Rena 20号正式回来~~~@every队友：爱你们!!!

Rena张

顶楼更新3~

（发现我把所有东西都挤在顶楼的话，顶楼会塌的~所以今天做了下改动~）

2012.3.26
今天睡过头了，没早起，任务也没全部完成……
以后还是果断要先完成自己计划的，再来做速度与越障啊~因为没做完速度与越障，我会睡不着的……这就是阅读小分队的魅力啊~
此外OG进度太太太太太慢了……我惭愧……所以果断要把OG排在第一个要完成的任务啊！！！
现在很晚了，还是得早点睡的呀~
照旧把偶的速度与越障贴上来……

【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障2系列】【2-6】文史哲---妇女
速度1  (337 words)

Leadership: Current Theories, Research, and Future Directions
Annual Review of Psychology
Vol. 60: 421-449 (Volume publication date January 2009)
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163621

Abstract:
This review examines recent theoretical and empirical developments in the leadership literature, beginning with topics that are currently receiving attention in terms of research, theory, and practice. We begin by examining authentic leadership and its development, followed by work that takes a cognitive science approach. We then examine new-genre leadership theories, complexity leadership, and leadership that is shared, collective, or distributed. We examine the role of relationships through our review of leader member exchange and the emerging work on followership. Finally, we examine work that has been done on substitutes for leadership, servant leadership, spirituality and leadership, cross-cultural leadership, and e-leadership. This structure has the benefit of creating a future focus as well as providing an interesting way to examine the development of the field. Each section ends with an identification of issues to be addressed in the future, in addition to the overall integration of the literature we provide at the end of the article.

Introduction:
One of our goals for this integrative review is to examine the ways in which the field of leadership is evolving and the consequences of its evolutionary path for the models, methods, and populations examined. For example, at the outset of the field of leadership, the primary focus was on studying an individual leader, who was most likely a male working in some large private-sector organization in the United States. Today, the field of leadership focuses not only on the leader, but also on followers, peers, supervisors, work setting/context, and culture, including a much broader array of individuals representing the entire spectrum of diversity, public, private, and not-for-profit organizations, and increasingly over the past 20 years, samples of populations from nations around the globe. Leadership is no longer simply described as an individual characteristic or difference, but rather is depicted in various models as dyadic, shared, relational, strategic, global, and a complex social dynamic (Avolio 2007, Yukl 2006).


速度2 (339 words)

We organize our examination of how leadership is evolving by discussing significant areas of inquiry that represent current pillars in leadership research, some understandably taller than others. We highlight the current state of each particular area of inquiry, and discuss what we know, what we don't know, and what remains interesting possibilities to pursue in future research. Given our space limitations, we focus more on the current state of these respective areas in terms of advances in theory, research, and practice, including the criticisms and boundaries of theories, models, and methods wherever appropriate. From this analysis, we offer some recommendations for future directions that the science of leadership could pursue, and we discuss the potential implications for leadership practice.
Looking back over the past 100 years, we cannot imagine a more opportune time for the field of leadership studies. Never before has so much attention been paid to leadership, and the fundamental question we must ask is, what do we know and what should we know about leaders and leadership? We begin addressing these questions not by going back to the earliest work in leadership, but rather by focusing on what is most current in the field. We then examine other areas from which the current work has emerged, rather than examining leadership material covered in recent reviews (Gelfand et al. 2007, Goethals 2005) or providing a comprehensive historical review of the field that is better left to the Handbook of Leadership(Bass & Bass 2008; see also Yukl & Van Fleet 1992).


Overview of Authentic Leadership:

One of the emerging pillars of interest in the field of leadership has been called authentic leadership development. As discussed in a special issue [edited by Avolio & Gardner (2005)] of the Leadership Quarterly on this topic and in an earlier theoretical piece by Luthans & Avolio (2003), the advent of work on authentic leadership development came as a result of writings on transformational leadership, in which authors such as Bass & Steidlmeier (1999) suggest that there are pseudo versus authentic transformational leaders.

速度3 (375 words)

Luthans & Avolio (2003) also introduced the concept of authentic leadership development into the literature with the goal of integrating work on (Luthans 2002) positive organizational behavior with the life-span leadership development work of Avolio (1999). Their main purpose was to examine what constituted genuine leadership development including what worked and didn't work to develop leaders and leadership, as well as to bring to the foreground some of the recent work in positive psychology as a foundation for examining how one might accelerate the development. Luthans and Avolio reasoned that using some of the theoretical work in positive psychology such as Fredrickson's (2001) broaden-and-build theory, they could offer a more positive way for conceptualizing leadership development. According to Fredrickson, those individuals who have more positive psychological resources are expected to grow more effectively or to broaden themselves and build out additional personal resources to perform. Luthans and Avolio report that to a large extent, the prior leadership development work was based on a deficit-reduction model strategy, where one discovered what was wrong with a leader and then worked to correct deficits in terms of focusing on the leader's development (also see Avolio & Luthans 2006).

Authentic Leadership Defined
First and foremost, the concept of authenticity has been around for a long time, as reflected in many philosophical discussions of what constitutes authenticity (Harter et al. 2002). George (2003) popularized authentic leadership in the general practice community when he published his book on the topic, as did Luthans & Avolio (2003) for the academic community.Luthans & Avolio (2003, p. 243) defined authentic leadership as “a process that draws from both positive psychological capacities and a highly developed organizational context, which results in both greater self-awareness and self-regulated positive behaviors on the part of leaders and associates, fostering positive self-development.” This definition and subsequent work on authentic leadership was defined at the outset as multilevel in that it included the leader, follower, and context very specifically in the way it was conceptualized and measured. This addressed a typical criticism in the leadership literature summarized by Yammarino et al. (2005, p. 10) who concluded, “relatively few studies in any of the areas of leadership research have addressed levels-of-analysis issues appropriately in theory, measurement, data analysis, and inference drawing.”

速度4 (366 words)

At the same time, several scholars (e.g., Cooper et al. 2005, Sparrowe 2005) expressed concerns with Luthans & Avolio's initial definition of authentic leadership. The initial conceptual differences notwithstanding, there appears to be general agreement in the literature on four factors that cover the components of authentic leadership: balanced processing, internalized moral perspective, relational transparency, and self-awareness. Balanced processing refers to objectively analyzing relevant data before making a decision. Internalized moral perspective refers to being guided by internal moral standards, which are used to self-regulate one's behavior. Relational transparency refers to presenting one's authentic self through openly sharing information and feelings as appropriate for situations (i.e., avoiding inappropriate displays of emotions). Self-awareness refers to the demonstrated understanding of one's strengths, weaknesses, and the way one makes sense of the world. These four constructs were further operationally defined by Walumbwa and colleagues (2008). Walumbwa et al. (2008) provided initial evidence using a multisample strategy involving U.S. and non-U.S. participants to determine the construct validity of a new set of authentic leadership scales. Specifically, they showed the four components described above represented unique scales that were reliable. These four scales loaded on a higher-order factor labeled authentic leadership that was discriminantly valid from measures of transformational leadership (e.g., Avolio 1999) and ethical leadership (e.g., Brown et al. 2005) and was a significant and positive predictor of organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, and satisfaction with supervisor and performance.

Future Focus Required
Work on defining and measuring authentic leadership is in the very early stages of development. Future research will need to offer additional evidence for the construct validity of this measure or other measures, and it will also need to demonstrate how authentic leadership relates to other constructs within its nomological network. This would include constructs such as moral perspective, self-concept clarity, well-being, spirituality, and judgment. Moreover, there is a need to examine how authentic leadership is viewed across situations and cultures and whether it is a universally prescribed positive root construct—meaning it represents the base of good leadership regardless of form, e.g., participative, directive, or inspiring. In the next section, we turn our attention to the second major focus on authentic leadership, which incorporates the term development.

速度5 (317 words)

Authentic Leadership Development:
Up until very recently, one would be hard-pressed to find in the leadership literature a general model of leadership development (Luthans & Avolio 2003). Even more difficult to find is evidence-based leadership development. Specifically, what evidence is there to support whether leaders or leadership can be developed using one or more specific theories of leadership? This question led to a concerted effort to explore what was known about whether leaders are born or made, as well as the efficacy of leadership interventions.

Heritability and Leadership
One avenue of research that has explored whether leaders are born versus made has involved studying identical and fraternal twins. Preliminary evidence using a behavioral genetics approach has shown that approximately 30% of the variation in leadership style and emergence was accounted for by heritability; the remaining variation was attributed to differences in environmental factors such as individuals having different role models and early opportunities for leadership development (Arvey et al. 2007). Because identical twins have 100% of the same genetic makeup and fraternal twins share about 50%, this behavioral genetics research was able to control for heritability to examine how many leadership roles the twins emerged into over their respective careers. In this and subsequent research for both men and women across cultures, similar results were obtained. The authors conducting this research conclude that the “life context” one grows up in and later works in is much more important than heritability in predicting leadership emergence across one's career.

Examining Evidence for Positive Leadership Interventions
Lord & Hall (1992, p. 153) noted, “too much research in the past has attempted to probe the complex issues of leadership using simple bivariate correlations.” It seems fair to say that although most models of leadership have causal predictions, a relatively small percentage of the accumulated literature has actually tested these predictions using controlled leadership interventions, especially in field research settings (Yukl 2006).

自由阅读 (185 words)

To determine whether experimental interventions actually impacted leadership development and/or performance, a qualitative and quantitative review of the leadership intervention (i.e., studies where a researcher overtly manipulated leadership to examine its impact on some specific intermediate process variables or outcomes) literature was undertaken (seeAvolio & Luthans 2006, Avolio et al. 2009, Reichard & Avolio 2005). The focus of this meta-analytic review was unique in that up to that point, more than 30 meta-analyses had been published on leadership research, none of which had focused on leadership interventions and more than one model of leadership. For each study, the leadership intervention examined was categorized into six types: training, actor/role-play, scenario/vignette, assignments, expectations, others. Reichard & Avolio (2005) reported that regardless of the theory being investigated, results showed that leadership interventions had a positive impact on work outcomes (e.g., ratings of leader performance), even when the duration of those interventions was less than one day. In terms of utility, participants in the broadly defined leadership treatment condition had on average a 66% chance of positive outcomes versus only a 34% chance of success for the comparison group.

以下是文章link：
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163621



越障 (878 words)
How helping women helps business

Companies whose social investments focus on women in developing economies help not only the recipients but also themselves.
January 2010 ? Irina A. Nikolic and Lynn Taliento
Source: Social Sector Practice


This is a Conversation Starter, one in a series of invited opinions on topical issues. Read the essay, then share your thoughts by commenting below.
Few companies make social investments specifically aimed at empowering women in developing economies, but we believe that supporting this goal is good business and good practice for all companies. In the course of our work,1 we’ve uncovered a startlingly wide range of ways in which private-sector companies can offer sizable economic benefits not only to women and their societies but also to the companies themselves. The benefits to businesses come from enlarging their markets, improving the quality or size of their current and potential workforce (for instance, by attracting talent globally), and maintaining or improving their reputations.
Women in developing economies are hampered by many of the same concerns that face women in other countries, but they also deal with a number of additional barriers to economic security. In some cases, these problems are straightforward—girls getting less food and education than boys, for example. In others, they are as complicated as the difficulty women in many countries have in keeping control over money they may earn (because of regulations or long-standing cultural traditions that prevent them from having secure access to bank accounts), owning property, or acquiring loans.
Women’s unfulfilled potential significantly hinders economic growth. One recent study, for example, estimates that lower education and employment rates for women and girls are responsible for as much as a 1.6 percentage point difference in annual GDP growth between South Asia and East Asia.2On the other hand, educated, income-earning women are especially powerful catalysts for development because they tend to invest more of their money in their families’ health, education, and well-being than men do.
Nevertheless, only 19 percent of the respondents to a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey said that their companies had invested in economic-development activities specifically aimed at women in developing markets. Yet 83 percent said that economic growth there was at least somewhat important to their companies’ success over the next ten years. (Read more in the accompanying survey results, “Rethinking how companies address social issues: McKinsey Global Survey results.”)
Companies whose social investments do focus on women in developing economies, the survey and our other research show, benefit not only women and their societies but also themselves. Among survey respondents, 34 percent say that such investments have already improved profits, and a further 38 percent expect them to do so.
Even more notably, our research shows that private-sector companies can create such benefits with a much broader range of measures than most executives believe. Promoting literacy, for example, offers a straightforward link to improved workforce productivity—but, it turns out, so does providing antiretroviral drugs to workers’ families. Anglo American, a mining company, extends HIV antiretroviral benefits to dependents (mostly women and children) of its employees in Africa. It has benefited from increased worker loyalty—retention rates are up—and from fewer missed workdays by employees who would otherwise need to care for sick family members. Furthermore, the communities Anglo American is serving now see lower infant mortality rates and healthier children.
Hindustan Lever’s Shakti program, meanwhile, tapped into the significant potential of empowering women to reach markets the company couldn’t otherwise. Launched in 2000, the program offers microcredit grants that enable rural women to become direct-to-home distributors of Hindustan Lever products. This new sales force has significantly boosted sales of the company’s products in rural villages, a market that is otherwise dauntingly expensive to reach. By the end of 2008, the Shakti network had grown to include more than 45,000 saleswomen covering more than 100,000 villages and more than three million homes in India.3
Private-sector programs can also give companies longer-term or more intangible rewards, such as maintaining a positive brand image or creating a more educated workforce or wealthier consumers. In India, Standard Chartered recently partnered with the International Federation of Netball Associations to build a program designed to use the sport to develop the life skills and self-esteem of girls between 14 and 16 years of age from families earning less than $2 a day. Piloted in Mumbai and Delhi, and currently being significantly expanded, the program includes an additional direct economic-empowerment component: a loan fund to help girls achieve their professional goals.4
Private-sector companies, we’ve found, can make development investments in programs that help girls and women throughout their lives—from infancy through education, preparation for work, support in the workplace, and ensuring financial security. For each stage of women’s lives, we’ve distilled a set of high-impact actions, which range from offering prenatal care and infant vaccinations to providing onsite bank accounts ensuring that female employees control their income and retirement savings. Companies don’t have to go it alone: successful ones, we’ve seen, design and implement their investments collaboratively with the women they’re trying to help, nongovernmental organizations with relevant experience, and other companies with similar interests. They can create real benefits for everyone by creatively combining an interest in empowering women in developing markets with a strategic assessment of where doing so can help meet corporate goals.
We invite you to share your experiences. Has your company acted to empower women economically? Are you the beneficiary of an economic-empowerment program? What results have you seen?


啊……今天速度超级无敌慢的哇……而且还没怎么看懂~~~伤心……
NO.1：Leadership, review of leadership, and the goal, and the exam of leadership is not merely individual, but also the followers, peers, supervisors and so on, and it focuses on many kind of other aspect of leadership.  2'36

NO.2：How we organize our examination towards leadership. We focus more on current leadership in the field. Overview of Authentic Leadership...  2'09

NO.3：Authentic leadership~balabala~ the concept of authentic leadership..  2'45

NO.4：many scholars express concerns on authentic leadership. There are four components of authentic leadership. The definition of each of the four components. The study of authentic leadership needs future focus...  3'02

NO.5：Whether leaders are born or made. A research has been done between twins. It has shown that 30% was accounted for by heritability, and the remaining was different environment.  2'16

NO.6：(free reading) 1'15

越障
Companies who focus on women not only benefit the recipients but themselves.

The current conditions of women which make them the focus of those companies, and the reasons that helping women can be beneficial to both the society and the companies.

An successful example is stated.
7'50''

明天继续 加油！

Rena张

啊 新的一天又结束啦~ 偶来更新来啦~更新完要早点睡着啊……

今天OG还是慢！万事开头难嘛~不能气馁，明天要硬着头皮继续 继续~
不知道是不是受早上OG的影响，下午开始做什么都慢……
做个狒狒logic做了40min~偶滴神呐……正确率依然如故……
晚上的速度与越障呀~ 我想知道我是不是把速度也当越障看啦？ 肿么会这么凄惨……

照例把今天的速度与越障贴上来~


【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障2系列】【2-7】科技-particle physics-neutrino
neutrino这词，说实话，我这个外行原本不知道。可最近半年来这词实在太火了，尤其是最近的Science / Nature几乎每期都少不了它的靓影…..所以今天咱就一起来认识一下吧，看看某个由爱因斯坦提出的、咱在中学物理课上学过的公理，到底有没有被推翻呢？

[计时一]
The neutrino and its friends
Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles which make up the universe. They are also one of the least understood.

Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry electric charge. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons.Neutrinos are affected only by a "weak" sub-atomic force of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to pass through great distances in matter without being affected by it. If neutrinos have mass,they also interact gravitationally with other massive particles, but gravity is by far the weakest of the four known forces.

Three types of neutrinos are known; there is strong evidence that no additional neutrinos exist, unless their properties are unexpectedly very different from the known types. Each type or "flavor" of neutrino is related to a charged particle (which gives the corresponding neutrino its name).  Hence, the "electron neutrino" is associated with the electron, and two other neutrinos are associated with heavier versions of the electron called the muon and the tau (elementary particles are frequently labelled with Greek letters, to confuse the layman).

Looking for Neutrinos, Nature's Ghost Particles
To study some of the most elusive particles, physicists have built detectors in abandoned mines, tunnels and Antarctic ice
By Ann Finkbeiner
Smithsonian magazine,     November 2010
[233 WORDS]
[计时二]
We’re awash in neutrinos. They’re among the lightest of the two dozen or so known subatomic particles and they come from all directions: from the Big Bang that began the universe, from exploding stars and, most of all, from the sun.They come straight through the earth at nearly the speed of light, all the time, day and night, in enormous numbers. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second.

The problem for physicists is that neutrinos are impossible to see and difficult to detect. Any instrument designed to do so may feel solid to the touch, but to neutrinos, even stainless steel is mostly empty space, as wide open as a solar system is to a comet. What’s more, neutrinos, unlike most subatomic particles, have no electric charge—they’re neutral, hence the name—so scientists can’t use electric or magnetic forces to capture them. Physicists call them “ghost particles.”

To capture these elusive entities, physicists have conducted some extraordinarily ambitious experiments. So that neutrinos aren’t confused with cosmic rays (subatomic particles from outer space that do not penetrate the earth), detectors are installed deep underground. Enormous ones have been placed in gold and nickel mines, in tunnels beneath mountains, in the ocean and in Antarctic ice. These strangely beautiful devices are monuments to humankind’s resolve to learn about the universe.

It’s unclear what practical applications will come from studying neutrinos.“We don’t know where it’s going to lead,” says Boris Kayser, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

Physicists study neutrinos in part because neutrinos are such odd characters: they seem to break the rules that describe nature at its most fundamental. And if physicists are ever going to fulfill their hopes of developing a coherent theory of reality that explains the basics of nature without exception, they are going to have to account for the behavior of neutrinos.
[313 WORDS]
[计时三]
In addition, neutrinos intrigue scientists because the particles are messengers from the outer reaches of the universe, created by violently exploding galaxies and other mysterious phenomena. “Neutrinos may be able to tell us things that the more humdrum particles can’t,” says Kayser.

Physicists imagined neutrinos long before they ever found any. In 1930, they created the concept to balance an equation that was not adding up. When the nucleus of a radioactive atom disintegrates, the energy of the particles it emits must equal the energy it originally contained. But in fact, scientists observed, the nucleus was losing more energy than detectors were picking up. Soto account for that extra energy the physicist Wolfgang Pauli conceived an extra, invisible particle emitted by the nucleus. “I have done something very bad today by proposing a particle that cannot be detected,”?Pauli wrote in his journal. “It is something no theorist should ever do.”

Experimentalists began looking for it anyway. At a nuclear weapons laboratory in South Carolina in the mid-1950s, they stationed two large water tanks outside a nuclear reactor that, according to their equations, should have been making ten trillion neutrinos a second. The detector was tiny by today’s standards, but it still managed to spot neutrinos—three an hour. The scientists had established that the proposed neutrino was in fact real; study of the elusive particle accelerated.

A decade later, the field scaled up when another group of physicists installed a detector in the Homestake gold mine, in Lead, South Dakota, 4,850 feet underground. In this experiment the scientists set out to observe neutrinos by monitoring what happens on the rare occasion when a neutrino collides with a chlorine atom and creates radioactive argon, which is readily detectable. At the core of the experiment was a tank filled with 600 tons of a chlorine-rich liquid, perchloroethylene, a fluid used in dry-cleaning. Every few months, the scientists would flush the tank and extract about 15 argon atoms, evidence of15 neutrinos. The monitoring continued for more than 30 years.
[338 WORDS]
[计时四]
Hoping to detect neutrinos in larger numbers, scientists in Japan led an experiment 3,300 feet underground in a zinc mine. Super-Kamiokande, or Super-K as it is known, began operating in 1996. The detector consists of50,000 tons of water in a domed tank whose walls are covered with 13,000 light sensors. The sensors detect the occasional blue flash (too faint for our eyes to see) made when a neutrino collides with an atom in the water and creates an electron. And by tracing the exact path the electron traveled in the water,physicists could infer the source, in space, of the colliding neutrino. Most,they found, came from the sun. The measurements were sufficiently sensitive that Super-K could track the sun’s path across the sky and, from nearly a mile below the surface of the earth, watch day turn into night. “It’s really an exciting thing,” says Janet Conrad, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The particle tracks can be compiled to create “a beautiful image,the picture of the sun in neutrinos.”

But the Homestake and Super-K experiments didn’t detect as many neutrinos as physicists expected. Research at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO, pronounced “snow”) determined why. Installed in a 6,800-foot-deep nickel mine in Ontario, SNO?contains1,100 tons of “heavy water,” which has an unusual form of hydrogen that reacts relatively easily with neutrinos. The fluid is in a tank suspended inside a huge acrylic ball that is itself held inside a geodesic superstructure, which absorbs vibrations and on which are hung 9,456 light sensors—the whole thing looking like a 30-foot-tall Christmas tree ornament.

Scientists working at SNO discovered in 2001 that a neutrino can spontaneously switch among three different identities—or as physicists say, it oscillates among three flavors. The discovery had startling implications. For one thing, it showed that previous experiments had detected far fewer neutrinos than predicted because the instruments were?tuned to just one neutrino flavor—the kind that creates an electron—and were missing the ones that switched. For another, the finding toppled physicists’ belief that a neutrino,like a photon, has no mass. (Oscillating among flavors is something that only particles with mass are able to do.)
[365 WORDS]
[计时五]
How much mass do neutrinos have? To find out, physicists are building KATRIN—the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment. KATRIN’s business end boasts a 200-ton device called a spectrometer that will measure the mass of atoms before and after they decay radioactively—thereby revealing how much mass the neutrino carries off. Technicians built the spectrometer about 250 miles from Karls­ruhe, Germany, where the experiment will operate; the device was too large for the region’s narrow roads, so it was put on a boat on the Danube River and floated past Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade, into the Black Sea,through the Aegean and the Mediterranean, around Spain, through the English Channel, to Rotterdam and into the Rhine, then south to the river port of Leopoldshafen, Germany. There it was offloaded onto a truck and squeaked through town to its destination, two months and 5,600 miles later. It is scheduled to start collecting data in 2012.

Physicists and astronomers interested in the information that neutrinos from outer space might carry about supernovas or colliding galaxies have set up neutrino “telescopes.” One, called IceCube, is inside an ice field in Antarctica. When completed, in 2011, it will consist of more than 5,000 blue-light sensors (see diagram above). The sensors are aimed not at the sky, as you might expect, but toward the ground, to detect neutrinos from the sun and outer space that are coming through the planet from the north.The earth blocks cosmic rays, but most neutrinos zip through the8,000-mile-wide planet as if it weren’t there.

A long-distance neutrino experiment is taking place under several Midwestern states. A high-energy accelerator, which generates subatomic particles, shoots beams of neutrinos and related particles as much as six miles deep, beneath northern Illinois, across Wisconsin and into Minnesota.The particles start at Fermilab, as part of an experiment called the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS). In less than three-thousandths of a second, they hit a detector in the Soudan iron mine, 450 miles away. The data the scientists have gathered complicates their picture of this infinitesimal world: it now appears that exotic forms of neutrinos, so-called anti-neutrinos,may not follow the same rules of oscillation as other neutrinos.

“What’s cool,” says Conrad, “is that it’s not what we expected.”

When it comes to neutrinos, very little is.

[384 WORDS]
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Looking-for-Neutrinos-Natures-Ghost-Particles.html#ixzz1qDbnzgbg


[越障]
Neutrinos not faster than light
ICARUS experiment contradicts controversial claim.
16 March 2012 Corrected:

The ICARUS detector in Gran  Sasso, Italy, has confirmed that neutrinos travel no faster than the speed of light.

Neutrinos obey nature's speed limit, according to new results from an Italian experiment. The finding, posted to the preprint server arXiv.org, contradicts a rival claim that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light.

Neutrinos are tiny, electrically neutral particles produced in nuclear reactions. Last September, an experiment called OPERA turned up evidence that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light (see 'Particles break light speed limit'). Located beneath the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy, OPERA detected neutrinos sent from CERN, Europe's premier particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. According to the group's findings, neutrinos made the 731-kilometre journey 60 nanoseconds faster than predicted if they had travelled at light speed.

The announcement made international headlines, but physicists were deeply sceptical. The axiom that nothing travels faster than light was first formulated by Albert Einstein and is a cornerstone of modern physics. OPERA defended its announcement, saying that it could find no flaw in its measurement.

Now another experiment located just a few metres from OPERA has clocked neutrinos travelling at roughly the speed of light, and no faster. Known as ICARUS, the rival monitored a beam of neutrinos sent from CERN in late October and early November of last year. The neutrinos were packed into pulses just 3nanoseconds long. That meant that the timing could be measured far more accurately than the original OPERA measurement, which used 10-microsecondpulses.

“Our results are in agreement with what Einstein would like to have,” says Carlo Rubbia, the spokesperson for ICARUS and a Nobel prizewinning physicist at CERN. Neutrinos measured by the experiment arrived within just 4 nanoseconds of the time that light travelling through a vacuum would take to cover the distance, well within the experimental margin of error.

Because the pulses from CERN were so short, ICARUS measured only seven neutrinos during the late autumn run, but Rubbia says that the relatively low number does not matter. “How many times do you have to say 'zero' to make sure it's zero?” he asks.

The findings are yet another blow to OPERA, which was already under intense scrutiny from the wider experimental community. Almost as soon as the announcement was made, physicists began trying to poke holes in the OPERA analysis, and on 23 February researchers from within the OPERA team announced that they had uncovered possible timing problems with their original measurements (see 'Timing glitches dog neutrino claim'). Those problems could have led to the60-nanosecond discrepancy.

Dario Autiero, a physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon, France,and physics coordinator for OPERA, welcomes the latest result. He notes that OPERA continued to detect faster-than-light neutrinos in October and November,when the shorter pulses were used. The team continues to search for possible sources of error, he says.

For some, the new measurements settle the matter once and for all. “The OPERA case is now conclusively closed,” says Adam Falkowski, a theoretical physicist at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France.But Rubbia says that he is still awaiting further measurements set to be made later in the spring by OPERA, ICARUS and two other experiments inside Gran Sasso.

“Had we found 60 nanoseconds, I would have sent a bottle of champagne to OPERA,” Rubbia says. But as it stands, he suspects he will be toasting Einstein. “It's quite a relief, because I'm a conservative character,” he says.
[599 WORDS]
Source: Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.10249
http://www.nature.com/news/neutrinos-not-faster-than-light-1.10249?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20120320

Recommended listening:
http://blog.ted.com/2008/04/29/brian_cox/
An intriguing talk - particle physics, astronomy, and a physicist’s perception of our universe


啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊~
终于看完啦~
速度那个慢哟~肿么办肿么办肿么办呀！！！！！

NO.1: Neutrinos are the fundamental elements compose the universe. They are electrically neutral.  ...... 01:53

NO.2: Neutrinos exist everywhere, from the very stage of explosion. A large number of neutrinos pass through our bodies. Because of their special characteristics, they are hard to capture.  ...... 02:33

NO.3: 在很久以前人们就开始假设N的存在，但是没有切实可信的证据来证明，多年后，有人根据XXX每隔3个小时就spot N. 这次的试验证明了N是真实存在的。十年后，另一个试验take place.  ....... 02:35

NO4: 日本的科学家做了一个试验，他们在一个有XX吨的水的水箱周围布置了XXX多个感应器，用来捕捉肉眼看不见的N在水中和电子碰撞时产生的蓝光。并根据这一试验得出绝大部分的N是来自太阳的，科学家们可以用XX来trace太阳在蓝天中的轨迹，以及地下XX深处的太阳的轨迹。 .......03:25

NO.5: 为了测量N的质量，科学家们利用一个很先进的K~做了个试验，但是由于街道的路太窄了，试验地点只好放到了漂浮在海上的船上了，从XX到XX再到XX, XXX. 在这个试验中科学家们最感兴趣的是N从外太空所带来的信息~ ........02:59

越障

I~发表声明说N不会比光速快。简单介绍了下N。C的opera测试出N比光速快那么一点点……但是这受到物理学家的质疑。现今另一个试验I~，它在时间的测量上更精确，他们得出的结果是与爱因斯坦相一致的。这一试验结果还给opera带来了其他的影响，从他们宣布结果的那天开始，那些物理学家们就开始想要指出它的漏洞。但是opera的科学家们不死心，还要利用新的timingXX继续研究，要找出错误。多数人还是站在爱因斯坦这一边滴~ 05:57

Rena张

今天太晚了~明天再来更新今天的日记吧~ 再不睡 就要失眠喽~
-----------------------------------
3.28  今天的新鲜事--加入了逻辑小分队~ 那个开心啊~
---------------------------------------------
速度与越障~
Inditex
Fashion forward
Zara, Spain’s most successful brand, is trying to go global
摘自http://www.economist.com/node/21551063
FLOGGING fashion is like selling fish, as Amancio Ortega, the founder of Inditex, likes to say. Fresh fish, like a freshly cut jacket in the latest colour, sells quickly and at a high price. Yesterday’s catch must be discounted and may not sell at all.
This simple insight has made Inditex one of the world’s two biggest clothes makers. (The other, H&M Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden, is about the same size.) From its base near the Spanish fishing port of La Coruña, Inditex’s main brand, Zara, has conquered Europe.
The Inditex model, celebrated in many a case study, goes like this. Other fashion firms have their clothes made in China. This is cheap, but managing a long supply chain is hard. By the time a boat has sailed halfway round the world, hemlines may have risen an inch and its cargo will be as popular as geriatric haddock.
Inditex, by contrast, sources just over half of its products from Spain, Portugal and Morocco. This costs more. But because its supply chain is short, Inditex can react quickly to new trends. Instead of betting on tomorrow’s hot look, Zara can wait to see what customers are actually buying—and make that. While others are stuck with unwanted stock, Inditex sells at full prices.
Sales have quadrupled to ?3.8 billion ($19.1 billion) since the firm’s initial public offering in 2001. Inditex’s operating profits are high and have been more stable over time than its peers’. The firm now faces two challenges. Can it go global? And will its “fast-fashion” model be copied, or bettered, by others?
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For now, Inditex is dependent on Europe: 70% of its sales in 2011 were there. Sales in Spain, which accounted for 25% of revenue, have stalled. Europe is stagnant and ageing. Inditex needs new markets.
Pablo Isla, who took over as chairman from Mr Ortega last summer, has big plans. “Going into China is like beginning again in Europe for us,” he says. Announcing its annual results on March 21st, Inditex said it opened 179 new stores in Asia in 2011, 156 of them in China.
A global brand needs a prominent shop window. On March 15th Inditex opened a huge outlet on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, having bought the store for $324m last year. (Even after adjusting for inflation, that is more than the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which America bought all or part of 15 states.) The aim is not merely to sell to New Yorkers, but to convince shoppers everywhere that Zara is hip.
Inditex’s formula has not worked everywhere. Zara has struggled in America, for instance. It sells trendy cuts and slim fits. Outside the biggest cities, Americans have long preferred classic, roomier clothes (though this may be changing). Chinese office ladies like Zara’s slim fits more, says Fraser Ramzan of Nomura, a bank. Iria Campos, a Zara designer, says Chinese women choose pastels to flatter their pale skin rather than the stronger colours Europeans prefer; but otherwise they have surprisingly similar tastes.
Still, China will not be easy. Zara’s clothes are far pricier than local rivals’, whereas in Europe they are relatively cheap. And because of the distance from La Coruña, Zara must charge more in absolute terms as well. So it has to convince Chinese shoppers that it is luxurious enough to justify the price tag. Its Chinese stores are packed, but its success is more fragile in China than in Europe, says Luca Solca of CA Cheuvreux Research in Paris. It must watch the quality of its products.
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And expect hurdles. Last year China’s consumer watchdog attacked Zara for poor quality. The firm denies that it was singled out for political reasons. But the Chinese government typically targets foreign firms first. Last week McDonald’s and Carrefour were pilloried for minor lapses.
At some point, Inditex may have to adapt its business model for Asia. As its Chinese sales grow, it will make sense to have both logistics and design in China, says Mr Solca. Last year rumours flew that Inditex might buy Giordano, a Hong Kong-based version of Gap, an American clothes chain. Both companies denied it.
Inditex currently has a dozen or so designers in Shanghai and around 250 at home in La Coruña. That will surely change. Creatively, Europe is “rather dead”, says José Luis Pavia Cervera, a former executive at Inditex who now works for C&A, a mid-market retailer. In the future, China will set the trends, he reckons.
Several of Inditex’s rivals are struggling. In February the Benetton family moved to de-list their fashion group to revamp its business model. Benetton went international in the 1980s but overexpanded and lost direction. Its shocking ads (the Pope kissing an imam, etc) no longer thrill. America’s Gap, another retailer with global ambitions, is ailing. Both brands have lost market share to Inditex and H&M.
The genius of Mr Ortega’s model, says a former Inditex executive, is that it picks up on every season’s trends and is never associated with any one style, which could fall out of fashion. Alone among its peers, it does not advertise. Instead, it relies on chic locations and shop-window displays. Rivals, however, argue that Zara is in fact associated with something: a gilded age of throwaway fashion. Now that tight belts are in, women may hesitate to buy a top and wear it only twice.
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Inditex is trying to develop new brands. Bershka, the most successful, was launched in 1998 and has sales of ?.3 billion. But the firm remains dependent on Zara, which generated 65% of sales in 2011.
Kings of La Coruña
The change at the top appears to have gone smoothly. Mr Isla was Mr Ortega’s deputy and hand-picked successor. The 75-year-old Mr Ortega remains powerful, however: he still owns 59% of Inditex. He started work in a clothing shop in La Coruña at 13, and has always directed the design, manufacturing and selling side of the business, while delegating other parts, such as finance and IT. The firm has developed a “schism” between the product side and finance, according to “Zara and Her Sisters”, a recent book by Enrique Badía.
Mr Isla’s background is different. A lawyer, he was chairman of Altadis, a tobacco group, before joining Inditex in 2005. Even now that he is the boss, says a former colleague, Mr Isla “has little to do with the product side of the business”. Mr Ortega is still in charge of that, apparently.
Insiders praise Mr Isla. He has curbed costs. During 2010-11 the firm rolled out a global online-commerce platform for Zara. Were it not for Mr Isla, Inditex would probably not have broken with its bricks-and- mortar tradition so boldly. The company does not release figures, but the online store is said to be thriving.
Nevertheless, insiders worry about the day Mr Ortega really retires. Inditex will need a new muse, some say. Mr Isla retorts that product teams make product decisions, and that Mr Ortega’s handover of the chairmanship represented “the complete professionalisation of the company”.
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Why has no one copied Inditex’s business model? One executive at Gap is said to have answered: “I would love to organise our business like Inditex, but I would have to knock the company down and rebuild it from scratch.” The gulf between Inditex and its rivals is bound to shrink, however. Isabel Cavill of Planet Retail, a consultancy, notes that retailers such as Gap and George, a brand owned by Britain’s Asda, are seeking to move production away from Asia and closer to home.
As Benetton addresses its problems, it will adopt elements of Inditex’s model, such as the way it frequently updates its collections, says an executive close to the company. Plenty of competitors are poaching the Spanish firm’s people to learn its secrets. “My main task at C&A is to replicate Inditex’s obsessive focus on its products and its shops,” says Mr Pavia, who has hired people from Inditex to help him. Nothing lasts forever in the world of fashion. Fortunes, like hemlines, can go down as well as up.

The farther the better for corals after oil spill
Deepwater organisms may be slow to recover from Gulf accident
摘自 http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/339476/title/The_farther_the_better_for_corals_after_oil_spill_

Deepwater corals didn’t escape the ecological damage of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. How much they were hurt depended on how close to the spill’s source they were.
Six months after the spill, marine scientists sent deep-diving submersibles down 290 to 2,600 meters to check out the damage at the bottom of the Gulf. At several sites more than 20 kilometers away from the ruptured wellhead, deepwater corals such as Paramuricea apparently continued to thrive. But just 11 kilometers from the spill, similar corals had lost tissue and were covered in places with a brown flocculent material.
(296字)
自由阅读
Chemical analysis of that “floc” linked it to the chemical composition of oil spewing from the wellhead, suggesting the material in some way forms after exposure to oil. Because deepwater corals live so long and grow at a biologically glacial pace, it could be years before the full effect of the oil spill on deepwater corals is known, scientists say.
Helen White, a geochemist at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and her colleagues report the finding online the week of March 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

越障
Computer passwords
Speak, friend, and enter
Computer passwords need to be memorable and secure. Most people’s are the first but not the second. Researchers are trying to make it easier for them to be both
摘自http://www.economist.com/node/21550763
PASSWORDS are ubiquitous in computer security. All too often, they are also ineffective. A good password has to be both easy to remember and hard to guess, but in practice people seem to plump for the former over the latter. Names of wives, husbands and children are popular. Some take simplicity to extremes: one former deputy editor of The Economist used “z” for many years. And when hackers stole 32m passwords from a social-gaming website called RockYou, it emerged that 1.1% of the site’s users—365,000 people—had opted either for “123456” or for “12345”.
That predictability lets security researchers (and hackers) create dictionaries which list common passwords, a boon to those seeking to break in. But although researchers know that passwords are insecure, working out just how insecure has been difficult. Many studies have only small samples to work on—a few thousand passwords at most. Hacked websites such as RockYou have provided longer lists, but there are ethical problems with using hacked information, and its availability is unpredictable.
However, a paper to be presented at a security conference held under the auspices of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a New York-based professional body, in May, sheds some light. With the co-operation of Yahoo!, a large internet company, Joseph Bonneau of Cambridge University obtained the biggest sample to date—70m passwords that, though anonymised, came with useful demographic data about their owners.
Mr Bonneau found some intriguing variations. Older users had better passwords than young ones. (So much for the tech-savviness of youth.) People whose preferred language was Korean or German chose the most secure passwords; those who spoke Indonesian the least. Passwords designed to hide sensitive information such as credit-card numbers were only slightly more secure than those protecting less important things, like access to games. “Nag screens” that told users they had chosen a weak password made virtually no difference. And users whose accounts had been hacked in the past did not make dramatically more secure choices than those who had never been hacked.
But it is the broader analysis of the sample that is of most interest to security researchers. For, despite their differences, the 70m users were still predictable enough that a generic password dictionary was effective against both the entire sample and any demographically organised slice of it. Mr Bonneau is blunt: “An attacker who can manage ten guesses per account…will compromise around 1% of accounts.” And that, from the hacker’s point of view, is a worthwhile outcome.
One obvious answer would be for sites to limit the number of guesses that can be made before access is blocked, as cash machines do. Yet whereas the biggest sites, such as Google and Microsoft, do take such measures (and more), many do not. A sample of 150 big websites examined in 2010 by Mr Bonneau and his colleague Sören Preibusch found that 126 made no attempt to limit guessing.
How this state of affairs arose is obscure. For some sites, laxity may be rational, since their passwords are not protecting anything particularly valuable, such as credit-card details. But password laxity imposes costs even on sites with good security, since people often use the same password for several different places.
One suggestion is that lax password security is a cultural remnant of the internet’s innocent youth—an academic research network has few reasons to worry about hackers. Another possibility is that because many sites begin as cash-strapped start-ups, for which implementing extra password security would take up valuable programming time, they skimp on it at the beginning and then never bother to change. But whatever the reason, it behoves those unwilling to wait for websites to get their acts together to consider the alternatives to traditional passwords.
Skysail dactyl gimcrack golem
One such is multi-word passwords called passphrases. Using several words instead of one means an attacker has to guess more letters, which creates more security—but only if the phrase chosen is not one likely to turn up, through familiar usage, in a dictionary of phrases. Which, of course, it often is.
Mr Bonneau and his colleague Ekaterina Shutova have analysed a real-world passphrase system employed by Amazon, an online retailer that allowed its American users to employ passphrases between October 2009 and February 2012. They found that, although passphrases do offer better security than passwords, they are not as good as had been hoped. A phrase of four or five randomly chosen words (for instance, the headline above) is fairly secure. But remembering several such phrases is no easier than remembering several randomly chosen passwords. Once again, the need for memorability is a boon to attackers. By scraping the internet for lists of things like film titles, sporting phrases and slang, Mr Bonneau and Dr Shutova were able to construct a 20,656-word dictionary that unlocked 1.13% of the accounts in Amazon’s database.
The researchers also suspected that even those who do not use famous phrases would still prefer patterns found in natural language over true randomness. So they compared their collection of passphrases with two-word phrases extracted at random from the British National Corpus (a 100m-word sample of English maintained by Oxford University Press), and from the Google NGram Corpus (harvested from the internet by that firm’s web-crawlers). Sure enough, they found considerable overlap between structures common in ordinary English and the phrases chosen by Amazon’s users. Some 13% of the adjective-noun constructions (“beautiful woman”) which the researchers tried were on the money, as were 5% of adverb-verb mixes (“probably keep”).
One way round that is to combine the ideas of a password and a passphrase into a so-called mnemonic password. This is a string of apparent gibberish which is not actually too hard to remember. It can be formed, for example, by using the first letter of each word in a phrase, varying upper and lower case, and substituting some symbols for others—“8” for “B”, for instance. (“itaMc0Ttit8” is thus a mnemonic contraction of the text in these brackets.) Even mnemonic passwords, however, are not invulnerable. A study published in 2006 cracked 4% of the mnemonics in a sample using a dictionary based on song lyrics, film titles and the like.
The upshot is that there is probably no right answer. All security is irritating (ask anyone who flies regularly), and there is a constant tension between people’s desire to be safe and their desire for things to be simple. While that tension persists, the hacker will always get through.
(1115字)

NO.1: 新鲜的才能买的又快又贵~Z已经占领欧洲市场了，I没有像其他时尚公司一样把厂址设在劳动力廉价的中国~ ~~~ 它现在面临着两个挑战，一个是如何走上国际化，一个是它是否会被超越。 01:43
NO.2：I需要新的市场。于是它把目光转向中国。它在美国纽约开店不仅仅是为了把产品买给纽约客，更多的是要让购买者相信Z是hip~I的风格在美国并不太受欢迎，因为美国人更喜欢传统的风格~虽然中国人喜欢有鲜艳的色彩来装饰自己，但是他们与喜欢重色彩的欧洲人有着类似的品味~在中国市场的成功is more fragile than in Europe. 02:13
NO.3: I被指出存在质量问题。就在上周麦当劳和家乐福也在中国被指出存在问题。中国人首先把矛头指向外企~I现在有XXX个设计师在上海~将来它在中国的安排将有所改变。它的欧洲市场已经dead~  ~~~~~~~ 02:25
NO.4：I要开发新品牌~但任然依赖Z。简介了I的两个不同背景的boss~ I的内部人员最担心的是XX的退休~ 他们需要一个新的muse~ ~~~~~~~   01:46
NO.5 + 自由 : 为什么没有人模仿I的商业模式~XX说他们会采纳I的诅咒模式~XX说他们会采纳I的元素~~~   ~~~~~~  （后面换了个主题就走神了……没看明白~~~）2:20

越障：

Passwords 各种密码各种黑客~ 最常见的密码~easy to remember but not hard enough to guess~ older 的密码比younger的更安全些~ 重要的 不重要的都用同一个密码~ 给黑客提供了极大的便利~ 如果猜十次就能猜中的话，黑客就愿意去尝试~   balabala~~~10:05

各种困啊~ 真心不知道肿么这么不集中~~~慢慢慢~以后我改名叫慢慢算了~

Rena张

真心不能这么晚睡啊~

越障真是越来越不行啦~~~~~
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3.29
A security patch for your brain
The quickest way to improve online security is to upgrade your mental software
Mar 24th 2012 | from the print edition
【计时1】
TWO decades ago only spies and systems administrators had to worry about passwords. But today you have to enter one even to do humdrum things like turning on your computer, downloading an album or buying a book online. No wonder many people use a single, simple password for everything.
Analysis of password databases, often stolen from websites (something that happens with disturbing frequency), shows that the most common choices include “password”, “123456” and “abc123”. But using these, or any word that appears in a dictionary, is insecure. Even changing some letters to numbers (“e” to “3”, “i” to “1” and so forth) does little to reduce the vulnerability of such passwords to an automated “dictionary attack”, because these substitutions are so common. The fundamental problem is that secure passwords tend to be hard to remember, and memorable passwords tend to be insecure.
Weak passwords open the door to fraud, identity theft and breaches of privacy. An analysis by Verizon, an American telecoms firm, found that the biggest reason for successful security breaches was easily guessable passwords. Some viruses spread by trying common passwords. Attacks need only work enough of the time—say, in 1% of cases—to be worthwhile. And it turns out that a relatively short list of passwords provides access to 1% of accounts on many sites and systems.
Fingerprint scanners and devices that generate time-specific codes offer greater security, but they require hardware. Passwords, which need only software, are cheaper. In terms of security delivered per dollar spent, they are hard to beat, so they are not going away. But they need to be made more secure.
【字数：270】
【计时2】
The solution, say security researchers, is to upgrade the software in people’s heads, by teaching them to choose more secure passwords (see article). One approach is to use passphrases containing unrelated words, such as “correct horse battery staple”, linked by a mental image. Passphrases are, on average, several orders of magnitude harder to crack than passwords. But a new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge finds that people tend to choose phrases made up not of unrelated words but of words that already occur together, such as “dead poets society”. Such phrases are vulnerable to a dictionary attack based on common phrases taken from the internet. And many systems limit the length of passwords, making a long phrase impractical.
An update is ready for installation
An alternative approach, championed by Bruce Schneier, a security guru, is to turn a sentence into a password, taking the first letter of each word and substituting numbers and punctuation marks where possible. “Too much food and wine will make you sick” thus becomes “2mf&wwmUs”. This is no panacea: the danger with this “mnemonic password” approach is that people will use a proverb, or a line from a film or a song, as the starting point, which makes it vulnerable to attack. The ideal sentence is one like Mr Schneier’s that (until the publication of this article, at least) has no matches in Google.
Some websites make an effort to enhance security by indicating how easily guessed a password is likely to be, rejecting weak passwords, ensuring that password databases are kept properly encrypted and limiting the rate at which login attempts can be made. More should do so. But don’t rely on it happening. Instead, beef up your own security by upgrading your brain to use mnemonic passwords.
【字数：296】

Unfree trade
The European Commission is flirting dangerously with protectionism
Mar 24th 2012 | from the print edition
【计时3】
“FREE trade, yes. Disloyal competition, no. Europe that opens all its public-procurement markets when others do not open them at all—it’s no.” Thus Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, in a markedly protectionist campaign speech earlier this month. Less than a fortnight later, the European Commission has snapped its heels. It has issued a proposal to let the EU close its public-procurement markets to firms from countries that exclude European competitors from their public contracts. Like Mr Sarkozy, Eurocrats insist that this is not protectionism. It is, rather, creating a lever to prise open closed markets. The proposal has been a long time coming; if the commission had to postpone every initiative because of an election, it could never do anything. Yet many still see this as a campaign gift to Mr Sarkozy.
France’s Socialists will not denounce it. But liberals, especially Britain and other north Europeans, are aghast. Everybody knows that Mr Sarkozy dislikes free trade. What dismays them is that the commission should abandon its role as a force for open markets. Germany, usually careful to stay close to France, said in a scathing private paper that “the proposal is unacceptable and should be rejected.” It notes that Europe can hardly argue against “buy American” restrictions while adopting “buy European” ones.
One reason the proposal got past the commission was an unholy alliance between Michel Barnier, the French single-market commissioner, and Karel De Gucht, the Belgian trade commissioner. Whether it passes the Council of Ministers, representing national governments, is another matter. Mr De Gucht says Europe must deal with the world with less “naïveté”. Its competitors resort to means fair and foul to promote their interests. It is time for Europe to play rough.
【字数：287】
【计时4】
His first move last year was to propose restricting the number of poor countries benefiting from unilateral trade preferences. The next is to take on the large public-procurement market, which often accounts for as much as 15-20% of GDP. Some 40 countries have signed up to the government-procurement agreement (GPA) to open public contracts. About ?50 billion of EU contracts are open to foreign bidders, twice as much as in America and 13 times as much as in Japan. More seriously, China is not a signatory, despite years of negotiations.
Yet the commission’s idea of threatening to exclude tenders that contain more than 50% of goods and services from foreign countries not covered by GPA or other accords still looks unwise. Free trade benefits countries that open their markets by promoting productivity. In public procurement, citizens and governments benefit from cheaper foreign bids that save public money. It seems perverse, at a time of stringent austerity, for countries to deny themselves a means of controlling spending. The plan puts the interests of producers above those of consumers and taxpayers. And if it provokes retaliation, even the producers will not in fact be protected. The EU is already close to a trade war with China, and much of the world, over its proposals to charge foreign airlines for carbon emissions. It has also joined forces with America and Japan to take China to the WTO over restrictions on exports of rare-earth minerals.
“We know that economics textbooks say free trade is good for us,” says one Eurocrat. “But this is also about politics.” And the political context is that Europe is weakened by the euro crisis and threatened by the rise of emerging powers. With a big trade deficit, France blames competition from emerging markets for deindustrialisation and délocalisation, the shifting of factories out of the country. It is supported by its Club Med allies, including even Italy. (The liberalism of Italy’s technocratic prime minister, Mario Monti, does not, it seems, yet extend to external trade.)
【字数：336】
【计时5】
It is a bizarre proposal, given that European economies would like to export their way out of trouble—taking a leaf out of Germany’s book. And it runs against the thrust of Europe’s response to the euro crisis, which is to boost competitiveness, not to coddle inefficiency. Worse, the commission’s proposal is that it would not only give Brussels power to close parts of the market, but also allow national governments, municipalities and other bodies to shut out some foreign bidders (though only with explicit support from the commission). This would apply to contracts above ?m with 50% foreign content. Countries could thus exclude bids that have a large share of European content. This is not just external protectionism: it threatens the EU’s single market.
The commission says it is responding to demands from European leaders, at a summit in 2010, for greater “reciprocity” in dealings with the world. But a better form of reciprocity is the mutual opening of markets. Negotiations to liberalise trade are far from hopeless. Last year China made a substantially improved offer to join the GPA. The EU has concluded a trade pact with South Korea and is negotiating with India, Canada and others. And it is thinking about a new accord with America.
Beware the 1930s
A charitable view of the commission’s proposal is that it is a nuclear option, never to be used. Another is that it prevents a free-for-all as countries protect their markets, creating instead common rules policed by Brussels. A third is that it creates a safety valve to defuse demands for extreme measures. “We avoid the risk of national protectionism by creating a European mechanism,” says one commission official. “If we do not do it we are going to have real trouble. The liberals do not understand what could happen.”
But the commission is underestimating other dangers. Europe needs more competition, not less, to overcome its crisis. If there is a silver lining in the global financial crisis, it is that the world has so far avoided a 1930s-style protectionist war. The EU should not do anything that could provoke another one.
【字数353】

【越障】
As Health Law Is Contested, Developing a Plan B
State Senator Karen Keiser of Washington, leader of a group tackling the issue of widening the pool of insured, with David Hanig, a health care policy analyst.
By REED ABELSON
Published: March 26, 2012

State officials and insurance executives are devising possible alternatives to the coming federal requirement that most Americans buy health insurance, even as the Supreme Court hears arguments about the constitutionality of the mandate.
The options being discussed include imposing state requirements that people get insurance, penalties for people who delay and automatic coverage enrollment. While it is unclear which way the court will rule, state officials and insurance executives say they have no choice but to prepare their options before the proposed mandate goes into effect in 2014. “We’re always working on Plan B — always,” said Senator Karen Keiser, a state lawmaker in Washington State who leads a group tackling the issue.
“It will be up to state legislators, that is where the power will move,” said Ms. Keiser, a Democrat. “We have a lot of options at the state level.”
Some Wall Street analysts predict that if the federal mandate is struck down and the rest of the law is upheld, the industry will quickly shift its focus to alternatives, particularly those that enable the states to bolster enrollment, so enough healthy people sign up and premiums do not skyrocket. “The states are obviously not wanting the health insurance market and exchanges to spiral out of control,” said Jason Gurda, who follows insurers for Leerink Swann.
In Georgia, where the legislature has not yet authorized the development of an exchange to buy and sell insurance as required by the law, the state’s insurance commissioner, Ralph T. Hudgens, says he knows he may have to come up with a marketplace, regardless of how the Supreme Court rules. He said he opposed the mandate, but he believed the exchange could make it easier for citizens to buy policies. “Whether the mandate is struck down or not, Georgia is under the edict to establish an exchange,” he said. Although unlikely, given the political opposition and current unpopularity of the federal mandate, some states, following the example of Massachusetts, could authorize their own mandates requiring people to buy coverage or pay a penalty.
States could also make it difficult for people to enroll only when they needed care by setting limited periods when individuals could sign up or by imposing penalties on those who waited, although that could require a change to the federal law. Individuals could be also be automatically enrolled by their employer unless they opted out, although some groups are already challenging an existing provision in the law that requires employers to automatically enroll any new workers in a health plan as overly burdensome.
The law could also be modified to allow states to continue to use high-risk pools, where people with expensive medical conditions might go to get more heavily subsidized coverage. And while the current law requires insurers to cover anyone with a pre-existing condition, Congress could contemplate allowing insurers to exclude an existing medical condition if someone waited to enroll only when they needed care.
“There are alternatives to the mandate,” said Andrew Dreyfus, the chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state most closely watched as an indication of how the federal law may play out because of its adoption of a similar law, under then-Governor Mitt Romney, now running for the Republican nomination for president.
One way Massachusetts brought down the cost of coverage for individuals, for example, was to merge that insurance market with the one for small businesses, where the premiums were lower, which other states could also do, Mr. Dreyfus said. The state also started a marketing campaign, featuring the Boston Red Sox, to try to persuade young people to enroll.
“You could have a market, but it would be a more dysfunctional market,” Mr. Dreyfus said.
The sweeping federal health care bill known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Obama in 2010 after a contentious legislative battle. It has an array of provisions — many of them controversial — that are intended to expand care and lower costs. Central to the law, proponents say, is the mandate. Coupled with generous subsidies for some moderate-income individuals and the creation of new state insurance exchanges, it is viewed as essential to the ability of insurers to offer coverage to everyone, regardless of their health, and avoid charging higher premiums to people who are sick. Without the mandate, they say, too few young and healthy people will enroll, driving up the cost of insurance drastically for those who do and potentially causing the market to collapse.
“If you knock off the third leg, does the stool fall down?” asked Chris Jennings, a Democratic policy analyst in Washington. “It’s certainly a huge wobble. It’s very risky.”
The addition of a tax penalty encouraged significantly more people who were younger and healthier to buy coverage, according to a 2011 analysis of the Massachusetts law in The New England Journal of Medicine. “What we know for sure is, the law will work with the mandate,” said Jonathan Gruber, a health economist who played a central role in developing both the federal and state laws and was one of the authors of the analysis. “Once you get rid of the mandate, you don’t really know.”
And some argue that Congress, for one, is likely to refuse to make changes to the law to develop alternatives to the mandate. “It isn’t going to get fixed,” said Robert Laszewski, who runs a consulting firm, Health Policy and Strategy Associates, in Alexandria, Va. “Republicans want to blow it up. They’re going to be happy that the Supreme Court threw a grenade in it.”
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in June on the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that people must make a purchase to avoid a penalty. If the court strikes down the mandate, it could also choose to strike down the entire law or its major provisions. The court could also delay making a decision until Americans are actually faced with paying a penalty on their 2015 taxes if they do not have insurance coverage.
Some of those who favor the mandate say, at least privately, that they do not believe it is quite the linchpin to the law’s success as the heated rhetoric and flurry of legal briefs might suggest. There is no consensus about how much higher premiums might be without a mandate. “Nobody has a crystal ball,” said Larry Levitt, an executive with the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group.
Even some people who favor the mandate say it is so modest that its absence will not be missed much. By 2016, the law imposes a maximum penalty on those who refuse to buy coverage of $695 or 2.5 percent of annual income, with some exceptions. As one insurance chief executive, Mark T. Bertolini of Aetna, told Reuters in an interview this year, “Even as it exists today, the individual mandate is weak and still presents problems because the penalty is so low. If you get rid of it, I don’t know that it makes all that much of a difference.”
As a result, many insurers and policy analysts say federal and state officials are likely to have to come up with additional ways of making it harder for people who wait until they get sick to sign up. In Massachusetts, for example, the state needed to limit the open-enrollment period to prevent people from starting and dropping coverage to suit their medical needs.
Making the law work, a spokeswoman for Aetna said, “will take additional measures if we are to make insurance truly affordable, especially in a world without a mandate.”
【字数：1269】

速度

NO.1: In the past, only XX needs security passwords. Nowadays, visiting a Web, downloading documents need a password. And many of the passwords are easy to guess. Passwords such as 12345 and 123 are very common. And the change of numbers into letters does not make any difference. Fingerprint XX is more secure but expensive.   01:47
NO.2: The solutions to the problem discussed above. One is to upgrade people's mental software. Use phrases that are unrelated to each other and picture them in head. An alternative choice is to use the first letters of a sentence as password. But the disadvantage of this method is that many people use the sentences from a film or XX which are easy to be guessed. ~~~  01:52
NO.3: free trade\ open closed trade\ A proposal to close European market to companies from other countries.  Everyone knows that French president 萨科奇 doesn't like free trade. One reason for the proposal has been passed by commission is the unholy relationship between XX and XX. Whether it will pass the Council is another matter.   02:35
NO.4: he propose two steps. First is to restrict the number of countries benefit from unilateral trade. Then XXX~~~. Because E doesn't allow to open its market with counties that have more than 50% of the goods and materials list on the XXX. E is close to war with China, and much of the world, ~~~. It also XX with Japan and America~~ Free trade benefit the countries who improve their productivity~ ~ euro crisis and emerging power~ ~  02:37
NO.5: It's a bizarre proposal~~~  ~~~  there are three kinds of views about this proposal~  不知道为什么这段看完后不记得什么了~   03:01
越障：14：10~~~ 好 混乱~

偶发现偶是那种越看越慢滴~

Rena张

鉴于大家都很忙，没人有空来监督我~所以嘞，我只能自我监督~
而且每天都要来自我监督下~ 跟自己说加油~ 每天加油一点点~ 每天速度提高一点点~

Rena张

3.30~  今天真心没状态~ 肚子疼~
------------------------------
【速度】
France Considering Release of Oil Reserves
【计时1】
France says it is ready to release some of its strategic oil reserves, possibly in a joint effort with the United States and Britain to curb the increase in crude oil prices and cut the cost of gasoline that motorists pay.

French Energy Minister Eric Besson said Wednesday that the U.S. had asked it to join in releasing some of its emergency stock of oil. He said France is discussing the plan with the International Energy Agency, the 28-nation coalition of industrialized nations that coordinates release of oil reserves. The U.S. said no decision has been made on whether to release any of the oil it controls.

Normally, oil reserves are only released when there is a severe oil supply disruption, which is not the case at the moment. But Western leaders say they are concerned that the increase in oil prices over the last several months could slow the global economic recovery.

The price of oil - which largely controls the cost of gasoline - has partly risen because of tensions over what Western powers say is the development of nuclear weaponry by oil-producing Iran. Emerging global economies are also using more oil, further boosting the price.
【198】
【计时2】
Consumer complaints about increased gasoline costs are weighing heavily on U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, both of whom face tough re-election contests in the coming months. In the U.S., the cost of gasoline now averages more than $1 a liter. That price is still quite low by some international comparisons, but the highest ever in the U.S. for this time of year.

World oil prices fell Wednesday after France announced its intention to tap its strategic reserves and a U.S. report showed that its oil inventories are growing. The price for light sweet crude oil fell two percent on the New York market to about $105 a barrel.

But analysts say the current price is about $15 a barrel higher than it might be without the confrontation between West and Iran, which could lead to a disruption in Iran's oil exports. Some suggest that release of the emergency reserves could cut the price of oil to about $100 a barrel.
Report Outlines Unstable Global Food Situation
The world’s food system is dangerously out of balance, according to a prominent group of agriculture researchers.
And they say food security problems will only grow as the population increases and the climate changes.
【209】
【计时3】
In a new report ahead of this summer’s Rio +20 U.N. Sustainable Development Conference, the experts deliver a roadmap for feeding the world on a warming planet.

The new report, by a commission of experts from 13 countries, highlights the tangle of contradictions in today’s global food situation.

1 billion hungry, 1 billion overfed
“We have a billion people on the planet who are food insecure and a billion who are suffering from over-nutrition. We have possibly as many as a couple of billion more who are malnourished,” says Molly Jahn, a member of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change and an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

At the same time, she says, a third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted.

Meanwhile, agricultural production is a major contributor to climate change, which produces more frequent crop-destroying weather extremes.

With another 2 billion mouths to feed by 2050, and an increasingly wealthy world eating higher on the food chain, the commission says pressure on the food system threatens to push past what the planet can sustain.

Food-secure by 2050

Jahn says the report outlines a set of solutions to reach a food-secure world by mid-century that involves actions at all levels, “from very small-scale local action that will involve getting more and better quality food from the same or smaller patches of ground, to global outcomes that have to do with the way we manage, for example, trade of commodities.”
【247】
【计时4】
The report recommends boosting the productivity of small-scale farmers to increase food supplies and reduce poverty.

But productivity must increase without doing further damage to an already strained environment, it says. That means growing more food without clearing more forests or over-using chemical fertilizers, both of which contribute to climate change.

It also says the need for food can be reduced by cutting food waste and promoting healthier diets with less meat.

The report is punctuated with case studies highlighting successes for each recommendation, from Bangladesh to Brazil.

Making the recommendations a reality will require a much greater commitment from everyone from policymakers to the private sector, the report adds, and a much bigger global investment in sustainable agriculture.
Italy's Monti Blames Germany, France for Debt Crisis
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti says he thinks the European governmental debt crisis is "almost over," but on Wednesday blamed German and French actions a decade ago for causing it.

The Italian leader, speaking to investors in Tokyo, said Germany and France "were loose" in 2003 in controlling their budget deficits and debt just four years after the euro became the dominant currency in Europe.
【192】
【计时5】
Germany and France are the continent's two strongest economies. But Monti said that if "the father and mother of the eurozone are violating the rules" to control spending, one could not expect Greece and other debt-ridden countries to keep deficits in check. In the last two years, Greece has had to secure two international bailouts to avoid defaulting on its financial obligations, while Europe has also sent rescue packages to both Ireland and Portugal.

But Monti said he believes the worst of the crisis is nearing an end.

"The eurozone has gone through a crisis, a huge crisis," he said. "I believe that this crisis is now almost over, but there has been a defining, delicate moment last autumn when Italy was becoming a component of this crisis."

He said austerity measures imposed in Italy and labor reforms will boost Europe's third biggest economy, even as Italian labor unions have called for short work stoppages to protest regulations that would make it easier to dismiss workers.

"And this is a reform that of course is implying some resentment, some discussions, some bitter discussions in the country now, but I have the impression that a majority of Italians perceive this as a necessary step," added Monti.
【205】
【自由阅读】
Monti was a member of the European Commission in the early 2000s. During that time, the commission recommended sanctions against Germany and France because they were exceeding a eurozone requirement that they keep their budget deficits to less than three percent of their national economic production.
But the European Council, comprised of elected officials, vetoed any sanctions.
【越障】
Stock Market Flaws Not So Rare, Data Shows
Stock market disruptions like the ones last week that temporarily shut down part of the nation’s third-largest exchange and briefly halted the trading of Apple shares are more common than investors may think.

Although traders and the public were stunned by the problems on the BATS Global Markets stock exchange on Friday, a review of industry data shows that market disruptions large and small are a daily occurrence. The frequency of the problems has rattled the confidence of some investors and companies raising money through supercharged electronic markets.
The communication breakdown that blocked trading on parts of the BATS exchange for more than an hour has been seen in at least 110 instances across the nation’s 13 stock exchanges over the last year, a review of data from Nasdaq shows. That number has gone up every year since 2007.
In one instance in January, BATS said it was unable to trade with the New York Stock Exchange for nearly 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, exchanges have halted trading in company shares after sudden spikes or falls, as happened Friday with Apple, at least 265 times over the last year — more than one for every day of trading, according to data analyzed by the Tabb Group, a market research firm. These circuit breakers kick in after stocks experience 10 percent swings in a short period of time and can be caused by a technical error or waves of electronic trading on news developments.
“These things are occurring all the time,” said Tim Quast, a managing director at ModernIR, which helps companies get access to capital markets. “We know that at any given moment something can go awry.”
The breakdown at BATS last week points to one of the worst possible outcomes. The exchange company’s own stock plunged as its shares were first offered to the public, leading the company to take the rare step of taking its shares off the market. The drop in Apple’s share price was halted because of new circuit-breaker rules instituted in 2010 by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Trading flowed on to other exchanges. BATS blamed a software error, and regulators are examining the causes.
The incident has been described by BATS and other exchanges as an example of how quickly exchanges are able to identify and fix market disruptions. But some market participants say the problems can weaken the stock market on a number of levels. When a stock’s price goes haywire, investors can get locked into bad trades, or shut out of good ones.
In addition, minor events at one exchange risk spiraling out through other exchanges and setting off a severe flash crash, like the one seen in May 6, 2010, when major markets fell more than 8 percent in a matter of minutes.
Blame for the market disturbances has fallen on the growing complexity and speed of the nation’s 13 official stock exchanges — three of which are owned by the New York Stock Exchange — and dozens of less official platforms for trading. A decade ago there were only two major trading platforms, and transaction times were measured in seconds.
A regulatory change in 2007 threw open the floodgates of competition by forcing stock trades to be routed to the exchange with the best price, as long as the exchange could act immediately. The proliferation of exchanges since then has lowered the price of trading for investors, and trade times are now measured in milliseconds. In the race for speed, however, some industry experts say reliability has been sacrificed.
“The markets basically gutted their high-cost, nonstop infrastructures for very fast, low-cost infrastructures,” said Larry Tabb, the founder and chief executive of the Tabb Group.
There is little public data available on how frequently market disturbances occur. The S.E.C. does not provide comprehensive numbers on them. Most of the information is publicized in nonstandardized form by the exchanges themselves.
Nasdaq provides some of the most complete data on how often it has encountered breakdowns with other exchanges. When BATS’s trading platform began acting erratically on Friday, the other exchanges made such breakdown declarations against BATS.
Exchanges began reporting these events only in 2007. Since then, the number of times Nasdaq has declared breakdowns at other exchanges — what market overseers call declarations of self-help — has risen each year, climbing from 96 times the first year to 139 times last year. These figures do not include the instances in which other exchanges reported problems with Nasdaq.
“As you have more self-helps, you are going to have more people backing out of the market,” said Joseph Saluzzi, a founder of the brokerage firm Themis Trading and a critic of the current market structure.
In some cases, these disruptions are caused by a bad network connection and are fixed quickly. But other times, trading in entire categories of stocks has been thrown off. Over the last five years, Nasdaq has called out problems with BATS 33 times, and with the New York Stock Exchange 109 times.
A spokesman said the New York Stock Exchange had no comment on the figures.
Joe Ratterman, BATS’s chief executive, said in an interview that Nasdaq had a reputation for declaring breakdowns against other exchanges “inappropriately,” and often when the problems were with Nasdaq’s own system.
“We’re often frustrated because we find that the problem was on Nasdaq’s end,” Mr. Ratterman said.
A Nasdaq spokesman declined to comment.
Even with disturbances happening, Mr. Ratterman added, today’s interconnected markets can repair themselves more quickly than in the past.
“I totally get it that people are concerned,” he said, but he added that the ability of investors to trade “smoothly today is superior to what it’s been in the past.”
The S.E.C. and other regulators have been examining the vulnerabilities of the market, and the impact of high-speed trading, since the flash crash in May 2010. A new committee for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission examining the issue was set to meet for the first time on Thursday.
The S.E.C. has already taken several steps to head off moments of market chaos, including the circuit-breaker measures for 10 percent swings.
The circuit breakers have also provided a new window into how often such extreme market moves happen. During periods of calm trading, like January of this year, circuit breakers were used infrequently: 14 times, according to data analyzed by Tabb. In contrast, they were used 51 times in December. The figures do not indicate how often the problems were because of the exchanges rather than other factors.
Christopher Nagy, the head of order routing at the retail broker TD Ameritrade, compared circuit breakers to brakes on a car. They are important, he said, but they become less effective as the car goes faster, as the market has in recent years.
“When you see any sort of market strife, you see chaos erupt,” he said.
The S.E.C. is considering introducing other measures to monitor the markets, like a new system, known as limit up-limit down, to halt extreme trades before they can be executed. But some market watchers say the agency has not been able to keep up with the increasing speed and complexity of the markets.
“We’ve managed over the past few years to equip the traders with Ferraris,” said Richard Bentley, the vice president for capital markets at Progress Software, which provides the industry with technology, “and the regulators are trying to keep up with them on bicycles.”
【1232】

大爱小白呀~~ 速度的字数终于不再是280+啦~ 终于有机会在1min多一点点的时候看完啦~ 虽然还是不如在座的各位牛牛们~ 不过偶已经挺开心啦~ 哈哈【计时1】01:15     【计时2】 01:08    【计时3】 01:16    【计时4】 01:12    【计时5】 01:14
因为今天练速度呢~所以看的快了一点点后，看完就不记得具体说了什么了~只能是大概好像什么什么的……嘿嘿~

铁板神猴

贴了好多速度越障~ 我们这种“平凡人”应该是CD的majority~ 坚持锻炼成为大牛！ 加油呀~

Rena张

贴了好多速度越障~ 我们这种“平凡人”应该是CD的majority~ 坚持锻炼成为大牛！ 加油呀~

-- by 会员 铁板神猴 (2012/3/30 16:31:23)

嗯嗯~谢谢神猴~与君共勉！！
ps:多贴点速度越障，才能显示出偶是阅读小分队的忠实粉丝嘛~(*^__^*) 嘻嘻……

搞G战士DB

Rena加油！要早睡哦，熬夜会影响第二天状态的，加油加油！

Rena张

Rena加油！要早睡哦，熬夜会影响第二天状态的，加油加油！

-- by 会员 搞G战士DB (2012/3/30 22:41:27)

谢谢DB~~ 今天一定早睡~ DB也加油！