【Native Speaker每日综合训练—34系列】【34-10】文史哲

pennyz

Stay tuned to our latest post! Follow us here---> http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

Part I: Speaker

Breaking Bad Habits

Counselor: Welcome everybody. You’ve all joined this support group because you have some bad habits that you’d like to break. Would anyone like to introduce themselves and tell us abouttheir bad habit?

Stu: Uh yeah, I’m Stu and my wife signed me up for this supportgroup because she says I have some really bad habits. One of my worst is my nail biting.You can see that they’re pretty ragged.

Counselor: Thank you, Stu. Is there anyone else...?

Stu: Oh yeah, I also smack my gum.That drives my wife crazy, so I try not to do it in her presence.

Counselor: Well, thanks for sharing,Stu. If we could move on to...

Stu: I also tend to tap my fingers and crack my joints,which my wife says is really annoying, though her hair twirlingis prettyannoying to me.

Counselor: Stu? Let’s let a few other people...

Stu: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention what my wife says is mymost annoying bad habit.

Counselor: What is that?

Stu: I tend to interrupt people in conversation.

Counselor: Really? I hadn’t noticed.

Script byDr. Lucy Tse

Source: ESLPOD

http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=14904759

[Rephrase 1,18:05]

pennyz

Part II: Speed

Kissing Language Barriers Goodbye

Google is paving the way for the universal voice translator, formerly a thing of science fiction. But will they actually help us communicate?

By Travis M. Andrews

[Time 2]

For a long time, the universal translator has been a pop culture obsession. Star Trek presents it as a handheld machine, resembling a microphone, that can translate most languages immediately. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy boasts a Babel fish, a creature that, when stuck inside one’s ear, offers instant translation of any language in the galaxy.

So it should come as no surprise that present-day humans are trying to create a device that works just as well. Dozens of translation smartphone apps exist, but most translate words on a simple, one-to-one basis; a user types or speaks a word and the app bounces back with a translation.  Now, the goal, and the real monetary windfall, is for engineers and entrepreneurs to make it possible for two people to converse in different languages, while a small device spits out translations in real time.

Traditional Voice Translators

On a trip to Greece, English-speaking Andrew Lauder fell ill.

“I went to the pharmacy, and they couldn’t understand any English, so I got no meds,” says Lauder, CEO of Vocre Translate. The drug labels were quite literally Greek to him. Language barriers are common for world travelers. In a foreign country, small transactions like buying medicine or getting directions—another difficulty Lauder faced— become herculean tasks.

When he returned stateside, Lauder created Vocre Translate, a voice and text translation app, that like other apps including SayHi Translate, use a traditional model in which a word translates directly to another word. Say “Hello,” and the smartphone or tablet chirps back an automated “Hola.” “Goodbye” becomes “Sayonara.” And so on, much like a text translator.

To create the simple audio translation, the creators of these apps needed data. Vocre pulled its information from public domain recordings and documents, such as old films or public hearings. “We basically begged a voicemail transcription service to let us use their cloud for speech recognition,” says SayHi CEO Lee Bossier.

Once the engineers had audio and text data, they paired the audio and text, word for word. Voice recognition software recognizes “cheese” and converts it into text. That’s converted into French, and the app finds the French pronunciation for “fromage.”

That said, if a user cheekily calls something “cheesy,” the translator doesn’t work as well, because spoken language isn’t nearly as static as written language. Cadence, slang, inflection, pronunciation, dialect and conversational flow can change meaning.

At present, both apps take a few seconds to translate, but are no doubt effective, especially in concert with body language, for transactional conversations like ordering a meal. After all, humans have been ordering food in non-native languages for years and always manage to still eat. But they haven’t been able to have in-depth, complex conversations.

With Vocre and SayHi, conversations can stiffly stagger along, but it isn’t the same as chatting in your native language. Google intends to change this entirely.

479 words

[Time 3]

Google’s Approach (Statistical Machine Translation)
When learning a new language in school, we begin with individual vocabulary terms. But language is more fluid—words need context.

“The approach [Google] takes is a more general approach,” says Josh Estelle, a software engineer for Google Translate. “Instead of trying to hardcode all these rules, we try to learn the rules by looking at data.”

The tech company avoids the one-to-one, word-for-word method and instead employs statistical machine translation, looking not at what words mean but how language is modeled, which it learns through data. So, it aims for the forest, not the trees. An English example: we know the definitions of the word “break” and “up.” But the phrase “break up” is not the literal combination of the two words.

Statistical machine translation requires data. Mountains of it. For the method to work, it needs not just the fact that “fromage” is French for cheese but 100 examples of both “fromage” and cheese being used in actual sentences.

Estelle says if an English speaker has two menus, identical save for the fact that one’s printed in English and one in Chinese, “you can probably figure out what the Chinese character is for ‘soup.’” Context is king. But to create that context, you need access to millions of menus, and every other document imaginable.

Which is exactly what Google has. Without the web giant to gather heaps of data, a real-world Babel fish couldn’t exist. It crawls the web and collects everything—text and audio. Then, it feeds this data into algorithms that compare everything to everything else. These comparisons help get to the root of how language naturally works.

“One thing that surprises people when we talk about Translate is our team doesn’t have any linguists on it,” Estelle says. “We’ve launched 71 languages, and I would say our team doesn’t know how to speak the vast majority of them. A human translator is not going to be able to learn all these terms and things as fast as our [data] can learn from the web.”

334 words

[Time 4]

What’s the Point?
Like Google, Facebook sees benefits. Consider the social media site’s own foray into translation.

“The mission of Facebook has been connecting the entire world, and one of the barriers of connecting the world is not everyone speaks the same language,” says Tom Stocky, a director of engineering at Facebook. “On the translation side, I think the really ambitious vision for the future is if you could use Facebook in your native language and interact with any other language.”

This past August, Facebook acquired Jibbigo, a speech-to-speech translation app that’s available for Android and iOS devices.

Keen Facebook users will note that the social site already employs some translation. If you’ve ever had a Spanish post on your English-based page, you’ve immediately been given the opportunity to translate it into your native tongue.

But Stocky sees the voice component as a potential game changer. The rise of smartphones and tablets welcomes a perpetually interconnected world, and the rise of speech recognition software is inviting new means of web interaction. Stocky envisions a future in which users can just speak a command to their smartphones and interact with other users, language differences aside.

“There’s no question that will happen eventually, because the only limitations there are the power of the language engine and of course processing time and processing power,” he says.

Laura Murphy, a professor in the department of global health systems and development at Tulane University and an admitted technology skeptic, questions the value of a universal translator, and not needing to know more than one language.

She thinks the device could be somewhat useful with travel, business and international relations but not groundbreaking. At a certain level, we already have translators (people) in place, and most who work in foreign relations know the appropriate languages. A device, Murphy believes, could have negative consequences.

“I think it can make people lazy,” Murphy says. Translating languages can be mentally challenging by forcing the brain—especially one that knows more than two languages—to work in a different way, but the exercise is rewarding, nonetheless. The brain pulls from a place of linguistic empathy that even the finest voice translator could never reach.

While this universal communication could be a positive, Murphy acknowledges, “it might lead to people thinking they’re communicating when they’re not.” Culture is not always completely embodied in language (take sarcasm, for example), and communication is not always about the information being passed.

407 words

[The rest]

When Can We Expect to See This Technology?
“In 2005, it took us 40 hours to translate 1,000 sentences,” Estelle says, of Google. “Today, we translate the equivalent of 1,000 sentences every 10 milliseconds.”

As Richard Anderson famously says in the 1970s TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, “We have the technology.” Now it’s just about waiting for the collecting and analyzing of data. How long that will take remains unknown, according to Estelle. But cautious estimates put such a device in our hands within a decade.

While app creators like Bossier or giant companies like Google and Facebook don’t want to build their own versions of the Biblical Tower of Babel, it does want to put an end to babbling. It envisions a world where we all communicate, about medicine, about politics, about ideas.

And, that world might not be far off.

144 words

Source:Smithsonian
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/kissing-language-barriers-goodbye-180950310/

The Optimal Office

How better design could fix your workday—and your life

JULIE BECKMAR 19 2014, 9:06 PM ET

[Time 5]

THOUGH THE “OPEN PLAN” MODERN OFFICE, with its sea of desks, might look like the offspring of a newsroom or a trading floor, it can also trace its heritage to 1960s Germany. There, two brothers who worked in their father’s office-furniture business kicked off the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape,” movement, which sought to boost communication and efficiency and de-emphasize status. As the idea took hold in North America in the decades that followed, employers switched from traditional offices with one or two people per room to large, wall-less spaces. By the turn of the century, roughly two-thirds of U.S. workers spent their days in open-plan offices .

But as the layout became commonplace, problems emerged. A 2002 longitudinal study of Canadian oil-and-gas-company employees who moved from a traditional office to an open one found that on every aspect measured, from feelings about the work environment to co-worker relationships to self-reported performance, employees were significantly less satisfied in the open office . One explanation for why this might be is that open offices prioritize communication and collaboration but sacrifice privacy. In 1980, a group of psychology researchers published a study suggesting that this sacrifice might have unintended consequences. They found that “architectural privacy” (the ability to close one’s door, say) went hand in hand with a sense of “psychological privacy” (feeling “control over access to oneself or one’s group”). And a healthy dose of psychological privacy correlated with greater job satisfaction and performance
243 words

[Time 6]

With a lack of privacy comes noise—the talking, typing, and even chewing of one’s co-workers. A 1998 study found that background noise, whether or not it included speech, impaired both memory and the ability to do mental arithmetic, while another study found that even music hindered performance . There’s also the question of lighting. Open offices tend to cluster cubicles away from windows, and a forthcoming study shows that on workdays, employees without windows get an average of 47 fewer minutes of sleep than those with windows, and have worse sleep quality overall . Artificial light has its own downsides. One pair of researchers found that bright overhead light intensifies emotions, enhancing perceptions of aggression and sexiness—which could lead to a lack of focus during meetings if arguments get heated, or co-workers get overheated .

To add another tangle to this knot, different personality types respond differently to the conditions of office life. For example, the study on background music found its negative effects to be much more pronounced for introverts than for extroverts. Even the office coffee machine could be hurting some employees. Although a moderate dose of caffeine was recently found to enhance long-term information retention, caffeine has previously been shown to hinder introverts’ cognitive performance during the workday.

Further complicating matters, cubicle dwellers are forever hunting for ways to improve their office experience. The latest craze is the standing desk, inspired by the widely reported health risks of sitting all day. One study found that people who sat at least six hours a day had a higher risk of premature death than those who sat three hours or fewer—regardless of physical-activity level . But being on one’s feet presents its own health risks: standing for more than eight hours a day has been tied to back and foot pain, as well as preterm birth .

So what’s a research-minded boss to do? Easy: Give employees their own private offices, with plenty of sun, and turn off the overhead lights. Supply the introverts with noise-canceling headphones and decaf, but pump the extroverts full of caffeine and even let them listen to music now and then. And don’t let any of us sit too much—or stand too much. Maybe we can crouch.

379 words

Source:The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/the-optimal-office/358640/

pennyz

Part III: Obstacle



The pope’s message to the president
By E.J. Dionne Jr.

[Paraphrase 7]

President Obama’s first salary as a community organizer was paid by a Catholic group, and his earliest social justice work was rooted in Catholic social doctrine. He identified with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, then Chicago’s archbishop, whose consistent ethic of life encompassed a dedication to the poor, a concern over the human costs of war and opposition to the death penalty.

You could thus imagine that at his meeting with Pope Francis on Thursday, the president was tempted to ask: Why can’t these American bishops get along with me? Or, perhaps more humbly: Holy Father, what can I do to make these guys happy?

It is a sign of how politicized the American Catholic Church has become that its different factions were lobbying hard over the message the bishop of Rome should send after meeting with the president of the United States.

Catholic conservatives hoped that Francis would again condemn abortion by way of upbraiding the pro-choice Obama. They’d like strong language supporting the campaign spearheaded by the more conservative bishops against the contraception mandate in the health-care law.

Catholic progressives were looking for Francis to push the president to move more forcefully against poverty and inequality around the world, not just at home. They want some of the pope’s searing criticisms of global capitalism by way of reminding Obama that the Catholic Church is well to his left on economic matters.

Both sides, in other words, want Francis to bless their own positions inside the U.S. Catholic struggle. The progressives believe they now have a friend in Rome, and conservatives worry the progressives might be right. After all, as Michael Sean Winters pointed out in the National Catholic Reporter, “the American bishops who are most aggressively hostile to Obama are also the American bishops who have been most resistant to Pope Francis.”

But this meeting underscored something else: While Francis has decidedly moved the church back toward the social justice Catholicism with which Obama connected as a young man, Francis’s worldview is plainly not American. Efforts to shoehorn him into our debates have a distorting effect. And the Vatican — itself divided into factions — has other things to think about besides the contention within the U.S. church.

From everything he has said, Francis is, in our terms, a social conservative. Yet the issues about which he feels a genuine sense of urgency involve the hundreds of millions around the globe who suffer from extreme deprivation and oppression. From this standpoint, the political and theological skirmishes that consume so much energy among believers in wealthy countries might seem a form of self-indulgence.

Francis didn’t leave conservative U.S. bishops out in the cold in their contraception battle, as the Vatican statement after the meeting made clear. But it’s difficult to see the pope joining them at the ramparts. The veteran Vatican correspondent John Allen has documented attacks on religious liberty from state-sponsored persecution, including the outright murder of Christians. In light of this, the U.S. uproar over a requirement that contraception be subsidized in health insurance policies seems disproportionate. That’s especially true since the government-led health systems in many predominantly Catholic countries routinely cover contraception.

As for foreign policy, the Vatican has an approach of its own. It has often found itself allied with Obama — for example, on his quest for Middle East peace — but has also opposed him, as when he threatened military retaliation for Syria’s use of chemical weapons . Conservatives have ignored or downplayed the Vatican’s relative dovishness, except when it provided them with another club to use against Obama.

But this highlights the larger truth that Francis defies many currents of American thinking. Francis is anti-consumerist and anti-materialist. That is quite at odds with an American ethos that turns the mall into a religious shrine and shopping into a sacrament. The pope preaches a code of sacrifice that is not widely celebrated in our society outside the realm of military combat. He extols the simple life, a value popular in sections of the environmental movement but not a big seller in a country obsessed with stuff and gadgets.

It would be good if Francis encouraged the parts of the U.S. Catholic leadership most alienated from the president to stop treating this former church employee as an enemy. But the pope’s main job is to pose a radical challenge to our complacency and social indifference. In doing so, he should stir an uneasiness that compels all of us — and that includes Obama — to examine our consciences.

746 words
Source:Washintonpost
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-the-popes-message-to-the-president/2014/03/26/8e52fd10-b50d-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html

pennyz

难得发个喜闻乐见不太难的文史哲，不坐沙发我都不好意思
4:55s
the predsident Obama meet with Pope Francis
the conflicts between the progressive bishop and conservative bishop about this meeting' impact
the progressive is in favor of the president and pope while the conservative are not
but pope don't talk about the things they want to hear,and focus on the proverty and inequality all around the world
pope talk about the policy in america
and also defies many currents of american thinking ,too obesessed with material
pope's idea may compel all of us to examine our consciences

hemodata

睡前一刷居然出来了。。。那作好了再睡觉

speaker: this conversation is between a counselor and a student in a support group, which aims to help people stop their bad habits. The man was the first among the group to introduce himself. He was signed by his wife for his several bad habbits: first, he bits nails. Second, he sometiomes smack his gun. Third, he also makes noises by using his fingers and joints. But the most annoying habit he has, is that he interrupt other people during conversations. However, for the conselor, she didn't notice that the man interrput people because during this conversation he didn't do so. In fact, the counselor interupter the man for several times since she wanted to provide other students a chance to make their self introduction.

wangziann

我一直纳闷，占首页那么兴奋么，感觉还可以哈。。。

Time 1
People share their bad habits on a support group to break it: nail biting, smacking his gum,crack joints, interrupt people in conversation

Time 2:

New creature APP thatcan translate the audio language to another instantly is created by CEO of Vocre Translate who are embarrassed by the language barrierin Greek.

They do it by pairingthe audio and text, translate it and re-pronunciation it in another language.

Time 3

Google try to make more accurate translateaccording to the context base on the data analysis.

Time 4

Some social network site such as Facebookhave already use the translation APP. Someone thinks the rise of speechsoftware is inviting new means of web interaction, but one professor said that itis somewhat useful in certain situation does not mean it isgroundbreaking.

Time 5

The open office prioritize thecommunication and collaboration but sacrifice privacy which may have unintendedconsequence.

Time 6

Boss care about the research should giveemployees their own private offices, with plenty of sun, and turn off theoverhead lights. Supply the introverts with noise-canceling headphones anddecaf, but pump the extroverts full of caffeine and even let them listen tomusic now and then. And don’t let any of us sit too much—or stand too much.
(美好的不存在。。。)

cherry6891

占座~~~~~

Obstacle:5:20

Catholic group’s attitude toward abortion in obamacare--they hope that Francis would again condemn abortion and support contraption mandate in the health-care law.

Time2 3:14

Andrew create a voice translator which can give u text translator on screen. He got the idea after he traveled to Greek where he met problem because of language barrier

Time3 2:09

Google approached a new translator learning the rulers by looking at the date rather than trying to hardcode all the rulers

Time4 2:58

Facebook wants to use the translation to make u interact with any language, however, the only limitation is that the power of the language engine and processing time. Some people think it will people lazy and the translation can not embody attitude or feeling.

Time 5 1:35

Opening office can help to communicate but less privacy

Time6 2;45

Advices to research-minded boss:privacy office with plenty of sunshine, don’t let employee stand or sit for a very long time

铁板神猴

站首页 逼迫作业！
------------------------------------------

Speed
2'30''
1'52''
2'20''
35''
1'30''
2'12''

Obstacle
4'39''

Kissing Language Barriers Goodbye
Time 2
- Tranlators in old times had limits.

- Lauder developed an translator in a traditional way.

Time 3
- Google's data based techs are switched from one to one, word to word method to all of them. It focuses on the forest rather than trees.

The new translator compares thousands and thousands of examples of context to make out the correct results.

Time 4
- Facebook bought a speech company in order to foray into translation. But they expected that the translation future shall be on smartphones and other mobile devices.

- However, experts worried the advanced translating technology might cause people to be lazy to train their brain, unable to feel empathetic to others, and actually be not communicating when they thought so.

The rest
- The time we can expect to see this technology will not be far off.

clairellnnxx

谢谢：）

speaker:
Stu joined a support group to get rid of his bad habits, and he kept talking about his endless bad habits such as taping fingers, cracking his joints, bitting nails and smaking his gum...
sign sb up
nail bitting
smak one's gum: make loud noises and sound while you are chewing your gum.

time2: 3'56''
the invention of voice translator makes communication easier than before when you travel to non english speaking countries,but it still has a long way to go.
time 3:2'21''
google's methoed to develop the voice translator:using mountains of datas to build a vocabulary that words come out  in context.
time4: 3'12''
Facebook employed some translator already to make communication between different languages more convenient.Some professor pointed out that using universal translator could have negative consequence too: making ppl lazy.
time5: 2'06''
the passage talks about a new office style with less wall and more open spaces, the advantage of open-plan office is that it boosts communication and efficiency, however, it sacrifices ppl's privacy too, and these sacrifices have unintended consequences.
time 6:2'30''
the possible consequences of open plan offices:the noise, caffine, light,window...different personalities react differently to the conditions of office life.

ob:6'03''

xiaofan0205

差点赶不上首页

Speaker:
counselor: the person who provides advice to people, trained to help people
support group: group of people who have similar problems or issues
bad habits: things that you do over and over again that are bad for you
to break: to change the bad habits
signed me up: to put someone's name on the list of something, enrolled
nail biting: use you teeth to break the nail
ragged: uneven, not smooth
smack my gum: to make loud sound or noise while you eat your gum
in her presence: face to face
sharing: talk about something with other people
move on to: to go to someone else
tend to tap my fingers: to often to hit your finger on the table or something over and over again
crack my joints: move or bend your knuckles that make a sound
annoying: irritating, bother
hair twirling: to take a small hand of your hair to twist it around your finger, especially when people feel worried
to interrupt: to speak when someone else is still speaking

Time2: 3'47"
Time3: 2'16"
Time4: 2'46"
Nowadays, people want to create a device to make it possible for two people to converse in different languages.
The tech company avoids the one-to-one, word-for-word method and instead employs statistical machine translation, looking not at what words mean but how language is modeled. It requires a lot of data which is exactly what Google has.
Some professor sees the voice component as a potential game changer, others think it can make people lazy and bad for the communication.

Time5: 2'11"
Time6: 3'01"
Nowadays, most workers spent their days in open-plan offices, but researches show that employees were siginificantly less satisfied in the open office.
There are lots of element to influence the job satisfaction and performance such as background noise, music, sun light, caffeine, and the time people sitting or standing.