Olivia的阅读小分队日记

olivia瓜瓜

大家好呀~~周四经管时间~~
在猴哥“声情并茂”的“阅读小分队纲领性文章”之后发帖，LZ赶脚压力好大！TT。不过今天的作业还是传统型的咯~
速度部分的文章都来自Bloomberg的Opinion，TIME 1和TIME 2分别来自一篇文章（不过文章本身很长，LZ只是选取了其中一部分…LZ实在是太贪心，哪篇文章都喜欢 放不下，就索性都帖上来了…TT），TIME 3/4/5 来自一篇文章。越障是TIME上一篇关于中国（specifically户口）的评论。
今天的文章都是评论性的，所以呢，我们学习他们的论证，但也要批判着读~~就是这样啦！（其中Article 2原文后面 关于市场机制到底如何有几十条讨论，很有意思，大家感兴趣可以通过一些方法去看看~）

翠花，上作业！

【PART I: SPEED】

Article 1: Who Created the IPhone, Apple or the Government?
By Mark Buchanan Jun 20, 2013
[INTRODUCTION]
Albert Einstein famously held the view that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” What we think we know can limit what we see as possible. The greatest thinkers challenge what everyone believes to be obvious. They allow us to see the world anew.
We may be primed for another lesson, this time in economics. It has been “obvious” to most people over the past 30 years that the creative dynamism of the free market, the energy of private individuals pursuing their own dreams, is the best driver of economic innovation. The global economy carries the indelible imprint of the brilliant visionaries who created companies such as Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Google Inc. Innovation is a private affair, best left free of the typically sluggish and wasteful interference of government.
What seems so obvious might also be completely wrong. This is the point that economist Mariana Mazzucato makes in her recent book, “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths.”
Think of the Internet, biotechnology, electronics, photonics, materials science and nanotechnology -- all the crucial technologies of our age. Go back further to oil, rail, the airlines and nuclear energy. None of these would be as developed as they are, and some would hardly exist, without the founding vision and directed action of government agencies.
[216 WORDS]

【TIME 1】
Long-Term Vision
Consider the Internet and the World Wide Web, energized by competition among behemoths such as Google and Facebook Inc. and countless garage-style startups such as Clarity and Avaaz. This frontier of market freedom was brought into existence by government pursuing a long-term vision that no company would have attempted. People at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had the imagination to support a consortium of universities and research firms to build a network of computers able to exchange information, and undertook the sustained effort required to make it happen.
What about Google? The genius and inspiration of the company’s founders, Sergey Brin andLarry Page, played a big role in making it happen. So did funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, which let the two computer scientists develop the algorithm that so transformed Web search and propelled the company ahead. Forward-thinking leaders at the foundation offered funding in precisely this area because they thought it would pave the way to a world of new technologies.
Even Apple, normally viewed as the singular creation of the lone genius of Steve Jobs, owes much to government. Mazzucato points out that Apple received crucial finance in its early years from the U.S. government’s small-business investment program. Every one of the most important technologies in Apple’s smart products, including the iPhone and iPad, were developed elsewhere and largely thanks to state funding.
The picture is similar throughout the economy. Of the roughly 100 most important innovations from 1971 to 2006, as identified by R&D Magazine, almost 90 percent depended heavily on federal research support, according to Mazzucato. And whatever big pharmaceutical companies might say about the risks they take and amounts they spend to develop new drugs, most of the really innovative discoveries the past few decades have come from publicly funded laboratories.
The point isn’t that Jobs wasn’t a genius, or that the energy and creativity of the private sector aren’t necessary. It’s that governments have had a huge and widely unappreciated influence on our economic well-being. They can often achieve things the private sector cannot, creating new technologies and entirely new markets.
It’s a point that John Maynard Keynes made long ago: “The important thing for Government,” he observed, “is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.”
【TIME 1 ENDS – 401 WORDS】

[THE REST]
White Elephants
Governments do have flaws. They are prone to pursue white-elephant projects and to suffer from stifling bureaucracy. These are problems to battle against, while benefiting from the best things government can do.
Mazzucato warns that the perception of government impotence in innovation can be self-fulfilling. Uncertainty in policy is a recipe for failure. Government is most effective when it acts with confidence, as evidenced in places such as China and Brazil, which have successfully developed technologies for the anticipated “green revolution” with the help of state aid.
As long as we remain under the spell of myths and don’t recognize the potential for visionary government action to help lead society forward -- as it has in the past -- we are likely to suffer. Viewed correctly, government should be an invaluable partner of the private sector, one that is willing and able to take the crucial risks that business won’t.
[150 WORDS]
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-19/who-created-the-iphone-apple-or-the-government-.html



Article 2: What to Do When the Invisible Hand Stops Working
By Mark Buchanan Jun 6, 2013
[INTRODUCTION]
Economists rave about the power of the market to deploy productive resources better than any central planner possibly could. A mysterious process, which Adam Smith called the “invisible hand,” guides countless individuals with conflicting aims to somehow coordinate into a remarkably effective economic organization. Usually.
But as the British economist John Maynard Keynes famously argued, markets can also fall into dysfunction. A crisis can set off a downward spiral: Spending declines, companies fail, people lose jobs, spending declines further. Much of the wonderful coordination disappears, as if the invisible hand were injured.
None of this is controversial. But if you ask how best to cure an afflicted economy, you get vicious and sometimes hysterical argument, typically polarized along political lines. Should markets be left alone, because the invisible hand is self-healing and intervention can only make matters worse? Or does an economy, like a real living thing, sometimes need direct medical (or governmental) intervention?
Resolving the debate is difficult, largely because we know surprisingly little about how the invisible hand actually achieves such precise economic coordination. Even more surprising, few economists over the past 30 years have been focusing on this area of ignorance.
[194 WORDS]

【TIME 2】
Perfect Rationality
If that sounds hard to believe, consider the “state-of-the-art” mathematical models currently used by economists. They ditch all the complexity of the real economy in favor of a peculiar scheme in which one ideal household and one ideal firm meet and optimize their behavior with perfect rationality. Adam Smith would be mystified -- I think even horrified. Such “rational expectations” models can be tweaked to back up just about any story you like, so it is little wonder that the vicious arguments over policy persist.
Happily, there is hope. A few economists have been trying to go deeper by exploring the actual coordinating mechanisms of the invisible hand, how they emerge and also how they can break down.
One notable example is a line of research initiated about a decade ago by Robert Clower and Peter Howitt. They noted that useful economic coordination comes about over time as people interact, discovering where to find the goods they like as well as the companies they trust and find useful. Businesses get started after people learn about one another’s needs and wants. In other words, there’s a necessary and usually messy growth history behind the familiar structures -- firms, shops, and other intermediaries -- that provide the coordination for a functioning economy.
To get a sense of how the process works, Clower and Howitt set up a computer simulation. They let lots of virtual people interact with one another, following fairly simple rules to trade among themselves while seeking their desired goods. People finding many potential trading partners for certain goods could choose to set up a specialist firm trading that good, profiting while also making it easier for others to find that good. Over time, a vast web of useful firms covering all goods emerged, without any central planning, to solve the coordination problem of getting goods to the people who wanted them. Something else happened, too: One of the goods in the economy came to be valued universally by all as a convenient medium of exchange. The market discovered money all on its own.
Unlike traditional economic models, Clower and Howitt’s way of looking at an economy respects Adam Smith’s core heroic insight: that coordination emerges in a wholly natural way, from the interactions of ordinary people (For more on this fascinating research, see my blog). It can also offer insight into practical policy matters, including those that so interested Keynes.
【TIME 2 ENDS – 401 WORDS】

[THE REST]
Valuable Infrastructure
In recent work with Quamrul Ashraf and Boris Gershman, for example, Howitt finds an important effect of financial crises that rational-expectations models miss: the hard-to-reverse failure of firms. The disappearance of firms destroys valuable coordinating infrastructure, making economic life more challenging for others. As other firms lose key sources of income, supplies and customers, they might also go bankrupt, furthering the destruction.
Afterward, the recovery of an economy won’t be only a matter of restoring confidence, letting prices and wages adjust, or keeping interest rates low. Recovery requires the time-consuming rebirth of entire networks of firms. Although the research doesn’t model that process explicitly, it’s pretty clear that government action could easily help, by providing individuals with unemployment benefits until they find a new job, or by intervening to keep crucial firms alive (remember the U.S. automaker bailouts of 2009).
The work of Howitt and colleagues is only a beginning, but a huge step in the right direction. The unfortunate reality is that most economic theory today still rests on analyses of extremely intelligent people acting in unrealistic situations. We need to explore the way people of ordinary intelligence manage in the face of an incredibly complex world. Until we can really understand the coordination mechanisms that help us do it, policy making will remain a dark art.
[218 WORDS]
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-05/what-to-do-when-the-invisible-hand-stops-working.html




Article 3: Who Killed Equality?
By Ezra Klein Jun 20, 2013
[INTRODUCTION]
There are two main schools of thought on income inequality: The fatalists, who contend that rising inequality is the ineluctable result of a changing economy, and the redistributionists, who blame a skewed tax system and lethargic government. Perhaps it’s time to consider a third.
The fatalist case rests on technology: As we replace human toil with networked computers and tireless robots, those who own the technology or learn to master it benefit, and those whose jobs are displaced by technology suffer. The ease with which we outsource jobs, ship goods and videoconference to China helps people who own companies but hurts those whose jobs are shipped out. The winner-take-all economy is a boon to people who can market themselves or their product globally and a bust for those who can’t.
Of course, this creates a less equal world, the fatalists say. A private equity manager can goose profits at one company by outsourcing the call center and at another by automating production. The new economy is perfectly organized to make this manager richer. Meanwhile, the 52-year-old machinist who was fired isn’t trained in the latest technology, can’t compete with the low wages of a Malaysian 19-year-old and is stuck on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, with an upside-down mortgage. Everything in the new economy is working to make him poorer. Inequality is simply the space between those two lives.
Precisely as this analysis would predict, income inequality has skyrocketed since 1979. Median income for high-school educated men has fallen by 31 percent. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent has seen its pay rocket up 130 percent. And that’s before taxes even enter the picture.
[273 WORDS]

【TIME 3】
One Conclusion
Fatalists conclude that government hasn’t caused inequality -- taxes and social services haven’t changed all that much -- so government action raising taxes or increasing infrastructure spending, for example, won’t fix it either. The only possible remedy is more education and training for workers, which will take decades. Shame, isn’t it?
The redistributionists agree with much of this analysis. But they think the fatalists understate both how much the government has contributed to inequality by cutting taxes on the rich and not investing in the poor, and how much good it could still do. In a new paper for the Economic Policy Institute, Andrew Fieldhouse makes the most optimistic version of this case.
The effective tax rates for the very rich -- that is, the tax rates they actually pay -- have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. “The effective tax rate for the top hundredth of a percentile (i.e., tax filers in the 99.99-percent-and-above range by income) has fallen by more than half, from 71.4 percent in 1960 to 34.7 percent in 2004.” So as the rich have gotten richer, the share of income they pay in taxes has declined.
The twist in Fieldhouse’s argument is his identification of a secondary effect by which tax cuts have goosed incomes at the top while holding them down at the bottom. He cites research suggesting that the high tax rates paid by the rich in the mid-20th century gave them little reason to spend time and energy trying to get even richer. If a big raise would be accompanied by a big tax bill, why bother fighting for a raise?
Thus, declining tax rates unleashed the desire of the wealthy to seek a bigger piece of the pie. As it turned out, they had quite a lot of power to get themselves a better deal. They had political power in Washington and state capitals, of course, but also power in the workplace. Since 1979, chief executive officer pay has gone from 29 times what the average worker is paid to 228 times what the average worker is paid. Much of that increase is zero-sum: Income that once might have gone to workers is now diverted to the C-suite, because executives have more bargaining power. And with private-sector unions wasting away, that power increases every day.
【TIME 3 ENDS – 383 WORDS】

【TIME 4】
Mitigation Theory
Consequently, Fieldhouse concludes that higher taxes on the rich may do more to curb inequality than many realize. First, higher taxes would reduce inequality directly through redistribution. Second, they would lessen it indirectly by discouraging the rich from making great efforts to become even richer. If Fieldhouse is right, then the fatalists are wrong: Pretax inequality can be mitigated by tax policy.
There’s something to this, but ultimately I think Fieldhouse gives the tax code too much credit. Changes he attributed to the tax code are really rooted in political culture. Taxes on the wealthy didn’t lower themselves, after all. Wealthy Americans fought to bring them down. And now that they’ve grown used to those low taxes and high incomes, they will fight to keep them.
Toward the end of the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s candidacy was powered in part by a plutocratic revolt against Democratic plans to let the top marginal rate revert to 39.6 percent. The wealthy wouldn’t meet a truly sharp increase in the top income tax rate with a shrug and a renewed disinterest in their wages. If anything, it would increase their class solidarity and political mobilization.
Yet the fatalist and redistributionist camps also give the government too little credit -- and too little blame -- for inequality. Both cleanly divide the issue in half: On one side is the way the economy distributes income, on the other the way the government redistributes it. But this misses the space between: the way the government itself changes the economy.
This drives Dean Baker crazy. “Federal government spending averages roughly 20 percent of GDP,” the dyspeptic Washington economist writes in “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.” And that’s just the beginning. “Adding in state and local government spending gets us a bit over 30 percent. This means that all levels of government spending account for less than one-third of the economy. If this is the exclusive realm for political debate, and we ignore the way in which the government structures the larger economy, then we have given up two-thirds of the game,” he writes.
【TIME 4 ENDS – 350 WORDS】

【TIME 5】
Wider Appeal
It’s a shame that Baker frames his book as advice for progressives because his argument should also appeal to conservatives. Who the government taxes and how it spends that money, Baker argues, doesn’t begin to describe the myriad ways in which the government shapes the economy. The Federal Reserve’s decision to prioritize low inflation over full employment, for example, is a government intervention of staggering importance, even if it’s rarely presented that way. The same goes for the Treasury Department’s management of the dollar. The duration of patents matters enormously, as do the licensing requirements for high-wage jobs, the regulation of corporate boards and even rules on how much cash banks must keep on hand.
Baker basically agrees with the fatalists who believe the economy has changed in ways that have exacerbated inequality, and he even agrees that changes to the tax code won’t suffice to remedy it. Where he parts with both fatalists and redistributionists is in his belief that government policies have hastened those divisive economic changes, and that a different set of government interventions has the potential to counteract them, creating a more equal economy.
Baker’s insight is bracing, though his book doesn’t follow through on it as comprehensively as I’d like. Still, it suggests the right starting point for a smarter debate over what has caused inequality and what can be done about it. Washington argues a great deal over taxes and spending, and far less over the way government sets the rules for the economy and for those who benefit most from it.
“This is sort of like playing football without knowing that the way to score points is to get the ball into the other team’s end zone,” Baker writes. “It’s hard to win when you don’t know how the game is played.”
【TIME 5 ENDS –299 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-19/who-killed-equality-.html




【PART II: OBSTACLE】
Article 4: China’s Chicken-and-Egg Problem: What Comes First, Wealth or Freedom?
By Rana ForooharJune 19, 2013

There are many questionable bits of conventional wisdom about China, but one of the most persistent is this: The Middle Kingdom must get rich before it becomes free. The notion is that as China develops into a middle-class nation, it will eventually come to adopt various aspects of Western-style liberal democracy, including better and more transparent governance, a stronger and more independent judiciary system, and a broader array of protected civil rights. But as I have been traveling in China for the last two weeks, I’ve heard an interesting twist on the conventional wisdom: That if China is to become richer, it needs to become freer – and soon.
The argument centers around two factors. First, China is already a middle-income nation. Per capita income in China is now above $5,000 per year, and many coastal areas are double that (Shanghai and Beijing are above $17,000). This is a range that’s often defined as an international middle class (keep in mind that the cost of living in China is far below what it is in the US). Indeed, many Chinese are far wealthier: There are over one million millionaires in China, and many Chinese can afford all the trappings of Western yuppies. Cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Chengdu are full of upscale children’s boutiques, teeth whitening clinics, bustling Starbucks selling lattes at U.S. prices, and pricy Kaplan-style test prep centers designed to get Chinese teens into American and British boarding schools.
At the same time, China’s economy is changing. It’s less and less about cheap exports, and more about complex manufacturing, nascent services, and real estate. According to Andy Rothman, a highly respected macroeconomist at Shanghai-based CLSA bank, a sclerotic state-owned sector means that private enterprises now represent nearly 100% of new job creation in China. And private enterprises require more robust contract law to survive. “You’ve got an economy that’s increasingly driven by enterprise, intellectual property, and real estate, and yet you have no rule of law,” says Rothman, referring to the fact that the judiciary system is ineffectual and rulings tend to be erratic. As the economy slows, as it is now and will continue to do as China moves up the economic food chain, the risk of legal conflicts grows. State data shows that between 2008 and 2012, civil, commercial, and maritime lawsuits involving foreign parties, often in dispute over things like intellectual property, rose by 57%.
Even when contracts are defended, penalties are minor. John Ford, general manager of Wuhan based Diamond Power, a boiler parts company that is a Chinese subsidiary of an American firm, told me that although his company contends with numerous local copycats, they haven’t brought a suit because they are nearly impossible to win, and the cash payoff is “chicken feed.” The local government in Wuhan wants Diamond to make more advanced equipment there, but Ford says his parent company is “wary” about IP theft. “China needs a better system to deal with this,” says Rothman, or investment will be dampened. Experts from places like the World Bank and the Shanghai Institute for International Affairs agree. Ideally, the Communist Party would be subservient to the country’s legal system, something that the Chinese constitution actually calls for. But, say Rothman and others, you probably won’t see that kind of shift in the next ten years, a drag that will continue to be a headwind to China’s economic rebalancing.
What you may see much sooner is civil rights reform, or more particularly reform of China’s “hukou” system that divides citizens into two unequal classes – rural dwellers, and urban ones. Since the 1950s, China has prevented rural people who migrate to the cities for work to receive social benefits like healthcare, pensions, and education. They can only receive such benefits if they go back to their villages – and the social services on offer in the countryside are a fraction of those enjoyed in the city. Migrants also have no urban legal rights; they can’t send their children to local schools; they make a fraction of what legal residents do; and can’t buy property in cities, which represents 60% of all Chinese individual wealth. As the World Bank 2030 report on China recently observed, the hukou system has created huge inequities—financial, social, and educational—between legal urban dwellers, and the 230 million unofficial migrants who now make up 17% of the urban population.
Earlier this month, the Chinese ministry of public security announced that it was working on new guidelines for hukou reform. The impetus for change is both political and economic. For the first time in the history of modern China, there’s an underclass of illegal city dwellers (one the size of Indonesia) that are not doing better year to year – and this presents a huge social stability problem for the government. “When you have a group of people who are trapped in poverty, that’s not a good thing in a democracy; but in an autocracy, it’s a recipe for really bad stuff,” says Rothman. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party leadership was quite unsettled by the Arab Spring, which has become an impetus for moving ahead with hukou reform now, according to Chinese foreign policy experts. The plan is to slowly roll out new benefits and legal status for some migrants, city by city. But Rothman believes that once things start the process will move quickly, as migrants around China realize what’s happening in other cities and the government is forced to move to prevent mass relocation.
The cost for reforming hukou with a starting group of 20 million migrants would be about $320 billion (roughly $16,000 per worker, with costs split in thirds between the government, companies, and workers). But Gan Li, the Chinese economist who directs the state’s household income survey, says that increased government and employer transfers would bolster Chinese urban income by 29%, which would boost consumption and help create the kind of consumer society China needs to grow. Indeed, millions of people would suddenly be able to buy property and begin buying consumer goods for those homes. (Rural residents and migrants spend only 45% of what legal urban residents do on durable goods.)
Hukou reform would also help increase the size and quality of the Chinese workforce—migrant workers typically have several years less schooling and are less productive than legal contract workers. A survey of multinational companies recently found that while going from temporary migrant workers to contracted legal ones upped costs by 4.5%, output per worker rose by 27%.
Of course, the economic benefits of such legal reforms can snowball in unexpected ways. Hukou reform shines a spotlight on China’s overall property rights system, in which all land is owned by the state. When the state decides to take that land for development, rural residents are often paid far less than market value. Lawyers in Tsinghua University law school in Beijing say that land dispute cases are on the increase, putting pressure on the Party to move to a truly market oriented system of property ownership – a step that some economists believe could unlock over a trillion dollars of wealth in the Chinese economy.
For the Middle Kingdom, freedom itself may bring a Big Bang of prosperity – but only if the Party is resilient enough to evolve. Loosening its grip enough to create true rule of law in China will be the chief challenge — and economic opportunity — for the Chinese government in the coming decades.
【OBSTACLE ENDS – 1239 WORDS】
Source: TIME
http://business.time.com/2013/06/19/chinas-chicken-and-egg-problem-what-comes-first-wealth-or-freedom/#ixzz2WkHahGjo
1m03s
2m18s
41s
2m05s
1m45s
1m55s
1m53s
1m36s

obstacle ：7m20s  

一天不读 速度急速下降 ，不能放纵自己啊！！！！！！！

irvan

olivia瓜瓜 发表于 2013-6-19 23:34
[Time 1]
Article 1
Sunflowers Do the Math

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。
文章读完再看自己写的概要文章框架应该基本能出来了。
坚持一段时间养成习惯就好了。

我刚开始跟小分队的时候，做不到active reading又反感记笔记= =
强迫了一个多星期边读边记笔记，读越障有很明显改善。
到后面因为真的不习惯记笔记就没有再记了，改为每读完一段自己迅速的在脑里整理下段落大意，和上面的段落大意连起来回忆下（这个地方的回忆主要是最最基本的行文框架，比如上面一段是例子，这一段是总结，或者转折blabla）。写回忆的时候就把文章再拉回开头，每看到一段，大致瞄一下自己刚整理的概要都会立刻想起来，然后这样写回忆（我是真做不到不看文章回忆。。。越障太长了= =）

olivia瓜瓜

感谢神猴的分享～此帖子将作为阅读小分队的纲领性文章。新人必读。by iamyingjie~

今后三次都由我暂代”风随心动01“发帖，今天的主题我特意开了个mindset专题，也算是经管中的 personal or organizational management。

speed与obstacle的格式是为了向 HBR 致敬，两篇均选自这里。

Speed部分是大牛Carol Dweck的HBR Ideacast interview文字整理，附上podcast，感兴趣可以顺便练听力。(为了保证对话完整性，今天速度都比较长。enjoy it~)

Obstacle是另两位大牛针对Carol Dweck的mindset理论的一些 excerpt and application.

Part I: Speed

Article 1
The Right Mindset for Success
by HBR IdeaCast  |   6:32 PM January 12, 2012
An interview with Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.


[Time 1]
TRANSCRIPT

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. Today, we're going to be asking why some people reach their potential while other people who are just as talented don't. To do that, we're going to dig into the science of persistence and praise with Carol Dweck, Stanford professor and the auther of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Carol, thanks so much for talking with us.

CAROL DWECK: A pleasure to be here today.

SARAH GREEN: So your research has shown that the talented people who find success have a growth mindset. Tell us a little bit about what a growth mindset is exactly.

CAROL DWECK: Let me start with a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is when people believe their basic qualities, their intelligence, their talents, their abilities, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount, and that's that. But other people have a growth mindset. They believe that even basic talents and abilities can be developed over time through experience, mentorship, and so on. And these are the people who go for it. They're not always worried about how smart they are, how they'll look, what a mistake will mean. They challenge themselves and grow.

SARAH GREEN: So I think we've all experienced maybe the strange sensation of, say, going back to your high school reunion, whether it's the 10 year, or the 20, or the 30 year, or something, and seeing the person you thought was going to be the next President of the United States or something who just-- their career has just not panned out. In that case, you never intend to be that person. You never intend to be the person who has the fixed mindset. So how does someone fall into that trap?

CAROL DWECK: That's a great example because you think oh, this person's most likely to succeed. They've gotten the A's. They're president of the student body. But because of their success, they may have fallen into a fixed mindset. They may have believed all the hype, the idea that they just have it. And they become afraid of making mistakes. They become afraid of tarnishing their image.

And because they are fearful of venturing out of their comfort zone, they don't take the risks or develop the abilities they're capable of. You go back to the same reunion, and you see people you thought were not likely to succeed, and they've really done amazing things. These are the people who maybe didn't have an image to uphold, didn't feel the weight of other people's expectations, and just followed their passions and developed their abilities.
[442 words]

[Time 2]
SARAH GREEN: So I'm wondering as you talk about that, is this a conundrum that we can get into at any time? If you become CEO of a company, say, at 45 or 55, can you suddenly find yourself falling into the same trap?

CAROL DWECK: It's possible. Many people have told me that when they were promoted into a prestigious position, they suddenly felt, now I have to have all the answers. Now, my period of growth is over. I have to be a fully mature person who knows everything. So yes, at any point, you can fall into that trap. People who become CEOs suddenly feel they have to be gods goddesses, and not people who say, gee, I don't know. Let's talk about it. Let's think about it. Let's feel our way through this problem.

SARAH GREEN: So how can we go about making sure, in our own selves, that we stay in the growth mindset or we encourage the growth mindset if we may recognize that that's not where we're most comfortable?

CAROL DWECK: Yes, we have to keep in mind the hallmarks of a growth mindset. In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I'm going to reveal my weaknesses, you say, wow, here's a chance to grow. If you find yourself afraid of challenges, get yourself into a growth mindset and think about all of the growth potential in following this opportunity, even if it's out of your comfort zone.

If you react to a setback defensively, wanting to hide it, wanting to make up excuses for it, you're in a fixed mindset. And instead, ask what can I learn from this experience that can help me go forward next time? In the fixed mindset, you're so focused on the outcome. Will I look good? Will I live up to my reputation? Will people think I'm brilliant?

In a growth mindset, you're focused on the process, the process that you engage in to bring about your successes, and the processes you engaged in that may have created your failures, but you can learn from them and do better the next time. So every time you feel yourself sinking into fixed mindset thinking, worrying about a challenge, feeling measured by a setback, worrying about the outcome rather than the process, try to slip yourself over into more growth mindset thinking.
[402 words]

[Time 3]
SARAH GREEN: And what if you're trying to encourage a growth mindset in someone who's reporting to you? Because I'd imagine, for instance, a lot of managers would like to have someone who is the straight A student, right, who they can then hire that person and think they'll get right to work. And I think it can be baffling for some people when someone that talented doesn't perform up to standard. If you want to push someone who's really talented into a growth mindset, how would you proceed?

CAROL DWECK: Great question. First of all, yes. A lot of companies hire people with great pedigree, straight A. But [? Patrick Welsh ?] once said, these pedigrees don't tell you about the passion and the drive to get things done. So what message should a manager or leader give to new recruits that would put them into more of a growth mindset?

First, I think the message from the top is really important, that we value passion, dedication, growth, and learning, not genius.

SARAH GREEN: Mm.

CAROL DWECK: Second, we don't expect that you've arrive here fully formed. We expect that you've arrive here ready to learn. Third, we expect you to stretch beyond your comfort zone and take reasonable risks, not to do the same thing you're good at over and over and stay in your comfort zone. Fourth, we value process here, and we reward process. We reward taking on big but reasonable challenges. We reward pursuing them doggedly. We reward teamwork. And even if a project has not reached fruition or become successful, we reward that you've engaged in in a wholehearted and smart way.

SARAH GREEN: Mm.

CAROL DWECK: So the companies now that are thriving are the ones that give this message. And also, my research has shown, contrary to popular opinion, you don't praise talent. You don't praised ability. You praised process.
[318 words]

[Time 4]
SARAH GREEN: Mm. I would love it if you could talk a little more about that because that's actually a piece of research that has changed the way my friends who are parents actually praise their kids, and I just think it's fascinating.

CAROL DWECK: We've done a lot of work now showing that praising someone's talent puts them into a fixed mindset. The whole self-esteem movement taught us erroneously that praising intelligence, talent, abilities would foster self-confidence, self-esteem, and everything great would follow. But we've found it backfires. People who are praised for talent now worry about doing the next thing, about taking on the hard task, and not looking talented, tarnishing that reputation for brilliance. So instead, they'll stick to their comfort zone and get really defensive when they hit setbacks.

So what should we praise? The effort, the strategies, the doggedness and persistence, the grit people show, the resilience that they show in the face of obstacles, that bouncing back when things go wrong and knowing what to try next. So I think a huge part of promoting a growth mindset in the workplace is to convey those values of process, to give feedback, to reward people engaging in the process, and not just a successful outcome.

SARAH GREEN: Mm. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the flip side of that, about giving-- in a situation where there's negative feedback to be given. Because I think we've all been in situations at work where we've worked on something that's-- the project has come up short. It's not good enough. And I think, in those situations, there's a natural tendency to say, well, but we worked really hard on it! And then, usually the answer comes back, well, that doesn't matter. The product isn't good enough. So what's a better way to have that kind of interaction?

CAROL DWECK: I think that kind of conversation can be critical. And I think the person who's giving the feedback needs to focus, as I'm saying, on [? the process ?] but not just the effort. Everyone's putting it-- or believing they're putting in-- a lot of effort to everything. How they engaged in the process, maybe as a team, what strategies they tried, how they gauged when and whether those strategies were being successful, whether they were sensitive enough to change strategies when they were starting to get the negative feedback. So how they went forward, how they corrected themselves, and why in the end it might not have worked and what they might do differently next time.

One CEO I talked to recently said he rewards that value added, being able to put knowledge and skills back into the company, even when a project itself has not been successful.
[463 words]

[Time 5]
SARAH GREEN: Can you say a little more about That What you mean by that putting back into the company?

CAROL DWECK: So what did a team or a persona learn from an effort even when it wasn't successful? Many successful people-- Einstein, Thomas Edison-- have said they've learned more from their failures than often from their successes. So many huge breakthroughs came after a number of huge failures that provided learning experiences. So you're not going to reward someone just because they failed, obviously not. But what did the journey teach them that will help them and others in the company become successful the next time?

So as people are engaging in a process, in a project, they're monitoring what worked and what didn't with an eye toward the future. And the more they can feed that back into the company to make it more a communal learning experience, the more that is reward worthy.

SARAH GREEN: Mm. I want to get a little further afield for a moment than the world of business and ask you-- so many of your studies and a lot of your research has focused on students and how they respond to praise in those kinds of settings. And as we were talking about, this I'm realizing that a lot of we're talking about is reprogramming and deprogramming ourselves or people we work with from ways we've been used to experiencing praise and thinking about success. How would you think our education system would be better able to produce people who were persistent, creative, innovative people, lifelong risk taking learners? How would our education system need to change in order to produce people like that?

CAROL DWECK: That's a great question. We've always produced creative people, the mavericks. And I'm worried now, with all the emphasis on high stakes testing, doing well on the test, getting perfect scores, that we are subverting what we've always been good at. I think the message has to go out in the educational system, and I'm working really hard with leaders to do this, that the name of the game is a learning.

We actually have a program for students that teaches them that they're in charge of their brains, that their brain is kind of like a muscle that grows stronger with use, and that every time they stretch themselves to learn something new, their brains form new connections, and they get smarter over time. We want to empower students to be motivated to grow their brains, and that's done by stretching, by being passionate about something, by learning new things, by welcoming things that are hard, by seeing a period of confusion as a period that's going to create new neurons.
[455 words]

[The Rest]
SARAH GREEN: Mm.

CAROL DWECK: The more our classrooms are organized around stretching, and growing, and being comfortable with confusion and setbacks, the more we are going to create growth mindset students and growth mindset leaders.

SARAH GREEN: It's interesting because I think that to be comfortable with confusion takes a certain amount of boldness, not just on the person who's learning, but on the teacher or the manager as well. You have to be OK with your people who you're trying to lead being confused.

CAROL DWECK: Yes, and you have to be OK with yourself being confused because teachers and managers need growth mindsets not just about the students or employees, they need it for themselves. A teacher, a leader, they are learners. They're the ones that are leading us in learning and should be modeling being confused, being comfortable, being out of their comfort zone, knowing how to go get information or create teams that'll move us out of a period of confusion into clarity. So they need growth mindsets about their own skills, their own talents, their own abilities over time.

SARAH GREEN: And what strikes me is that this is something that, no matter what your actual talent level or ability level is, it seems applicable. If you go back to our education system, most of the national discussion focuses on the students it's not serving at the lower end, the C students who aren't getting by. But as we've been talking today, a lot about it doesn't really work for the A students either who are getting those easy A's and learning that success should come easily.

CAROL DWECK: Yes.

SARAH GREEN: And I could see the same thing happening in a corporation.

CAROL DWECK: Yes, because what's happening is all the success and all the praise is leading-- our research shows-- is leading people to think, the people at the top of the heap, yes, I have it. I'm the person who doesn't have to work hard to be smart. I'm the person who's already smart. Students who have coasted to easy A's learn the name of the game is to do it without looking like you're straining. So yeah, I think the people at the top have fallen into bad habits.

SARAH GREEN: Mm.

CAROL DWECK: And this is a time of tremendous change where, like it or not, you're going to have periods of confusion. Like it or not, you're going to turn into a novice over and over again. And we need to be comfortable with struggle, not just effort, but struggle, confusion.

SARAH GREEN: Well, it sounds a little bit exhausting but also very rewarding, I think. Carol, thank you again so much. I just really, really enjoyed this conversation.

CAROL DWECK: I enjoyed it greatly.

SARAH GREEN: That was Stanford's Carol Dweck. Her book is Mindset. For more, visit hbr.org.
[482 words]

Source: HBR
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2012/01/the-right-mindset-for-success.html



Part II: Obstacle

Article 2
Do You Have a Growth Mindset?
by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown  |  10:29 AM November 23, 2010


Mindset is everything. If that statement seems too strong, consider that we bring these basic assumptions to every decision and action we make. Left unexamined, they may unnecessarily restrict us or lead us in the wrong direction altogether. Perception may not truly be reality, but when it comes to how we approach challenges and opportunities, mindset determines the world we encounter and possibilities we apprehend. Achieving the power of pull requires us to make our assumptions explicit and examine them in different contexts — testing, challenging and refining.

As we began to discuss in our last post, adapting to the Big Shift and harnessing the potential of pull requires embracing a new mindset. This posting will focus on another key set of assumptions.

In her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford Professor Carol Dweckdistinguishes two extremes of the mindsets people tend to have about their basic qualities:

•        In a fixed mindset, "your qualities are carved in stone." Whatever skills, talents, and capabilities you have are predetermined and finite. Whatever you lack, you will continue to lack. This fixed mindset applies not just to your own qualities, but to the qualities of others.

•        In a growth mindset, "your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts...everyone can change and grow through application and experience." Qualities like intelligence are a starting point, but success comes as a result of effort, learning, and persistence.

The distinction between fixed and growth mindsets has tremendous implications — as individuals and organizations — for how we address the growing pressures around us.

The Mindset Paradox: The greatest threat to success is avoiding failure. One of the most provocative aspects of Dweck's work is what it says about our approach to challenges. In a fixed mindset, you avoid challenging situations that might lead to failure because success depends upon protecting and promoting your set of fixed qualities and concealing your deficiencies. If you do fail, you focus on rationalizing the failure rather than learning from it and developing your capabilities. With a growth mindset, you focus on learning and development rather than failure and actively pursue the types of challenges that will likely lead to both learning and failure. This sounds a lot like the questing disposition we have discussed previously.

Mindset profoundly shapes key business practices:

Business Ecosystems. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that there are a finite set of smart people and valuable resources outside your company. The challenge is how to identify, connect with and mobilize them to deliver more value to the marketplace — static resources tied together in a static ecosystem. The ecosystem benefits from the network effects of adding more and more participants because more diverse capabilities are connected and accessible.

If you believe that both the resources and the ecosystem itself are dynamic, then the role of the ecosystem is not just to connect and mobilize existing resources but to build relationships that help all participants get better faster. This leads to a more powerful form of increasing returns — not just network effects but new mechanisms to accelerate learning and performance improvement — as each participant learns faster as more and more participants join the ecosystem.

Talent Management. A fixed mindset leads you to focus almost exclusively on attracting and retaining talent. The assumption: each person's skills and capabilities are set. You will tend to devote too many resources to those with a perceived stock of knowledge and overlook (and eventually lose) employees with limited stocks but great learning potential. Worse, because you underestimate the value of learning and development, you won't likely get the most out of those employees you do value.

With a growth mindset, you understand that individual and organizational capabilities can be cultivated and developed, to improve performance and to expand in new directions. You focus more on talent development, creating work environments and practices that enable employees, regardless of work classification, to develop new skills and to learn by working with others, by problem-solving and experimentation.

Relationship-building. A fixed mindset fosters a zero-sum view of the world: if you win, I lose. With a fixed and finite set of value, the only question is how to allocate it. This perspective fosters conflict and mistrust and, not surprisingly, relationships governed by relative power, tend to be transactional and are rigidly defined to protect each party's share of the value.

A growth mindset fosters a broader view of the possibilities: by working together, we can create more value than if we work individually. While there are still issues around allocation, relationships are cultivated based on a goal of creating an even bigger pie. These relationships center on improving the performance of all participants, and the process of creating value together fosters trust. The levels of collaboration and trust deepen with time, creating a more valuable relationship.

Mindset may be destiny but it is changeable. While mindset has a profound impact on our ability to harness the power of pull, Dweck (displaying her growth mindset) offers hope: "Mindsets are an important part of your personality, but you can change them. Just by knowing about the two mindsets, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways."

The future belongs to those who can adopt a growth mindset. Those with a fixed mindset will likely be increasingly stressed and overwhelmed by mounting performance pressures and sustained uncertainty. Worse, the more they avoid failure, the more susceptible these individuals and organizations can be, not learning from mistakes and missing opportunities.

What assumptions do you make about the world and how do they play out in your decisions? What techniques have been useful for exposing your unexamined assumptions? Have you succeeded in actually changing your mindset?
[948 words]

1m47s'
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obstacle ：4m19s
today i feel so good
/first ，the first line，the audio ，thevoice of the hostess is really nice and i just imagine when i prepare my toefl listening，if i can practice with this kind of voice， it's fairly fantastic.
second,this topic is meaningful, as i read this passage, i map a image of last month ,i was worrying about my test and depressing for questioning that "my IQ has any problem " ,but now ,i am support this growth mindest ,so i only believe that nothing is a  problem ,but repeating and continuing failure and standing up，you can do it ！ “

to my lover GMAT ，i love you so much ！！

olivia瓜瓜

[Time 1]
Article 1
Sunflowers Do the Math

The spiraling shapes in cauliflower, artichoke, and sunflower florets (above) share a remarkable feature: The numbers of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals are consecutive Fibonacci numbers—the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on, so that each number is the sum of the last two. What's more, those spirals pack florets as tight as can be, maximizing their ability to gather sunlight for the plant. But how do plants like sunflowers create such perfect floret arrangements, and what does it have to do with Fibonacci numbers? A plant hormone called auxin, which spurs the growth of leaves, flowers, and other plant organs, is the key: Florets grow where auxin flows. Using a mathematical model that describes how auxin and certain proteins interact to transport each other around inside plants, researchers could predict where the hormone would accumulate. Simulations of that model reproduced patterns exactly matching real "Fibonacci spirals" in sunflowers, the team reports this month in Physical Review Letters. Based on their results, the researchers suggest that such patterns might be more universal in nature than previously thought, so keep an eye out: Fibonacci numbers might be spiraling in every direction.
[字数：193]
Source:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/scienceshot-sunflowers-do-the-ma.html

[Time 2]
Article 2
Fatherhood From Beyond the Grave

Men who become dads in their 50s may feel studly, but they've got nothing on the wild guppy. New research shows that the male Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata), the ancestor of the common aquarium resident, can become a father long after death. Scientists spiked a guppy-free stretch of stream in Trinidad with 38 male and 38 female fish. Every month, they used butterfly nets and traps baited with dog food to capture the guppies in the study area—which was bounded by waterfalls, ensuring no immigrants or escapees—and then analyzed their DNA. The survey showed that almost 14% of the 540 tallied births took place after dad had died, and that a male guppy could become a father 8 months, roughly 75 years in human terms, after his demise. That allowed half of the fish to sire offspring from beyond the (watery) grave, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The male has the female to thank for this supernatural ability. A female guppy can store her consort's sperm for months in a tiny pocket inside her ovaries, which is lucky, because females live much longer than males. The arrangement benefits both sexes: Females can have babies even if the dating scene is grim, and males can reproduce for longer than their lifespan.

[字数：220]
Source:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/06/scienceshot-fatherhood-from-beyo.html

[Time 3]
Article 3
Selectively Targeting Aerosol Pollutants Could Reduce Climate Change


Cutting our overall use of fossil fuels has proved a daunting challenge, but it might be possible to get some relief from the effects of climate change by selectively reducing the particulate pollution we produce. Recent research suggests that if we can clean up diesel engines and primitive cookstoves in India and China, for example, that could delay the effects of greenhouse-gas buildup even if pollution from coal-fired power plants persists. A study released last week concludes that if every country were to do what California has done in the last couple of decades to clean up diesel emissions, it would slow down global warming by 15 percent. Reducing similar pollution from sources such as ships and cookstoves—which weren’t included in the study—could help even more.
The study comes as governments in India and China are deciding how to address their increasing pollution, which can contribute to fatal human health problems. Over the weekend, state-controlled media in China announced new pollution rules targeting both power plants and emissions from cars and trucks.
Aerosol pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, soot, and ozone are all bad for human health, but they have different effects on the climate. “Some of the aerosols are warming the planet, and some are cooling the planet,” says Phil Rasch, a fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. For example, sulfates that form from coal-plant exhaust reflect sunlight back into space, acting to shade the planet and cool it off. Black-carbon particles from diesel exhaust, on the other hand, absorb sunlight and heat up, warming the atmosphere.
“When you add them together, we think that on balance they’re cooling the planet,” Rasch says. That is, they mask some of the temperature increase that would have occurred as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, the main human contribution to global warming. But this effect would be more significant if the particulates that help heat up the atmosphere were removed. “If we could get rid of the ones that are warming the planet,” he says, “then that would buy us some more time.”

[字数：349]


[Time 4]

Rasch says that several other recent papers have asked the question posed in the one that came out this week: “What would happen if we immediately got rid of only the black-carbon aerosols?” He says doing that “might lead to a cooling of the planet by half a degree to a degree Celsius.” He notes, however, that the impact on temperature is hard to pin down. For one thing, pollution affects clouds and rainfall, which have complicated effects on climate.
One advantage of going after black carbon is that the effects would be almost immediate. These pollutants fall out of the atmosphere in the course of a few days or weeks, so once emissions stop, the air quickly clears. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
Of course, it’s ultimately important to reduce all pollution, since it kills millions of people a year. “We want to cut down on pollution in every way that we can because of human health,” says Lai-yung Ruby Leung, a fellow at PNNL, who is one of the authors of the black-carbon study that came out his week. Selectively reducing pollutants as a way of countering global warming “is an important strategy we can think about,” she says, “but it needs to be carefully done.” Rasch emphasizes speeding up reduction of the pollutants that warm the planet, not necessarily putting off regulations to reduce the ones that cool it.
Leung says the research suggests at the very least that as countries clean up sulfates from power plants, they should make sure to cut down on diesel emissions at the same time. Just reducing the sulfates would cause the planet to warm up.

[字数：284]
Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/515961/selectively-targeting-aerosol-pollutants-could-reduce-climate-change/

[Time 5]
Article 4
Fast Break
Metastatic cells move through tight spaces more quickly than ordinary cells

Most cancer deaths are caused by metastatic tumors, which break free from the original cancer site and spread throughout the body. Many of the genetic changes that allow cells to become metastatic have been studied extensively, but it has been more difficult to study the physical changes that contribute to this process.
MIT researchers have now developed a way to study, on a large scale, how changes in key physical properties of cancer cells allow them to migrate to new sites. Scientists have previously observed that cells with higher metastatic potential are more deformable than nonmetastatic cells, but the MIT team found that cancer cells also seem to traverse narrow channels more easily because they encounter less friction, which may help them travel through blood vessels to new tumor sites.
"Our measurements provide an additional perspective on cell properties," says Sangwon Byun, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper describing the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The system that Byun and colleagues used to study the cancer cells is based on a device that Scott Manalis, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and a professor of biological engineering, developed to measure the mass of a single cell. For the new study, Byun, Manalis, and colleagues adapted the system to measure a cell’s velocity as it traveled through a narrowly constricted channel about 50 microns long, allowing them to estimate the cell’s deformability and susceptibility to friction.
They found that metastatic cells not only were more deformable than nonmetastatic cells but also traveled faster. "It seems that the cells experience less friction, making it easier for them to get through the channels," Byun says. The researchers are now using their system to detect the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that are found in cancer patients’ blood at levels ranging from a few to several thousand per milliliter. After capturing those cells, scientists could do many more tests on them, including analyses of genes expressed and proteins produced, to learn more about how they break free from tumors. Manalis and colleagues also plan to study physical changes that occur in cells as they go through the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, a process that allows cancer cells to stop sticking together and become mobile.

[字数：379]
Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/515416/fast-break/
Part II: Obstacle
Article 5
Computer Scientists Get Wet


In the summer of 2008, when Wired magazine ran a cover story titled "The End of Science," former Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson wrote, "The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all. There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?"
Five years later—not a lot of time, admittedly—data, computers, and statistical tools are indeed having a major impact on science. In the domain sciences—traditional fields like physics, biology, and chemistry—the old ways are holding. People still care about causation, mechanisms, and coherent theories, but in many disciplines, researchers are looking to supplement those traditional elements of science, harvesting gains from the data deluge by, in effect, learning from Google. In May, Science Careers wrote about some of these "pi-shaped" researchers, who have added computer science techniques to the techniques of their various native fields.
But it's also possible to get pi-shaped from the other end—the computer science end. By adding fundamentals of  biology to their computer science training, more than a few native computer scientists are contributing—and preparing themselves to contribute—to the advancement of the life sciences (among other fields), laying foundations for  new branches of study. It is indeed a promising approach, but there is still much work to be done—satisfying work, one pioneer says.
Biology for computer scientists
Lawrence Hunter graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in computer science in 1989, during what he calls "the AI winter," a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence—the field he had been studying. So he went in a new direction, joining the fledgling Human Genome Project as a programmer. "I had studied biology till tenth grade, which meant I had no modern biology at all," he says. Hunter attended weekly genomics seminars at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) where he worked. As his own coding began yielding results—for example, a list of genes that allowed eukaryotes to diverge from prokaryotes—he began to take biology more seriously. He asked a lot of questions and read all of the papers that his colleagues suggested. "I spent a decade learning by osmosis from all the brilliant people around me," says Hunter, who is considered one of the founders of bioinformatics.
Hunter is now the director of the computational bioscience program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He has published seminal papers in his field and written a life sciences textbook aimed at non-life scientists: The Processes of Life: An Introduction to Molecular Biology.
Hunter believes that computer scientists can cross over at any career stage. "Studying CS is like learning to play a musical instrument and can't be done quickly. Biology can be learned by reading and remembering," he says.
Rewiring cells
Synthetic biology, which involves designing and building genetic constructs and testing them in living cells, requires wet lab skills. "The combination of quantitative abilities and experimental biology skills is very valuable in synthetic biology," says Timothy Lu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Research Laboratory of Electronics, an interdepartmental center where "research encompasses an extensive range of natural and man-made phenomena."
Nevertheless, Lu, who has an undergraduate degree with majors in electrical engineering and computer science (and minors in biomedical engineering and biology), doesn't make bench experience a prerequisite for his incoming graduate students. He just expects them to be enthusiastic about learning biology.
That approach worked for Samuel Perli, a 5th-year doctoral candidate in Lu's lab who had no college-level biology to speak of before he started his graduate studies in computer science at MIT. While doing research on wireless networks, he attended a talk by the director of the institute's Synthetic Biology Center. He was inspired to sign up for "Introduction to Experimental Biology," after squaring away the requirements for his master's degree. That semester, he read books, research papers, and popular articles on biology, and had conversations with friends who did biology research. He was following in the footsteps of the academics who had created this field less than 2 decades ago. "I love the fact that once I program and modify a single living cell, I can have millions of similar cells by just growing them up," says Perli, who is now at the bench almost every day.
At Harvard Medical School, Pamela Silver is a founding member of the Department of Systems Biology, which she describes as a field that among other things "seeks to understand what evolution gave us and how we got to where we are." Though we have genomic information about various organisms, we still have to synthesize it to understand how the whole organism or system functions, she explains in this YouTube video. Similar to Lu, she doesn't require incoming researchers to have a background in cell biology.

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貌似我每次都慢了一个节拍

1m16s
1m20s
1m40s
1m09s
1m54s

obstacle：4m38s

渣渣求教各位牛牛，我一般是一个词一词的读，发现自己慢的不行！！
第一问： 在看文章中如何抓结构看！！！

每次看之前我都会提醒自己要注意抓结构，active reading ，脑子里要有真个结构图，但是读起来了发现又忘了。。所以每次读完obstacle 就看完了不知道讲了啥。

第二问： active reading，如何进行，有方法吗？

olivia瓜瓜

Article I About mRNA

【Warm up】
The "life cycle" of an mRNA in a eukaryotic cell. RNA is transcribed in the nucleus; processed, it is transported to the cytoplasm and translated by the ribosome. Finally, the mRNA is degraded.
【33words】

【Time1】
Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a large family of RNA molecules that convey genetic information from DNA to the ribosome, where they specify the amino acid sequence of the protein products of gene expression. Following transcription of mRNA by RNA polymerase, the mRNA is translated into a polymer of amino acids: a protein, as summarized in the central dogma of molecular biology.

As in DNA, mRNA genetic information is encoded in the sequence of nucleotides, which are arranged into codons consisting of three bases each. Each codon encodes for a specific amino acid, except the stop codons, which terminate protein synthesis. This process of translation of codons into amino acids requires two other types of RNA: Transfer RNA (tRNA), that mediates recognition of the codon and provides the corresponding amino acid, and ribosomal RNA (rRNA), that is the central component of the ribosome's protein-manufacturing machinery.

Synthesis, processing, and function
The brief existence of an mRNA molecule begins with transcription, and ultimately ends in degradation. During its life, an mRNA molecule may also be processed, edited, and transported prior to translation. Eukaryotic mRNA molecules often require extensive processing and transport, while prokaryotic molecules do not.

Transcription
Transcription is when RNA is made from DNA. During transcription, DNA polymerase makes a copy of a gene from the DNA to mRNA as needed. This process is similar in eukaryotes and prokaryotes. One notable difference, however, is that prokaryotic RNA polymerase associates with mRNA-processing enzymes during transcription so that processing can proceed quickly after the start of transcription. The short-lived, unprocessed or partially processed product is termed precursor mRNA, or pre-mRNA; once completely processed, it is termed mature mRNA.

Eukaryotic pre-mRNA processing
Processing of mRNA differs greatly among eukaryotes, bacteria, and archea. Non-eukaryotic mRNA is, in essence, mature upon transcription and requires no processing, except in rare cases. Eukaryotic pre-mRNA, however, requires extensive processing.
【309words】

【Time2】
5' cap addition
A 5' cap (also termed an RNA cap, an RNA 7-methylguanosine cap, or an RNA m7G cap) is a modified guanine nucleotide that has been added to the "front" or 5' end of a eukaryotic messenger RNA shortly after the start of transcription. The 5' cap consists of a terminal 7-methylguanosine residue that is linked through a 5'-5'-triphosphate bond to the first transcribed nucleotide. Its presence is critical for recognition by the ribosome and protection from RNases.

Cap addition is coupled to transcription, and occurs co-transcriptionally, such that each influences the other. Shortly after the start of transcription, the 5' end of the mRNA being synthesized is bound by a cap-synthesizing complex associated with RNA polymerase. This enzymatic complex catalyzes the chemical reactions that are required for mRNA capping. Synthesis proceeds as a multi-step biochemical reaction.

Polyadenylation
Polyadenylation is the covalent linkage of a polyadenylyl moiety to a messenger RNA molecule. In eukaryotic organisms, with the exception of histones, all messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules are polyadenylated at the 3' end. The poly(A) tail and the protein bound to it aid in protecting mRNA from degradation by exonucleases. Polyadenylation is also important for transcription termination, export of the mRNA from the nucleus, and translation. mRNA can also be polyadenylated in prokaryotic organisms, where poly(A) tails act to facilitate, rather than impede, exonucleolytic degradation.

Polyadenylation occurs during and immediately after transcription of DNA into RNA. After transcription has been terminated, the mRNA chain is cleaved through the action of an endonuclease complex associated with RNA polymerase. After the mRNA has been cleaved, around 250 adenosine residues are added to the free 3' end at the cleavage site. This reaction is catalyzed by polyadenylate polymerase. Just as in alternative splicing, there can be more than one polyadenylation variant of a mRNA.

Polyadenylation site mutations. The primary RNA transcript of a gene is cleaved at the poly-A addition site, and 100-200 A’s are added to the 3’ end of the RNA. If this site is altered, an abnormally long and unstable mRNA results. Several beta globin mutations alter this site: one example is AATAAA -> AACAAA. Moderate anemia was result.
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_RNA

Article II About DNA

【Time3】
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and many viruses. Along with RNA and proteins, DNA is one of the three major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life. Genetic information is encoded as a sequence of nucleotides (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine) recorded using the letters G, A, T, and C. Most DNA molecules are double-stranded helices, consisting of two long polymers of simple units called nucleotides, molecules with backbones made of alternating sugars (deoxyribose) and phosphate groups (related to phosphoric acid), with the nucleobases (G, A, T, C) attached to the sugars. DNA is well-suited for biological information storage, since the DNA backbone is resistant to cleavage and the double-stranded structure provides the molecule with a built-in duplicate of the encoded information.

These two strands run in opposite directions to each other and are therefore anti-parallel, one backbone being 3′ (three prime) and the other 5′ (five prime). This refers to the direction the 3rd and 5th carbon on the sugar molecule is facing. Attached to each sugar is one of four types of molecules called nucleobases (informally, bases). It is the sequence of these four nucleobases along the backbone that encodes information. This information is read using the genetic code, which specifies the sequence of the amino acids within proteins. The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA in a process called transcription.

Within cells, DNA is organized into long structures called chromosomes. During cell division these chromosomes are duplicated in the process of DNA replication, providing each cell its own complete set of chromosomes. Eukaryotic organisms (animals, plants, fungi, and protists) store most of their DNA inside the cell nucleus and some of their DNA in organelles, such as mitochondria or chloroplasts. In contrast, prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) store their DNA only in the cytoplasm. Within the chromosomes, chromatin proteins such as histones compact and organize DNA. These compact structures guide the interactions between DNA and other proteins, helping control which parts of the DNA are transcribed.
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【Time4】
Properties
DNA is a long polymer made from repeating units called nucleotides.DNA was first identified and isolated by Friedrich Miescher and the double helix structure of DNA was first discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick. The structure of DNA of all species comprises two helical chains each coiled round the same axis, and each with a pitch of 34 ångströms (3.4 nanometres) and a radius of 10 ångströms (1.0 nanometres). According to another study, when measured in a particular solution, the DNA chain measured 22 to 26 ångströms wide (2.2 to 2.6 nanometres), and one nucleotide unit measured 3.3 Å (0.33 nm) long. Although each individual repeating unit is very small, DNA polymers can be very large molecules containing millions of nucleotides. For instance, the largest human chromosome, chromosome number 1, consists of approximately 220 million base pairs and is 85 mm long.

In living organisms DNA does not usually exist as a single molecule, but instead as a pair of molecules that are held tightly together. These two long strands entwine like vines, in the shape of a double helix. The nucleotide repeats contain both the segment of the backbone of the molecule, which holds the chain together, and a nucleobase, which interacts with the other DNA strand in the helix. A nucleobase linked to a sugar is called a nucleoside and a base linked to a sugar and one or more phosphate groups is called a nucleotide. A polymer comprising multiple linked nucleotides (as in DNA) is called a polynucleotide.
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【Time5】
The backbone of the DNA strand is made from alternating phosphate and sugar residues.[11] The sugar in DNA is 2-deoxyribose, which is a pentose (five-carbon) sugar. The sugars are joined together by phosphate groups that form phosphodiester bonds between the third and fifth carbon atoms of adjacent sugar rings. These asymmetric bonds mean a strand of DNA has a direction. In a double helix the direction of the nucleotides in one strand is opposite to their direction in the other strand: the strands are antiparallel. The asymmetric ends of DNA strands are called the 5′ (five prime) and 3′ (three prime) ends, with the 5′ end having a terminal phosphate group and the 3′ end a terminal hydroxyl group. One major difference between DNA and RNA is the sugar, with the 2-deoxyribose in DNA being replaced by the alternative pentose sugar ribose in RNA.[9

A section of DNA. The bases lie horizontally between the two spiraling strands. (animated version).

The DNA double helix is stabilized primarily by two forces: hydrogen bonds between nucleotides and base-stacking interactions among aromatic nucleobases. In the aqueous environment of the cell, the conjugated π bonds of nucleotide bases align perpendicular to the axis of the DNA molecule, minimizing their interaction with the solvation shell and therefore, the Gibbs free energy. The four bases found in DNA are adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). These four bases are attached to the sugar/phosphate to form the complete nucleotide, as shown for adenosine monophosphate.

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1m25s 今天太晚了明天 obstacle 补上，，。。Time6】
Because of their central importance to biology, proteins have been the focus of intense research, particularly the manner in which they are produced from genetically coded templates -- a process commonly known as translation. While the general mechanism of translation has been understood for some time, protein synthesis can initiate by more than one mechanism. One of the least well understood mechanisms is known as cap-independent translation.

Now, John Chaput and his colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have produced the first genome-wide investigation of cap-independent translation, identifying thousands of mRNA sequences that act as Translation Enhancing Elements (TEEs), which are RNA sequences upstream of the coding region that help recruit the ribosome to the translation start site.

The new study outlines a technique for mining whole genomes for sequences that initiate cap-independent translation within the vastness of the genome.

The research has important implications for the fundamental understanding of translation in living systems, as well as intriguing potential in the biomedical arena. (Many viral pathogens are known to use cap-independent translation to hijack and redirect cellular mechanisms to translate viral proteins.)

The lead author of the study is Brian P. Wellensiek, a senior scientist in Biodesign's Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics. The group's results appear in the current issue of the journal Nature Methods.

During most protein synthesis in eukaryotic cells, cap-dependent translation dominates. The process begins after DNA is first transcribed into mRNA, with the aid of an enzyme polymerase. mRNA now forms the coded template from which the translated proteins will be generated. The mRNA code consists of sequences made from 4 nucleic acids, A, C, G & U, with each 3-letter grouping (known as a codon), corresponding to one amino acid in the protein being synthesized.

A key component in the translation process is the ribosome, which migrates along the single stranded mRNA, reading the codons as it goes. Before it can do this however, it must locate a special structure at the 5' end of the mRNA strand known as the cap. In normal cap-dependent translation, the ribosome is recruited to the 5' end of mRNA via a specialized cap-binding complex.

Cap-independent translation allows the ribosome to begin reading the mRNA message without having to first locate the 5' cap structure. Cap-independent translation occurs in eukaryotic cells during normal processes including mitosis and apoptosis (or programmed cell death). It is also a feature in many forms of viral translation, where the viral transcript is able to recruit the ribosome and co-opt its function to preferentially translate viral RNA.

In the current study, Chaput designed an in vitro selection strategy to identify human genome sequences that initiate cap-independent translation. The technique is able to select candidates from a pool of trillions of genomic fragments. Once a set of sequences was identified as translation enhancing elements, they were shown to function effectively in both cell-free and cellular translation systems.

As Chaput explains, most research on cap-independent translation has been conducted using RNA fragments derived from viruses. "These RNA molecules will fold into shapes that appear to mimic some of the initiation factors that that you would find in eukaryotic translation," he says. More recently, similar RNA molecules have been identified in cellular systems, though the sequences tend to be much shorter and function in a different manner.

Chaput's method of studying such sequences on a genome-wide scale involves first generating a DNA library of the entire human genome. Using enzymes, the genome is cut into random fragments of around 200 base pairs each. These sequences are then transcribed into mRNA.

Applying a technique known as mRNA display, the fragments are tagged in specific way, such that amino acid sequences resulting from successful translation events remain bound to the mRNA fragments that generated them. "Essentially, what we're doing is taking a library of human mRNA and tagging those sequences that act as translation enhancing elements," Chaput says. Those sequences bearing an attached peptide affinity tag can then be separated out from the remaining untranslated sequences, reverse transcribed, amplified using PCR technology and subjected to subsequent rounds of selection.

The sequences were later mapped onto the human genome. As expected, the complete library of sequences used at the start of the experiments mapped fairly evenly across the genome. But the sequences selected via mRNA display as translation enhancing elements tended to cluster in non-coding regions of the genome. The authors speculate that such sequences may have been evolutionarily selected against, as they have the potential to disrupt normal cap-dependent translation.

Roughly 20 percent of the translation enhancing elements functioned as internal ribosomal initiation sites, again turning up primarily in non-coding genomic regions. The origin of these sequences remains mysterious. It is conceivable that they were surreptitiously brought on board as a result of human interaction with different types of viruses.

Once Chaput's group had acquired a library of 250 distinct translation enhancing elements through selection using mRNA display, the sequences were screened for translation enhancing activity, which was quantified using a light based assay employing a luciferase reporter molecule.

By measuring levels of luciferase, the enhancement of each sequence could be assessed relative to background noise, with the better translation enhancing elements displaying 50-100 fold enhancement (and some as much as 1000-fold enhancement). The next step was to determine which of these sequences could function as internal ribosomal initiation sites.

To do this, the same 250 sequences were inserted into a vector bearing a hairpin structure. As Chaput explains: "If the ribosome latched onto the 5' end, it would hit that hairpin and would fall off. However if the ribosome skipped the hairpin and recognized the sequence on the other side of the hairpin independently and translated it, that's an indication that the sequence is functioning as an internal ribosomal initiation site." Both assays (for translation enhancement and internal ribosomal initiation) were validated under cell-free conditions and in human cells, using a vaccinia virus vector.

A study of this scope is possible thanks to innovative techniques for in vitro selection (such as mRNA display), as well as a revolutionary technology permitting massively parallel RNA sequencing (known as deep sequencing), which provides unprecedented speed and read accuracy.

Much remains to be learned about atypical translation processes. The mechanism of action for translation enhancing elements is still obscure, particularly in the case of internal ribosomal initiation sites. Similarly, the particular gene products that may result from cap-independent translation have yet to be identified and characterized.
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olivia瓜瓜

Part 1 Speed






Article 1(Check the title later)
3 Ways to Give Dad the Gift of Health: Dr. Oz

By Jeff Macke | Breakout – 9 hours ago

[TIME1]
Father’s Day usually conjures up images of ugly ties, homemade crafts from the kids, and, probably dad's favorite, barbecued meat and beer. But, according to the Center for Disease Control nearly 70% of adult American males are overweight. One in four U.S. men die from heart disease, in part caused by poor diet, inactivity and obesity. Honoring dad with gluttonous rituals of steak and alcohol is akin to celebrating your dog by letting it chase cars; he may enjoy it at the time but it’s not going to end well.

A better way to tell dad you love him is by trying to extend his life rather than shorten it. In the attached video cardiothoracic surgeon, author, and television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz offers three healthy alternatives to the “grilled meat and sloth” Father’s Day tradition.

1. Do something physical
"The most important thing to do if you want your dad to live a long time is to go out and play with him," says Dr. Oz in the attached video. Have a catch, take a swim, go on a bike ride or just walk around the neighborhood. Dr. Oz says anything that gets the blood pumping counts, even if it's outside of dad’s comfort zone.
"Dancing counts by the way," he insists, "As bad a dancer as he may be, as awkward as it might sound go out and get him moving."

2. Get him a healthy app
There are thousands of apps that encourage healthy habits. Dr. Oz suggests finding one, just one, that will help dad on a day-to-day basis. It could be an exercise monitor or calorie tracker. There are apps that work as pedometers. There are even motion detecting apps that will track dad's sleep cycles to help make sure his mind and body are getting the rest they need.
How do you find the right one? Dr. Oz says to go by popularity in app stores. "Forget about the medical validity for now. Let's focus first on whether or not they're easy to use and that way he'll enjoy using them and you'll be introducing him to a whole different way of taking care of his health that his generation didn't have access to."
[words: 370]

[TIME2]
3. Calculate dad’s Real Age
Dr. Oz is working with the government and private investors on a website called AskMD.com. He says the goal is creating a simple but sophisticated source for patient specific medical questions.

AskMD.com won’t be up and running until this fall. In the meantime Dr. Oz suggests having dad take the Real Age test at DoctorOz.com. There comes a point in every dad’s life when chronological age only serves to remind him he’s old. “Figure out how old his body thinks he is; that’s’ a much better way to have him keep track of the age difference between you and him.”

These three alternatives to a six-pack of beer and half a pound of red meat will make for a constructive Sunday but they aren’t enough. Eventually dad is going to have to start getting regular check-ups.

Nearly all father’s know the importance of getting a physical annually at the very least. Unfortunately the most recent census data shows that 1/3 of adult males in the U.S. haven’t seen a doctor in more than a year.

Telling dad what he should do isn’t going to get him to the doctor. “People don’t change what they do based on what they know, they change what they do based on how they feel,” says Dr. Oz.

So Dr. Oz has given America another worthwhile Father’s Day tradition: Make dad feel loved and important in your life. When it comes to making a man take care of himself a feeling that comes from his spiritual heart is more likely to get him to the doctor than pain in his physical chest.
[words: 272]
Source: Yahoo Finace
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/3-ways-dad-gift-health-dr-oz-171005385.html





Article 2(Check the title later)

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia.

May 18th 2013|From the print edition

[Warm up]
WESTERN politicians like to grandstand about North Korea, calling its leaders “mad”, “rogue” or “tinpot” (The Economist has been known to do this too.) In fact, North Korea is the world’s most rational despotic regime: a highly successful Communist absolute monarchy. Kim Jong Il, son of the country’s Stalinist founder, Kim Il Sung, failed as a leader by any of the usual standards—he enforced North Korea’s isolation and presided over a famine that killed between 400,000 and 2m people. But he succeeded in what counts. He lived a long time, died peacefully in late 2011 and passed power on to his son. In the same way that betting once raged about how briefly Kim Jong Il would last after his father’s death in 1994, so too are outsiders now calling time on North Korea’s fun-loving heir, Kim Jong Un (pictured). It may be a triumph of hope over experience.
[Words: 150]

[TIME3]
Andrei Lankov is an arch-realist. The author of an incisive new book, “The Real North Korea”, he grew up in Soviet Russia, studied for a while at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He is rare in having an unsentimental feel for the regime’s psychology of survival and for the mindset of those outsiders who would like to change North Korea but who, in the process, often succumb to wishful thinking.

For all its self-imposed isolation, North Korea since its inception as a Soviet creation in 1948 has depended for survival on a small, shifting, group of nations, which it has shaken down with consummate skill. Most aid these days is hoarded by the elites. But, as Mr Lankov explains, the regime did not set out to oppress its people. Kim Il Sung’s early promises included giving North Koreans a daily meal of meat soup and boiled rice, eaten under a tiled rather than a thatched roof. That appealed to a poor, agrarian people. Even today, after so much disillusionment, the ceaseless propaganda depicting the Kim dynasty as parents-in-chief, protecting a vulnerable nation from American and Japanese wolves, works to a remarkable degree.

Loyalty, however, was also won through ruthless purges of potential enemies, and through the North’s unique and horrifying songbun, a caste system in which families are classified as friendly, wavering or hostile, according to their historical, political and economic background. The efficacy of songbun as a tool of state control lies in it being forward-looking as well as regressive. Until recently, at least, not only did those suspected of disloyalty face official discrimination; so did their children and grandchildren. Whole families were thrown in the gulag.
As for outside pressure, policy towards North Korea has oscillated between soft and hard. Both approaches are doomed, Mr Lankov argues. The soft line—treat the North gently, reward it with concessions, and it will give up its nukes—flies in the face of repeated provocations, including yet another nuclear test in February. It requires outsiders to turn a blind eye to grotesque abuses of human rights. And it assumes that the regime can be persuaded to undertake Chinese-style economic reforms. But it cannot do this without collapsing, since the North is in ideological competition with South Korea, whose economic model, the regime knows, wins hands down.
[words: 394]

[TIME4]
The hardline version is no better. Any threat of military retaliation against the North is simply not credible. Greater Seoul, with 24m people, is within range of 250-300 pieces of North Korean artillery. Neither South Korea nor the United States will ever start a war unless seriously provoked, and there is little risk of that. The North’s strategy of manufacturing crises in order to wring out concessions will certainly continue. America has taken up a posture of “strategic patience”. But it cannot ignore the North Korean regime nor leave it alone; the Kim family will not let it.

The Kims are playing a long game, but one day their dynasty will collapse, brought low by the widening income gap with South Korea which will be impossible to conceal. Perhaps the most interesting, if hardly the most cheering, part of Mr Lankov’s lucid book lies in “being ready for what we wish for”. The post-Kim era risks being a dramatic and brutal upheaval. It will take decades to clean up after the Kims’ long misrule.

Even the promise of reunification with the South will bring disillusion. Poor North Koreans will be exploited by South Korean employers and tricked by financial scammers. Members of the former regime, their criminal skills already honed, will seize chunks of the economy and even prey on hitherto safe South Korean cities. And what fate awaits educated North Koreans? Doctors can make drips out of beer bottles, but know nothing of the modern pharmacopoeia. The typical history teacher, Mr Lankov says, “knows a lot about events that never actually happened”.

One intelligent move would be to re-examine how the West undermined the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, and start doing the same. Sponsoring radio stations that broadcast into North Korea and offering scholarships for refugees would be a good start. Both these would cost relatively little and would help North Koreans when they face the coming calamity. Unfortunately, for the moment Western politicians prefer grandstanding.
[words: 329]
Source: ECO中文网
http://www.ecocn.org/thread-190768-1-1.html





Article 3(Check the title later)
Getting China’s Tower of Babel on Record

June 13, 2013, 3:30 PM

[Warm up]
Michael Wu, 20, a student at Peking University, grew up in Shanghai. But when he wants to talk to his cousins in Hainan, he needs to bring his mother along to interpret the conversation.
The cousins in Hainan speak two kinds of Hainan dialect. “I actually cannot understand either of them,” Wu says. “It’s actually not much good for me to [try to] communicate with them.”

In China, that’s a common problem: The differences in dialects are so vast they amount to different languages—possibly more than 3,000 variations, according to some estimates. It’s one of the reasons that standard Beijing Mandarin has become the lingua franca of schools, businesses and government in China. But that uniformity comes at a cost: the rapid loss of many of these dialects.
[Words: 129]

[TIME5]
Now two Americans have taken on a daunting task: trying to get an audio record of all of the thousands of China’s languages and dialects before they disappear.
Linguists Steve Hansen and Kellen Parker are enlisting volunteers to canvass the country to capture both the languages and the stories of all of China’s 2,862 counties and 34 provincial areas. Phonemica, founded last year, now has about 200 Chinese and Chinese-speaking foreign volunteers lined up to record their friends, parents and grandparents, telling a story in fangyan (regional speech).

“The idea is that we want to record it all,” says Mr. Hansen. “And the only way to do this is through a crowd-sourced approach. We’re trying to get people involved who will go to their hometowns and record friends and relatives.”

“It is absolutely unique,” said Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, by email. “No one else is attempting to do this for Sinitic” (the languages of China).

Phonemica is nearly out of time. Scholars say that a few generations from now, all of China will speak as a first language standard Mandarin, the Beijing dialect that is taught in schools and used by new migrants to cities as well as businesspeople in every province.

Richard VanNess Simmons, a Rutgers professor of Chinese, says that as China’s economy has taken off over the past 20 years, “Mandarin has become the language that gets you somewhere and the language that parents want their kids to learn.” Even parents who speak regional dialects prefer that their children speak Mandarin at home.
“It’s happening so fast it’s almost too fast to document,” he says.

The Chinese government also has taken on the task of recording the country’s dialects, but its Chinese Language Resource Audio Database (中国语言资源有声数据) is still in the “fieldwork” stage, says Mr. Simmons, and “no results have yet been published as far as I know.”

An earlier effort by the Chinese Academy of Science in the 1990s, he says, produced a small series of about 20 recordings of dialects on audiotape and in book form. The academy then put out a DVD version that required users to install an old browser for Windows, so “it didn’t end up being very useful in digital form.”

Virtually unlimited storage in the era of cloud computing means Phonemica can record as many dialects as it wants without worry about technology becoming obsolete. The bigger challenge has been in getting drumming up enough volunteers to make recordings.

The site’s original model was the Speech Accent Archive created by George Mason University in Virginia, which records hundreds of English speakers reading the same English-language paragraph with different accents, from Brooklynese to Dutch. But Messrs. Hansen and Parker felt that there was also value in recording family stories, in the style of StoryCorps, an archive of 45,000 stories told by Americans to each other.
[words: 503]

[The rest]
So far, the site has 50 stories on record, ranging from young people talking about their favorite Chinese pop stars to grandparents remembering being sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Hsieh, a 61-year-old from Pingtung County, Taiwan, tells a story in the Hakka Sixian dialect. There are more than 30 million native speakers of Hakka, Mr. Parker says, but the Sixian dialect group is much smaller, mostly in the northwest part of Taiwan. Song Hongcheng, 50, from Fangxian in Hubei province, tells a story in the Fangzian dialect, a subset of Central Plains Mandarin, which has about 300,000 speakers.

So far the project has relied too heavily on young people—students interviewing fellow students—with not enough contribution from older generations, according to Mr. Simmons, who serves as an informal adviser to the project. He advised Phonemica to try to record people over the age of 30, and preferably over 60. Younger people, even if they speak in a dialect, tend to throw in standard Mandarin words more often than their grandparents would.

Leonardo Liu, 40, who has already recorded his parents, his wife and several colleagues, says the project made him wonder what it would have been like to hear the voice of Confucius. “Maybe 1,000 or 2,000 years later, we’ll be the ancient people. If the website can keep our voices and our accent, it will be great.”
[words: 235]
Source: WSJ
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/06/13/getting-chinas-tower-of-babel-on-record/


Part 2 Obstacle






Article 3(Check the title later)
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

Dec 16th 2010 |From the print edition Tweet...

[Time6]
ON THE evening before All Saints' Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master's degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn't graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What's discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

Rich pickings
For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world's university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America's annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.

Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world's students.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.
   
A short course in supply and demand
In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.

These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities', and therefore countries', research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.

In America the rise of PhD teachers' unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers' union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.

In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.

Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria's PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21

1m54s
1m18s
warm：46s
2m31s
1m54s
2m28s
rest‘： 1m05s
obstacle ：8m31s

olivia瓜瓜

【PART I: SPEED】

(Required)


The Chinese Economy—Posner
  

[Time 1]
A very poor country can grow rapidly, but a rich one cannot. The U.S. economy is very robust by international standards, but it rarely grows by more than 3 percent a year (except in the catching-up phase that follows a dip in the business cycle), and much of this growth is attributable to population increase; the U.S. has a relatively high birth rate and a high immigration rate. China grew at a very high rate, once it abandoned the communist economic system, from a very low base, but it is not surprising that the rate has slowed—yet slowed to a rate, still very high, of 7.7 percent in 2012.

I don’t know what the future holds, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the Chinese rate of economic growth plummeted. There are many negatives in China’s economic picture. The obvious one is the state-owned enterprises, which account for about half of total Chinese output. They are inefficient and corrupt, but also deeply entrenched, with numerous links to the communist officialdom that runs the country.

But there is also the uncertainty remarked by Becker that is created by China’s need to reduce the ratio of output that is exported and output that is consumed domestically, because increasing wages of Chinese workers have increased competition from countries where wages are still very low. The problem in reorienting an economy from producing primarily for export to producing primarily for the domestic market is that the sale of consumer goods requires an elaborate distribution infrastructure, a service culture, and a reasonably well informed consuming public, none of which is necessary for exporting and each of which is difficult to create. So China faces large restructuring costs in reorienting its economy to producing more for and selling more in the domestic market.
[Time 1 Ends, 297 Words]


[Time 2]
China is experiencing a brain drain, though retarded at present by poor employment opportunities in Europe (owing to Europe’s economic misery) and good ones, still, at home. Many of China’s brightest, best educated young people do not want to remain in China, and are welcomed as immigrants by many countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. One reason they don’t want to remain is China’s political system. China is a dictatorship, and in a dictatorship everything is subordinated to its maintenance. China not only is not democratic; it does not (as authoritarian regimes sometimes do—the Prussia of Frederick the Great is a famous example) protect personal liberties. China is also corrupt, increasingly militaristic, ethnically divided, hostile to minorities, and fearful of cults and religious sects. Its traditions, like those of Russia, are antithetical to the political and economic cultures of most prosperous countries. The negative features of Chinese society are relevant not only to explaining the brain drain, but also to judging whether its economy is likely to continue growing rapidly.

Emigration of the young is further worrying from the standpoint of economic growth because, as a result of China’s “one-child” policy (albeit sporadically enforced), the population is aging rapidly. This both diminishes labor supply (and so forces up wages, reducing China’s international competitiveness) and diverts resources to supporting unproductive elderly persons.

Another obstacle to continued rapid growth of the Chinese economy is the continuing rapid increase in the amount of pollution, which has already reached staggering proportions, beyond what developing countries usually encounter. As economic activity increases, so will the amount of pollution; to prevent it from getting altogether out of hand, China will have either to divert greater resources to pollution control, which will increase welfare but not measured economic output, or slow the rate of economic growth.

Still another source of concern is the recent drop in China’s economic growth rate, from about 10 percent to 7.7 percent. That is a drop of almost 25 percent, which implies a significant drop in the return on investment, which in turn implies that investment will fall. Such a fall will increase unemployment. It may also put strains on China’s banking system (if firms that borrowed to invest have difficulty repaying their loans, because of falling output)—a system already reported to be heavily stressed.

And finally I’m mistrustful of Chinese statistics. Should we trust economic reporting by officials of a dictatorship? I think not.

[Time 2 Ends, 408 Words]

Source: The Becker-Posner Blog
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/


Can You Overdo People Skills?
by Robert B. Kaiser and Robert E. Kaplan  |  10:00 AM June 5, 2013
  

[Warm Up]
In our work with leaders on overplayed strengths, people sometimes object to the idea that every strength can be taken too far. For instance, an academic journal editor once held up publication of a research article stating flatly that "it is impossible for a leader to be too supportive, caring, and loyal."

Did that journal editor have a point? Recent interest in one of the greatest American presidents offers a fascinating example. Let there be no doubt that Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinary leader who galvanized a bitterly divided country and navigated it through phenomenal discord. In fact, Lincoln is one of our personal favorite leaders. But his acclaimed biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of A Team of Rivals (which Steven Spielberg drew from in his recent film), turned up some counterintuitive insights in her penetrating research. Taking into account aspects of Lincoln often neglected in the cultural lore, she considers the possibility that his leadership could have been even more effective had he not been quite so caring.
[159 Words]


[Time 3]
In a 2009 HBR interview Goodwin was fast to point out Lincoln's tremendous gift of people skills. She described his exceptional emotional intelligence, willingness to hear out opposing views, keen eye for talent, capacity for forgiveness, and ability to share credit for success but take blame for mistakes. This constellation of admirable attributes earned him loyalty. It was key to recruiting and managing the big talents, and big egos, that made up his cabinet who — despite many being from opposing political parties and former rivals in seeking the presidency — "ended up believing that he was as near a perfect man as anyone they'd ever met," according to Goodwin.

However, Goodwin also concluded that "Lincoln's greatest flaw came out of his strength, which was generally liking people and not wanting to hurt them." This seemed to color his judgment, and delay corrective action by giving people too many chances to turn things around. Nowhere is this more evident than in the disastrous example of how Lincoln managed George McClellan, his general in the early stages of the Civil War.

McClellan had his own issues with overused strengths. His confidence and pride could verge into arrogance. Born to the upper class, McClellan was condescending and insubordinate toward his folksy commander-in-chief. He referred to Lincoln as "a well-meaning baboon" and declared him an "idiot." McClellan's tactical judgment soon proved to be questionable too. Though a systematic and thorough planner who exercised careful judgment, McClellan was also a perfectionist who suffered from analysis-paralysis and struggled to take decisive action. His excessively cautious approach is considered by military historians to be why the Union failed to quash the smaller Confederate forces early on in the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, the failure to seize the Confederate capital of Richmond, and the bloody draw against much smaller forces at Antietam.

Some believe that McClellan should have been removed well before Antietam. In part, Lincoln may have been reluctant to make such a bold staffing move because he was new to warfare and military strategy. Goodwin, however, concluded, "In the end it was his inability to hurt people that made Lincoln keep McClellan on far too long." By dragging his feet on this decision, the Confederacy managed to hold on despite long odds and the Union lost strategic ground and thousands of soldiers, including over 12,000 casualties at Antietam. Six weeks later, Lincoln finally removed McClellan from command.
[Time 3 Ends, 400 Words]


[Time 4]
Lincoln was not alone in struggling with tough people calls. In a recent HBR blog post, we documented how today over half of executives are too soft on accountability. This shortfall is particularly common among those with strong people skills, who are bedeviled by two hazards when it comes to tackling performance issues.

The first hazard is that caring leaders tend not to be direct, especially when there's a conflict. They might avoid talking with the other person altogether; or soft-pedal the message to the point where the person walks out of the room blissfully unaware of the seriousness of the problem. The hazard is augmented when leaders rationalize, usually by telling themselves, "I don't want to make anyone upset." They'd like to believe they are being protective of the other person, when in fact they're protecting themselves.

Leaders with strong people skills should also be aware of a second hazard: that they, like Lincoln with McClellan, will be much too slow to act. Well-liked leaders, if they are honest with themselves, shy away from tough action because they fear it will hurt their reputation. Another way that such leaders hang themselves up is by pointing to the subpar performer's good points. But if you wait until that person has no redeeming value, you'll wait forever. Finally, once these leaders do achieve clarity that the person needs to go, they let concerns about implementation delay action unnecessarily. "It will be hard to find a replacement" or "It's a bad idea to make a change now because there's been so much instability lately." In attempting to rein in tendencies that impede your ability to deal with tough personnel issues, self-delusion is your biggest threat.

How do you prevent your valuable people skills from turning into a liability? For one, wake up to the fact that that very aptitude puts you at risk of misapplying it. Realize too that the more heavily you rely on those skills and the more deeply you believe in them, the graver the risk. Second, wake up to the value of the antithesis of a strong people orientation — tough-mindedness about people. Finally, be able to imagine that the height of people skill is to combine these seeming polar opposites — to take needed tough actions in a constructive, respectful way.
[Time 4 Ends, 382 Words]

Source: Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/06/can_you_overdo_people_skills.html


[Time 5]
  
A mutual fund is a type of professionally managed collective investment vehicle that pools money from many investors to purchase securities.[1] While there is no legal definition of the term "mutual fund", it is most commonly applied only to those collective investment vehicles that are regulated and sold to the general public. They are sometimes referred to as "investment companies" or "registered investment companies." Most mutual funds are "open-ended," meaning investors can buy or sell shares of the fund at any time. Hedge funds are not considered a type of mutual fund.

The term mutual fund is less widely used outside of the United States and Canada. For collective investment vehicles outside of the United States, see articles on specific types of funds including open-ended investment companies, SICAVs, unitized insurance funds, unit trusts and Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities, which are usually referred to by their acronym UCITS.

In the United States, mutual funds must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, overseen by a board of directors (or board of trustees if organized as a trust rather than a corporation or partnership) and managed by a registered investment adviser. Mutual funds are not taxed on their income and profits if they comply with certain requirements under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.

Mutual funds have both advantages and disadvantages compared to direct investing in individual securities. They have a long history in the United States. Today they play an important role in household finances, most notably in retirement planning.

There are 3 types of U.S. mutual funds: open-end, unit investment trust, and closed-end. The most common type, the open-end fund, must be willing to buy back shares from investors every business day. Exchange-traded funds (or "ETFs" for short) are open-end funds or unit investment trusts that trade on an exchange. Open-end funds are most common, but exchange-traded funds have been gaining in popularity.
[Time 5 Ends, 316 Words]

[The Rest]
Mutual funds are generally classified by their principal investments. The four main categories of funds are money market funds, bond or fixed income funds, stock or equity funds and hybrid funds. Funds may also be categorized as index or actively managed.

Investors in a mutual fund pay the fund’s expenses, which reduce the fund's returns/performance. There is controversy about the level of these expenses. A single mutual fund may give investors a choice of different combinations of expenses (which may include sales commissions or loads) by offering several different types of share classes.
[93 Words]

Source: Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_fund

【PART II: OBSTACLE】

(Required, pick one of these two options)
Option 1

Technology
From Apple, an Overhaul for Mobile and the Mac
Highlights From Apple’s WWDC: At its annual worldwide developers conference, Apple unveiled its newest products and features, including the Mac Pro computer and iTunes Radio.

By BRIAN X. CHEN
Published: June 10, 2013
  

[Time 6]
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple wants to prove that it has not lost the ability to innovate in a post-Steve Jobs world.

The company on Monday introduced a major redesign of iOS, its mobile software system, as well as upgrades for some of its Mac computers. It also unveiled a new online music service for its music player, iTunes. The company, under intense pressure from investors, introduced the new software and Macs on the first day of its annual conference for software developers.

Its stock has fallen to about $450 after peaking at about $700 in September. Some investors worry that the company’s growth is slowing because it has lost its way after the death of Mr. Jobs, its visionary leader. Apple’s vexation showed at the conference. After unveiling a major upgrade for a Mac computer, Phil Schiller, the company’s vice president for global marketing, offered a sarcastic response to those who have suggested that Apple could no longer innovate.

Charles Golvin, a technology analyst at Forrester Research, said Mr. Schiller’s remarks indicated that “they have a chip on their shoulder.” But Mr. Golvin said that Apple was adding improvements to battery life and other enhancements to software that people would actually find useful. “What customers are getting here is tremendous innovation under the cover,” he said.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, called Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 7, the “biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone.”

The new mobile software system is the first made under the company’s lead hardware designer, Jony Ive. He was put in charge of software interface design after the company fired Scott Forstall, the former head of mobile software development, during a flurry of negative news reports surrounding Apple’s new mapping software.

The design in iOS 7 introduces thin typography, similar to Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, and a new color palette. The keyboard looks simple, with gray letters on flat, white backgrounds. Apple also removed textures that made some apps mimic real-life objects. The Calendar app has shed its faux leather; the Game Center app no longer has green felt; and the shelves in the iBookstore app are no longer wood-grained. And the home screen has an effect called parallax to make the app icons look as if they are popping out in 3-D.

“We have always thought of design of being so much more than the way something looks,” Mr. Ive said in a video demonstrating the operating system. “It’s the whole thing, the way something actually works on so many different levels.”

A new iOS feature, called Activation Lock, disables the iPhone even if a thief has turned it off or erased the data on the phone. Some police officers have called for a feature like this — a “remote kill switch” that renders the stolen phone useless and difficult to sell in the black market. The phone can be reactivated only after the user logs into it with the right Apple ID and password.“We think this is going to be a great theft deterrent,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering.

In iOS 7, Apple also made improvements to Siri, the voice-controlled assistant of the iPhone, which has been ridiculed for its spottiness and ineptitude. The feature has new male and female voices that sound more realistic, and it responds to more commands, like “Play my last voice mail” or “Increase my screen brightness.” In 2014, iOS and Siri will be integrated into cars made by a dozen manufacturers, including Nissan, Kia, Honda and Toyota, said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services.

Apple said iOS 7 would arrive in the fall. It will be a free update for iPhone and iPad owners.

The iPhone is driving Apple’s business, but the company is not lifting the gas pedal on its Macs. The company unveiled a major upgrade for the Mac Pro, its desktop computer for professionals, which it said would be assembled in the United States. The computer, scheduled for release this year, looks like a metal cylinder — a big change from the original rectangular tower. This was the first big upgrade for the desktop in three years.

It also unveiled new MacBook Airs, which it said would have enough battery life to last all day. The 11-inch version has nine hours of battery life and the 13-inch version has 12 hours, according to Mr. Schiller. Both versions start shipping immediately.

“You can watch the entire trilogy of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” on a single charge, Mr. Schiller said.

Apple also previewed its next Mac operating system, called OS X Mavericks. (The name is the first in a new theme, California, for Apple’s operating systems, after years of naming them for big cats. Mavericks is a reference to a major surf spot in California.) The new system includes some minor improvements, like the ability to tag documents to find them more easily. An urgent document can be tagged “Important,” for example, and can be quickly found in the operating system’s navigation window in a section labeled Important.

The hardware and software upgrades come at a crucial moment for in the competitive mobile market. One of Apple’s chief rivals, Samsung Electronics, has released several compelling smartphones and tablets over the last two years. And Google has gradually bulked up the Android software that runs on Samsung’s phones with powerful Internet services.

But Apple is, by some measures, still leading the mobile industry. The iPhone 5 is the best-selling smartphone in the world. Samsung Electronics sells the most phones over all because it sells multiple smartphones at different sizes and prices, whereas Apple has released one new iPhone a year.
[Time 6 Ends, 947 Words]

Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/technology/apple-unveils-new-look-for-mobile.html?src=me

1m35s 2m36s 2m27s 2m28s 1m51s obstacle ： 5m26s

olivia瓜瓜

PART I：SPEED

Article 1: Check the title later
The Globally Integrated Enterprise
[Time 1]
      The multinational corporation (MNC), often seen as a primary agent of globalization, is taking on a new form, one that is promising for both business and society. From a business perspective, this new kind of enterprise is best understood as "global" rather than "multinational."
      The corporation has evolved constantly during its long history. The MNC of the late twentieth century had little in common with the international firms of a hundred years earlier, and those companies were very different from the great trading enterprises of the 1700s. The type of business organization that is now emerging -- the globally integrated enterprise -- marks just as big a leap.
      Many parties to the globalization debate mistakenly project into the future a picture of corporations that is unchanged from that of today or yesterday. This happens as often among free-market advocates as it does among people opposed to globalization. But businesses are changing in fundamental ways -- structurally, operationally, culturally -- in response to the imperatives of globalization and new technology. As CEO and chair of the board of IBM, I have observed this within IBM and among our clients. And I believe that rather than continuing to focus on past models, regulators, scholars, nongovernmental organizations, community leaders, and business executives would be best served by thinking about the global corporation of the future and its implications for new approaches to regulation, education, trade, and commerce.
CORPORATE EVOLUTION
      In its early forms, the corporation was a creature of the state. Governments chartered and sanctioned corporations to perform specific duties on behalf of the nation and its rulers. This changed somewhat during the nineteenth century, when the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries granted company owners limited liability, and corporations gained a more liberated status as independent "legal persons."
(302)
Source:Foreignaffairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61713/samuel-j-palmisano/the-globally-integrated-enterprise

Article 2: Check the title later
Enterprise Practices Ignite Global Demand for Network Access Control Solutions, Finds Frost & Sullivan
NAC's ability to meet security needs in a dynamic network and business environment is revitalizing the market
[Time 2]
        Network access control (NAC) solutions – previously considered too complex, incomplete or inflexible – have evolved into a powerful and valuable security tool for enterprises globally. With its ability to address the security challenges stemming from rapidly changing network technologies and business practices, NAC installations will quickly gather pace. Financial organizations and federal government agencies will be chief adopters.
      New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.networksecurity.frost.com), Analysis of the Global Network Access Control Market, finds that the NAC market earned revenues of $235.5 million in 2012 and estimates this to reach $670.7 million in 2017.
      If you are interested in more information on this research, please send an e-mail to Mireya Espinoza, Corporate Communications, at mireya.espinoza@frost.com, with your full name, company name, job title, telephone number, company e-mail address, company website, city, state and country.
      Enterprise policies such as the bring-your-own-device (BYOD), which allows employees to use personal smartphones, laptops and tablets on the corporate network, have heightened network security concerns. NAC solutions offer comprehensive visibility and control over all devices connected to the network, whether physical, virtual, cloud-based, wired, wireless or remote.
      "Apart from resolving the immediate BYOD challenge, NAC provides comprehensive network management and policy enforcement capabilities that ensure the security of next-generation technology and business practices," said Frost & Sullivan Network Security Industry Analyst Chris Rodriguez. "The availability of advanced NAC solutions that can integrate with other technologies, such as intrusion prevention systems, next-generation firewalls, and security information event management tools, will add to market demand."
(247)

[Time 3]
       Since NAC vendors have invested heavily to address problems like product complexity and unmet endpoint requirements found in earlier versions, current products are ultra-scalable, flexible, easy-to-deploy, and offer excellent integration and support. While these features have given a boost to market revenues, lingering misconceptions that the technology retains previous limitations can rein in potential.
      NAC providers must educate customers and partners on the value of next-generation systems to widen market scope. Creating a broad NAC value proposition will be a crucial differentiating factor for solution providers, mainly among midsize end-users.
      "The next generation of NAC solutions will be expected to optimize and automate essential IT and security processes, including IT governance, risk management, compliance requirements, and guest management," asserted Rodriguez. "To gain market share, solution vendors must design and implement market strategies, product roadmaps, and acquisition plans immediately."
     The NAC technology resurgence will invariably cause several large competitors to enter the market. These firms face high entry barriers and may need to scout for partnerships and acquisitions to be successful.
      Analysis of the Global Network Access Control Market is part of the Network Security Technologies Growth Partnership Service program. Frost & Sullivan's related research services include:
•        Analysis of the Global Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) Market
•        Analysis of the Global Unified Threat Management (UTM) Market
•        Analysis of the Global Mobile Endpoint Security Market
•        Analysis of the Global Enterprise Firewall Market
      All research services included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants.
(249)

[Time 4]
About Frost & Sullivan
      Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants.
      Our "Growth Partnership" supports clients by addressing these opportunities and incorporating two key elements driving visionary innovation: The Integrated Value Proposition and The Partnership Infrastructure.
•       The Integrated Value Proposition provides support to our clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation including: research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation and implementation.
•       The Partnership Infrastructure is entirely unique as it constructs the foundation upon which visionary innovation becomes possible. This includes our 360 degree research, comprehensive industry coverage, career best practices as well as our global footprint of more than 40 offices.
      For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies?
(180)
Source:Finance.Yahoo
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/enterprise-practices-ignite-global-demand-155900553.html

Article 3: Check the title later
Developing global leadership
How IBM engages the workforce of a globally integrated enterprice
[Time 5]
      With rampant change seemingly on all fronts, do your employees and leaders have what it takes to compete on a global stage that places a premium on adaptable expertise?
Most organizations can envision the rewards of integrating global teams while accommodating local differences, but that's only part of the puzzle. What concrete actions can help transform your organizational culture in ways that let you tackle the challenges and grasp the opportunities of globalization?
      With global integration more important than ever, the management philosophy is changing at IBM and many other leading organizations in order to support it. So, how has IBM progressed in becoming a globally integrated enterprise (GIE)? Today, it offers more opportunities for more employees to acquire skills and global leadership experiences, as well as the means to work across the enterprise to better understand various national priorities and thus grow the business.
      In January 2008 Chairman Sam Palmisano challenged a small group of senior leaders to address specific challenges and opportunities related to IBM becoming a GIE and enabling the benefits for our clients and their organizations. The team's mission is to create an environment that nurtures and grows "global IBMers."
Central to the team's strategy is engaging employees at all career stages. Progress toward fully realizing the potential of the GIE model has come by using an integrated approach that centers on the execution of three key actions:
•        Grow locally and globally via a consistent methodology – Align business strategies with national priorities and societal goals, build local expertise and expand market relevance.
•        Develop leadership – Provide more employees with opportunities to enhance their skills, and offer more varied global experiences earlier in careers.
•        Enable the GIE vision – Accelerate enterprise-wide collaboration and an organizational culture based on shared values.
(291)
Source:IBM
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/gbs-integrated-enterprise-workforce.html

PART II：OBSTACLE


Article 4: Check the title later
No, the Lululemon CEO Didn’t Get Fired for See-Through Yoga Pants

      Earlier this year, yoga-wear company Lululemon had to initiate a massive recall of its popular luon yoga pants, which failed to fulfill one of the main duties of pants: opacity. The see-through-pants debacle cost the Vancouver-based firm an estimated $67 billion in sales, and gave the press enough material for headline puns to last a lifetime.
      So when it was announced Monday that Lululemon CEO Christine Day would be stepping down from the top job, many assumed that it was a result of the costly recall. Despite protestations from the company, news outlets from CNN to the Consumerist linked the departure to the see-through-pants fiasco.
      But investors were telling a different story, as Lululemon shares fell 12% in after-hours trading following the news. In fact, for many observers, the recall episode just reinforced Day’s competence. After the news of the malfunction spread, Day moved quickly to recall product and fired the companies Chief Product Officer Sheree Waterson. As retail analyst Patty Edwards of Trutina Financial told Forbes, “They handled the whole situation incredibly well.”
      So if Day wasn’t forced out because of the recall, why is she leaving? Few companies in the world have succeeded as well as Lululemon has during Day’s five-and-a-half-year tenure. The company’s stock has risen in value from under $4 per share in March of 2009 to a high of more than $80 before Day’s resignation. At the same time, Lululemon was able to aggressively grow its total number of stores, which according to Morningstar sat at 186 by the end of 2012, up from a single outlet ten years before. And while much of Lululemon’s revenue growth has come from this rapid expansion of stores, its not been a slouch when it comes same-stores sales, which have grown at a double-digit pace for much of Day’s tenure.
      With this kind of track record it would seem very odd if Day is leaving under anything but her own accord. (It should be noted that a CEO jumping ship when things are going so well is a little weird too.) Regardless of the reason behind Day’s departure, it’s critical to the firm’s fortunes going forward that whoever replaces Day will be able to continue her winning formula.
And what exactly is this formula? In an era in which traditional retail has been squeezed by the continued growth of online commerce, Lululemon has succeeded by not just selling yoga pants, but an image, a lifestyle, and a unique shopping experience. Yoga enthusiasts are drawn to the discipline for its spiritual and physical benefits, but also for the sense of community it provides. Lululemon pounced on this idea, created a store environment that acts as an extension of that community.
      Lululemon sales associates are called “educators.” And the firm invests heavily in their training so that when a customer enters the store, she feels that she is interacting with a knowledgeable member of her own community, rather than someone who’s hawking them goods. This is exactly the same strategy that the Apple store has deployed with such success. In a world where one can buy nearly any product cheaply and easily online, companies must justify the high cost of physical stores, and companies like Apple and Lululemon have done just that by selling an experience and an image along with their goods.
      And while this culture which has brought Lululemon such success wasn’t Christine Day’s creation — founder Chip Wilson should get the lion’s share of the credit here — Day is the one who successfully scaled it up from a regional sporting goods store to a national powerhouse. Surely Day’s 20 years as an executive at Starbucks taught her something about how to expand a retail chain while maintaining a unique culture. Whomever is brought in to replace Day is not only going to need the yoga-specific expertise to lead a “lifestyle company” such as Lululemon, she’ll also need an understanding of international markets as the firm begins to expand overseas, and the operational expertise to run a global supply chain.
      So while the exact reason for Day’s departure may be a bit of mystery, the reason Wall Street was upset about it is pretty clear. Few CEOs have had the kind of five year run that Day has just experienced during boom times, and she did it in the midst of the worst recession in generations. So while recalling a bunch of see-through pants may make great fodder for a joke, Day’s performance as CEO was certainly not. And the board of Lululemon will have its work cut out for it finding her replacement.
(765)
Source:Time
http://business.time.com/2013/06/14/no-the-lululemon-ceo-didnt-get-fired-for-see-through-yoga-pants/
1m55s
1m38S
1m59s
1m05s
1m36S

obstacle ：
the first time : 4m29s

                   main idea ：yoga wear company L‘s recall it's product pants,then it's ceo and so ？
                                  the L compeany in its store ,it not only sell the product ,but also sell a image or a community life style,
                                  and the sales person  must be trained  to be knowledgeable to talk with consumers,as Apple'store do.  

i decide to try once more ...
the second time:3m company 26s
                  main idea :yoga wear company recall it's pants because it is'nt have the duty of XXX. ensuing, the company's CEO have to step down.  
                                  but when we look at the database ,it's easy to find that this threat situation is dealed with well ,and the stock price roar high ,so why the ceo step d own?
                                  since this ceo take up this company, everthing is good, is not only sell  product ,but sell an image ,a life style and an woderful experience.  it's store always give the consumers a feeling that he just enter a community, when he or she talk to a saleaperson just as tallk to his community member,and so on, give  the consumers unique experience..   

  

olivia瓜瓜

ART I: SPEED】
  
Article 1: How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading's Rise and Fall
（前面部分文章内容省略）
【TIME 1】
The definition of high-frequency trading (HFT) varies, depending on whom you ask. Essentially, it’s the use of automated strategies to churn through large volumes of orders in fractions of seconds. Some firms can trade in microseconds. (Usually, these shops are trading for themselves rather than clients.) And HFT isn’t just for stocks: Speed traders have made inroads in futures, fixed income, and foreign currencies. Options, not so much.
Back in 2007, traditional trading firms were rushing to automate. That year, Citigroup (C) bought ATD for $680 million. Swanson, then 40, was named head of Citi’s entire electronic stock trading operation and charged with integrating ATD’s systems into the bank globally.
By 2010, HFT accounted for more than 60 percent of all U.S. equity volume and seemed positioned to swallow the rest. Swanson, tired of Citi’s bureaucracy, left, and in mid-2011 opened his own HFT firm. The private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures gave him tens of millions to open a trading shop, which he called Eladian Partners. If things went well, TCV would kick in another multimillion-dollar round in 2012. But things didn’t go well. For the first time since its inception, high-frequency trading, the bogey machine of the markets, is in retreat. According to estimates from Rosenblatt Securities, as much as two-thirds of all stock trades in the U.S. from 2008 to 2011 were executed by high-frequency firms; today it’s about half. In 2009, high-frequency traders moved about 3.25 billion shares a day. In 2012, it was 1.6 billion a day. Speed traders aren’t just trading fewer shares, they’re making less money on each trade. Average profits have fallen from about a tenth of a penny per share to a twentieth of a penny.
【TIME 1 ENDS - 301 WORDS】
（中间部分文章内容省略）
【TIME 2】
One of HFT’s objectives has always been to make the market more efficient. Speed traders have done such an excellent job of wringing waste out of buying and selling stocks that they’re having a hard time making money themselves. HFT also lacks the two things it needs the most: trading volume and price volatility. Compared with the deep, choppy waters of 2009 and 2010, the stock market is now a shallow, placid pool. Trading volumes in U.S. equities are around 6 billion shares a day, roughly where they were in 2006. Volatility, a measure of the extent to which a share’s price jumps around, is about half what it was a few years ago. By seeking out price disparities across assets and exchanges, speed traders ensure that when things do get out of whack, they’re quickly brought back into harmony. As a result, they tamp down volatility, suffocating their two most common strategies: market making and statistical arbitrage.
Market-making firms facilitate trading by quoting both a bid and a sell price. They profit off the spread in between, which these days is rarely more than a penny per share, so they rely on volume to make money. Arbitrage firms take advantage of small price differences between related assets. If shares of Apple (AAPL) are trading for slightly different prices across any of the 13 U.S. stock exchanges, HFT firms will buy the cheaper shares or sell the more expensive ones. The more prices change, the more chances there are for disparities to ripple through the market. As things have calmed, arbitrage trading has become less profitable.
To some extent, the drop in volume may be the result of high-frequency trading scaring investors away from stocks, particularly after the so-called Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, when a big futures sell order filled by computers unleashed a massive selloff. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 600 points in about five minutes. As volatility spiked, most high-frequency traders that stayed in the market that day made a fortune. Those that turned their machines off were blamed for accelerating the selloff by drying up liquidity, since there were fewer speed traders willing to buy all those cascading sell orders triggered by falling prices.
【TIME 2 ENDS - 378 WORDS】
（中间部分文章内容省略）
【TIME 3】
Europeans are already clamping down on speed traders. France and Italy have both implemented some version of a trading tax. The European Commission is debating a euro zone-wide transaction fee.
In the U.S., Bart Chilton, a commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has discussed adding yet more pressure. At the Boca conference the evening after the meeting took place, sitting at a table on a pink veranda, he explained his recent concern. According to Chilton, the CFTC has uncovered some “curious activity” in the markets that is “deeply disturbing and may be against the law.” Chilton, who calls the high-frequency traders “cheetahs,” said the CFTC needs to rethink how it determines whether a firm is manipulating markets.
Under the CFTC’s manipulation standard, a firm has to have a large share of a particular market to be deemed big enough to engage in manipulative behavior. For example, a firm that owns 20 percent of a company’s stock might be able to manipulate it. Since they rarely hold a position longer than several seconds, speed traders might have at most 1 percent or 2 percent of a market, but due to the outsize influence of their speed, they can often affect prices just as much as those with bigger footprints—particularly when they engage in what Chilton refers to as “feeding frenzies,” when prices are volatile. “We may need to lower the bar in regard to cheetahs,” says Chilton. “The question is whether revising that standard might be a way for us to catch cheetahs manipulating the market.”
【TIME 3 ENDS - 271 WORDS】

【TIME 4】
Recently the CFTC has deployed its own high-tech surveillance system, capable of viewing market activity in hundredths of a second, and also tracing trades back to the firms that execute them. This has led the CFTC to look into potential manipulation in the natural gas markets and review something called “wash trading,” where firms illegally trade with themselves to create the impression of activity that doesn’t really exist.
In May, Chilton proposed a .06¢ fee on futures and swaps trades. The tax is meant to calm the market and fund CFTC investigations. Democrats in Congress would go further. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio want a .03 percent tax on nearly every trade in nearly every market in the U.S.
As profits have shrunk, more HFT firms are resorting to something called momentum trading. Using methods similar to what Swanson helped pioneer 25 years ago, momentum traders sense the way the market is going and bet big. It can be lucrative, and it comes with enormous risks. Other HFTs are using sophisticated programs to analyze news wires and headlines to get their returns. A few are even scanning Twitter feeds, as evidenced by the sudden selloff that followed the Associated Press’s hacked Twitter account reporting explosions at the White House on April 23. In many ways, it was the best they could do.
【TIME 4 ENDS - 232 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/how-the-robots-lost-high-frequency-tradings-rise-and-fall#p4


  
Article 2: S&P's Latest Delusion: It’s 'Increasingly Clear' Banks Won't Get Bailouts
By Nick Summers | June 11, 2013
(Check the title later)
【TIME 5】
Standard & Poor’s (MHP), saying that it is “increasingly clear” that the government may not bail out big banks in another crisis, downgraded JPMorgan Chase’s (JPM)credit rating outlook this morning to “negative,” bringing it into line with seven other key financial institutions.
Since the bank rescues of 2008, investors have assumed that the United States government and others around the world won’t let banks fail, lest they bring the economy down with them. That’s more or less still the consensus. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-La.) introduced a bill in April on the theory that the biggest legislation to come out of the crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act, hasn’t adequately solved the problem of “Too Big To Fail.” Bloomberg View argues that the largest U.S. banks get a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion a year because of this perception, realized in the form of lower borrowing costs.
S&P apparently sees things differently. The ratings agency cited “the evolving nature of extraordinary government support” in docking its outlook on JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets. “We believe it is becoming increasingly clear that holding company creditors may not receive extraordinary government support in a crisis,” the agency wrote. Specifically, S&P said it will review the progress regulators have made towards their goal of an “orderly liquidation authority.” That refers to a plan under Dodd-Frank in which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation takes over a failing bank and methodically works through its shareholders and creditors.
S&P also revised its outlook on the long-term rating of the United States on June 10: from negative up to stable. The agency had downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to the second-tier AA+ in August 2011, adding to a short-term panic in the markets. Stocks have gone on a tear since that seemingly scary moment, with the S&P 500-stock index gaining 17 percent; investors mostly ignored S&P’s announcement on Tuesday. As of midday, shares of JPMorgan were down about 1 percent.
【TIME 5 ENDS - 352 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-11/s-and-ps-latest-delusion-it-s-increasingly-clear-banks-wont-get-bailouts#r=hp-ls


【PART II: OBSTACLE】
  
Article 3: When Bailouts Make Moral and Economic Sense
By Daniel Friedman & Daniel McNeill | Jun 11, 2013
(Check the title later)
【WARM UP - INTRODUCTION】
Effective or not, bailouts somehow seem unjust. Why use taxpayer money to save the companies that actually caused the meltdown, the banks that made the reckless loans, and insurance companies that wrote too many credit-default swaps? More broadly, why save the state and local governments that offered overly generous pensions? Or auto companies too fat and lazy to match foreign competitors? They deserve to suffer the consequences of their behavior.
Let’s start with the word “bailout.” To most laypeople, it suggests a gift to a giant, inefficient, highly connected octopus. But bailouts are typically investments: loans or purchases. In 1980, the U.S. government bailed out Chrysler with a $1.5 billion loan and earned acid criticism, mostly from liberals. But by 1983, Chrysler had paid it back and, with interest and stock warrants, the government made a $660 million profit. Taxpayers spent less overall, and the nation saved jobs. So these companies often pay for the lifesaver we throw them.
More basically, the trouble is that we don’t live in Adam Smith’s village. We live in a much larger world.
Take American International Group Inc. The mammoth insurer had links everywhere. On Feb. 28, 2008, it had branches in 130 countries and received half of its revenue from overseas. Its assets exceeded $1 trillion and its stock sold for $50.15. Yet for an insurance company it showed breathtaking disregard for risk. In August 2007, Joseph Cassano, head of the unit that made the fateful CDS deals, said, “It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.”
【288 WORDS】

【OBSTACLE】
Facing Bankruptcy

In late 2008, AIG faced death from “those transactions” and begged for help. The government could have punished it and let it succumb, but the harm would have been global. AIG owed money everywhere, and its bankruptcy could have brought surprising creditors, like the supposedly safe money-market funds, to their knees and spurred further panic.
Yet most AIG divisions earned a profit. So to keep this crumbling tower upright, the U.S. government pumped $182.5 billion into it and took 77.9 percent of its stock. The gamble seemed hazardous, since at one point its stock fell to about $1 a share. And it was the most hated bailout, partly because AIG went on to shower millions in bonuses on executives who had caused the fiasco.
But the strategy had key advantages. For instance, the government was buying inexpensively, when most investors thought the company mortally ill. And it could be patient. It didn’t need repayment at once. According to one analysis, by 2012 the U.S. government had earned all its money back and made a profit of $15 billion, and it still owned 16 percent of a company whose stock was selling for about $34.
Similarly, with the banking system, the most direct strategy would have been to take control of the most overleveraged big banks, fire the top executives, strip out the toxic assets and liquidate them slowly, and spin off new banks with cleansed balance sheets. This approach worked well in the U.S. savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s and more recently for banks in Scandinavia. Taxpayers ended up paying relatively little, and the economy suffered minimal damage.
However, like all investments, bailouts don’t always turn a profit. The Treasury gave the big banks about $230 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and has received about $255 billion, for a gain of $25 billion. However, the smaller banks still owe some $15 billion, and overall the public may never get the full $700 billion back from TARP. But its cost will be far less than pundits originally warned.

Saving Goliaths

So we have to counter the moral impulse to pull down irresponsible goliaths with the economic -- and ultimately moral -- benefits of saving them. After a financial crash, well-targeted bailouts and stimulus spending can hasten repair of the torn network. They can keep the economy stronger, spare the hardship of lost jobs, and earn money for taxpayers. The moral reaction, often manipulated to political advantage, hinders such repair work and prolongs the suffering.
The government can respond by educating the public about the nature of bailouts and thus help overcome the sense that they are ripping money from citizens’ paychecks to cushion fat cats from their blunders. This task may be difficult, but even so, Barack Obama’s administration proved deficient in it. Indeed, in the 2010 midterm elections, the moral backlash fueled the Tea Party and made further stimulus impossible. Repair of the financial system then had to proceed slowly, using awkward indirect subsidies.
The problems in the financial sector begin with bad promises at the base of the mortgage pyramid. A mortgage is a promise of monthly payments or an early repayment in full. That pledge is good as long as the owner can sell the house for more than the remaining principal balance of the mortgage. But when she no longer can -- when she owes more than the house is worth -- the promise is in jeopardy. She may do better by defaulting. And after 2007, falling home prices in much of Florida, California and elsewhere pulled millions of homeowners “underwater.” Monthly payments stopped from those who lost their jobs or were never able to pay to begin with.
But here is the interesting and important question: What about the underwater homeowners who can make the monthly payments? The value of a good credit rating and the possibility of a rebound in house prices might make it financially advantageous for them to keep paying on homes that are worth only slightly less than the value of their mortgage. At some point, however, it may make bottom-line sense to walk away from the loan.

Foreclosure Threat

The specter of massive foreclosures worried both politicians and economists. As a result, the Obama administration offered many programs to renegotiate distressed mortgages, some carved out of TARP funds and others created separately.
And that raised questions. Is it moral to use taxpayer money to ease the mortgages of people who should have understood and avoided them in the first place? Doesn’t every homeowner take a risk that the property’s value will decrease?
There is a moral tension here. On the one hand, most of us feel a desire to aid others in distress. On the other, we have homeowners with varied levels of culpability and merit -- from the “good people” who received typical mortgages and wound up underwater anyway, to those who trusted lying agents and signed mortgages with nasty provisions they didn’t know about, to those who lied to get mortgages they couldn’t pay back. The weights you place on helping out versus punishing in each case reflects your moral attitude.
But here, too, we have to be careful not to let our moral instincts outweigh good policy. So what are the economic dimensions of this situation?
Businesses routinely walk away from contracts when it is more profitable to, and we hear no uproar about it. Moreover, the law imposes no punitive damages on anyone breaking a contract (in most cases). If you default, you pay only for the harm you cause, and the courts pass no moral judgment on you. The rationale is that our economy ultimately benefits, since business moves faster and more nimbly.
Homeowners whose mortgages are sufficiently underwater are in a similar situation. By defaulting, they can enjoy living in a home at lower cost, even taking into account the impact on their personal credit rating and the loss of the tax advantages from home ownership. And, they may argue, what’s the harm to anyone else?
But this dynamic changes when a tide of defaults looms. The more defaults, the more foreclosures, and they bring down the price of all homes nearby. If foreclosures are nationwide, people’s wealth drops significantly. They can’t get home-equity mortgages, for instance. At the same time, as housing prices fall, owners get deeper underwater and default looks more and more appealing. So while an individual default here and there does not affect society much, a rash of them does. Yet if you lighten too many mortgage burdens, as the Obama administration proposed to do, you lower income for the banks and make them less likely to lend. And that damage radiates, too.

Default Decisions

So what actually happened?
Intriguingly, despite the dire predictions, most underwater homeowners chose not to default. Recent research suggests that the reasons were mainly moral. Many homeowners apparently didn’t want the guilt and shame from skipping out on the deal. Perhaps, too, they didn’t want to hurt their neighbors by abandoning their current home and contributing to neighborhood blight.
At the same time, the federal aid programs had few takers. For instance, the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, announced in February 2009, sought to help as many as 9 million homeowners to avoid foreclosure. However, far less than 10 percent have received any substantial relief, while about 4 million people lost their homes to foreclosure from 2007 to early 2012. And many of those losses have been processed improperly, in some cases fraudulently, to the banks’ advantage.
These foreclosure problems are doubtless due partly to the complexities higher up the food chain. But we share the opinion of many commentators that the larger problem is political. The financial industry spends more money on lobbying and campaign contributions than any other industry except health care, and it seems to get an excellent return on its investment. The industry opposed the mortgage-renegotiation programs, and then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did little to get them off the ground.
【OBSTACLE ENDS - 1365 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg

第一篇：差两行
第二篇：差八行
第三篇：差两行
第四篇：差一行
第五篇：2分钟

越障：8分13s 。 看不懂，再看一遍试试。。
第二遍：9分30s' 基本知道在讲什么东东了，明天加油