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今天的越障有点长哦~~~大家加油！
【速度】
North Korea launch failure
no surprise
"Space is hard" - it's a truism and we've just seen further evidence of it.
【计时1】
North Korea duly launched its satellite mission from the Sohae base on the Chinese border but soon had to admit the venture was a failure.
The nation's own engineers will be trying to find out precisely what went wrong but so, also, will analysts from the international community, who will be keen to assess just how far Pyongyang has progressed in its efforts to master rocket technology.
The 30m(100ft)-long Unha-3 vehicle is said to have lifted off at 07:39 local time on Friday (22:39 GMT Thursday), and headed south out over the Yellow Sea.
The rocket's trajectory, according to North Korea, was intended to take it and its Earth observation satellite payload towards a 500km-high polar orbit.
Within the hour, however, officials from Japan, South Korea and the US were briefing reporters that the mission had failed.
America in particular had a number of military systems in the region able to track the ascent.
The available information suggests the rocket disintegrated about 90 seconds into its flight, just before first-stage separation and ignition of the second stage.
One account talked of an unusually bright flaring coming from the vehicle.
All that fits with data indicating debris fell into the Yellow Sea about 165km (103 miles) west of Seoul, well short of the impact site where the North Koreans had planned to drop the first stage on a nominal flight.
【229words】
【计时2】
Inviting disaster
We should not be surprised by the outcome.
To put this type of endeavour in some sort of context, a US company will launch a rocket in the next month on the first commercial cargo re-supply mission to the space station. That company, with all the expertise and substantial investment available to it, took four launches before getting a working system.
North Korea is isolated, both intellectually and in terms of the materials and components it can source, and it will find success even harder to come by.
It is evident also that the country still has some very simple, but harsh, lessons to learn.
Consider for example the desire of Pyongyang officials to have the Kwangmyongsong ("Bright Shining Star") 3 satellite in orbit to coincide with Sunday's centenary of the birth of the nation's founding leader, Kim Il-Sung.
Western space experts will always tell you that schedule never determines readiness. It is the other way around.
To rush preparation just to meet an attractive date is to invite disaster.
The international community is appalled that North Korea should even be trying.
Critics saw Friday's launch as a thinly veiled ballistic missile test, something which is banned by UN resolutions.
Although the latest flight was a failure, UN Security Council members will be concerned that persistence on the part of Pyongyang will eventually see its engineers develop capable rocket systems.
If these are allied to the necessary guidance and re-entry technologies, and the country's already apparent advances in nuclear weaponry, North Korea would be in a position to seriously threaten its neighbours.
【262 words】
Why can smells unlock forgotten memories?
【计时3】
The toy cupboard at my grandmother's house had a particular smell. I cannot tell you what it was, but sometimes now, as an adult, I will catch a whiff of it. The smell brings with it memories I thought were lost, memories of visits to my grandparents' house, of my grandmother, and of playing with the toys from the toy cupboard. But why do smells have this power to unlock forgotten memories?
Neuroscience is a lot like a detective story – we have to look for clues to reveal the cause. But before we examine the clues, what background information do we have about the case?
Complex sense
What we know is that smell is the oldest sense, having its origins in the rudimentary senses for chemicals in air and water – senses that even bacteria have. Before sight or hearing, before even touch, creatures evolved to respond to chemicals around them.
Sight relies on four kinds of light sensors in the human eye, cells known as receptors, which convert light into the electrochemical language of our brain, and touch relies on different receptor types for pressure (at least four of these), for heat, for cold and for pain, but this pales into comparison for what is required for detecting smell. There are at least 1,000 different smell receptor types, which regenerate throughout your lifetime, and change according to what you are used to smelling. The result of this complexity is that we are able discriminate many, many different kinds of smells.
We do not, however, have names for all the smells we can differentiate. Smell is perhaps the sense we are least used to talking about. We are good at describing how things look, or telling how things sounded, but with smells we are reduced to labelling them according to things they are associated with ("smells like summer meadows" or "smells like wet dog", for instance). An example of this “hard-to-talk-about-ness” is that while we have names for colours which mean nothing but the colour, such as “red”, we generally only have names for smells which mean the thing that produces that smell, such as “cedar”, “coconut” or “fresh bread”.
【362 words】
【计时4】
Memory episodes
So now we have the background information, what are the important clues? Well, first, the part of the brain that is responsible for processing smells – the “olfactory bulb” – is next to a part of the brain called the hippocampus. This name means “seahorse”, and the hippocampus is so-called because it is curled up like a seahorse, nested deep within the brain, a convergence point for information arriving from all over the rest of the cortex. Neuroscientists have identified the hippocampus as crucial for creating new memories for events. People with damage to the hippocampus have trouble remembering what has happened to them.
Although they can learn new skills, like riding a bike, and new facts, like what someone is called, they do not create memories of doing these things or having the experiences. This “episodic memory” is precisely the kind of memory I have when I recall visits to my grandmother. And the olfactory bulb, seat of smell in the brain, is conveniently placed just next to the hippocampus, the primary brain nucleus for these memories.
【179 words】
【计时5】
Deep dive
Now, admittedly, this evidence is powerful, but circumstantial. We have the suspect (smell) placed at the scene of the crime (next to the hippocampus). But we are going to need more than circumstantial evidence if the case is going to stand up the scientific court. I hope my next piece of the evidence, a second clue from neuroscience, will convince you as to why smells are so powerful in unlocking memories.
Smell is unique among the senses in that it enters directly deep into the brain. If we look at the major pathways travelled by the other senses, such as hearing and vision, they start at the sense organs – that is, the eyes or the ears – and move to a relay station called the thalamus, before passing on to the rest of the brain.
With smell the situation is different. Rather than visiting the thalamic relay station on its journey into the brain, smell information travels directly to the major site of processing – the olfactory bulb – with nothing in between. We do not know what stopping off at the thalamus does for the other senses, but it certainly means that signals generated in the other senses are somehow “further away” from the nexus of processing done in the brain.
Could this be part of the reason why smells are both hard to put into words, but also able to trigger deeply hidden memories? Memory research has shown that describing things in words can aid memory, but it also reduces the emotion we feel about the subject. When we come up with a story about our memories, we start remembering the story as much as the raw experience.
So with my grandmother’s toy cupboard, that particular, unique, smell was picked up by the complex smell receptors in my young nose. The smell experience of the cupboard, which I have never found a name for, travelled directly into my brain, lodging next to the part specialised for encoding experiences. There it got entangled with the other memories of the cupboard, untouched by language, difficult to think about on purpose, but still lodged in my memory. Now, years later, the smell is not only enough to relive that experience but it is also enough to pull out the rest of the memories along with it.
【385 words】
【越障】
Playing with fire
Financial innovation can do a lot of good, says Andrew Palmer. It is its tendency to excess that must be curbed
FINANCIAL INNOVATION HAS a dreadful image these days. Paul Volcker, a former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, who emerged from the 2007-08 financial crisis with his reputation intact, once said that none of the financial inventions of the past 25 years matches up to the ATM. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist-cum-polemicist, has written that it is hard to think of any big recent financial breakthroughs that have aided society. Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel laureate, argued in a 2010 online debate hosted by The Economist that most innovation in the run-up to the crisis “was not directed at enhancing the ability of the financial sector to perform its social functions”.
Most of these critics have market-based innovation in their sights. There is an enormous amount of innovation going on in other areas, such as retail payments, that has the potential to change the way people carry and spend money. But the debate—and hence this special report—focuses mainly on wholesale products and techniques, both because they are less obviously useful than retail innovations and because they were more heavily implicated in the financial crisis: think of those evil credit-default swaps (CDSs), collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) and so on.
This debate sometimes revolves around a simple question: is financial innovation good or bad? But quantifying the benefits of innovation is almost impossible. And like most things, it depends. Are credit cards bad? Or mortgages? Is finance as a whole? It is true that some instruments—for example, highly leveraged ones—are inherently more dangerous than others. But even innovations that are directed to unimpeachably “good” ends often bear substantial resemblances to those that are now vilified.
For a demonstration, look at Peterborough. The cathedral city in England’s Cambridgeshire is known for its railway station and an underachieving football club nicknamed “the Posh”. But it is also the site of a financial experiment that its backers hope will have big ramifications for the way public services are funded.
Peterborough is where the proceeds of the world’s first “social-impact bond” are being spent. This instrument is not really a bond at all but behaves more like equity. In September 2010 an organisation called Social Finance raised £5m ($7.8m) from 17 investors, both individuals and charities. The money is being used to pay for a programme to help prevent ex-prisoners in Peterborough from reoffending. Reconviction rates among the prisoners recruited to the scheme will be measured against a national database of prisoners with a similar profile, and investors will get payouts from the Ministry of Justice if the Peterborough cohort does better than the rest. If all goes well, the first payouts will be made in 2013.
The scheme is getting lots of attention, and not just in Britain. A mixture of social and financial returns is central to a burgeoning asset class known as “impact investing”. Linking payouts to outcomes is attractive to governments keen to husband scarce resources. And if service providers like the people running the Peterborough prisoner-rehabilitation scheme can get a lump sum up front, they can plan ahead without bearing any financial risk. There is talk of introducing social-impact bonds in Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here, surely, is a financial innovation that even the industry’s critics would agree is worth trying. Yet in fundamental ways an ostensibly “good” instrument like a social-impact bond is not so different from its despised cousins. First, at its root the social-impact bond is about creating a set of cashflows to suit the needs of the sponsor, the provider and the investor. True, the investors in the Peterborough scheme may be more willing than the average individual or pension fund to sacrifice financial returns for social benefits. But as Franklin Allen of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Glenn Yago of the Milken Institute, a think-tank, argue in their useful book, “Financing the Future”, the thread that runs through much wholesale financial innovation is the creation of new capital structures that align the interests of lots of different parties.
Second, the social-impact bond is based on the concept of risk transfer, in this case from the government to financial investors who will get paid only if the scheme is successful. Risk transfer is also one of the big ideas behind securitisation, the bundling of the cashflows from mortgages and other types of debt on lenders’ books into a single security that can be sold to capital-markets investors. The credit-default swap is an even simpler risk-transfer instrument: you pay someone else an insurance premium to take on the risk that a borrower will default.
Third, even at this early stage the social-impact bond is grappling with the difficulties of measurement and standardisation. An obvious example is the need to create defined sets of measurements in order to work out what triggers a payout—in this case, the comparison between the Peterborough prisoners and a control group of other prisoners in a national database. Across finance, standardisation—around contracts, reporting, performance measures and the like—is what enables buyers and sellers to come together quickly and new markets to take off.
Neither angels nor demons
For all the similarities, there are two big differences between the social-impact bond and other, less lauded financial instruments. The first is that the new tool has been designed explicitly for a social purpose. But ask a pensioner how much money he wants to put into prisoner rehabilitation, and it isn’t likely to be all that much.
Whether protecting a retirement pot or signalling problems with a government’s debt burden, finance can be “socially useful” (to use a phrase popularised by Adair Turner, the outgoing chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority) without being obviously social. Lord Turner himself acknowledged that in a speech he gave in London in 2009: “It is in the nature of markets that there are some things which are indirectly socially useful but which in the short term will look to the external world like pure speculation.”
Many people point to interest-rate swaps, which are used to bet on and hedge against future changes in interest rates, as an example of a huge, well-functioning and useful innovation of the modern financial era. But there are more contentious examples, too. Even the mention of sovereign credit-default swaps, which offer insurance against a government default, makes many Europeans choke. There are some specific problems with these instruments, particularly when banks sell protection on their own governments: that means a bank will be hit by losses on its holdings of domestic government bonds at the same time as it has to pay out on its CDS contracts. But in general a sovereign CDS has a useful signalling function in an area tilted heavily in favour of governments (which do not generally have to post collateral and can bully domestic buyers into investing).
The second difference is that social-impact bonds are still in their infancy, whereas other crisis-era innovations were directly involved in a gigantic financial crisis. There are questions to answer about their culpability. A few products from that period do look inherently flawed. Only the bravest are prepared to defend the more exotic mortgage products that sprouted at the height of America’s housing bubble as lenders found ever more creative ways to bring unaffordable houses within reach. Finance professionals almost blush to recall an instrument called the constant-proportion debt obligation, a 2006 invention of ABN AMRO that added leverage when it took losses in order to make up the shortfall. The end of the structured investment vehicle (SIV), an off-balance-sheet instrument invented to game capital rules, is not much lamented. And the complexity of the “CDO-squared” has been widely condemned.
But even now it is hard to find fault with the concept, as opposed to the practical application, of many of the most demonised products. The much-criticised CDO, which pools and tranches income from various securities, is really just a capital structure in miniature. Risk-bearing equity tranches take the first hit when things go wrong, and more risk-averse investors are more protected from losses. (Euro-zone leaders like the idea enough to have copied it with their plans for special-purpose investment vehicles for peripheral countries’ sovereign debt.) The real problem with the CDOs that blew up was that they were stuffed full of subprime loans but treated by banks, ratings agencies and investors as though they were gold-plated.
As for securitisation and credit-default swaps, it would be blinkered to argue they have no problems. Securitisation risks giving banks an incentive to loosen their underwriting standards in the expectation that someone else will pick up the pieces. CDS protection may similarly blunt the incentives for lenders to be careful when they extend credit; and there is a specific problem with the way that the risk in these contracts can suddenly materialise in the event of a default.
But the basic ideas behind both these two blockbuster innovations are sound. India, with a far more conservative financial system than America, allowed its first CDS deals to be done in December, recognising that the instrument will help attract creditors and build its domestic bond market. Similarly, securitisation—which worked well for decades—allows banks to free up capital, enabling them to extend more credit, and helps diversification of portfolios as banks shed concentrations of risks and investors buy exposures that suit them. “Securitisation is a good thing. If everything was on banks’ balance-sheets there wouldn’t be enough credit,” says a senior American regulator.
Rather than asking whether innovations are born bad, the more useful question is whether there is something that makes them likely to sour over time.
Greed is bad
There is an easy answer: people. When bubbles froth, greedy folk use innovations inappropriately—to take on exposures that they should not, to manufacture risk rather than transfer it, to add complexity in order to plump up margins rather than solve problems. But in those circumstances old-fashioned finance goes mad, too: for every securitisation stuffed with subprime loans in America, there was a stinking property loan sitting on the balance-sheet of an Irish bank or a Spanish caja. “Duff credit analysis is always the cause of the problem,” says Simon Gleeson of Clifford Chance, a law firm.
This argument has a lot of power. When greed takes hold, finance in all its forms is undone. Yet blaming the worst outcomes of financial innovation on human frailty is hardly helpful. This special report will point to the features of financial innovations that can turn them into troublemakers over time and show how these can be managed better.
In simple terms, finance lacks an “off” button. First, the industry has a habit of experimenting ceaselessly as it seeks to build on existing techniques and products to create new ones (what Robert Merton, an economist, termed the “innovation spiral”). Innovations in finance—unlike, say, a drug that has gone through a rigorous approval process before coming to market—are continually mutating. Second, there is a strong desire to standardise products so that markets can deepen, which often accelerates the rate of adoption beyond the capacity of the back office and the regulators to keep up.
As innovations become more and more successful, they start to become systemically significant. In finance, that is automatically worrying, because the consequences of any failure can ripple so widely and unpredictably. In a 2011 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and Peter Tufano of Said Business School also argue that in a typical “S-curve” pattern, in which the earliest adopters of an innovation are the most knowledgeable, a widely adopted product is more likely to have lots of users with an inadequate grasp of the product’s risks. And that can be a big problem when things turn out to be less safe than expected.
【1982 words】 |
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发表于 2012-4-13 23:00:32
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