trade chin music or just plain chat. Editors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison scoured newspapers, diaries, billboards, poetry collections and menus. Each entry notes where and when a word seems to have surfaced and when it fell out of favor.
Happily, many humdingers remain on our lips, and local dialects still shape how we speak and are understood.
“Most people perceive themselves as speaking quite normal English,” says lexicographer Joan Houston Hall, the dictionary’s chief editor and Cassidy’s heir (he died in 2000). “Sometimes it’s quite a surprise to realize that the words they use every day and assume everybody knows wouldn’t be understood in other parts of the country.”
Those fluffy bits beneath the bed, for instance, are dust kitties (Northeast), dust bunnies (Midwest), house moss (South) or woolies (Pennsylvania). A potluck is a tureen dinner in upstate New York or, in the Midwest, a pitch-in or scramble dinner. Almost a whole page of DARE is dedicated to “wampus,” a Southern term for a variety of real creatures (such as a wild horse) and imagined ones, such as swamp wampuses and whistling wampuses.
速度2 （339 words）
Some DARE words hint at long-lost social occasions. At a “waistline party,” mentioned in African-American circles, the price of admission corresponded to a reveler’s girth; at a “toe social,” a mid-20th- century term, women draped in sheets were picked as partners on the basis of their feet. (Presumably they then danced together uninhibitedly, or “fooped.”) We can hear echoes of how men and women spoke to, or about, each other. In the 1950s, a man from the Ozarks might say his pregnant wife was “teemin’” or “with squirrel”—but not if she was around to hear him.
New words spring up all the time, but American language has become duller in some respects, because of the homogenizing impact of mass culture. The Subway fast-food chain has largely settled the great torpedo vs. hoagie vs. po’ boy vs. grinder vs. hero debate—most people just call a long sandwich a “sub.” Yet what makes for better conversation, a cold Texas wind or a “blue norther”? A baby frog on Martha’s Vineyard or a “pinkletink”? The loss of such words almost puts a lump in your goozle.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Snollygosters-Wampus-Toe-Socials-and-Other-Words-from-the-Dictionary-of-American-Regional-English.html#ixzz1oA7YdtuD
February 17, 2012
Imagining a City of Treelike Buildings
As New York City’s buildings sprouted toward the heavens in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a concern that people on the ground would be deprived of sunlight. The buildings were blocking out the sun for those on the ground and it looked like a problem that was only going to get worse.
The April, 1934 issue of Popular Science Monthly ran this illustration by B. G. Seielstad, which shows the city of the future as it was imagined by British writer R. H. Wilenski. It looks like this kind of design would depend much more on spacing such buildings out, but there’s no doubt there would still be some major shadows.
With modern elevators and living quarters perched high above the ground, Seielstad and Wilenski’s vision of the city of the future appears positively Jetsonian to modern eyes.
速度3 （379 words）
Shaped like trees with slender trunks, homes and office buildings of the future may rise into pure air on pedestals of steel. Our artist presents here his conception of this startling proposal, made recently by R. H. Wilenski, noted British architect. The scheme leaves the ground level virtually unobstructed. Each building is supported upon a single, stalk-like shaft of steel or strong, light alloys, resting in turn upon a massive subterranean foundation. Modern advances in the design of high-speed elevators simplify the problems of transporting passengers between the buildings and the earth. Access from one building to another is provided by a system of suspension bridges, and stores and places of recreation contained in the building make it possible to dwell aloft for an indefinite time without needing to descend. Gigantic, luminous globes are placed at strategic points to light the aerial city by night, while by day the inhabitants enjoy the unfiltered sunshine and fresh air of their lofty nests.
January 20, 2012
In The Future, All Women Will Be Amazons
In December 1950, newspapers across the country ran a piece distributed by the Associated Press titled “How Experts Think We’ll Live in 2000 A.D.” That article was written by a number of different editors at the AP and covered everything from the future of movies to the state of the economy in the year 2000. It also contained predictions from editor Dorothy Roe about the typical woman of the year 2000. Roe describes her as having perfect proportions: six feet tall and competing with men in sports like football and wrestling. Roe’s meal-pill-popping woman of tomorrow also has prominent positions in the world of government and business, with a final sentence proclaiming that she may even be president.
The woman of the year 2000 will be an outsize Diana, anthropologists and beauty experts predict. She will be more than six feet tall, wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver.
Chances are she will be doing a man’s job, and for this reason will dress to fit her role. Her hair will be cropped short, so as not to get in the way. She probably will wear the most functional clothes in the daytime, go frilly only after dark.
速度4 （335 words）
Slacks probably will be her usual workaday costume. These will be of synthetic fiber, treated to keep her warm in winter and cool in summer, admit the beneficial ultra-violet rays and keep out the burning ones. They will be light weight and equipped with pockets for food capsules, which she will eat instead of meat and potatoes.
Her proportions will be perfect, though Amazonian, because science will have perfected a balanced ration of vitamins, proteins and minerals that will produce the maximum bodily efficiency, the minimum of fat.
She will go in for all kinds of sports – probably will compete with men athletes in football, baseball, prizefighting and wrestling.
She’ll be in on all the high-level groups of finance, business and government.
She may even be president.
The illustration to the right appeared in the December 24, 1949 Daily Capital News (Jefferson City, Missouri) as part of an earlier syndicated Associated Press piece about the woman of the year 2000. This piece also mentions the expected physical growth and strength of women in the future, quoting Ann Delafield, a woman known for the “reducing plans” she advertised in women’s magazines of the early 1950s. Humorously, Ms. Delafield seems to believe that an abundance of sunshine is contributing to the growth of women during this era.
“Nature seems bent on producing a new race of Amazons. Within the next 50 years you’ll find the emancipated woman engaging actively in such sports as football, baseball and soccer. She’ll think nothing of chopping the wood and acting as family car mechanic.”
Miss Delafield has found that the shoulders of girls are 2 to 3 inches wider than their mothers’, their gloves are several sizes larger than Mom’s, and many a gal stoops down to kiss her teen age boy friend. Says Miss Delafield:
“Goodness knows what will happen if they continue to soak up vitamins and sunshine and just keep sprouting. Girls from the sunshine states, California, Texas and New Mexico can dwarf the girls from the Northeast.”
速度 5 （370 words）
The Oldest Modernist Paintings
Two thousand years before Picasso, artists in Egypt painted some of the most arresting portraits in the history of art
? By Smithsonian Magazine
Between 1887 and 1889, the British archaeologist W.M. Flinders Petrie turned his attention to the Fayum, a sprawling oasis region 150 miles south of Alexandria. Excavating a vast cemetery from the first and second centuries A.D., when imperial Rome ruled Egypt, he found scores of exquisite portraits executed on wood panels by anonymous artists, each one associated with a mummified body. Petrie eventually uncovered 150.
The images seem to allow us to gaze directly into the ancient world. “The Fayum portraits have an almost disturbing lifelike quality and intensity,” says Euphrosyne Doxiadis, an artist who lives in Athens and Paris and is the author of The Mysterious Fayum Portraits. “The illusion, when standing in front of them, is that of coming face to face with someone one has to answer to—someone real.”
By now, nearly 1,000 Fayum paintings exist in collections in Egypt and at the Louvre, the British and Petrie museums in London, the Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums, the Getty in California and elsewhere.
For decades, the portraits lingered in a sort of classification limbo, considered Egyptian by Greco-Roman scholars and Greco-Roman by Egyptians. But scholars increasingly appreciate the startlingly penetrating works, and are even studying them with noninvasive high-tech tools.
At the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen, scientists recently used luminescence digital imaging to analyze one portrait of a woman. They documented extensive use of Egyptian blue, a copper-containing synthetic pigment, around the eyes, nose and mouth, perhaps to create shading, and mixed with red elsewhere on the skin, perhaps to enhance the illusion of flesh. “The effect of realism is crucial,” says the museum’s Rikke Therkildsen.
Stephen Quirke, an Egyptologist at the Petrie museum and a contributor to the museum’s 2007 catalog Living Images, says the Fayum paintings may be equated with those of an old master—only they’re about 1,500 years older.
Doxiadis has a similar view, saying the works’ artistic merit suggests that “the greats of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance, such as Titian and Rembrandt, had great predecessors in the ancient world.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Oldest-Modernist-Paintings.html#ixzz1oABTaiib
越障 （999 words）
A FRAUD RING AND THE “RUSSIAN MIND-SET”
Posted by Julia Ioffe
A couple of days ago, thirty-six Soviet immigrants were arrested in New York for plotting to bilk health-insurance companies out of a quarter of a billion dollars. The plot, according to a story in the Times, involved ten doctors, nine clinics, and a hundred and five corporations: “The ring sought reimbursement for so many excessive and unnecessary medical treatments that it had to set up three separate billing processing companies just to handle the paperwork.” What’s remarkable here is just how unremarkable the story is, coming, as it does, out of Brighton Beach.
Brighton Beach is famous not only for its gauche cabarets and Russian delicacies and grumbling, highly-inflected Russian of the provinces, but for its improbable concentration of insurance fraud. As the Times puts it, “Brighton Beach has one of the highest rates of health care fraud in the nation, according to federal statistics. In fact, an analysis of data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates those two programs, shows that more health care providers in the Brighton Beach ZIP code are currently barred from the programs for malfeasance than in almost any other ZIP code in the United States.”
The article then goes into an intricate dance, dipping into a “Russian mind-set” that might draw Soviet immigrants to fraud—that’s from an unnamed law-enforcement official—and the to-be-sure-not-all-Soviet-immigrants-involved-in-health-care-are-criminals reminder:
Still, some experts in law enforcement and academia believe that the cumbersome Soviet system, with its thicket of strictures that governed almost every aspect of life, effectively helped to groom a generation of post-Soviet criminals in the United States.
“Obviously, particularly in Soviet times, but even nowadays, Russia still has a large amount of red tape and bureaucratic systems that are parasitic and hostile, almost designed to make you pay bribes,” said Prof. Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian organized crime at New York University. “So from cradle to grave, they have been used to that.”
It’s not so much that “systems” in Russia are designed to make you pay bribes, it’s that they’re often designed on the back of an envelope—that is, not designed or thought-through at all. The effect—sometimes intended, usually not—is to make de facto criminals out of basically everybody. In contemporary Russia, you’ll meet many pristinely-educated, well-traveled, white-collar business people who will tell you, absolutely sincerely, that they’d prefer to have “white”—that is, clean—businesses, but that the laws are so contradictory that they would go bust abiding by them all. These people are not guys in tracksuits named Fat Misha. They wear nice suits and speak foreign languages and have great table manners. Their wives like diamond stud earrings and subtle lip gloss. They’re contractors and distributors and partners with big Western firms. And, for the most part, they’re not crooks by intent but because there are simply very few ways to make money legally.
Many, if not most, of the guys rounded up in this week’s operation, I assume, came to the U.S. before making money was even a legal option for them. They came from the Soviet Union, where commerce was illegal. Back there, back then, they could have been black marketeers and speculators. Or they could have been drones working boring Soviet jobs, making salaries that could buy them nothing because the economy was too inefficient—and state spending priorities were too rocket-oriented—to give them anything to buy. So everything, from clothes to canned goods to shampoo, had to be gotten by hook, crook, personal connection, or by buying them off a black marketeer. So it was not that “you’re looked upon as a patsy” if you were not “scamming the government,” as that unnamed officer told the Times, it’s that you’d die of hunger if you expected to get your food just by walking into a store with some money. (Plus, there was probably a line out the door and down the block.)
“These people deserve all the opprobrium in the world, but context is important. These are traumatized people, taking actions for which they remain fully responsible, but not because they’re evil—because you, too, might quite possibly act that way if you’d spent a lifetime living in the nightmare place where they lived,” Boris Fishman, a former fact-checker at The New Yorker who’s finishing a novel about a failed journalist who starts forging Holocaust-restitution claims, told me. (Boris is also a fellow Soviet immigrant.) “Even in these cynical souls it goes back to their inability to imagine a system where you get enough by acting fairly.”
The other thing about the “Russian mind-set” is that it goes back to pre-Soviet times, too. There’s a Russian saying, born of a history full of hard rulers and stupid laws spinning in distant corners of a very big and hard-to-regulate space: “The severity of the law is mitigated by its lack of enforcement.” So whereas someone of the “American mind-set” expects to be caught for breaking the law, someone of the “Russian mind-set” doesn’t. That’s a gross oversimplification, but it gets you close to the cultural context.
I was seven when my family came over from the Soviet Union. My parents largely avoided—and sneered at—the immigrant milieus like those of Brighton Beach. They were educated Muscovites; they did not party at Russian restaurants. They took us, their children, to the opera and the ballet. But being poor immigrants, and ballet tickets being ballet tickets, we often found ourselves sitting in the nosebleed sections only to scamper down to the parterre when the lights went out. (These shows were full of other Soviet immigrants, and so you’d find yourself clawing for velvet seats in the dark with someone just like you.) If you can do it and no one will catch you—hey, it’s dark!—why not? Though I should say that the greatest obstacle to moving down to the more expensive seats was the vehement resistance of my annoyingly law-abiding little sister—also a Soviet immigrant.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/fraud-brighton-beach-russian-mind-set.html#ixzz1oACu1MAz |
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发表于 2012-3-4 22:56:40
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