Rena 20号正式回来~~~@every队友：爱你们!!!

h14zpsn

加油！！！我立马就来了~~~

-- by 会员 carol56056 (2012/3/25 8:30:52)

好几个贴纸下都看到你的头像，我记得以前看过一个伊丽莎白戴眼镜直接插到眼睛里去的那个，看见你这个果断笑死了~~~

Rena张

常常来CD才能时刻提醒自己：原来自己是那么那么那么地渺小~~~

Rena张

偶来贴今天的速度越障啦啦啦~~~
-------------------------------------------
速度
Short Story: 'Luck' by Mark Twain
速度一【281】
SUSAN CLARK: Now, the Special English program, AMERICAN STORIES.
(MUSIC)
Our story today is called "Luck." It was written by Mark Twain. Here is Shep O'Neal with the story.
(MUSIC)
SHEP O'NEAL: I was at a dinner in London given in honor of one of the most celebrated English military men of his time. I do not want to tell you his real name and titles. I will just call him Lieutenant General Lord Arthur Scoresby.
I cannot describe my excitement when I saw this great and famous man. There he sat, the man himself, in person, all covered with medals. I could not take my eyes off him. He seemed to show the true mark of greatness. His fame had no effect on him. The hundreds of eyes watching him, the worship of so many people did not seem to make any difference to him.
Next to me sat a clergyman, who was an old friend of mine. He was not always a clergyman. During the first half of his life he was a teacher in the military school at Woolwich. There was a strange look in his eye as he leaned toward me and whispered – "rivately – he is a complete fool." He meant, of course, the hero of our dinner.
This came as a shock to me. I looked hard at him. I could not have been more surprised if he has said the same thing about Nepoleon, or Socrates, or Solomon. But I was sure of two things about the clergyman. He always spoke the truth. And, his judgment of men was good. Therefore, I wanted to find out more about our hero as soon as I could.
速度二【273】
Some days later I got a chance to talk with the clergyman, and he told me more. These are his exact words:
About forty years ago, I was an instructor in the military academy at Woolwich, when young Scoresby was given his first examination. I felt extremely sorry for him. Everybody answered the questions well, intelligently, while he – why, dear me – he did not know anything, so to speak. He was a nice, pleasant young man. It was painful to see him stand there and give answers that were miracles of stupidity.
I knew of course that when examined again he would fail and be thrown out. So, I said to myself, it would be a simple, harmless act to help him as much as I could.
I took him aside and found he knew a little about Julius Ceasar's history. But, he did not know anything else. So, I went to work and tested him and worked him like a slave. I made him work, over and over again, on a few questions about Ceasar, which I knew he would be asked.
If you will believe me, he came through very well on the day of the examination. He got high praise too, while others who knew a thousand times more than he were sharply criticized. By some strange, lucky accident, he was asked no questions but those I made him study. Such an accident does not happen more than once in a hundred years.
Well, all through his studies, I stood by him, with the feeling a mother has for a disabled child. And he always saved himself by some miracle.
速度三【258】
I thought that what in the end would destroy him would be the mathematics examination. I decided to make his end as painless as possible. So, I pushed facts into his stupid head for hours. Finally, I let him go to the examination to experience what I was sure would be his dismissal from school. Well, sir, try to imagine the result. I was shocked out of my mind. He took first prize! And he got the highest praise.
I felt guilty day and night – what I was doing was not right. But I only wanted to make his dismissal a little less painful for him. I never dreamed it would lead to such strange, laughable results.
I thought that sooner or later one thing was sure to happen: The first real test once he was through school would ruin him.
Then, the Crimean War broke out. I felt that sad for him that there had to be a war. Peace would have given this donkey a chance to escape from ever being found out as being so stupid. Nervously, I waited for the worst to happen. It did. He was appointed an officer. A captain, of all things! Who could have dreamed that they would place such a responsibility on such weak shoulders as his.
I said to myself that I was responsible to the country for this. I must go with him and protect the nation against him as far as I could. So, I joined up with him. And anyway we went to the field.
速度四【308】
And there – oh dear, it was terrible. Mistakes, fearful mistakes – why, he never did anything that was right – nothing but mistakes. But, you see, nobody knew the secret of how stupid he really was. Everybody misunderstood his actions. They saw his stupid mistakes as works of great intelligence. They did, honestly!
His smallest mistakes made a man in his right mind cry, and shout and scream too – to himself, of course. And what kept me in a continual fear was the fact that every mistake he made increased his glory and fame. I kept saying to myself that when at last they found out about him, it will be like the sun falling out of the sky.
He continued to climb up, over the dead bodies of his superiors. Then, in the hottest moment of one battle down went our colonel. My heart jumped into my mouth, for Scoresby was the next in line to take his place. Now, we are in for it, I said...
The battle grew hotter. The English and their allies were steadily retreating all over the field. Our regiment occupied a position that was extremely important. One mistake now would bring total disaster. And what did Scoresby do this time – he just mistook his left hand for his right hand...that was all. An order came for him to fall back and support our right. Instead, he moved forward and went over the hill to the left. We were over the hill before this insane movement could be discovered and stopped. And what did we find? A large and unsuspected Russian army waiting! And what happened – were we all killed? That is exactly what would have happened in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. But no – those surprised Russians thought that no one regiment by itself would come around there at such a time.
速度五【252】
It must be the whole British army, they thought. They turned tail, away they went over the hill and down into the field in wild disorder, and we after them. In no time, there was the greatest turn around you ever saw. The allies turned defeat into a sweeping and shining victory.
The allied commander looked on, his head spinning with wonder, surprise and joy. He sent right off for Scoresby, and put his arms around him and hugged him on the field in front of all the armies. Scoresby became famous that day as a great military leader – honored throughout the world. That honor will never disappear while history books last.
He is just as nice and pleasant as ever, but he still does not know enough to come in out of the rain. He is the stupidest man in the universe.
Until now, nobody knew it but Scoresby and myself. He has been followed, day by day, year by year, by a strange luck. He has been a shining soldier in all our wars for years. He has filled his whole military life with mistakes. Every one of them brought him another honorary title. Look at his chest, flooded with British and foreign medals. Well, sir, every one of them is the record of some great stupidity or other. They are proof that the best thing that can happen to a man is to be born lucky. I say again, as I did at the dinner, Scoresby's a complete fool.

越障【755】
Did Belief in Gods Lead to Mayan Demise?
A dread of malevolent spirits haunting forsaken areas could, along with environmental catastrophes, help to explain why some areas in the ancient Mayan world proved less resilient than others when their civilization disintegrated, researchers suggest.
The ancient Maya once claimed an area about the size of Texas, with cities and fields that occupied what is now southern Mexico and northern Central America, including the countries of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. The height of the Mayan civilization, known as the Classic period, extended from approximately A.D. 250 to at least 900.
For unknown reasons, the Classic Mayan civilization then collapsed. The population declined catastrophically to a fraction of its former size, and many of their great cities were left mostly abandoned for the jungle to reclaim.
Scientists have long drawn connections between the decline of the ancient Maya and environmental catastrophes, especially drought. Deforestation linked with farming could also have triggered disaster — for instance, reduced tree cover of the ground would have led to loss of fertile topsoil by erosion, as well as greater evaporation of water by sunlight, exacerbating drought.
However, while some locales remain abandoned for long periods, others recovered more quickly. This patchwork pattern of recovery might argue against environmental catastrophes being the sole determining factor behind the collapse of the Classic Mayan civilization — if they were, one might expect such catastrophes to affect all areas equally.
Moreover, archaeologists have pointed out that ancient Mayan societies may have been vulnerable to collapse by their very nature. They apparently funneled wealth to a small ruling elite topped by hereditary divine kings, who had virtually unlimited power but whose subjects expected generosity — a string of military defeats or seasonal droughts could greatly damage their credibility. The stability of this system was further threatened by polygamy among rulers, spawning numerous lineages that warred against each other, overall generating conditions ripe for collapse.
To learn more about the reasons behind the patchy apocalypse and recovery, scientists focused on social declines seen in the terminal part of the Classic period in the Mayan lowlands, ranging from A.D. 750 to 950. They also looked at downturns from A.D. 100 to 250, the terminal part of the "re-Classic" period.
Available data suggested the elevated parts of the Mayan lowlands, which include much of today's Yucatan Peninsula, were significantly more vulnerable to collapse and less likely to recover than lower-lying areas. Sites within this elevated region lacked perennial water sources and were more dependent solely on what rainwater they could capture and store, leaving them vulnerable to shifts in climate. In contrast, neighboring lower-lying areas had access to springs, perennial streams and sinkholes known as cenotes that were often filled with water.
Reoccupying elevated interior areas with large numbers of people would require intense labor to re-establish water management systems, helping to explain why they were left abandoned, the researchers noted. In contrast, dwelling in the neighboring, low-lying areas was less challenging, and evidence suggests that sites there were typically occupied continuously even when the major political and economic networks they were linked with collapsed.
At the same time, the Classic Maya would have implicated gods and their "divine" rulers for the collapse. In that way, their abandoned territories became thought of as chaotic, haunted places, and reclaiming any lands from the forest was at best done with great care and ritual. Survivors in outlying sites may often not have bothered. "Reoccupation called for a reordering of a most profound kind," the researchers write in the March 6 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"I have little doubt that droughts and environmental degradation — for example, soil erosion or declining soil fertility — played roles in the collapse, defined here as a substantial and prolonged decline in population, of some sites or regions," said researcher Nicholas Dunning, a geographer at the University of Cincinnati. "There is also the important role played by the environmental setting of sites — for example, sites in the elevated interior region were significantly more vulnerable to drought cycles than those in surrounding lower-elevation areas where water was more abundant."
"But the fact that collapse was often a patchwork affair and a prolonged process does indeed strongly suggest that cultural factors — for example, strength of rulership, flexibility of the society and its ability to adapt to change — were equally important for determining whether or not a given site or group of sites adapted or collapsed," Dunning told LiveScience.
Dunning's colleagues included Timothy Beach of Georgetown University and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach of George Mason University.


沙发！！！
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速度：1. 01:20 \ 2. 01:26 \ 3. 01:25 \ 4. 01:51 \ 5. 01:20

  就说了一位满戴勋章的将军其实是个白痴~他只是运气太好~面试，考试的时候都是“我”帮了他一把，还为他偷了期末试卷，他才得以成为第一名~后来的战争发生，他不仅入伍了，还凭借雄厚的运气得到了升官的机会~为了以防万一，“我”还专门跟这他入伍了，给他出谋划策。到最后的生死关头他竟然做了一个极其错误的决定，但是没想到他运气这么好，我们不仅没死还赢了战争~因为那些俄罗斯军队认为在这个关键时刻我们会走那条路~~~全世界除了我和他本人，没人知道他是个笨蛋。 以上事实证明the best thing that can happen to a man is to be born lucky~~~  （表示强烈同意啊~~~有木有~~~）

越障：06:58 玛雅文明消失的原因——气候—干旱\ 社会属性—世袭制\ 文化~~~。。。。。

啊啊啊啊啊啊啊 这么算来 我是一分钟看一百字啊……

Rena张

PS: 今天的速度那篇好好玩啊~~哈哈~~

cathynine

加油啊！

Rena张

加油啊！

-- by 会员 cathynine (2012/4/2 18:18:46)

嗯嗯~加油加油~大家一起加油~

Rena张

这两天忘记发速度啦~~~赶紧的
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【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障2系列】【2-13】文史哲 计时1 （397words）
Australia’s migration history
The nineteenth century
In 1788, when European settlement began, Australia’s Aboriginal population was about 400,000. Today, over 20 million people live here. Migration has been the main driver for this change. In New South Wales, four out of every ten people are either migrants or the children of migrants.
Clearly Australia has a rich migration history. However attitudes to migration and particularly to the ideal source of migrants have changed considerably over these 218 years. The first migrants were decidedly involuntary, the convicts transported from Britain, Ireland and, to a lesser degree, other British colonies. Altogether 80,000 arrived in New South Wales between 1788 and 1840. From the 1830s they were joined by small numbers of voluntary migrants, again principally from Britain and Ireland. Some came under their own resources, others with assistance from one of the public or private schemes then available.
However, with the discovery of gold just outside Bathurst in 1851, the nature of Australian migration changed completely. People arrived in far greater numbers and from more varied backgrounds than ever before. Between 1851 and 1861 over 600,000 came and while the majority were from Britain and Ireland, 60,000 came from Continental Europe, 42,000 from China, 10,000 from the United States and just over 5,000 from New Zealand and the South Pacific. Although Australia never again saw such a rush of new immigrants, the heightened interest in settling here remained. By the time of Federation the total population was close to four million of whom one in four was born overseas. Many had been given assisted passages. Whilst the majority were of British or Irish extraction, there were significant numbers of Europeans, particularly Germans, and Chinese.
The infamous ‘White Australia’ policy: keeping Australia British
When the colonies federated in 1901, control of immigration changed. Instead of each colony managing its own system, the Commonwealth now oversaw recruiting and selection. Assisted passages were offered to encourage migration with priority still being given to the British and Irish. Despite comparatively large numbers of Chinese residents in Australia, the first legislation passed by the new parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act. Often referred to as the ‘White Australia policy’ this effectively banned Asian migration for the next fifty years. That same year the Federal Parliament passed the Pacific Islands Labourers Act to prohibit their employment as contract labourers and to deport those already here.

计时2 （293words）
In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, migration almost ceased. Furthermore, some migrants from countries previously thought acceptable were now reclassified as ‘enemy aliens’. Those born in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria and Turkey faced internment or general restrictions on their daily lives. Altogether about 7,000 people were interned, with camps in New South Wales at Berrima, Trial Bay and Liverpool. After the war, the 1901 Immigration Act was extended to ban people from these countries for five years. The ban on Turkish people was not lifted until 1930.
With the 1918 peace came a revival of assisted migration schemes. The British Government offered ex-servicemen free passage to one of the dominions or colonies and 17,000 arrived in Australia between 1919 and 1922. Church and community organisations such as the YMCA and the Salvation Army sponsored migrants. Small numbers also arrived independently. As the United States sought to limit migration of Southern Europeans, increasing numbers of young men from Greece and Italy paid their own way to Australia. By the 1930s, Jewish settlers began arriving in greater numbers, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe. However the 1929 stockmarket crash and the Great Depression put an end to sponsored migration and it was not until Australia had again fought a war that it was resumed.
Just as in the First World War, with the outbreak of the Second World War previously acceptable migrants — Germans, Italians, Japanese and Hungarians – were reclassified ‘enemy aliens’ and interned or kept under close police surveillance. No distinction was made on the basis of political sympathies. Thus, a large group of Jewish refugees that arrived on the Dunera in September 1940 were interned first at Hay in New South Wales, and later at Tatura in Victoria.

计时3 （381words）
‘Populate or perish’: post war migration
When the war ended, the government took an entirely new approach to migration. The near invasion of Australia by the Japanese caused a complete rethink of ideal population numbers. As Prime Minister Ben Chifley would later declare, ‘a powerful enemy looked hungrily toward Australia. In tomorrow’s gun flash that threat could come again. We must populate Australia as rapidly as we can before someone else decides to populate it for us.’ i In 1945, the Department of Immigration was established, headed up by Arthur Calwell. It resolved that Australia should have annual population growth of two per cent, of which only half could come from natural increase. 70,000 immigrants a year were needed to make up the difference.
However, although the government wanted the majority to be Anglo Celtic – and Arthur Calwell declared ‘It is my hope that for every foreign migrant there will be 10 people from the United Kingdom’ ii in fact the British Government was both unable and unwilling to meet such a high target. At the same time, some 11 million people had survived the Nazi labour and concentration camps and many, particularly Poles, Yugoslavs, Latvians, Ukrainians and Hungarians, were unable or unwilling to return home. Visiting Europe in 1947, Calwell therefore agreed to accept a minimum of 12,000 of these refugees a year.
On 28 November 1947, the first Displaced Persons – 844 young Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – arrived on the General Heintzelman in Melbourne and were transferred to Bonegilla migration hostel. In exchange for free passage and assistance on their arrival, they agreed to work for the government for two years.
During the seven years this scheme operated, nearly 171,000 arrived. When this source came to an end, the Federal Government negotiated a series of migration agreements including with the Netherlands and Italy (1951), Austria, Belgium, West Germany, Greece and Spain (1952), and the United States, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland (1954). In these immediate post war years Australia was second only to Israel in the proportion of migrants accepted. As a result, Australian society became markedly less British and Irish in character. At the 1961 census, eight per cent of the population was non-British in origin with the largest group being Italians followed by Germans, Greeks and Poles.

计时4 （326words）
Most migrants arrived by ship, disembarking in major cities such as Sydney and Melbourne. From there they were immediately taken to migration hostels in rural areas, often in former military barracks. With accommodation fashioned from old corrugated iron Nissen huts, migrants were frequently shocked at the primitive conditions. With men and women separated into single sex barracks, shared bathrooms and kitchens and a communal dining room serving unfamiliar, and often unpalatable food, migration hostels were neither comfortable nor welcoming. The intention was that migrants stay only four to six weeks until they could be resettled near their workplace. At times however work was difficult to find and some stayed for months if not years. Improvements were slow in coming. In 1969 family units opened at Villawood and migrants no longer had to share facilities. Yet, as one Polish immigrant who arrived there in 1975 remarked, ‘For the first time in my life I had a room to myself’. Some things had not changed, as to food, ‘After one week there we’d had enough’. iii
All assisted migrants aged over 16 had to work. Regardless of qualifications men were classified as labourers and women as domestics. One of the largest employers was the Snowy Mountain Scheme. Australia’s largest post war project, this diverted the course of the Snowy and Tumut Rivers to provide irrigation and generate hydro-electricity. The work was hard, dangerous and meant men lived for months in isolated and primitive camps. Other migrants found work in factories, in the burgeoning iron and steel industries, on the railways and in mines.
Although the official government policy was that migrants should assimilate into Australia’s Anglo Celtic culture, many celebrated their origins through membership of clubs, sporting and religious organisations. For some such community organisations made a huge difference in overcoming a sense of isolation. For others it came when they had their own homes and families and could grow familiar fruits and vegetables and eat traditional foods.

计时5 （381words）
From a ‘White Australia’ to multiculturalism
From the 1950s, Australia began to relax its ‘White Australia’ policy. In 1956 non-European residents were allowed to apply for citizenship. Two years later the Dictation Test was abolished as a further means of exclusion. By the 1960s mixed race migration was becoming easier and in 1967 Australia entered into its first migration agreement with a non-European country, in this case Turkey.
Then in 1972 Australians elected their first Labor government since 1948. As Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby radically changed official policy. The quota system, based on country of origin and preservation of racial ‘homogeneity’, was replaced by ‘structured selection’. Migrants were to be chosen according to personal and social attributes and occupational group rather than country of origin. In 1973, declaring Australia a ‘multicultural’ society, Al Grassby announced that every relic of past ethnic or racial discrimination had been abolished. The Australian Citizenship Act of that year declared that all migrants were to be accorded equal treatment.
In 1975 the first of what would become known as ‘boat people’ arrived in Darwin. More than 25 000 arrived in the next thirty years, initially from East Timor and then from Vietnam, China and, most recently, the Middle East. All are subject to compulsory internment while their claims of refugee status are assessed. Although Australia has been criticised by the United Nations and Amnesty International for the injustice of interring all illegal migrants, particularly children, it continues to this day.
In 1988 the Fitzgerald Inquiry led to further changes in migration with a move away from ‘family reunion’ towards an emphasis on skilled and business categories. The assisted passage scheme had ended in 1981 and only refugees are given any level of support on their arrival in Australia. In 1996, for the first time in Australia’s migration history, the number of British migrants arriving fell to second place behind New Zealand. Renewed prosperity in Europe has also meant that, where once Italians and Greeks made up the majority of non-British new arrivals, today, after New Zealand, it is people from China, South Africa and India. Conflicts overseas have also meant that Australia is now taking refugees from countries previously unrepresented. In 2006 the fastest growing refugee group is from Sudan followed by Afghanistan and Iraq.

越障 （748 words）
Mar 28, 1979:
Nuclear accident at Three Mile Island
At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar onPennsylvania's Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises.
After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.
As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant's parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.
Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.
Two days later, however, on March 30, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. On March 28, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on March 30, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised "pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice." This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100,000 people had fled surrounding towns.
On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation. That afternoon, experts agreed that the hydrogen bubble was not in danger of exploding. Slowly, the hydrogen was bled from the system as the reactor cooled.
At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public's faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the more than two decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.
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第一篇：澳大利亚的移民。曾经澳大利亚只有几千人，现在有万万人，而大部分的澳大利亚人都是移民过来的，这其中有两种，一种是被迫移民的原英国殖民地的奴隶们，还有就是自愿前往澳大利亚的移民了。在澳大利亚发现金矿的时候，全世界的人都来了，一战爆发的时候人们又不来了，后来大萧条的时候也不来了，再后来二战爆发的时候，原来允许来的现在被认为是敌人不能来了~ 作为英联邦国家，有部法案说英国和印度移民优先考虑~~~尽管有很多很多的中国人在澳大利亚~~~~~~  02:18\  01:59

战后由于有很多日本移民的到来，使澳大利亚政府觉得有必要主动增加澳大利亚增加的人口，而不是让带有恶意的其他民族的人来帮忙增加~ 所以澳大利亚放宽了对其他国家移民的政策……（好像不是这样 可能……）于是澳大利亚的人口增加了，但是其原本的印度和英国character却减少了~ 其人口比例最高的是意大利人，紧接着是德国…… 02:14

更多的移民来了，在最初的时候他们都被安排在一个像兵营一样的旅馆里~男女分开，吃的用的都是一起的~他们要等上数周才能被安排到离他们的工作近的地方住，而工作又是很难找的，所以有很多人要等上数月甚至年。Family units ~~~然后就可以单独住了~吃的也enough了~~~ 01:53

澳大利亚移民不再只是白种人的权力啦~ 其他民族的人民也可以来啦~~~于是澳大利亚消除了种族歧视。。。于是有很多中东国家的人民来啦~他们大部分是难民~ 美国和XX谴责澳大利亚收留了太多的这种非法的移民，尤其是大部分为儿童~~~  02:24

然后我困屎了……不记得了……也看不下去了……我错了~这么晚才想起来今天没越障~~~ 4月2

Rena张

已经超过了平常的睡觉时间，所以现在很不困的咯……上来唠叨几句。。。
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4月3的速度与越障先上~~~
The Happiness of Pursuit: What Science and Philosophy Can Teach Us About the Holy Grail of Existence
"When fishing for happiness, catch and release."

[计时一]
The secret of happiness is arguably humanity's longest-standing fixation, and its mechanisms are among the most consuming obsessions of modern science. In The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Cornell University psychology professor Shimon Edelman takes an unconventional – and cautiously self-aware of its own unorthodoxy – lens to the holy grail of human existence, blending hard science with literature and philosophy to reverse-engineer the brain's capacity for well-being. What emerges is a kind of conceptual toolbox that lets us peer into the computational underbelly of our minds and its central processes – memory, perception, motivation and emotion, critical thinking, social cognition, and language – to better understand not only how the mind works but also how we can optimize it for happiness.

As it turns out, a fundamental truth about happiness lies in the very language of the Declaration of Independence, which encouraged its pursuit:

“The focus on the pursuit of happiness, endorsed by the Declaration of Independence, fits well with the idea of life as a journey – a bright thread that runs through the literary cannon of the collective human culture. With the world at your feet, the turns that you should take along the way depend on what you are at the outset and on what you become as the journey lengthens. Accordingly, the present book is an attempt to understand, in a deeper sense than merely metaphorical, what it means to be human and how humans are shaped by the journey thorough this world, which the poet John Keats called 'the vale of soul-making' – in particular, how it puts within the soul's reach 'a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence.'

Though much of the book is rooted in scientific inquiry and research, Edelman begins with a disclaimer against the classical conception of science, one that echoes this beautiful recent definition of science as "systematic wonder":
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“According to one popular conception of science that goes all the way back to Francis Bacon's invention of it in 1620, scientific endeavor is all about getting answers from nature. That said, given the quality of answers one gets depends conspicuously on the quality of the questions one asks, scientific inquiries lacking in intrepidity, imagination, and insight are likely to yield little more than scientifically validated tedium.

Edelman goes on to explore "three things everyone should know about life, the universe, and everything." (Cue in Neil deGrasse Tyson on the most important thing to know about the universe.) The first has to do with the arrow of time and the idea that the universe is built around an asymmetry between the past and the future, governed by the basic laws of physics. The second hinges on the predicament of being alive and the awareness that "life is fragile and time is irreversible," and that terrible things can happen in a flash, leaving us unable to undo them, but we can anticipate and try to prevent them through insights from our past experience. From these two follows the third fact: that the future is predictable from the past, but only up to a point.

“The reason for this predictability is the sheer physical inertia of the universe. On an appropriately short time scale, things are guaranteed to stay as they are or to carry on changing in the same manner as they did before. There are also many kinds of long-term regularities, such as cycles of seasons. Animals can evolve to rely upon seasonal changes n the environment and to anticipate them from telltale cues (think of migratory birds that respond to the first frost.) Or, animals can evolve sophisticated brains that represent patterns of change in the environment and anticipate the future by treating it as a statistically projected extension of the past. Either way, it is the capacity for forethought that distinguishes, on the average, between the quick and the dead.
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Forethought, in fact – the distillation of experience using statistical inference – plays a large part in how the brain computes mind, and computation is a central element of cognition. The best way to understand the building blocks of the mind, from perception to action, Edelman argues, is by considering them as a web of interlinked computations:

“Computationally… the unfolding of behavior can be thought of as a ball rolling down a continually shifting landscape of possibilities, always seeking the deepest valleys. This computational understanding of the nature of perception, motivation, and action offers some intriguing insights into the meaning of, and the prospects for, the pursuit of happiness.

Of particular note is this discussion of the function and nature of memory, something we've previously explored:

“Far from being a mere repository for odd pieces of information, your memory is charged with relating the episodes of your life to each other, seeking recurring patterns – crisscrossing paths that run through the space of possible perceptions, motivations, and actions. Because of its likely evolutionary roots in way-finding, episodic memory relies heavily on taking note of locations in which events happen and of their spatial relationship, turning a representation of the layout of the physical environment into a foundation for the abstract space of patterns and possibilities that it constructs over the mind's lifetime. As they fall into place the paths through the possibility space can support mental travel in space and time, which are both simulated to the best of the mind's knowledge and ability. Episodic memory is thus the mind's personal space0time machine – a perfect vehicle for scouting for and harvesting happiness.

Among our most potent weapons in the arsenal of happiness, however, is one of the defining characteristics of our species: language. Paralleling Mark Changizi's insights on how language helped us evolve and Mark Pagel's case for language as the origin of the human social mind, Edelman observes:
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“Language is unique among cognitive functions in the degree to which – in the best co-evolutionary tradition – it both helps and is helped by social interactoins. As social animals, we revel in group play, which is what language evolves to promote and we evolve to master. Happiness and misery being the two-pronged stimulus with which evolution prods its pack animals, is it any surprise that we can be moved to tears or to laughter by a few well aimed words?

(Cue in Terin Izil on the power of simple words.)

Edelman ties it all back to foresight:

“Both in language and in cognition in general, mastery comes down to the same two abilities: first, understanding the world by seeking patterns in sensorimotor activity and learning to relate them to a wider context, including your own and other people's experiences and mind processes; and second, using understanding to support foresight. The big picture is in fact even simpler than that: understanding and foresight are really two sides of the same coin, because they both hinge on knowledge of the causal structure o the world.

One particularly fascinating discussion deals with the concept of concepts – a corollary of our tendency to think in terms of generalized patterns of information, from which we distill causal knowledge about the world to employ in our understanding, prediction, and forethought. This capacity for pattern-recognition, Edelman argues, is what gives rise to the Self, presenting a fine addition to this ongoing exploration of what is a person and what constitutes character, or personality:

“A persistent cluster of such conceptual knowledge accrued by a mind becomes the effective Self…
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Learning the code that one must live by is hard work for which we, as creatures that are subject to evolutionary pressure, are rewarded with transient effort- and success-related happiness – not because we are entitled to it, but because creates that are thus rewarded learn better and are less likely to go extinct. To be happy, or for that matter to have any kind of feeling toward a percept, a thought, or an acton, a cognitive system must have a capacity for phenomenal experience – a capacity that is predicated on certain structural qualities of the representation-space trajectories that the system's state can follow. Insofar as feelings are included in the evolutionary causal loop, creatures like us, which take life personally by virtue of constructing and using phenomenal Selves that feel, have a competitive edge over zombies that by definition do not (which explains why the latter are such a rarity in real life.)

This gathering of experiential patterns, in fact, appears to be a central component of happiness:

“Cognitively transparent (hence peaceful), gradual self-change of the kind that promotes well-being and, indeed, happiness is helped along by the accumulation of experience. That life experience is good for your practical wisdom has been noted by philosophers; more importantly, this notion turns out to be very much along the lines of what science has learned about the role of experience in cognition.

That blend of philosophy and science is indeed the defining, winning characteristic of The Happiness of Pursuit, the underlying message of which may seem simple – roughly captured by the tired yet infinitely true adage, "Stop and smell the roses," and premised on the idea that experience itself, or "pursuit," is the true fountain of happiness – but it cuts to the heart of what we intuit to be true, and does so with a razor-sharp blade of science and critical thought.
Edelman sums up the practical advice that emerges in seven words:

“When fishing for happiness, catch and release.
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Source: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/26/the-happiness-of-pursuit-shimon-edelman/


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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB#
Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
Published: March 17, 2012

Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?
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速度：
今天的速度啊，就觉得它讲的超有道理，什么生活啊，时间啊，态度啊，幸福啊~特别是那谁谁的那句话："When fishing for happiness, catch and release." 但是不知道为什么就是记不起来具体讲了些什么~~~这是为什么呢？（还有就是看到后面，本来不斜的字都往左倾了……汗……） 02:32\ 02:29\ 02:26\ 01:52\ 02:04

越障：7:00
Bilinguals are smarter. 人们通常认为随着全球化的演变，双语是个颇具实用性的优势。而科学家发现双语还能让你更聪明~过去人们认为双语会干涉大脑适当地运用其中一种语言，而现在恰恰是这一点，它能帮助人们更快地转换。然后举了例子~~~什么blue square, red circle.
然后是双语跟单语的不同之处~~~进一步解释说明双语可以让大脑更聪明~~~ ~~~~(然后就不记得了)~~~

Rena张

今天的流水账：
开心的事：OG12的RC做完啦~~~今天一口气把剩下的5篇一起解决掉啦~还记得第一天刚开始重看OG-RC的时候，那个痛苦啊，一天才一篇……万事开头难嘛~后来渐渐地2篇、3篇，一直到今天的5篇，真的很开心。
难过的事：还是和OG12有关，重做RC发现有些题目连做错的选项都跟之前一模一样……我汗呐~更糟糕的是正确率米有80%啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊啊！！！！！这让俺情何以堪呐……
新鲜的事：逻辑小分队开工啦~~~今天开始要多做份作业啦~~~ 依然万事开头难，但是有了OG12的经验在前边，再难我也要坚持住，因为坚持住了，就没那么难了~~~
糟糕的事：妈妈咪呀~~~现在都快3点啦~我得碎觉去啦~~~不然就要毁容掉啦啦啦啦啦………………

Rena张

最后说一句：突然想起来以前的时候有个当时当地的小牛人跟俺说过这么句话：宁做鸡头也不做凤尾。。。
我想说的是，如果是鸡头，即使是最棒的鸡头也永远只是鸡头……
如果是凤尾，那么经过坚持不懈的努力，表现出异于常人的毅力，也是有可能成为凤头的~ 最起码能有个盼头~期待有那么一天……

PS：这下困了~囧囧囧囧囧o(╯□╰)o