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Olivia的阅读小分队日记

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94#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-7-3 23:11:45 | 只看该作者
art I:Speed


【Time 1】
Seismic Data Set Could Improve Earthquake Forecasting


PAVIA, ITALY—Sumatra 2004. Wenchuan 2008. Haiti 2010. Japan 2011. In each case, the story was the same: An earthquake struck without warning, taking thousands of lives and smashing buildings like sand castles.
Geoscientists still can't predict when a major quake will strike, and many have given up trying. But many do try to issue more general forecasts of hazards and potential damage. This week, researchers added a potentially powerful new tool to their kit: the largest seismic database of its kind ever constructed, based on tens of thousands of earthquake records stretching back more than 1000 years. Together with a new global map of strain accumulation at plate boundaries, the data sets will form the core of an international public-private partnership intended to reshape the science of earthquake forecasting.
The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation, which has been developing the seismic risk platform since 2009, unveiled key components of it at a meeting here, called Reveal 2013.
"To advance the science of earthquake forecasting we must enhance the data," GEM co-founder Ross Stein told the opening session. Stein, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and a handful of other disaster experts proposed the project in 2006, with the aim of bringing a systematic and open approach to a discipline that had previously been hampered by disparate methods. "Everyone knew we needed to do this," Stein says. "No one was willing to put the money up. GEM did."

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【Time 2】

To develop the new maps, researchers refigured the magnitudes and locations of nearly a thousand historic earthquakes dating back to 1000 C.E. according to strict, uniform new criteria. Using modern algorithms, they also recalculated seismogram records of 20,000 earthquakes over the past 100 years at a cost of €1 million. To get a handle on the driving force behind most earthquakes, other geoscientists reappraised the movements of Earth's tectonic plates to estimate the rate of deformation at plate boundaries. In all, they deduced 20,000 velocities from measurements at 70,000 stations around the world. GEM says that the software used to analyze the data, known as OpenQuake, will be publicly released next year to set a uniform and open standard in hazard calculations.
GEM hopes to develop better ways to calculate both seismic hazard—the probability that earthquakes will occur over the next 50 years—and seismic risk, the casualties and economic losses likely to result. Risk is of particular interest to the insurance companies that fund much of GEM's research. At the meeting, researchers unveiled an ambitious new project to assess the quality of building stocks around the world, using national data sets, satellite imagery, and on-the-street censuses recorded by smart phone apps.
Reveal 2013 participants say that they are impressed by the partnership's rapid progress. "We do have our own world map of natural hazards," says Anselm Smolka of the insurance firm Munich Re, which has donated €5 million to the program. "But with a team of just 20, we cannot do more. We need cooperation. GEM gives industry access to a global network of scientists."

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【Time 3】

Seth Stein, a geophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a longtime critic of quake forecasting, says that he welcomes the attempt to bring clarity to the field. But he warns that no amount of data collection can overcome the deep uncertainties inherent in Earth faulting processes. For example, he says, even a complete 2000-year history of seismic shaking in China would have given planners no clues to the three most devastating events that have struck since 1950. "GEM is doing a good job of improving the things that can be improved," says Seth Stein (who is not related to Ross Stein). "So a better record will help us some. But whether it will ever be adequate to allow us to fully characterize the probability of events, my guess is probably no."
Ross Stein acknowledges the need for humility in the face of Earth's complexities: "We must tell the public what we know; and we must tell them what we don't know—in language they understand."
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Resource:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/seismic-data-set-could-improve-e.html?ref=hp



【Time 4】
Prediabetes Risk Factors
5 Signs You Might Be at Risk for Diabetes

Incredibly, one in four Americans over age 20 has prediabetes -- and most don't even know it. Being prediabetic means that your blood glucose levels are higher than normal but short of being classified as diabetic levels. Studies show that most people with prediabetes go on to develop type 2 diabetes within 10 years, unless they lose weight and make dietary and exercise changes.
Because prediabetes develops gradually over years, it's often said that there are no obvious symptoms. But it's possible to notice certain warning signs of growing insulin resistance, the inability to process the energy in food properly that's a key aspect of prediabetes, says Beth Reardon, director of nutrition for Duke Integrative Medicine at Duke University.
Paying close attention to such warning signs gives you plenty of time to make changes before the situation progresses to type 2 diabetes, she says.
"These symptoms usually occur in tandem with one another; together they create a bigger picture that says insulin resistance is going on," Reardon says. "Some signs can be measured, some we feel, some we can just see."
If you're experiencing the following signs, you should ask your doctor about an insulin response test to measure your insulin and blood sugar levels. If the tests confirm that your body is starting to have trouble managing its glucose, it may be incentive for you to commit to the diet and exercise changes that can help move you away from the path toward diabetes.

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【Time 5】

What Feeling Tired and Sluggish After Eating Might Mean
Ready to nap right after a big meal? This is a normal response to an influx of carbs (think of that post-Thanksgiving dinner feeling). But if it happens often, your body may be sending a message that your diet is too diabetes-friendly.
After eating, all carbohydrates -- whether in a doughnut or a carrot -- are broken down into the bloodstream as glucose (blood sugar), the body's main energy source. When the blood containing the glucose hits the pancreas, this organ gets the message to release insulin, a hormone it produces to help the cells throughout the body use glucose. Cells have insulin receptors that allow glucose to enter and either be stored as future energy or used right away.
It's a great system. But a diet that's high in simple carbs like sugar, white flour, and sweet beverages -- especially when consumed in large quantities at one sitting -- overwhelms it. According to Reardon, the cells' insulin receptors eventually stop receiving the insulin, which means they can't take in the glucose. The glucose builds up in the blood while the needy cells don't get any. The pancreas, meanwhile, notes the glucose level is still high in the blood that flows through it, and it pumps out still more insulin in response. Net result: You feel sleepy and may find it hard to think, because your brain and body are depleted until the system rights itself.
"Over time, this cycle can cause someone to become chronically insulin resistant. The body simply can't keep up with the demands that all those simple sugars and fats are placing on it," Reardon says.
What helps: Slow your carb load. Choose more complex carbohydrates, such as whole grains (barley, oats, quinoa, spelt, brown rice), vegetables, and whole fruits (not juices) that the body has to work harder to digest. This means blood sugar stays stable longer. Move around right after eating -- take a 15-minute walk; even washing the dishes helps -- rather than plopping in front of the TV. The activity will help your body begin to process the big glucose intake faster and more efficiently. In fact, a Mayo Clinic study presented at the 2011 American Diabetes Association annual meeting reported blood sugar levels rose only half as much after eating in a group that was moderately active after a meal, compared to a control group that ate, then rested.

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Resource:
http://www.caring.com/articles/5-early-warning-signs-of-diabetes

Part II: Obstacle


【Time 6】
Are Dogs Now Just Furry Kids?

The Summer of 2013 officially began only last Friday, but already it has a good shot at achieving a dubious distinction in the annals of parental indulgence. This could be the summer that ice cream trucks for dogs go mainstream.
Ever since the K99 ice cream truck set up shop in the parks of London during the summer of 2010–to the tune of the Scooby Doo theme song, no less–the trend of cruising trucks full of specially-made canine ice cream treats and cookies has been spreading and appears to be hitting its jaunty stride. Last summer, they started dropping by dog parks in more and more American cities, confident in the knowledge that all it takes is one person ponying up $3 for a doggie cone and in no time, every other dog owner in the vicinity will feel compelled to do the same for their own little precious. And now, according to a story on NBC’s website this weekend, some of the more successful dog food trucks are talking about franchising their brands.
This was inevitable, I suppose, given all the singles whose significant other has paws, and all the aging Baby Boomers whose own kids have moved out, or at least down to the basement. These days, dog love swings easily into sweet, excessive indulgence.
Among recent examples of ideas whose time apparently has come are a device developed by a San Francisco firm that allows pet owners to track how active their dog is during the day while they’re at work, and a high-end dog food whose main ingredient is ground-up chicken feathers. It’s designed for dogs with food allergies.
Kid stuff
Products like those get much of the media attention, yet some of the more interesting developments in the deepening entanglement of dogs and owners have not been in the marketplace, but in scientific laboratories. Researchers have been focusing on the potent bond between dogs and owners, particularly how it affects a pet’s behavior.
For instance, a study done at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE, found that connections between dogs and their owners can have striking similarities to parent-child relationships. Okay, no surprise there, but what they learned about how it influences a dog’s confidence was pretty revealing.
Specifically, they saw that, as in parent-child bonding, dogs use their caregivers as a “secure base” from which to interact with the world around them. In this case, the dogs could earn a food reward by manipulating toys. But they showed much less interest in working for a treat when their owners weren’t around. If they were there, it didn’t seem to make much difference if the owner was silent or encouraging. What mattered was their presence. And it couldn’t be just any human–the dogs weren’t very motivated when a stranger was in the room with them. Only when their owners were nearby did they go after the food with gusto.
Said researcher Lisa Horn, “One of the things that really surprised us is, that adult dogs behave towards their caregivers like human children do.”
Dark thoughts
Then there was the study published earlier this year in the journal Animal Cognition, which concluded that dogs are much more likely to steal food if they think nobody can see them. Again, big surprise, right? Anyone with a dog knows that even the most guileless mutt becomes a creature of cunning when food is involved.
But there’s a larger lesson here. What the research actually determined was that dogs were four times more likely to sneak food in a dark room than a lighted room. Which suggests that they can understand when a human can or cannot see them. And that could mean that dogs are capable of understanding a human’s point of view.
Explained lead researcher Juliane Kaminski:
“Humans constantly attribute certain qualities and emotions to other living things. We know that our own dog is clever or sensitive, but that’s us thinking, not them.The results of these tests suggest that dogs are deciding it’s safer to steal the food when the room is dark because they understand something of the human’s perspective.”
In dogs we trust
Here are other recent studies on the dog-human connection:

Beware of southpaws: According to researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia, dogs that show a preference for using their left paws are more aggressive toward strangers than dogs that are right-pawed or show no preference. But they also found that left-pawed dogs were no more excitable or attention-seeking than other dogs. Only about 10 percent of humans are left-handed, but there’s an even split between left-pawed, right-pawed, and ambilateral canines.
Fortunately, humans have refrained from chasing their butts: It turns out that Doberman pinschers with canine compulsive disorder (CCD) have similar abnormalities in their brain structure as humans with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). That makes scientists more hopeful that further research in CCD–exhibited in dogs by blanket-sucking, tail-chasing, and chewing–could help lead to new therapies for OCD in humans.
Thanks for sharing: If you have a dog, you no doubt realize that it brings a lot of bacteria into your home. What you may not realize is that’s not a bad thing. For instance, skin microbes, note scientists at North Carolina State University, can help you fight off diseases. Particularly high levels of microbes related to dogs were found on pillowcases and, strangely enough, TV screens.
Except when they pee on the rug: No source less than the American Heart Association says that owning a dog can be good for your heart. The organization issued a statement to that effect last month following a scientific review of research showing that dog owners not only get more exercise, but also can have their stress levels and heart rates lowered by the presence of their pets.
If dogs were on Facebook, they’d like everything: And finally, a survey by the research firm Mintel found that almost half of those who participated said that their pets are better for their social lives than being on Facebook or Twitter. Also, according to the survey, almost one out of five Millenials who own a dog or cat have a pet-related app on their smartphones.


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作业来了:
time1:1m15s
  A lot of earthquake which have no any prediction taken away thousands of lives and disaster many buildings,but now there will be a data base system to predict the earthquake.  
time2:1m20s
  this system is to be relived 2013 but lack of funds.
time3: 40s
   although this system improve our prediction technology ,we can't assure its prediction is adequate truth.
time4:1m04s
   1\4Americans over 20s have diabetes, though a lot of people even don't know it's exitence.   
time5:1m54s
        重读:为什么老走神。。。。受不了自己了。。。
      after meal your tired and sluggish means you have a friendly-diabetes diet, you should intake more carbonhydrate food
obstacle:  5m14s

   connections between dog and humans, really surprise me!!
好几天没练了,有些生疏,今天的文章好具有科普性,学到了很多东西,感谢楼主!!
93#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-7-2 22:24:12 | 只看该作者
今天蛮倒霉的,被小偷顺走1000RMB, 这些好逸恶劳的人,真心想问候你全家人,这辈子最讨厌小偷,昧着良心的钱不知道你怎么花的。。。。舍财免灾吧,看有个上海朗格的坑爹的中介。打击我,说我这个条件把目标定得太高,还很不屑的挂了电话。我想说点什么好呢,搞笑!!一切还得继续,明天陪妈妈去医院,每天晚上就花时间学习一下,希望复习的这种感觉没有丢掉就好,每天不管是看5道或10道,有时间就多看点,走自己的路,让鼠目寸光的人说去吧。。。                    2013\7\2 22:24
92#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-30 22:24:34 | 只看该作者
LZ本来准备今年暑假在学校战GMAT的,由于楼主 妈妈生病了做手术这几天安心不下来复习,准备回家,一直到妈妈康复,可能计划会有些变化,重明天回家后再做计划,但阅读还是会坚持每天做得,现在好想坐在自习室图书馆自习,游走在陪伴我几个月的GAMT的,但突然情况的说来就来,不管怎么样心向着那个方向,我的GMAT等妈妈好些了,再来。。我爱你GMAT,我爱你留学,可能要将你推迟一年了,给我更充分的准备。
91#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-28 23:18:27 | 只看该作者
【PART I: SPEED】
(Required)
[Warm up]

MAP: The Most Famous Brand From Every State
The first map I've ever seen showing a Hooters next to Saks


Derek Thompson Jun 25 2013, 3:52 PM ET

MoreVerizon is New York. AOL is Virginia. Apple is California. Here's a map of the U.S. by each state's most famous company by where the company was founded. (Allsup's!).

  

Choosing the most famous company founded in each state seems like a matter of taste rather than statistics. Apple's market cap is bigger than McDonald's. But is the white apple really more iconic than the golden arches? Let the debate begin.
[90 words]
Source: The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/busin ... every-state/277129/



Do Funny Ads Work?
In 1920, nobody knew. Nobody knows today, either.
Derek Thompson Jun 21 2013, 1:24 PM ET

  


[Time 1]
"Avoid humor."

John Caples, the legend in direct-response advertising who wrote the famous "They laughed when ..." ads, had strong feelings how to sell stuff with jokes. And his feelings boiled down to this: Stop trying to be funny. "You can entertain a million people and not sell one of them," he said. "There is not a single humorous line in two of the most influential books in the world, namely, the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalog."

Well, so much for Sears Roebuck catalogs and so long to avoiding humor in advertising. A majority of TV ads now contain "some humorous elements." But, after much ink has been spilled trying to add a research backbone to Caples' claim, it's still not clear whether Caples was cranky or prescient.

The first challenge of studying humor in advertising is that it's pretty much a methodological nightmare to quantify funniness. The world is not divided into two clean categories, hilarious ads and perfectly serious commercials. There are ads that try to be funny but are not. There are ads that don't try to be funny but are. And there are ads -- thousands of ads -- that try to delight us and elicit a "meh."

It seems intuitive that legitimately funny messages are memorable, which helps keep their products top-of-mind, provided that the audience recalls what exactly the advertisement was about. But decades of research has suggested that humor simply isn't special, and it certainly isn't any more effective that a clear, simple, serious message. One recent study from the University of Colorado, Denver, found that we tend to remember the extremes -- awesomely funny ads and (ironically) awfully lame ones.
[Time 1 Ends, 277 Words]


[Time 2]
I was reminded of some of this reading into the history of humor in advertising recently when I was asked during an interview to explain, "what sort of things young people find funny." I paused, thought for a moment, realized that any attempt at an answer would be pointless, and responded that I thought the question was akin to asking, "what sort of colors do young people like?" I don't know. All sorts?

Still, just because humor is somewhat ineffable doesn't mean there aren't things to learn about it. Some research shows that men and young people in general prefer aggressive humor, where somebody "wins" the interaction, while women, older people, and richer people tend to prefer affiliative humor, which is victimless. A recent Nielsen special report on Boomer versus Millennial attention spans concluded that aging brains are more easily distracted and better process repetition, which younger brains have "better attention capture, engagement, and memorability" makes them receptive to faster edits and quick slapstick humor.

Ultimately, however, the sheer amount of the research into humor in advertising is another data point to tell us what we already know, which is that nobody has any clue what sort of advertising works until it works. If you really want somebody to remember something, make it impossible for them to forget it ...
[Time 2 Ends, 220 Words]

Source: The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/busin ... ny-ads-work/277113/


Your money
How the Supreme Court’s ruling will affect gay married couples
By Gail Waterhouse June 26, 2013

[Time 3]
The Supreme Court’s ruling that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional paves the way for married gay couples to receive more than a 1,000 federal benefits and protections their straight counterparts already have access to.

The ruling applies to all married couples in Massachusetts, as well as the 11 other states and the District of Columbia where gay marriage is legal.

“This is enormous,” said Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus. “The right to marry is not only critical socially and societally, but it also has huge economic implications.”

The 1,138 federal benefits and protections already given to opposite-sex married couples will now apply to same-sex couples, and will affect the way businesses handle employee benefits, like healthcare and family leave, as well as hiring and new employee orientation practices.

“Striking down DOMA gets rid of a lot of distractions,” said Tracy Burns, the executive director of the Northeast Human Resources Association. Before the ruling, human resources staff had to navigate the intricacies of the differences between benefits for straight and gay married employees, added Burns.

Most notably, gay married couples will be able to file a joint federal tax return; before gay married couples in Massachusetts had to file jointly for the state income tax and then file separately as a single person for their federal tax returns.

Scott Squillace, an estate planning lawyer at Squillace & Associates in the Back Bay, which has approximately 350 gay couples as clients, and Christopher Paul, an estate planning lawyer in New Hampshire’s McLane Law Firm, outlined some of the larger benefits gay married couples will now be able to receive:
[Time 3 Ends, 276 Words]


[Time 4 ]
Military benefits: Though the US military has repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and promised to give 20 benefits to same-sex couples as early as August, all benefits to opposite-sex military spouses will now apply to same-sex spouses as well. Additionally, spouses of deceased veterans will be eligible to receive veterans’ benefits. Other benefits include spousal coverage under health care plans and housing allowances to cover gay married couples.

Social Security survivor benefits: If a spouse in the marriage dies, the surviving spouse can now collect the deceased spouse’s Social Security checks if that amount is higher than the one he or she was currently receiving.

Federal estate tax break: An unlimited marital deduction now applies on both the state and federal level, meaning that if one spouse wanted to leave all possessions and assets to the living spouse, he or she would be able to do so, without that amount being taxed. Previously, the federal estate tax was 40 percent on any estate over $5.25 million.

Property sales: If one spouse sells land to another, capital gains taxes will not apply.

Retirement plan rollover: A deceased spouse’s Individual Retirement Account can roll over into the survivor’s without being taxed first.

Federal health care protections: Same-sex married couples will now be eligible to receive COBRA benefits and spousal benefits in Medicare, cutting the cost of those health plans.

Federal employee benefits: For federal employees, the government will recognize gay spouses, making them eligible for a variety of benefits such as healthcare coverage. Federal gay married employees can also participate in family medical leaves.

US Citizenship. Spouses who are citizens can now sponsor a visa for a non-citizen spouse and the foreign national can receive spousal preference for a path to citizenship.
[Time 4 Ends, 290 Words]

Source: The Boston Blobe
http://www.bostonglobe.com/busin ... rd4hGoYO/story.html




How to Do Regulatory Stimulus
By Matthew Yglesias

Posted Wednesday, June 26, 2013, at 11:47 AM


  

Picture: A Ford C-MAX hybrid vehicle goes through assembly at the Michigan Assembly Plant Nov. 8, 2012, in Wayne, Mich.
[Time 5]
In yesterday's climate speech, Obama took out a fair amount of time to explain the long history of industry crying wolf about the economy-killing impact of environment regulations, and I was glad he did it. But that speaks largely to the short-term issue. A different question is how does regulatory policy intersect with the conditions of a depressed economy with low and stable inflation and near-zero short-term interest rates. And the answer is—it depends.

The basic issue is that with idle resources in the economy, you want to do things that bolster the marginal product of new capital investments or the marginal value of new durable goods purchases. Whether stricter or laxer rules serve that purpose depends on what the rules apply to.

So to take an example, if you increase fuel-efficiency standards for all new cars starting tomorrow while leaving existing cars alone, you exacerbate a recession. The price of new cars will go up, but holding onto your old gas-guzzler will get cheaper (since other people will be driving more fuel-efficient cars) so you end up slowing the pace at which people upgrade vehicles. By contrast, if you say that the dirtiest X percent of cars currently on the road will be illegal 10 months from now, then you increase the pace at which the nation's vehicle fleet turns over and boost short-term growth. In other words, regulations that tend to make the existing stock of equipment go obsolete faster can boost growth, but regulations that tend to make new equipment more expensive will tend to retard it.

In terms of power plant regulations, what you'd ideally want to do is force existing coal-fired plants to either close or invest in some kind of upgraded infrastructure while simultaneously making it easier to build gas or renewable plants.

The problem with stimulative regulation is that the kinds of regulations that stimulate—the ones that force otherwise useful equipment to be scrapped—are the kinds that are politically toughest to impose. It's easier, politically, to grandfather existing equipment and simply put the squeeze on new stuff. That said, in terms of pro-growth green measures, there's plenty you could do to de-regulate, starting with land use rules on land that's already been developed. Turning detached houses in expensive suburbs into apartment buildings and townhouses, and turning apartments and townhouses in expensive cities into bigger apartments is much greener than turning open land into new detached houses. But it tends to be broadly illegal in large swaths of the country. Deregulating on that kind of density while stepping up rules on pollution from existing power plants and vehicles can do a lot to create jobs.
[Time 5 Ends, 444 Words]

Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/blogs/money ... pur_investment.html


【PART II: OBSTACLE】
(Required, pick one of these two options)


Option 1
Has China Reached a Turning Point?
Jeremy, Quinnipiac University, April 18, 2013

[Time 6]
I want to thank everyone for being here and for giving me the opportunity to speak.

The title of my talk is a question: has China reached a turning point? My answer to that question is to say that it appears that China has reached four different turning points. This makes it very hard to predict where China will end up going because if one turns four times one can end up heading in almost any direction.

The four turning points that I have in mind are the following. The first two relate to urbanization, the subject of my own research. First is what I would refer to as the Lewisian Turning Point. The 2010 Census showed that China now is over 50% urbanized. Second, the regime seems to be moving towards the development of larger scale cities as opposed to spreading out urbanization across many different localities. Third, China’s transition from an investment and export based economy to one that is increasingly consumption-based. Fourth, and finally that China’s rapid economic growth seems to finally have run headlong into the environmental consequences of that growth.

I will speak briefly about each of these turning points before coming back to the question of where China is headed.

The Lewisian Turning Point is named for the Nobel-winning Economist Arthur Lewis and his model of surplus labor. To simplify, that model states that as long as a society has extra laborers in the countryside, they can move to much more high productive industrial work, while keeping wages low and not hurting agricultural production. China’s rapid economic growth over the past 30 years has in many ways followed this model. Yet with rapid increases in wages for factory workers and others, it seems clear that China has moved towards a situation in which it no longer has rural surplus labor. In other words, China has reached the Lewisian turning point, which implies that it will have to find growth in other ways.

One possible path could be seen in discussions over changes in the way that China urbanize. The regime has consistently promoted small and medium cities over large ones. Since the beginning of CCP rule in 1949, the regime has worried about urban instability—and from the regime’s perspective rightly so, since nondemocratic regimes with single dominant cities are much more prone to collapse than those facing a number of different cities. This is counter-intuitive for those who know Chairman Mao’s famous saying that a single spark can start a prairie fire. Mao, of course is right, a single spark can start a prairie fire, but it is much more likely that a prairie fire will start when many sparks are concentrated in one space. The regime has dealt with the possibility of urban unrest by biasing its policies in favor of cities, and when this bias led farmers, especially in the 1950s, to “blindly flow” to favored cities, the regime limited the ability of farmers to migrate. These migration restrictions, referred to as the hukou system, have been reformed but remain barriers to those born in the countryside interested in moving to cities. These restrictions have been lowered for smaller cities, but the walls outside of larger cities remain tall.

It has been suggested that the regime believes that it needs to encourage growth in its largest cities now to promote innovation, creativity, and productivity despite the potential dangers of urban unrest that might arise from having so many crammed together so closely to each other and the seats of economic and political power. This debate can be summarized by two different Chinese phrases that translate to the English “urbanize”: chengshihua—urbanization of cities and chengzhenhua—urbanization of towns. It appears possible that China will move away from the latter towards the former.

It is believed that this transition towards developing larger cities will also encourage a shift towards consumption and away from investment and exports as the principal source of Chinese economic growth. It is well-known that the Chinese economy is particularly dependent on selling its goods to others and investing resources for its future to achieve the high rates of growth that have been the dominant economic fact about China for the past decades. Yet this too seems to be changing. The Great Recession or Global Financial Crisis is a study in contrasts on this point.

When the Chinese regime was hit by the dramatic drop in export demand it replaced this external demand for Chinese made goods with internal demand through a massive stimulus package. This did two things: first it showed that the world is not enough; that is, China could not depend on the rest of the world’s demand for its goods to continue its growth. Second, by investing incredible amounts of resources in additional infrastructure, the regime realized that it needed to shift its economy away from such investment quickly less even more uneconomical projects, white elephants or bridges to nowhere and the like, were constructed. However, promoting consumption has been difficult and run into its own problems. As millions upon millions of Chinese bought their first appliances and cars, the environmental consequences of such consumption have made themselves known. If the fundamental social contract that the regime operates with is a trade-off of growth for stability, many Chinese are wondering whether growth has anything for them. What good is a car if one is stuck in traffic and unable to drive anywhere; or an apartment in a city with air-quality so pitiful that simply walking around outside is dangerous?

So, it is clear that China has reached a turning point. Indeed, I would argue that it has reached many of them at almost the same time. This makes predicting where China will be headed a very challenging task. Last year, the World Bank, jointly with the Chinese State Council released a very interesting document entitled: China 2030—Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative Society. I would argue that it presents a best-case scenario of where the country is headed. The chapter titles of the report make this optimism apparent: Green Development, Increasing Innovation, Strengthening the Fiscal System, Achieving Mutually Beneficial Relations with Other Countries, and so on… What is missing from that document is politics. The Chinese Communist Party is never mentioned as an important actor and social stability is assumed. China faces many turning points in the next few years; the question is whether China will navigate them safely and what paths will the country, party, and people be on at the end of this wild ride.

Thanks.

[Time 6 Ends, 1094 Words]

Source: Science of Politics
http://scienceofpolitics.wordpre ... o-its-reached-four/



Option 2
The Long Road to Marriage Equality
By GEORGE CHAUNCEY Published: June 26, 2013
  
[Time 6]

NEW HAVEN — THE Supreme Court’s soaring decision on Wednesday to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional is a civil rights landmark, but the history leading up to it is poorly understood. Marriage equality was neither inevitable nor, until recently, even conceivable. And the struggle for it was not, as is commonly believed, a natural consequence of the gay liberation movement that gained steam in the late 1960s.


It was not until the 1980s that securing legal recognition for same-sex relationships became an urgent concern of lesbians and gay men. Decades earlier, such recognition was almost unimaginable. In the 1950s, most states criminalized gay people’s sexual intimacy. Newspaper headlines blared the State Department’s purge of homosexual employees during the McCarthy-era “lavender scare.” Police cracked down on lesbian and gay bars and other alleged “breeding grounds” of homosexuality.

The lesbian and gay liberation movements of the early 1970s did not make marriage a priority — quite the opposite. Activists fought police raids, job discrimination and families’ rejection of their queer children. Most radical activists scorned the very idea of marriage. But a handful walked into clerks’ offices across the country to request marriage licenses. State officials suddenly realized that their laws failed to limit marriage to a man and a woman; no other arrangement had been imagined. By 1978, 15 states had written this limitation into law.

A “traditional family values” movement arose to oppose gay rights and feminism. Anita Bryant and other activists took aim at some of the earliest local anti-discrimination laws, and by 1979 they had persuaded voters in several cities to repeal them. Subsequently, in more than 100 state and local referendums, gay-rights activists had to defend hard-won protections. This, not marriage, consumed much of their energy.

It was the ’80s that changed things. The AIDS epidemic and what came to be known as the “lesbian baby boom” compelled even those couples whose friends and family fully embraced them to deal with powerful institutions — family and probate courts, hospitals, adoption agencies and funeral homes — that treated them as legal strangers.

Hospitals could deny the gay partner of someone with AIDS visitation privileges, not to mention consultation over treatment. He couldn’t use his health insurance to cover his partner. He risked losing his home after his partner died, if his name wasn’t on the lease or if he couldn’t pay inheritance taxes on his partner’s share (which would not have been required of a surviving spouse).

When two women shared parenting and the biological mother died, the courts often felt obliged to grant custody to her legal next of kin — even if the child wished to remain with the nonbiological mother. If the women separated, the biological mother could unilaterally deny her ex the right to see their children.

Couples used wills, powers of attorney and innovative new legal arrangements like domestic partnerships and second-parent adoption to try to get around these injustices, an astounding achievement given the reigning conservatism of the ’80s and early ’90s. But for all their virtues, none of these arrangements could provide the Social Security, tax, immigration and other benefits that only marriage could bestow.

The marriage movement emerged out of this maelstrom, but it was always about more than legal benefits. Historically, denial of marriage rights has been a powerful symbol of people’s exclusion from full citizenship. Enslaved people in America did not have the right to marry before the Civil War; Jews did not have the right to marry non-Jews in Nazi Germany. In 1948, the United Nations enshrined the freedom to marry as a fundamental human right. That same year California’s highest court became the first in the nation to overturn a state law banning interracial marriage.

As attitudes toward homosexuality changed in the 1990s, before accelerating ever more rapidly over the last decade, antigay activists — who had already fought gay teachers in schools, gay-student groups, gay characters on TV sitcoms, domestic partnerships and anti-discrimination laws — redoubled their fight against marriage equality. In 1996, when it appeared that Hawaii’s courts might let same-sex couples wed, Congress passed DOMA, which declared that no state needed to give “full faith and credit” to another state’s same-sex marriages. It also denied federal recognition and benefits to such marriages. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority: “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.”

When Massachusetts became the first state to permit gay couples to marry, in 2004, it unleashed opposition as well as euphoria. That year, 13 states amended their constitutions to ban such marriages (12 had already done so legislatively). Ultimately, California and 40 other states acted to limit marriage to one man and one woman by constitutional amendment, legislation or both; in 30 states, the amendments remain on the books. It seems likely that California will soon join 12 states (along with the District of Columbia) where same-sex marriage is legal, but the state-by-state battle will grind on everywhere else.

The intensity of the backlash against marriage equality eventually produced its own backlash. Many heterosexuals sought to distance themselves from the antigay animus it expressed. Young people, who grew up in a cultural universe different from their parents’, began to wonder why marriage was an issue at all. Political figures as different as Barack Obama and Rob Portman described how their children had affected their thinking.

Federal benefits will dramatically improve the lives of countless people, from the lesbian widow who needs her wife’s Social Security benefits to hold onto her home to the gay New Yorker whose foreign husband will now be able to live with him in America. Couples will no longer suffer the indignity of having the government treat their marriages as inferior.

Other urgent problems also confront lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including the endemic bullying of queer students, discrimination in housing and employment and the surge in new H.I.V. infections among young gay and bisexual men. Marriage equality has singular legal, cultural and practical significance. Nonetheless, it was not the first issue to animate the struggle for equality and dignity — nor will it be the last.

*George Chauncey, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, was an expert witness in both of the same-sex marriage cases decided Wednesday.
[Time 6 Ends, 1021 Words]


time1:1m30s  
      consumers tend to a more simple, clear ads rather than funny ones.
time2:  1m01s
      giving a certain answer to the question "what types humor young people like? is pointless ,and the perfect humors vary by the different type people.
time3:  1m45s
      The government ruling of the right of same-sex marry give the same-sex couple and economic more benefits
time4 :
       many kinds of benefit can be obtained by same-sex couple.
time5 :2m28s
       the regulation can always bring property  ? it depends ..
5m54s:
   the history of the same-sex marriage right ,from limited to liberation.
90#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-26 23:42:57 | 只看该作者
Part I: Speed
[Time 1]
Article 1
Stone Age Snails

A variety of snails common in western Ireland may have been transported there by humans during the Stone Age, a new study suggests. Cepaea nemoralis, the banded wood snail, is found in many locales in Western Europe and is typically 1.5 centimeters across, about the width of an adult's thumbnail. But a subpopulation of the species found in western Ireland ranges up to twice that size and has a distinctive white lip on its shell to boot—traits also seen in members of the species from southern France, along the northern slopes of the Pyrenees. In previous studies, carbon-dating of shells revealed that the normally rare, white-lipped variant arrived in Ireland more than 8000 years ago. Now, geneticists have linked the Irish snails to the Pyrenees. As they report online today in PLOS ONE, they found that one particular lineage of the species—with two exceptions, both associated with snails found along the coasts of the Irish Sea—were found only in Ireland and in the central and eastern Pyrenees. How the snails reached Ireland but apparently skipped intermediate regions has long been a mystery. It's most likely, the researchers suggest, that the rare white-lipped variant of the snail hitched a ride with traders traveling from the Mediterranean region through the Pyrenees on their way to Ireland—perhaps unintentionally, in fodder for the trader's animals or, more intriguingly, as a part of the trader's food supplies. French cuisine, after all, has long been famed for its escargot.

[字数:247]
Source:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/scienceshot-stone-age-snails.html?ref=hp
[Time 2]
Article 2
The Bird's Disappearing Penis

Most male birds are missing a little something down there. In 97% of living birds, the male doesn't have a penis; instead, he secretes sperm out of an opening called a cloaca, which is also used for excretion of urine and feces. Scientists comparing embryos of the Pekin duck, Anas platyrhynchos, which has an external penis, and the domestic chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, which lacks one, have now figured out why this is. At first, the chickens' genitals develop the same as the ducks', with a phallus precursor (red in above image) appearing in the first few days. But 8 or 9 days into the embryos' development, the chickens start to look drastically different: The cells in the rudimentary penis begin to die, eventually leaving only a slight bulge. When the researchers looked at the patterns of gene activity in the embryos, they found that the cell death was linked to the switching on of a gene called Bmp4. Turning on Bmp4 in duck embryos made their penises stop growing during development as well, the team reports online today in Current Biology. The findings likely mean that a change to Bmp4 is what led, in evolutionary history, to some bird lineages lacking a penis, although the evolutionary pressures that may have led to this are still under debate. Because other Bmp genes exist, and they're found across the tree of life, the researchers say that the mechanism discovered here could also reveal how other organisms have lost body parts throughout evolution.

[字数:220]
Source:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/scienceshot-the-birds-disappeari.html
[Time 3]
Article 3
Location may stymie wind and solar power benefits
The health and climate gains made by green energies are often lowest in the windiest or sunniest places.

Wind farms and solar installations are often located in places where they will have the least impact on climate and health, a report finds.

These renewable energies emit less carbon dioxide and air pollution than burning fossil fuels for electricity. But the windiest and sunniest places in the United States — such as the southwestern plains and deserts — are not always the most socially and environmentally beneficial sites for wind turbines and solar panels. The benefits, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, vary depending on what energy sources are being replaced.

New wind and solar installations displace the most carbon dioxide and air pollutants where they replace the coal-fired plants found predominantly in eastern and Midwestern states such as Indiana and Pennsylvania. The benefits are much smaller in California and the US southwest, where cleaner gas-fired plants are more common.

“One would think it makes most sense to install the next solar panel in sunny California, because the solar resource is better there,” says Inês Lima Azevedo, an environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a co-author of the study.

“But if we start thinking about the emissions that are displaced by adding that solar panel, the story is different: in Pennsylvania, one will be displacing old and dirty coal power plants and thus avoiding more health and environmental damages associated with the emissions from those plants.”

The team calculated the power-generation capacity of thousands of wind turbines and hundreds of solar panels across the United States and evaluated the corresponding health and environmental benefits. Assuming a social cost to the environment and human health of US$20 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, and $6 million per air-pollution-caused death, the combined climate and health benefits per megawatt hour used from electrcity produced by solar power range from about  $10 in Arizona, to $100, in some northeastern states, the researchers estimate.

[字数:340]

[Time 4]
Social benefits
As for wind energy, the overall health and environmental benefits in the United States amount to $2.6 billion per year. This is 60% more than the yearly US subsidy of $1.6 billion for wind power diffusion, the researchers say. But the US production tax credit — the main policy mechanism to induce wind-power development — encourages investors to seek sites with the highest energy output rather than those with high social benefits, says Lima Azevedo.

As a result, 30% of the 34,000 megawatts of wind capacity in the United States is installed in Texas and California, where social benefits are lowest, and less than 5% is in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, where wind power offers the greatest benefit from displaced pollution.

To maximize benefits for taxpayers, Lima Azevedo says, policy-makers should think about a subsidy scheme that encourages operators to build plants where they will yield the biggest health and climate gains. The easiest way to do that, she says, would be to price air-pollutant emissions at their source — the power plants.

The findings are “exceedingly interesting” and relevant for any nation weighing the costs and benefits of moving towards more wind and solar energy, says Nebojsa Nakicenovic, an energy-systems analyst at the International Institute of Applied System Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. “This study clearly shows that, if installation sites are well chosen, the costs that some may feel worried about are in fact more than offset by avoided damages to human health and the environment.”

[字数:247]
Source:
http://www.nature.com/news/location-may-stymie-wind-and-solar-power-benefits-1.13258
[Time 5]
Article 4

Caffeine, the stimulant in coffee, has been called “the most widely used psychoactive substance on Earth.” Snyder, Daly and Bruns have recently proposed that caffeine affect behavior by countering the activity in the human brain of a naturally occurring chemical called adenosine. Adenosine normally depresses neuron firing in many areas of the brain. It apparently does this by inhibiting the release of neurotransmitters, chemicals that carry nerve impulses from one neuron to the next. Like many other agents that affect neuron firing, adenosine must first bind to specific receptors on neuronal membranes. There are at least two classes of these receptors, which have been designated A1 and A2. Snyder et al propose that caffeine, which is structurally similar to adenosine, is able to bind to both types of receptorswhich prevents adenosine from attaching there and allows the neurons to fire more readily than they otherwise would.

For many years, caffeine’s effects have been attributed to its inhibition of the production of phosphodiesterase, an enzyme that breaks down the chemical called cyclic AMP. A number of neurotransmitters exert their effects by first increasing cyclic AMP concentrations in target neurons.

Therefore, prolonged periods at the elevated concentrations, as might be brought about by a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, could lead to a greater amount of neuron firing and, consequently, to behavioral stimulation. But Snyder et al point out that the caffeine concentrations needed to inhibit the production of phosphodiesterase in the brain are much higher than those that produce stimulation. Moreover, other compounds that block phosphodiesterase’s activity are not stimulants.

[字数:256]
Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/515416/fast-break/

Part II: Obstacle
Article 5
Violence against women at epidemic proportions

Three in ten women worldwide have been punched, shoved, dragged, threatened with weapons, raped, or subjected to other violence from a current or former partner. Close to one in ten have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner. Of women who are murdered, more than one in three were killed by an intimate partner.

These grim statistics come from the first global, systematic estimates of violence against women. Linked papers published today in The Lancet and Science assess, respectively, how often people are killed by their partners1 and how many women experience violence from them2. And an associated report and guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Swizerland, along with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council in Pretoria, estimates how often women suffer sexual violence from someone other than a partner, gauge the impact of partner and non-partner violence on women’s health and advise health-care providers on how to support the victims.

“These numbers should be a wake-up call. We want to highlight that this is a problem that occurs in all regions and it’s unacceptably high,” says Claudia García-Moreno, a physician at WHO who coordinates research on gender violence and worked on all the publications.

According to the WHO report, 42% of women who experienced violence were physically injured by their partners. But violence harms women in ways beyond injury. Violent partners may prevent women from visiting health clinics or from accessing medicine or contraception. Women who experienced violence from a partner are more likely to be infected with HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, to have an abortion, to give birth to underweight and premature babies, and to attempt suicide. They are also more likely to use alcohol and are twice as likely to experience depression — factors which can be both cause of and be caused by a partner's violence. In addition, the authors point out, raised stress levels are implicated in a range of health problems, including chronic pain, diabetes, heart disease and gastrointestinal disorders.

Such figures mean that violence should be considered alongside 'mainstream' health risks such as smoking and alcohol use, says Kristin Dunkle, a social epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who was not involved in the studies. “This is the moment where we say ‘no one is allowed to have their head in the sand, and no one is addressing women's health if they aren't addressing violence’.”

On the scientific agenda
The data came from a concerted effort over many years to develop and disseminate methods to measure gender-related violence, says Rachel Jewkes, head of the South African Medical Research Council in Pretoria. “By saying ‘we're going to measure it,’ we've put it on the scientific agenda.”
As recently as 15 or 20 years ago, she says, governments generally considered domestic violence as something that was private and inevitable — something that governments could do little to address, she says. Having global figures puts violence on the radar of “global bodies that are looking for one number to show that violence is an issue”.

To compile their estimates, each report combed through the peer-reviewed literature as well as the so-called 'grey literature', such as statistics and reports compiled by government agencies. To estimate the prevalence of violence against women across global regions and age ranges, for example, dozens of researchers searched more than 25,000 abstracts, says Karen Devries, a social epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who worked on the reports.

Devries team sought studies that assessed the prevalence of violence across entire countries or large regions within them. They also performed or requested additional analyses of four large international surveys. In total, their estimates were based on data from 141 studies in 81 countries, with 80% of the estimates based on what are considered gold-standard methods — private one-on-one interviews in which women are asked about specific acts of violence, including slaps, kicks, use of weapons and rape over their lifetime.

Global variation
Studies were adjusted for differences in design and methodological quality. The highest rates of partner violence, estimated between 54% and 78%, were found in central sub-Saharan Africa, but even high-income regions in Asia, North America and western Europe had rates above 15%. These jump considerably when sexual non-partner violence is factored in.

The studies still have gaps. For example, data about partner violence from central sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and southern Latin America, and for women  over 49, were scarce. In addition, the studies did not assess emotional violence, and though estimates did not consider partners’ gender, most research studies solicited information only on male partners. In addition, many homicide reports do not include information about perpetrators’ relationships to their victims.

Nonetheless, the data that have been pulled together will enable researchers to conduct cross-country and regional comparisons and help generate hypotheses about how social conditions and policies may influence prevalence, says Victoria Frye, a social epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York. “We really did not have that capacity previously.”

And by establishing baseline figures for violence, governments and social researchers are better placed to develop and assess interventions, says Jewkes. “I want to see us in a situation where we are tracking the global decline of women being hit by partners and experiencing rape.”

[字数:884]        

            由于今天太晚了准备先看obstacle 了
,其他明天补上
obstacle:4m57s   
      large numbers static data about women violence from partner are presented all over the world espacially in south African ,east Asia ,north latin...and so on
      this situation  call for the attention by government
      this data also have miss something ,such as the emotional violence ,partner's gender....
   
89#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-25 23:43:35 | 只看该作者
Part I:[Speed] 速度



  
[Title] Cheetah-Cub: A Robot That Runs Like a Cat
  
[ Time 1 ]
Even though it doesn't have a head, you can still tell what kind of animal it is: the robot is definitely modeled upon a cat. Developed by EPFL's Biorobotics Laboratory (Biorob), the "cheetah-cub robot," a small-size quadruped prototype robot, is described in an article appearing today in the International Journal of Robotics Research. The purpose of the platform is to encourage research in biomechanics; its particularity is the design of its legs, which make it very fast and stable. Robots developed from this concept could eventually be used in search and rescue missions or for exploration.
   
This robot is the fastest in its category, namely in normalized speed for small quadruped robots under 30Kg. During tests, it demonstrated its ability to run nearly seven times its body length in one second. Although not as agile as a real cat, it still has excellent auto-stabilization characteristics when running at full speed or over a course that included disturbances such as small steps. In addition, the robot is extremely light, compact, and robust and can be easily assembled from materials that are inexpensive and readily available.
  
Faithful reproduction
The machine's strengths all reside in the design of its legs. The researchers developed a new model with this robot, one that is based on the meticulous observation and faithful reproduction of the feline leg. The number of segments -- three on each leg -- and their proportions are the same as they are on a cat. Springs are used to reproduce tendons, and actuators -- small motors that convert energy into movement -- are used to replace the muscles.
"This morphology gives the robot the mechanical properties from which cats benefit, that's to say a marked running ability and elasticity in the right spots, to ensure stability," explains Alexander Sprowitz, a Biorob scientist. "The robot is thus naturally more autonomous."
  
Sized for a search
According to Biorob director Auke Ijspeert, this invention is the logical follow-up of research the lab has done into locomotion that included a salamander robot and a lamprey robot. "It's still in the experimental stages, but the long-term goal of the cheetah-cub robot is to be able to develop fast, agile, ground-hugging machines for use in exploration, for example for search and rescue in natural disaster situations. Studying and using the principles of the animal kingdom to develop new solutions for use in robots is the essence of our research."
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617104608.htm
  
[Title]You Probably Agreed to NSA Snooping When You Accepted That Website’s Terms of Service
Maybe we shouldn't be so shocked about PRISM, considering we grant companies like Facebook, Google and Apple incredible leverage to hand over our data to government agencies the moment we accept their terms of service agreements.
  
[ Time 2 ]
Everyone from Mark Zuckerberg down to the verage Facebook user has expressed surprised outrage at the existence of PRISM, a top-secret government program that the National Security Agency uses to access user data from at least nine major Internet companies in order to target foreign threats. But maybe we all shouldn’t be shocked at all, considering we grant companies like Facebook, Google and Apple incredible leverage to hand over our data to government agencies the moment we accept their privacy policies and terms of service agreements.
  
Tucked away in those long paragraphs of legalese on pretty much every major Internet website (including Time.com) is a clause about how a business will handle your private data when the feds come knocking. In general, these companies grant themselves wide latitude. Yahoo says it might hand out your data to investigate or prevent “situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person.” Facebook will respond to a court order, search warrant or other legal request “if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so.” Apple provides user data to government agencies if “for purposes of national security, law enforcement, or other issues of public importance, disclosure is necessary or appropriate.”
  
It’s unclear whether even this kind of vague legal verbiage opens the door for a program as sweeping as PRISM has been reported to be. The exact nature of the data collection program is still unclear. Initial reports in The Washington Post and The Guardian painted a picture of a Big Brother-esque surveillance apparatus with unfettered access to massive amounts of data. The Director of National Intelligence responded by saying that all data acquired through the program, which targets only terrorist suspects who are not in the U.S., was lawfully obtained but through secret court orders made possible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A New York Times report last week fell somewhere in the middle, describing a “locked mailbox” for the NSA on tech companies’ servers where the government could routinely ask for the data it sought in its investigations. All the companies steadfastly deny any involvement in the program and say the government doesn’t have direct access to their servers.
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[ Time 3 ]
Whatever the case, the now-acknowledged program takes data collection to a scope beyond what many users likely expected and possibly beyond what some companies’ terms of service allow. There’s a fine distinction between providing government officials private data when compelled to by a legal document like a court order and helping them to circumvent traditional legal channels. “If they say [they] only ever give up your data when compelled to do so by the government, but then it turns out they actually turn over your data routinely whenever the government says hello, then there might be a claim you could bring under the [Federal Trade Commission] Act,” says Andy Sellars, a staff attorney for the Digital Media Law Project based at Harvard University.
   
Such a contradiction could qualify as a deceptive trade practice under FTC rules. Companies have gotten in trouble for violating their own privacy policies before. In 2011, Google was forced to revamp its privacy policy and face regular independent privacy audits for 20 years because of “deceptive tactics” used in the rollout of failed social network Google Buzz. The company was hit with a $22.5 million penalty last year for misrepresenting privacy assurances to users of the Safari Internet browser. Microsoft and Facebook have also run afoul of the FTC for making false promises in their privacy policies. Still, the FTC has never levied a punishment that truly impacted a tech giant’s bottom line—that $22.5 million Google fine, the largest ever obtained by the FTC, is equivalent to the revenue the company generates in about four hours.
   
Individual consumers might also take aim at the PRISM companies, but their chances of success are slim. In 2006 when similar revelations about widespread government surveillance of telecommunications data came to light, Verizon was sued for $50 billion in a class-action lawsuit. But in 2008 Congress granted retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that were involved in surveillance programs, freeing them from legal culpability. Similar measures could be taken to protect Internet companies so that details of the PRISM program aren’t brought to light in a public court. According to the original Washington Post story, in fact, these companies already have immunity.
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[ The rest ]
Of course, all of this only applies to the U.S. legal system. Companies like Google and Facebook have huge international customer bases, and PRISM is targeted squarely at non-Americans. In the European Union, where laws regarding the use of people’s personal data are more stringent than in the U.S., experts say that these Internet companies could face lawsuits.
Even if they do avoid legal trouble, tech companies–whose entire business models hinge on convincing users that their data is safe and secure–have every reason to want the PRISM story to go away as fast as possible. Google is now asking the White House for permission to publish information about the number of secret national security data requests it receives in its annual transparency report about government demands for user information. Facebook, which has never published a transparency report, is suddenly excited by the idea and also wants to include information on national security data requests. Microsoft and Twitter are on board too.
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http://business.time.com/2013/06/14/you-probably-agreed-to-nsa-snooping-when-you-accepted-that-websites-terms-of-service/?iid=biz-main-lead


[Title]The dangers of insularity:
Islands may amplify the biggest waves, not break them
  
[ Time 4 ]
Surfers shun beaches shielded by islands off the coast. That, as generations of swarthy, golden-haired hulks will tell you, is because such islands create a natural breakwater. This dampens waves and makes for a boringly calm surf best left to sunbathers. The surfers’ reasoning is sound for the short-wave, wind-generated swells that they ride. But Themistoklis Stefanakis, of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan, France, warns it may not be true for the longer wavelengths of tsunamis. As he and his colleagues show in a paper posted on arXiv, an online repository, littoral islands may actually exacerbate, rather than diminish, the effects of these waves.
   
Anecdotal evidence for this counterintuitive assertion comes from (mercifully rare) episodes where the same tsunami has battered different types of coastal topography. In 2010, for instance, when one hit the Mentawai islands in Indonesia, areas of coastline directly behind islets bore the brunt of the damage, according to Costas Synolakis, a tsunami expert at the University of Southern California who is one of the study’s co-authors.
Dr Synolakis, Mr Stefanakis and their colleagues decided to try to put numbers on their hunch. Rather than valiantly staking out seafront locales, though, they tested the idea with a computer model.
   
This is harder than it sounds. Simulating the way waves behave as they make landfall means taking account of, literally, oceans of data. To simplify the problem, the researchers looked at what happens when a computerised wave encounters a cone-shaped island on a smoothly sloping seabed in front of a straight cyber-coastline with a beach that continues to rise smoothly as it progresses inland. These approximations allow a computer to cope with the problem, yet are sufficiently similar to many real places for the conclusions drawn from them to, as it were, hold water.
  
The team made their virtual islet jut out of the ocean to an altitude of 100 metres, a typical height above sea level for such outcrops. They then looked at 200 combinations of gradients for the sides of the island, the seabed and the beach; the distance between the island and the beach; and the wavelength of the encroaching tsunami. In none of these did an island offer any succour to the coastline behind it. Instead, it acted as a lens, focusing the wave’s destructive power and amplifying its size by between 5% and 70%.
   
The upshot is that, far from shielding a coastline, offshore islands can make things worse—information that should be incorporated into tsunami evacuation plans. For if a big wave is coming, running from it is not enough. You also have to know how far to run before it is safe to stop.
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http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21579439-islands-may-amplify-biggest-waves-not-break-them-dangers-insularity


[Title] Confessional Tweeting May Help Dieters
Participants in a media-assisted weight-loss program had some success, and those who tweeted about their efforts lost a bit more. Karen Hopkin reports
  
[ Time 5 ]
Social media—it can help you keep up with friends, stay on top of the news, and maybe even fit into your skinny jeans. Because a study shows that using Twitter can help people lose weight. The results appear in the journal Translational Behavioral Medicine. [Gabrielle Turner-McGrievy and Deborah Tate, Weight loss social support in 140 characters or less: use of an online social network in a remotely delivered weight loss intervention]
  
Now, before you go thinking you can just Tweet yourself to a size 2, the volunteers in the study were taking part in a media-assisted weight loss program. For six months, 96 overweight participants tuned in to weekly podcasts about nutrition and exercise. In addition, half of them made use of mobile apps to track calories and physical activity, and to keep other folks in the study apprised of their progress.
  
On the whole, participants reduced their body weight by about 3 percent. But those who used Twitter lost even more: another half a percent for every 10 times they Tweeted.
  
Some Tweets offered emotional support, but many were simply informative. Like, “Avoided the pastries at this morning’s meeting. But I did have a skim mocha without whipped cream.”
  
Such confessional Tweeting may help dieters stay honest. Or at least keep their fingers occupied and out of the cookie jar
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=confessional-tweeting-may-help-diet-13-06-06






Part II:[ Obstacle ] 越障
  
  
  
[Title]Red dreams
Mars has always been Shangri-La for space buffs. Two new private missions show that its lure is as strong as ever
Jun 1st 2013 |From the print edition
  
[ Time 6 ]
ON JULY 20th 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, it capped half a century of extraordinary progress in aviation. In the six and a half decades since the Wright brothers’Flyer had staggered into the air near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, aeroplanes had shrunk the world, revolutionised warfare and created the modern travel industry. Technical records for altitude, speed and endurance had fallen helter-skelter.
  
For that reason, many of those watching the two astronauts on their black-and-white televisions could have been forgiven for thinking that going to the Moon was simply the first step in a human expansion into the solar system. Indeed, that had long been the dream of the space buffs who made the Moon missions possible. Wernher von Braun, the genius who designed the Saturn V Moon rockets—and who had been planning Mars expeditions since the publication, in 1948, of his book “Das Marsprojekt”—pitched a crewed Mars mission to then-President Richard Nixon soon after Armstrong and Dr Aldrin landed.
  
But it was not to be. The Apollo Moon programme was shut down early, and the world’s astronauts have spent the past 41 years pootling around in low-Earth orbit. Now, though, spurred by the rise of the buccaneering, private-sector “New Space” industry, which is offering access to the cosmos at prices far lower than government-backed rockets can manage, the old dream is enjoying a resurgence. Elon Musk, whose rocket firm SpaceX already flies cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), makes no secret of his Martian ambitions. Two privately run organisations in particular—Inspiration Mars, brainchild of Dennis Tito, an American tycoon who became the world’s first space tourist in 2001, and Mars One, run by Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch entrepreneur—have announced plans to send people to Mars without relying on the resources of a state.
   
Mr Lansdorp admits that, on hearing about his plans, people’s first response is that he must be crazy. But both he and Mr Tito (who started his career as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, in Pasadena, which runs NASA’s unmanned Mars missions) insist they are serious. Technical studies have been done, astronaut applications are being processed and deals are being signed with the firms that will build the spacecraft.
  
Both men are motivated by frustration with government efforts, which have gone around in circles—and not orbital ones—for decades. It is the stated policy of Barack Obama’s government to send a crewed mission to Mars in the 2030s. But given the recent history of NASA as a political football (the George Bushes senior and junior both proposed similar missions that went nowhere), and given looming cuts to its budget, few think such a mission will actually happen. As Mr Tito put it when he announced Inspiration Mars: “the way we’re going, we’ll never get started.”
  
Can-do talk aside, there are good reasons for scepticism. Sending people to Mars will be extremely difficult; far harder than sending them to the Moon. For one thing, Mars is much farther away. The Apollo missions took three days to get there, but flight times to Mars are measured in months. That would require an utterly reliable spacecraft. The vast distance imposes a communication delay, too. Whereas the Apollo astronauts could talk to their ground-based controllers more or less in real time, Martian astronauts would face delays of up to 40 minutes between asking a question and getting an answer.
  
And spending months in deep space would expose a crew to a chunky dose of radiation. Information from the Curiosity rover’s flight to Mars, just published in Science, suggests a crew could expect a radiation dose close to the maximum lifetime limit for NASA’s astronauts. If the sun were to have one of its regular temper tantrums, known as coronal mass ejections, which produce huge bursts of ionising radiation, that limit might be far exceeded.
  
When the stars are right
Both missions hope to use SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a planned upgrade of its existing Falcon rocket. But even with access to cheap rockets, flying to Mars without the financial firepower of a government requires clever, and drastic, cost-cutting. In Mr Tito’s case, this means that although his astronauts will fly within about 140km (90 miles) of the Martian surface, they will not actually land. His mission calls for a two-person craft—possibly a variant of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which is already used to ferry cargo to the ISS—to be sent on a “free return” trajectory to Mars. By clever design of its orbit, the craft can be sent to Mars with a single burn of its rocket engine. From thereon in, gravity takes over. The craft will swing around Mars and emerge on a trajectory precisely calculated to have it re-enter Earth’s atmosphere several months later, with only minimal course corrections needed along the way. Orbital mechanics is one of Mr Tito’s specialities. Before he left JPL to become an investment manager, he designed orbits for Mars probes.
  
Removing the requirement to land simplifies the task enormously. No complex manoeuvring into a Mars orbit is necessary. No landing craft is needed, nor any survival gear for use on the Martian surface. That saves fuel and, more importantly, launch mass (the overriding concern for any space mission). Mr Tito’s team hopes to wring further savings by launching in 2018, in order to take advantage of a rare set of celestial circumstances that allow a gravity-powered trip to Mars and back in 501 days, instead of the two years that would normally be required. That keeps food and water requirements low.
  
“There is nothing technically infeasible about Tito’s plans,” says Robert Zubrin, who runs the Mars Society, which lobbies for human trips to Mars, and who has spent decades thinking about exactly how such missions might be executed. Mr Tito’s team has plenty of technical nous, as well as a deal with NASA to develop technology. It plans to recycle as much kit as possible from the ISS, whose life-support systems have proved themselves reliable for more than a decade.
  
Of course, saying that something is technically feasible does not mean that it is easy. Mr Tito’s mission will push the bounds of space flight. A year and a half is long time to spend cooped up in a craft the size of a motor-home, but Dr Zubrin points out that similar feats have already been achieved. Valeri Polyakov, a Russian cosmonaut, spent 438 days in space in 1994 and 1995. Four other Russian and Soviet missions have been over 300 days long. Mr Tito hopes to keep personal conflict to a minimum by sending a married couple—ideally one past child-bearing age, to eliminate the risks of accidental pregnancy and radiation-induced infertility.
  
The return to Earth could also be difficult. Inspiration Mars’s spacecraft will slam into Earth’s atmosphere at 14.2km a second, significantly above the 11km/s speed of Apollo. No existing heat shield could deal with such re-entry speed. But Taber MacCallum, the head of Paragon Space Development, an engineering firm, who is one of Mr Tito’s chief collaborators, says modern materials should be up to the task of making a new one.
  
Assuming the engineering questions can be solved, Mr Tito’s chief problems will then be time and money. His mission faces a hard deadline. If it is not ready by January 2018, the intricacies of orbital mechanics mean there will not be another chance of such a short trip until 2031. And even a stripped-down, Spartan mission that uses as much existing technology as possible and makes no attempt to land will be expensive. Inspiration Mars gives no official cost estimates, but Jeff Foust, the editor of theSpace Review, an industry newsletter, thinks it could be done for “very roughly, around a billion dollars”, a sum that Mr Tito may try to raise through a personal donation, the sale of media rights, sponsorship deals and charitable appeals to his fellow tycoons.
  
It is a big task, and a dangerous one, but it is not beyond what technology allows. Dr Foust, for instance, gives Mr Tito about a one chance in three of succeeding. Even if everything does go according to plan, though, cynics might question the value of a billion-dollar, one-and-a-half year trip that comes within spitting distance of Mars but does not land. Dr MacCallum points out that even a fly-by would generate a great deal of publicity. “It would be a [Charles] Lindbergh” mission, says Dr Zubrin. “The point would be to prove it can be done.” (Though, since it would involve a pair of people making a hazardous journey for the first time, rather than a copy-cat, albeit solo, trip eight years later, a better comparison would be with Alcock and Brown, two British pilots who flew the Atlantic in 1919.)
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time1:2m05s
time2:  2m01s
time3:1m54s
50s
time4:  2m26s
time5:1m05s

obstacle: 8m06s
1 introduce the plan of send people to mars by the Apollo plan  

2 describe the difficulty to send people to moon.  
88#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-24 23:06:50 | 只看该作者
Part 1 Speed





Article 1

By Casimir Platzer / 21st june 2013

[TIME1]
Nimen hao!
Dear Mrs. President Han Ming

Honorable
Estimated

Dear Guests from politics, economy and media
Dear Colleagues from the hospitality world in China

I am very glad to see so many of you to join the 2nd China Hotel Culture Festival 2013 in Hangzhou. 1800 participants is an impressive number and I congratulate the China Hotel Association for the initiative and organization of this Event.


I am fascinated by your country and your culture. China has the oldest and uninterrupted cultures of the world, going back about 4000 years. You have invented 4 of the most important inventions: the compass, the paper, gunpowder and the art of printing.

I think it was Deng Xiao Ping that initiated extensive economical reforms in 1978. They have made China one of the world’s most important economies and generated a never seen momentum in the whole country.

It was in 1978 that China’s paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping reversed China’s direction forever, from a socialist economic state to the capitalistic reforms that have paved the way to China’s open-door policy of post-modernisation in all sectors of industry and business.

For the last 30 years your country has experienced a sustainable high economic growth with an average GDP growth of 8%. In the last 4 years you GDP has gone from just under 5 trillion dollars to almost 8 trillion dollars. Ladies and Gentlemen, you have overtaken Japan in 2010 and are now the second largest economy worldwide. China is today the focus of global economic interest.

And what about the hospitality industry?
One simply has to marvel at the pace of progress of China’s hotel development industry since 1978 when, at that time, China was in its infant stage of opening up to the world.

China’s hotel industry has now become a showcase and, certainly, something of a beacon to the world, transforming the country’s hotel industry from the dull and drab 1970’s Marxist mode of operations to one the most innovative, dynamic approaches to marketing strategy and creative design.
[words: 337]

[TIME2]
In 2012, total visitor arrivals to China registered a year-on-year growth of 11.4%, reaching approximately 3.1 billion. Tourism demand was positively influenced by several significant factors:

Some of the factors to mention are the opening of the Beijing-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway, anticipation of a new Tourism Law, continuous appreciation of RMBs since September 2012, and the release of the Outline of the National Leisure Plan, which aims to improve the overall quality of leisure and tourism by 2020.

I know that the star-rated hotel room inventory has increased rapidly at an annual growth rate of 10%, but please don’t forget the travel and hotel review sites. These are just about as important as the stars and over 90% of the travelers worldwide read these reviews. So use these sites as a marketing tool. You have to convince your customers to write reviews, because if you don’t, only the unhappy customers will write something.

Even if the growth has flatten out now and there is a short-term slowdown, I am convinced that in the long term the growth in the Chinese hospitality industry will continue. This is also why many of the major hotel companies like Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Accor and many more open hundreds of hotels in the next months.
China has a growing middle class that’s ready and willing to consume goods at Western proportions and with Western variability. But you have to convince these people to come to your hotels and restaurants.

Another important issue will be to manage your costs very carefully. I come from Switzerland where we have staff costs up to 50% and food cost of approx.35%. If you don’t have a very exact cost control you fail.

In times of slight economics down turn your cost control is one of the most important issue. If you can’t generate more revenue, you can optimize your benefit by managing your costs carefully. I know that you had a salary increase for hotel employees effective 1 April and the result is a 5% labor cost increase. And don’t worry they will continue to cause some pressure to your margins.
[words: 356]


[TIME3]
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are the leaders of our industry,
Our industry leads in the way of this global economy in more aspects than many other industries. Think about it. We are leaders because we provide employment, competitive wages and providing excellent career opportunities to the people of our community.

We are leaders also because we help reducing poverty around the world by providing employment to all levels of skills, while generating revenue of the whole communities.

We are leaders also in our community because we help it to overcome the economic difficulties in attracting capital investment and spending from other parts of the world.

We are leaders because we are fighting the effects of the climate change while our industry, all our industry, hotels and airlines, contribute less that 2.5 percent of the total emission of CO2 worldwide.

Since 5 years natural disasters start to grow in the world. It can hit anywhere: Volcano in Iceland and Argentina, many hoteliers got bad with this, Haiti was destroyed, Japan hotelier were in a bad shape, China had severe earthquakes and also flooding. Then, this is just the beginning.

We need to cooperate with sustainable development issues and show the other industries that we still are the leaders in fighting and continue to fight for the issues of climate change.

I’m trying here to light a fire together. I am speaking out and loud because I have the hope. I do believe very strongly in our hospitality industry. For China to truly become the top destination in the world, hoteliers and developers must focus on “Green and Eco-Hotels” in both urban and resort destinations.

The Chinese authorities are urged to continue to provide incentives to hoteliers who build environmentally sensitive properties. This will set the next standard of luxury accommodation in China. “Luxuriously Green” is the mandate for both development and operational standards.

Leaders are made-leaders are not born. Leadership is forced in time of crisis. It’s easy to sit down in a meeting and chit-chat about various theory. It’s another thing to lead when our industry is down. We need to continue to be the leaders. We need to think creatively always how we can restore our competitive edge.

Before I finish I would like to remind you about something that I would like always:

A great leader one time said “It doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or white cat; as long as it can catch a mouse, it is good cat”.

Do you know this Gentleman? I do!

His name is Deng Xiao Ping

And look the development you had: Deng Xiao Ping’s words have transcended into the Chinese psyche quite persistently, as demonstrated by China’s rise to global economic prominence.

Thank you very much
Xiexie ni – Zaijian!
[words: 462]






Article 2(Check the title later)
Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.

By Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton. Simon & Schuster; Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

[TIME4]
WHAT would you do with $590m? This is now a question for Gloria MacKenzie, an 84-year-old widow who recently emerged from her small, tin-roofed house in Florida to collect the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in history. The blogosphere is full of advice for this lucky Powerball pensioner. But if she hopes her new-found lucre will yield lasting feelings of fulfilment, she could do worse than read “Happy Money” by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton.

These two academics—she teaches psychology at the University of British Columbia; he lectures on marketing at Harvard Business School—use an array of behavioural research to show that the most rewarding ways to spend money can be counterintuitive. Fantasies of great wealth often involve visions of fancy cars and palatial homes on remote bluffs. Yet satisfaction with these material purchases wears off fairly quickly. What was once exciting and new becomes old-hat; remorse creeps in. It is far better to spend money on experiences, say Ms Dunn and Mr Norton, like interesting trips, unique meals or even going to the cinema. These purchases often become more valuable with time—as stories or memories—particularly if they involve feeling more connected to others.

This slim volume is packed with tips to help wage slaves as well as lottery winners get the most “happiness bang for your buck”. It seems most people would be better off if they could shorten their commutes to work, spend more time with friends and family and less of it watching television (something the average American spends a whopping two months a year doing, and is hardly jollier for it). Buying gifts or giving to charity is often more pleasurable than purchasing things for oneself, and luxuries are most enjoyable when they are consumed sparingly. This is apparently the reason McDonald’s restricts the availability of its popular McRib—a marketing gimmick that has turned the pork sandwich into an object of obsession.

Readers of “Happy Money” are clearly a privileged lot, anxious about fulfilment, not hunger. Money may not quite buy happiness, but people in wealthier countries are generally happier than those in poor ones. Yet the link between feeling good and spending money on others can be seen among rich and poor people around the world, and scarcity enhances the pleasure of most things for most people. Not everyone will agree with the authors’ policy ideas, which range from mandating more holiday time to reducing tax incentives for American homebuyers. But most people will come away from this book believing it was money well spent.
[words: 424]
Source: ECO中文网
http://www.ecocn.org/thread-193058-1-1.html




Article 3(Check the title later)
A New Solution That Stops Snoring and Lets You Sleep

6/15/2013 23:55 PST

[TIME5]
If you’re like most Americans you probably don’t get eight hours sleep each night.

But, if you also constantly feel exhausted, experience headaches for no obvious reason or have high blood pressure, you could have a more serious problem.

That’s because these can all be the result of snoring—which is, in turn, the most common symptom of a potentially serious health problem—obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

While most people think of snoring as a minor annoyance, research shows it can be hazardous to your health.  That’s because for over 18 million Americans it’s related to obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). People who suffer from OSA repeatedly and unknowingly stop breathing during the night due to a complete or partial obstruction of their airway.  It occurs when the jaw, throat, and tongue muscles relax, blocking the airway used to breathe.  The resulting lack of oxygen can last for a minute or longer, and occur hundreds of times each night.  

Thankfully, most people wake when a complete or partial obstruction occurs, but it can leave you feeling completely exhausted.  OSA has also been linked to a host of health problems including:
Acid reflux
Frequent nighttime urination
Memory loss
Stroke
Depression
Diabetes
Heart attack

People over 35 are at higher risk.

OSA can be expensive to diagnosis and treat, and is not always covered by insurance.  A sleep clinic will require an overnight visit (up to $5,000).  Doctors then analyze the data and prescribe one of several treatments.  These may require you to wear uncomfortable CPAP devices that force air through your nose and mouth while you sleep to keep your airways open, and may even include painful surgery.

Fortunately, there is now a far less costly, uncomfortable, and invasive treatment option available.  A recent case study published by Eastern Virginia Medical School's Division of Sleep Medicine in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine concludes that wearing a simple chinstrap while you sleep can be an effective treatment for OSA.

The chin strap, which is now available from a company called MySnoringSolution, works by supporting the lower jaw and tongue, preventing obstruction of the airway.  It’s a made from a high-tech, lightweight, and super-comfortable material.  Thousands of people have used the MySnoringSolution chinstrap to help relieve their snoring symptoms, and they report better sleeping, and better health overall because of it
[words: 388]
Source: How Life Works(HLW)
http://www.howlifeworks.com/Article.aspx?Cat_URL=health_beauty&AG_URL=A_New_Solution_That_Stops_Snoring_and_Lets_You_Sleep_428&ag_id=1054&wid=0DDFB6DF-A979-4033-87A5-3F7C8FD843AF&did=3248&cid=1005&si_id=1188



Part 2 Obstacle





Article 4(Check the title later)
How Do Death Valley’s “Sailing Stones” Move Themselves Across the Desert?

By Joseph Stromberg  June 10, 2013

[TIME6]
Start at the Furnace Creek visitor center in Death Valley National Park. Drive 50 miles north on pavement, then head west for another 30 miles on bone-rattling gravel roads. During the drive—which will take you four hours if you make good time—you’ll pass sand dunes, a meteor crater, narrow canyons, solitary Joshua trees and virtually no evidence of human existence whatsoever.  But soon after cresting the Cottonwood Mountains, you’ll come upon a landscape so out of place even in this geologically bizarre park that it almost seems artificial.

Racetrack Playa is a dried-up lakebed, ringed by mountains, about 3 miles long and flat as a tabletop. During summer, the cracked floor looks prehistoric under the desert sun; during winter, it’s intermittently covered by sheets of ice and dustings of snow. But the dozens of stones scattered across the playa floor are the most puzzling part of the view. Ranging from the size of a computer mouse to a microwave, each one is followed by a track etched into the dirt, like the contrail behind an airplane. Some tracks are straight and just a few feet long, while others stretch the length of a football field and curve gracefully or jut off at sharp angles.

Staring at these "sailing stones," you’re torn between a pair of certainties that are simply not compatible: (1) these rocks appear to have moved, propelled by their own volition, across the flat playa floor, and yet (2) rocks don’t just move themselves.

“It’s very quiet out there, and it’s very open, and you tend to have the playa to yourself,” says Alan Van Valkenburg, a park ranger who has worked at Death Valley for nearly 20 years. “And the longer you stay out there, it just takes on this incredible sense of mystery.” The mystery is rooted in an extraordinary fact: No one has ever actually seen the rocks move.

Explanations for the stones’ movement have tended towards the absurd (magnetism, aliens and mysterious energy fields, for example). Some present-day visitors apparently agree—Van Valkenburg notes that stone theft is a growing problem, perhaps because of perceived special properties. “I don't know whether people think they're ‘magic rocks,’” he says. “But of course, as soon as you remove them from the playa, all ‘magic’ is lost.”

But if they’re not magic, what really does cause the stones to sail? In 1948, two USGS geologists named Jim McAllister and Allen Agnew set out to answer the question. They proposed that dust devils caused the strange movement, perhaps in combination with the playa’s intermittent flooding. In 1952, another geologist tested this hypothesis as directly as he knew how: He soaked a stretch of the playa and used a plane’s propeller to create powerful winds. Results were inconclusive.

In the following decades, theories drifted towards ice, which can occasionally form on the playa during the winter. During the early 1970s, a pair of geologists—Robert Sharp of Cal Tech and Dwight Carey of UCLA—attempted to settle once and for all whether ice or wind was responsible. The team visited the Racetrack twice a year and meticulously tracked the movements of 30 stones, giving them names (Karen, the largest boulder, was 700 pounds). They planted wooden stakes around the stones, surmising that if ice sheets were responsible, the ice would be frozen to the stakes, thereby immobilizing the stones. But some stones still escaped—and despite frequent visits, the pair never saw one move.
Still, ice remained the primary hypothesis for decades. John Reid, a Hampshire College professor, took student groups to the playa annually from 1987 to 1994 to study the stones. Because of the many parallel tracks, he came away convinced that they were locked together in large ice sheets that were blown by strong winds.

But Paula Messina, a geologist at San Jose State, used GPS to create a digital map of the tracks and found that most were, in fact, not parallel. Furthermore, wind-based models were thrown into doubt when researchers attempted to calculate the wind speeds necessary to move the ice sheets. The lowest figures were hundreds of miles per hour.

Enter Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. In 2006, as part of a project with NASA, Lorenz was setting up a network of miniaturized weather stations in Death Valley. The weather is harsh enough there to serve an analogue for weather conditions on Mars. But then he discovered the sailing stones. “I was intrigued, as everyone is, and I had this instrumentation I was using in desert locations during the summer,” he says. “We realized we could use it during the winter and try to understand what the conditions really are at the playa.”

As the research team studied weather patterns on the Racetrack, they also looked for rocks that seemed to move on their own in other environments. Scanning the scientific literature, Lorenz learned that the buoyancy of ice helped float boulders onto arctic tidal beaches, creating barricades along the shore. The scientists began putting this idea together with what they saw on the Racetrack. “We saw one instance where there was a rock trail and it looked like it hit another rock and bounced, but the trail didn't go all the way up to the other rock, like it was repelled somehow,” says Lorenz. “We thought if there was a collar of ice around the rock, then it might be easy to imagine why it might bounce.”

Eventually, Lorenz employed a tried-and-true method for testing his nascent idea: the kitchen-table experiment. “I took a small rock, and put it in a piece of Tupperware, and filled it with water so there was an inch of water with a bit of the rock sticking out,” he says. “I put it in the freezer, and that then gave me a slab of ice with a rock sticking out of it.” He flipped the rock-ice hybrid upside down and floated it in a tray of water with sand on the bottom. By merely blowing gently on the ice, he realized, he could send the embedded rock gliding across the tray, scraping a trail in the sand as it moved. After decades of theoretical calculations by countless scientists, the answer seemed to be sitting on his tabletop.

Lorenz and his team presented their new model in a 2011 paper. “Basically, a slab of ice forms around a rock, and the liquid level changes so that the rock gets floated out of the mud,” he explains. “It’s a small floating ice sheet which happens to have a keel facing down that can dig a trail in the soft mud.” Calculations show that, in this scenario, the ice causes virtually no friction on the water, so the stones are able to glide with just a slight breeze. The team argues that their model accounts for the movement far better than any other, since it doesn’t require massive wind speeds or enormous ice sheets.

Still, says Ranger Van Valkenburg, most visitors to the Racetrack seem to resist this concrete explanation for such a peculiar phenomenon. “People always ask, ‘what do you think causes them to move?’ But if you try to explain, they don't always want to hear the answers,” he says. “People like a mystery—they like an unanswered question.”

In a way, though, Lorenz’ physical explanation really need not diminish the feeling of awe the sailing stones bring about—it can heighten it. You can get a sense of it by sitting at the playa and imagining the perpetual sailing of the stones over time, stretching into millennia. As human societies rise and fall, and as cities are constructed and then left to disintegrate, the stones will glide gradually around their playa, turning back and forth. Frozen in ice and nudged by the slightest of breezes, they will endlessly carve mysterious, zigzagging paths into the hard flat ground.
[words: 1318]
Source: smithsonian

20-20
time1:1m19s
       a speech about describing the chinese economical growth is given by Casimir Platzer .
time2:1m46s
       the surrounding of hostipility industry including the growing numbers of wold's tourist who will go to china all over the world and the growing income of chinese middle class   
  time3:1m50s
       why we are the leaders of this industry ?
time4: 2m38s
      how to use your money more happy?
time5:1m48s
      if you have not enough 8 hours sleep, you will get a diseas OSA ,which will cause  a lot of healthy problem ,even make your ereyday sleep lack breath several times.
obstacle: 6m02s
      an attracting place have a strange phenomenon ,the stone movement . a lot of sicientist study there and  want to explain the reason ,
finally a man and his student team explain this stone because of something ice and others ,then glide ..
       But it was more advisable not let the tourists know this truth ,a myth maybe more better
87#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-24 00:30:59 | 只看该作者
SPEED
[Time1]

One of the world's most visited cities but also famous for its rudeness, Paris has embarked on a campaign to improve its reputation and better cater to the needs of tourists.
Waiters, taxi drivers and sales staff in the French capital all too often come off as impolite, unhelpful and unable to speak foreign languages say local tourism chiefs, who are handing out a manual with guidelines on better etiquette.
A six-page booklet entitled "Do you speak Touriste?" contains greetings in eight languages including German, Chinese and Portuguese and advice on the spending habits and cultural codes of different nationalities.
"The British like to be called by their first names," the guide explains, while Italians should be shaken by the hand and Americans reassured on prices.
Of the Chinese, the fastest-growing category of tourists visiting the City of Light, the guide says they are "fervent shoppers" and that "a simple smile and hello in their language will fully satisfy them."
France is the world's top destination for foreign tourists, with Paris visited by 29 million people last year. The business tourists bring to hotels, restaurants and museums accounts for one in 10 jobs in the region and is a welcome boost to the economy at a time of depressed domestic consumption.
The Paris chamber of commerce and the regional tourism committee have warned, however, that growing competition from friendlier cities like London meant Paris needed to work harder to attract visitors, especially from emerging market countries.
Some 30,000 copies of the handbook on friendly service is being distributed to taxi drivers, waiters, hotel managers and sales people in tourist areas from the banks of the Seine river up to Montmartre and in nearby Versailles and Fontainebleau.
Setting realistic linguistic ambitions, it suggests offering to speak English to Brazilians - who it describes as warm and readily tactile and keen on evening excursions - by telling them: "Nào falo Português mas posso informar Inglês (I don't speak Portuguese, but I speak English)."
(331)
[Time2]
I
It was a more muted affair for President Obama in Berlin today as he spoke at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate before an invite-only crowd of 4,500 guests - a remarkable difference from the rock-star welcome he received five years ago in front of 195,500 cheering supporters.
Then, Obama had it all to play for - the glowing presidential candidate symbolizing America's revived hope for the future. This time, he arrived back in Berlin under the cloud of NSA surveillance programs which have outraged many Europeans and the ever-growing crisis in Syria.
The President removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves as he battled the 86F temperature on Wednesday, quipping: 'People of Berlin, your welcome is so warm I'm going to take off my jacket.'
At times wiping away beads of sweat, the President read from paper because the teleprompter wasn't working.
He used the bulk of his speech to call for a reduction in the world's nuclear stockpiles - as he stood  behind high walls of bullet-proof glass in the public square. The two-inch thick sheets are routinely used when the President appears before large crowds in public spaces.
Appealing for a new citizen activism, Obama renewed his call for the world to confront climate change, a danger he called 'the global threat of our time'.
In a wide-ranging speech that enumerated a litany of challenges facing the world, Obama said he wanted to reignite the spirit that Berlin displayed when it fought to reunite itself during the Cold War.
'Today's threats are not as stark as they were half a century ago, but the struggle for freedom and security and human dignity, that struggle goes on,' Obama said at the city's historic Brandenburg Gate under a bright, hot sun.
'"And I come here to this city of hope because the test of our time demands the same fighting spirit that defined Berlin a half-century ago.'
The German press had mixed reviews for Obama on Wednesday, a marked difference from five years ago when 'Obama-mania' greeted him in the streets.
(341)
[Time3]
National newspaper Die Zeit published an article online on the Berlin speech, saying that Obama appeared to be the 'young, fresh, uninhibited' political force he was five years ago - but that the time between his speeches has been marked by 'bitter disappointment'.
The article said Obama's battles over gun control and equality for same-sex marriage must be remembered, otherwise his speech in Berlin could be seen as just 'nice words' in light of his decisions on Guantanamo and the NSA surveillance.
The president called for a one-third reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles in his speech, saying it is possible to ensure American security and a strong deterrent while also limiting nuclear weapons.
Obama's address comes nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy's famous Cold War speech in the once-divided city.
Obama told Berlin that countries should not focus inwards and that in order to be stronger we need to break down the walls in our hearts.
He added: 'When Europe and America lead with our hopes instead of our fears we achieve things no other nations can do.'
He challenged Americans and Europeans not to become complacent even though the Cold War is over.
Obama says there's a temptation to turn inward now that barbed wire and concrete walls no longer separate East and West in Berlin.
He said that he returned to Berlin because the tests of our time require the same fighting spirit.
Obama added: 'Our work is not yet done.'
Other than his landmark speech, the President spent Wednesday in talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel and other top politicians including president Joachim Gauck.
He touched down with his family in the German capital on Tuesday night, waving to the crowds gathered at Tegel Airport.
His wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha visited the city's Holocaust memorial on Wednesday, accompanied by the President's half-sister Auma, who studied in Germany.
Five years ago, when he was still seeking election as President, Obama received a rapturous reception on a brief tour of Europe where he was greeted as a leader who could give the world a fresh start after the controversial presidency of George W. Bush.
Now he is a much more divisive figure - although his re-election last year was welcomed by most Europeans, recent revelations about his administration's spying on internet communications have tarnished his record in the eyes of many.
Mr Obama's speech tomorrow will inevitably be compared with JFK's, which took place on June 26, 1963 at the Rathaus Schöneberg, a few miles away from the Berlin Wall which had been under construction over the previous two years.
Kennedy's speech, considered one of his best, held up West Germany as a symbol of freedom on the front line of the battle against communism.
It featured the famous line: 'All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, "Ich bin ein Berliner!"'
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[Time4]
IF HOLLYWOOD is even half-right about America’s mood, the rich and powerful have a problem. Films opening this summer are steeped in distrust of the ruling classes. One (“World War Z”) is about a pandemic that topples governments and leaves America under martial law. Another (“Elysium”) portrays a selfish elite which has retreated to a fortified, orbiting paradise, leaving the other 99% to suffer on a slum-like Earth. In a third (“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”) decadent bigwigs loll about in a thinly disguised Washington, DC, oppressing the masses and making youngsters kill one another on reality TV.
One film offers some cheer: the new Superman flick, “Man of Steel”, which opened on June 14th. True, it shows America looking impotent, as aliens hurl fighter jets about like Tonka toys and lay waste to Metropolis (a city that bears a striking resemblance to Manhattan). The final body-count must be close to six figures. But the film is oddly optimistic, and in just the right way to assuage some of America’s deepest anxieties.
This is the umpteenth time, since his appearance in 1938, that Superman has pulled off this feat. Though a bland, priggish sort—dubbed the Big Blue Boy Scout by detractors—he keeps evolving to meet the emotional needs of his adopted home. During the Great Depression he battled capitalist bullies. During the second world war, he walloped Nazis. During the cold war he confronted villains with atomic bombs. In the primary-hued 1978 hit starring Christopher Reeve, he tackled an urban crime-wave as a sort of super-cop, his heroism wrapped in just enough camp irony to win over jaundiced, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam audiences.
A whole industry of scholarship has sprung up around Superman. Echoes of Moses have been detected in his lonely journey from the planet Krypton as a baby. Fans have spotted hints of Superman-as-Christ (they are glaring in the latest film). Larry Tye, a Superman biographer, has said that as a rule the character “does best when America is doing worst”. He is a hero for hard times.
More than 14m people paid to see “Man of Steel” in its opening weekend. They saw a film filled with nods to modern anxieties, from global terrorism to climate change. Rather than the comic, boastful villainy of earlier versions, this film portrays a clash of civilisations, in which the enemy are fanatics bound to a grimly hostile ideology. On the doomed planet Krypton, doddery politicians squabble in the face of an ecological disaster caused by using too much energy. Subtle, it is not. But it strikes a chord when just one American in ten trusts Congress. (That recent Gallup poll result was the worst score for any American institution, ever.) Once the action switches to Earth, human institutions are little use. Political leaders are absent, the police are no help, and—painfully for a watching journalist—Superman’s employer, the Daily Planet newspaper, is struggling to survive against scrappier internet competitors.
Yet the film is still strangely upbeat. Like all Superman films, it is a paean to immigrant success. Superman, having crashed to Earth as an infant, discovers that he has super powers: ie, an outsider moves to America and makes good. And in this version, Superman is played by a Briton (Henry Cavill) while his father Jor-El is played by an Australian (Russell Crowe). Politicians debating immigration in Washington should pay heed.
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[Time5]
“Man of Steel” is a tale for an age of complicated patriotism. In real-life America no institution is more trusted than the armed forces, even though the public no longer really supports the wars its troops have been fighting for more than a decade. That ambivalence is reflected on screen. The film’s few impressive authority figures are military folk. But they must earn the audience’s respect through acts of individual courage, because their weapons are ill-adapted to the fight at hand.
One can read too much into “Man of Steel”. In the end it is a summer film about a superhero, much of which is taken up with aliens throwing large objects, such as trains, at each other. Yet even popcorn flicks can have serious undertones. Every Superman film sees the American way come under attack, before reasserting its primacy. In a nod to today’s anxieties, the 2013 version raises the possibility that the American way—involving such virtues as openness, loyalty and respect for the value of each life—might be a source of weakness, rather than strength.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s an allegory
The enemy—ruthless, pre-programmed, collectivist super-competitors—mock Superman when he interrupts a spectacular, town-levelling bout of combat to save a few soldiers. For every human saved we will kill a million more, scoff the aliens. Cold logic is on their side, not least because crowds of extras have just been squished and slammed to death, unmourned. Yet it is Superman’s compassion that earns him the confidence of American troops, who declare: “This man is not our enemy.” And at the 11th hour American pluck, along with a dose of creative improvisation, defeats the enemy’s well-drilled master-plans. The plot makes little sense, yet it makes all the sense in the world. In an age of confusion and unprecedented outside competition, when Americans trust their instincts and do their best, they can still win. The 1978 Superman caper, a classic of the genre, was about glibly reasserting the prevailing order. The 2013 version has a more modest ambition: keeping faith with the American way. Given that the government cannot control Superman, a debate arises as to whether the authorities can trust the hero, and he them. “I grew up in Kansas,” the hero replies, brushing the question aside. “I’m about as American as it gets.” It is a perfectly sensible answer, and helps explain why “Man of Steel” is much more fun than its dystopian rivals. It is also a cracking film. In the battle of the summer box office, root for the man in the cape.
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OBSTACLE

J. Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at the secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. For this reason he is remembered as "The Father of the Atomic Bomb". In reference to the Trinity test in New Mexico, where his Los Alamos team first tested the bomb, Oppenheimer famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." and "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
After the war Oppenheimer was a chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power and to avert the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken political opinions during the Red Scare, he had his security clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954. Though stripped of his direct political influence Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and work in physics. A decade later President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation.
Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, work on electron–positron theory, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, and a first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as work on the theory of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays.
As a teacher and promoter of science, Oppenheimer is remembered most for being the chief founder of the American school of theoretical physics while at the University of California, Berkeley, contributing significantly to the rise of American physics to its first era of world prominence in the 1930s. After the second World War, he contributed to American scientific organizations again, as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he held Einstein's old position of Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer in Europe
After graduating from Harvard, Oppenheimer was encouraged to go to Europe for further study. He was accepted for postgraduate work at Ernest Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge under J.J. Thomson.
Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent his forte was not experimental but rather theoretical physics. He developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, who was only a few years his senior. Oppenheimer once doused an apple with noxious chemicals and put it on Blackett's desk; Blackett did not eat the apple, but Oppenheimer was put on probation and ordered to go to London for regular sessions with a psychiatrist.
In 1926 he left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. Oppenheimer made friends who would go on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. Oppenheimer was known at Göttingen for being a quick student. However, he was also known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions. This irritated some of Max Born's pupils so much that they signed a petition to make Oppenheimer be quiet in class. Born left it out on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it was effective without a word being said.
Oppenheimer obtained his Ph.D. in 1927 at the age of 23 at the University of Göttingen, supervised by Born. After the oral exam for his degree, the professor administering reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."[9] Oppenheimer published more than a dozen articles at Göttingen, including many important contributions to the then newly-developed quantum theory. He and Born published a famous paper on the so-called "Born-Oppenheimer approximation", which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, an action allowing nuclear motion to be neglected in order to simplify calculations. It remains his most cited work.
Atomic Energy Commission
After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created in 1946, as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was immediately appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC) and left the directorship of Los Alamos. From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction, and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always implemented.
As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by President Truman to advise the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. In this report, the committee advocated creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, which would own all fissionable material, and the means of its production, such as mines and laboratories, and atomic power plants where it could be used for peaceful energy production. Bernard Baruch was appointed to translate this report into a proposal to the United Nations, resulting in the Baruch Plan of 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the USSR's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly, and was rejected by the USSR. With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual distrust of the U.S. and the USSR.
While still Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to influence policy away from a heated arms race. When the government questioned whether to pursue a crash program to develop an atomic weapon based on nuclear fusion—the hydrogen bomb—Oppenheimer initially recommended against it, though he had been in favor of developing such a weapon in the early days of the Manhattan Project. He was motivated partly by ethical concerns, feeling that such a weapon could only be used strategically against civilian targets, resulting in millions of deaths. But he was also motivated by practical concerns; as at the time there was no workable design for a hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer felt that resources would be better spent creating a large force of fission weapons; he and others were especially concerned about nuclear reactors being diverted away from producing plutonium to produce tritium. He was overridden by President Truman, who announced a crash program after the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer and other GAC opponents of the project, especially James Conant, felt personally shunned and considered retiring from the committee. They stayed on, though their views on the hydrogen bomb were well known.
In 1951, however, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. This new design seemed technically feasible, and Oppenheimer changed his opinion about developing the weapon. As he later recalled:
“ The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political, and the humane problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it.”
Oppenheimer's critics have accused him of equivocating between 1949, when he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and 1951, when he supported it. Some have made this a case for reinforcing their opinions about his moral inconsistency. Historian Priscilla McMillan has argued,[50] however, that if Oppenheimer has been accused of being morally inconsistent, then so should Rabi and Fermi, who had also opposed the program in 1949. Most of the GAC members were against a crash hydrogen bomb development program then, and in fact, Conant, Fermi and Rabi had submitted even more strongly worded reports against it than Oppenheimer. McMillan's argument is that because the hydrogen bomb appeared to be well within reach in 1951, everybody had to assume that the Russians could also do it, and that was the main reason why they changed their stance in favor of developing it. Thus this change in opinion should not be viewed as a change in morality, but a change in opinions purely based on technical possibilities.
The first true hydrogen bomb, dubbed "Ivy Mike", was tested in 1952 with a yield of 10.4 megatons, more than 650 times the strength of the weapons developed by Oppenheimer during World War II.
(1001)


1m43s:
Paris‘s servece industry  is trying to become more  polite and more attracting to all over the world to compete with some competing cities such as london,  

1m56s:
     one speak of obama describe something about weather ,temperature,and cold war。

2m27s:
an article about obama's berlin speech

3m40s :
some films and then a person and then the ”men of steel“

2m21s :the ”men of steel “is compete with other superhero films /、

obstacle :8m20s
  
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s  achievement in the scientific field.
J. Robert Oppenheimer oppose the the development of the hydrogen bomb。
and then the hydrogen bomb is taken place in war2

虽然记笔记读文章比较慢,但训练时应该记一下好一些
86#
发表于 2013-6-22 23:57:52 | 只看该作者
olivia瓜瓜 发表于 2013-6-22 23:54
恩恩,谢谢这么有心的妹纸打了这么多,我明天开始记笔记试一下,就因为昨天没读出去玩了 ,今天感觉生疏 ...

700+ too~~
加油哇=0=
85#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-6-22 23:54:22 | 只看该作者
irvan 发表于 2013-6-21 14:53
我觉得你可以试试边读边做笔记。每读完一段或者几段回想下上面主要讲的内容,用最简洁的方式记下概要。
...

恩恩,谢谢这么有心的妹纸打了这么多,我明天开始记笔记试一下,就因为昨天没读出去玩了 ,今天感觉生疏了 很多 ,不能放纵自己要坚持啊 !!! 可以 多多 沟通交流噢!!真心祝你700+
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