Adeline的economist阅读分析帖

AdelineShenUID：2630498

A special report on television
Changing the channel

Television is adapting better to technological change than any other media business, says Joel BuddApr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

ONE evening last year Steve Purdham noticed something odd. The flow of data into and out of We7, a British music-streaming website he runs, had abruptly slowed. An hour later it returned to normal. Such a sharp fluctuation usually means a server is malfunctioning—a potentially ruinous problem. But when engineers checked the computer system they found nothing wrong. So what could have happened between 8pm and 9pm on a Saturday night to cause such a sudden drop in use? Suddenly it dawned on Mr Purdham: “Britain’s Got Talent” was on television.
At its peak that show drew 68% of all British TV viewers and notched up the biggest audience for any programme since 2004, when the English football team played Portugal in the European championship. It also turned Susan Boyle, a middle-aged Scot, into an international star. Video of Miss Boyle singing “I Dreamed a Dream” ricocheted around the internet and caught the attention of news outlets. The singer became a fixture of talk shows and tabloid newspapers, which dubbed her “SuBo”. Her first album sold more quickly in America than any other by a female artist since Nielsen Soundscan began tracking music sales in 1991.
When it comes to mobilising a mass audience, nothing can touch television. On February 7th this year 106m Americans watched the New Orleans Saints defeat the more favoured Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. The nation spent more time glued to that one match than it spent on YouTube, the most popular video-streaming website, during the entire month, according to ComScore. Remarkably, television can deliver these huge audiences even though it provides more choice than ever.
In 1992 Bruce Springsteen, a rocker from New Jersey, released a song called “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)”. There are now hundreds of channels. A quick channel-surf through a basic cable-TV package in America turns up a weighty history of the civil war, a South Korean melodrama, a college basketball game, a Hispanic talent show, a congressional hearing, a zombie film, European football, an evangelical sermon and a documentary about a “half-ton teen”. Many more options are available on demand with a few clicks of the remote control. The offerings are decidedly mixed, but there is always something on.
“There are not many genres that are not addressed any more,” says Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom, a media conglomerate. “We try to think of new ones all the time.” And where America has led, others have followed, often much more quickly. Until the early 1990s India had two state-run television channels, Doordarshan 1 and Doordarshan 2, which were best known for their amateurish dramatisations of Hindu epics. It now has more than 600. In Britain the proportion of homes that receive multi-channel television has risen from 31% to 89% in the past ten years.
The box that delivers all this stuff has evolved, too. Televisions used to be squat cubes. Gradually they have flattened and turned into panels, and their screens have become sharper and brighter. They have spread to bedrooms, kitchens and even bathrooms (with heated screens to ward off condensation). The latest devices from Samsung and Sony are as thin as laptop computers. Television has gone online and become mobile. This year it will expand into the third dimension.
Predictions of TV’s imminent demise have come and gone like fast-forwarded advertising breaks. In 1990 George Gilder, an American writer, claimed that by the end of the 20th century traditional television would be extinct because technology would enable consumers to track down programmes that catered to their particular interests. Bass fishermen would watch endless shows about bass fishing. Even the technological futurists found it hard to imagine the explosion of websites, social networking and mobile phones that was to come. Yet these things have not displaced television. Rather, they have squeezed around it.
More of everythingLook at Japan, a country that leads many technological trends. Last year Tokyo residents spent an average of 60 minutes a day at home consuming media on the internet or a mobile phone, up from just six minutes in 2000. But they also spent more time in front of the television: an average of 216 minutes, up from 206 minutes. Among young women, the group that advertisers most want to reach, television-watching went up more steeply. Admittedly their attention was not always fixed on the box. Many teenage girls send text messages on their mobile phones while watching television. “In Japan we like to do two things at the same time,” explains Ritsuya Oku of Dentsu, an advertising agency.
Or take American teenagers. In 2004 the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the average person aged 8-18 was spending almost six-and-a-half hours a day taking in some kind of media—television, films, music, video games and so on. By multitasking, they were able to cram eight-and-a-half hours of media consumption into that time. The researchers concluded that young people were “filled to the bursting point” with media. Whatever, responded their subjects. When the study was repeated in 2009, young Americans were spending more than seven-and-a-half hours with media each day, an hour more than they had done five years earlier (see chart 1). Into that space they packed an astonishing 10 hours and 45 minutes of consumption. Among other things, they were watching more television.

“Report: 90% of waking hours spent staring at glowing rectangles,” read a headline in the Onion, a satirical newspaper, last year. The joke contains a profound truth. Distinctions between glowing and rectangular television sets, computers and mobile phones are gradually disappearing. Televisions have long doubled as monitors for video-game consoles. More recently they became digital radios. Now they are turning into gateways to the internet. People who buy high-end televisions this year will discover that their new toys can obtain all sorts of things, from stock quotes to weather forecasts.
At the same time TV is moving beyond the living room. Many programmes can be viewed on computers, mobile phones and tablet devices like Apple’s iPad. Video-streaming websites are becoming more professional, meaning they are both better designed and contain more proper television. Services like iPlayer, which carries BBC television shows, and Hulu, which distributes programmes from America’s ABC, Fox and NBC, have grown in popularity. At first this success delighted people who earn their living from TV. Gradually they have become more alarmed.
Every media business that the internet has touched so far has come off badly. Recorded music sales have fallen steeply in value since Napster, a file-sharing website, appeared in 1999. The internet has drawn classified advertising away from local and regional newspapers, turning once highly profitable businesses into basket cases. Book publishers have watched helplessly as online retailers and e-readers have driven down prices.
The internet tends to disaggregate media products, breaking music albums into tracks and splitting magazines into their constituent articles. It also disintermediates by bringing content directly to consumers, sometimes by means of piracy. Online, people can pick and choose the content that interests them without paying much for it. One of the most harmful things about the internet as it has evolved in the past few years, says Jeff Bewkes, the boss of Time Warner, one of the world’s biggest media firms, is the assumption that charging for content is hostile to the consumer. As the saying goes, content wants to be free—or, at least, paid for only by advertising. “We already tried that,” says Mr Bewkes. “It was known as the wasteland.”
In 1961 Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told a room full of television executives that they had created a “vast wasteland” of uninspired shows. At that time America had three broadcast networks, which operated on the principle that the least objectionable shows would draw the biggest audiences and the most advertising revenue. As Minow predicted, competition improved matters. In the 1970s cable and satellite television began to spread. New subscription channels like HBO, which had to please viewers rather than advertisers, were able to take risks. Broadcasters raised their game in response.
The result, beginning in the late 1990s and continuing today, has been a golden age for television. It can be argued that Hollywood makes less impressive films these days than it did in the 1970s (or the 1930s), but that is not true of television. Modern TV shows like “The Sopranos”, “The West Wing”, “Mad Men” and “Modern Family” are so superior to what went before—so much better written, better acted and better shot—that they almost seem to belong to a different medium.

Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s boss, fears television will return to the wasteland. The danger is not lack of choice, as Minow found, but a surfeit of choice. So much content will be available on so many digital platforms that audiences will become too small to pay for good programmes. The internet already competes strongly for advertising. In Britain more money is now spent online than on television (see chart 2), although some of this can be blamed on artificial restrictions on TV advertising rates.
Even so, this special report will argue that television’s encounter with technology is turning out quite differently from the experience of other media businesses. Although growing choice and the profusion of platforms is indeed crushing smaller shows, it is helping the biggest ones thrive. Televised sport is stronger than ever. Viewers have embraced some innovations but roundly rejected efforts to transform the living-room set, puzzling and frustrating some of Silicon Valley’s best minds.
Television is not about to suffer the fate of music or newspapers, yet the next few years will be dangerous nonetheless. A handful of upstart websites, with audiences smaller than many channels at the bottom of the programme guides, have already rattled the giant TV industry.

McerosUID：2784917

嗯 可以接着欣赏美文了

ringtailbunnyUID：2579853

这个到底和gre的阅读相似率有多大啊？我准备黄皮做完之后找lsat和gmat的阅读做的，这个的相似率怎么样啊？

AdelineShenUID：2630498

这个到底和gre的阅读相似率有多大啊？我准备黄皮做完之后找lsat和gmat的阅读做的，这个的相似率怎么样啊？
ringtailbunny 发表于 2010-4-30 22:21

可以先作lsat和gmat作为前期训练，如果你有时间的话。

具体可以去看草草的阅读训练那些主题贴~

duijinxiaoziUID：2585955

支持下 Adeline  MM。  
貌似今天还没更新？
我也天天看economist。

duijinxiaoziUID：2585955

回答LS：
我Sci部分必看。
http://www.economist.com/science-technology
其他的部分，感兴趣就看。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

一直在以做实验为借口逃避好多东西
从退6G到春学期考试到走进五月
就像当年把G放在第一位一样
以为做实验很忙很累就应该理所当然地把其他好多事情都过滤
实验的间隙本可以做很多事 至少完成好自己的本职工作
却总是犯懒地看电视聊天水论坛
没有一点好好学习的心思
眼看着二战T的日子越来越近
眼看着二战G的日子也越来越近
没有一点好好弄英语的迹象
整天拿做实验很忙来骗自己 麻痹自己 貌似自己已经很努力了
其实一点也不
只是在为自己的懒散找借口而已
心情时好时坏 太受得失左右 常常摇摆不定 不够乐观洒脱
在经受了一些挫折、批评和自我反思以后
应该好好调整自己的心情来面对新的学期了

想起当年考G的时候天天记录的备考日志
给了自己很多鼓励 于是从今天开始 我要在这里记录我的奋斗日记
要争取不懒散 少抱怨 多做事
要开开心心
要充满期待
要心怀感恩

嗯 好好学英语
在见到Ann之前一定要给她一份满意的托福成绩单
一定要以一种academic的口吻跟她好好交流research的问题
不然怎么对得起爸爸妈妈的投资 怎么对得起Ann的信任和潇雅姐的帮助
接下来的英语学习计划
每天economist真的要坚持下去才好 别再断了
托福考试时间6月26号（当时犹豫了一下，报晚了，囧，离期末考很近）
打算8月中旬在美国完成一次G的机考
所以这两者基本需要一起复习了
阅读是长久逐步提高的事情 所以还是每天看economist吧
跟aw一起练习 每天看文章和写点comments坚持到5月26号
这算是前期热身 因为五月份其他事情还很多 考虑到这个实际情况以及我不是神人
该预留的时间还是要预留
这次一定一定要坚持下来啊  别再半途而废了  不然对不起寄托。。。
嗯 听力的前期热身是每天听真题如果可以的话听读吧
那个时候就是觉得听力听下来基本都懂 没什么问题 以为不需要太多准备
没想到考出来很悲剧 看来听读训练还是有必要的
五月热身阶段每天早上听读一到两小时吧
口语的话老师同学都说我pronunciation不错 关键是要训练短时间内组织语言并加以表达的能力
感觉还是组织语言太慢 一紧张就说啥都不知道了 考试的时候乱的很
热身阶段可以每天拿一套题练练 和听读一起 两个加起来花两个小时吧
毕竟阅读economist和comments加起来如果好好做的话至少也得三个小时
以后尽量提高效率争取两个小时搞定
这样热身阶段的任务就是每天早上听读训练和口语练习
每天抽时间做economist阅读精析和写comments
这样每天大概留出五个小时给英语 作为GT二战的热身阶段
六月作为T的冲刺阶段和G的中期备考阶段 我到时再给出详细的计划 嗯

顺带提一下专业课和research还有应该慢慢着手准备的套磁
专业课不能再像春学期一样基本放羊处理了
尽量不要翘课 上课还是要好好听的 夏学期的几个老师都不错 应该不像春学期某些课那么无聊了
好好听 每次课后好好巩固知识点 该完成的作业好好完成 别总拖着 拖着不是因为忙 只是因为自己懒而已

各种research还是要好好做 接下来要看大量文献 做大量阅读了 一定要好好看 多多思考 别总看了几行就水论坛聊天 这样太没效率 学习的时候就好好学习 聊天的时候就好好聊天 别整的好像天天空虚寂寞的要死一样水论坛 真克制不住就把网断了 或者到没网的地方自习去

文化班的东西已经错过了太多 我是那么珍惜这个集体 不要辜负了这片好天地

过两天Mr.Moore要回来了 应该会有一次跟MSU一些老师和同学的非正式meeting
可能要学很多新的东西 好好面对这个全新的世界 或许就像Mr.Moore说的 能找到我的那个exiciting point

套磁的事情该要慢慢放到日程上来 特别是Ann的文章要好好看 关于PM的research前沿要好好看
这样暑假才会比较容易上手
这个暂且放到15号以后 因为15号有一个结题答辩和一个中期审查答辩
虽然根本到现在都没时间好好弄

Anyway，A ZA A ZA. Fighting!~:loveliness:

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The death penalty
Theirs but to do and dieThe deficiencies of the systemApr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
The Autobiography of an Execution. By David Dow. Twelve; 271 pages; $24.99. Buy from Amazon.com
Last Words of the Executed. By Robert Elder. University of Chicago Press; 304 pages; $22.50 and £14.50. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AMERICA’S fondness for the death penalty is disconcerting—and to no one more than David Dow, whose job is to defend death-row inmates in the most kill-happy state, Texas. Mr Dow’s frank account, “The Autobiography of an Execution”, weaves tales from his often-futile efforts—in which stalling, rather than stopping, his clients’ execution is frequently the only feasible goal—with scenes from his own family life. “We planned the execution around our vacations,” he writes of one of his clients, Henry Quaker.

Quaker’s grim case forms the core of the book. The beneficiary of a life-insurance policy on his family, the jurors are told, he was arrested for shooting his wife, from whom he had recently separated, and two children. Mr Dow is unable to save Quaker, largely because the case was badly mishandled by his initial lawyer, a common predicament for death-row inmates. Mr Dow attends the execution. Of the roughly 100 people on death row he has represented over his career, Mr Dow believes seven were innocent. (To protect his clients’ confidentiality, Mr Dow not only altered names but mixed up the circumstances of many cases that he has worked on. So Quaker’s tale, along with everything else in the book, is a composite of true circumstances, he explains.)

Mr Dow is angry. “I used to support the death penalty. I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is,” he writes. His world is full of public defenders who fail to perform even the most basic duties in court, indifferent judges, cowardly public officials, and an absurdly rigid system which honours the letter of the rules over actual justice.(good sentence)

Mr Dow does not actually like many of his clients. And he points out some sorry truths of the American justice system. As in the Quaker case, Mr Dow generally gets to his clients too late, because the federal courts are loth to(不愿意） go back over the problematic trials of the state courts. His work is gruelling and awful—and then the client dies and the process starts all over again with somebody new.

Knowing something of the deficiencies of the American justice system is useful for leafing through（迅速翻阅） “Last Words of the Executed”, the final statements of hundreds of Americans who have been condemned through the centuries. Robert Elder has organised his book according to the manner of death. There are chapters on hanging; the firing-squad (Utah is due to execute a prisoner in June this way—America’s first such execution since 1996); the gas chamber; the electric chair; and lethal injection (the most common method used, though it once took so long to find a beefy Ohio inmate’s vein that he was granted a break to go to the toilet).

The last words are remarkable for their remorse, humour, hatred, resignation, fear and bravado. “I wish you’d hurry up. I want to get to hell in time for dinner,” a 19th-century Wyoming murderer told his hangman. Some rambled; others were concise. Several blamed the drink; others reasserted innocence, or (especially in recent years) railed against the death penalty. Some accepted their fate. “If I was y’all, I would have killed me. You know?” said a Texan, who had murdered his son’s former girlfriend and her sister, as he readied himself for lethal injection. America’s diverse heritage is stamped even onto its killers’ final moments.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

useful words and expressions:

weave ... from 编织
be loth to...不愿意
leave through 迅速翻阅
lethal injection
disconcerting

comments:

This report tells the lawless system of death penalty in America. Actually in China we consider death panalty as reasonable from the old times to recent days. Maybe that's because we have a strong government and its people always believe that only those who ought to be killed would be killed by the death penalty and most people believe the justice of the system. I am not sure about the situation in China, but from this report we come to know that this system is lawless in America and justice is limited very much. Public defenders fail to perform even the most basic duties in court. Public officials are making indifferent judges. This is an absurdly rigid system which honours the letter of rules over actual justice. In such a case, should death penalty be banned?

As far as I am concerned, the system of death penalty in America should be improved. Actually I support death penalty because I think those who bring great disorder to the society should pay for their mistakes. If the mistake is too serious, say killing many innocent life, the killer should pay by giving his or her own life so that others can be warned and such cases can happen less frequently. It is also a kind of comfort for the family of those victims.

Of course, the Americans need to improve their lawless system of death penalty.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

早上出去吃饭的时候听到很清晰地钢琴声，好怀念啊好怀念，都快有一年没碰钢琴了吧，手都不知道生到什么地步去了...

我竟然舍得过这么久没有钢琴的日子哇

于是突然想起谷大哥曾经对我说的一句话： 梦想会让你失去很多东西。

希望在匆匆赶路的时候，别忘了多看一眼身边美丽的风景，这艰辛路途上陪伴我们的人和事，是比结果更重要的最宝贵的财富。

其实 黑白琴键 音乐 也是我的小小梦想啊...

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Evaluating the Relative Environmental Impact of Countries

The environmental crises currently gripping（吸引注意力的） the planet（grip这个词用的不错，学习之） [1], [2] are the corollary（必然的结果） of excessive human consumption of natural resources [3].

Indeed, there is considerable and mounting（表示多的词可以这么用） evidence that elevated degradation and loss of habitats and species are compromising ecosystem services that sustain the quality of life for billions of people worldwide [1], [4], [5]. Continued degradation of nature despite decades of warning [1], coupled with（外加，加上） the burgeoning human population (currently estimated at nearly 7 billion and projected to reach 9–10 billion by 2050) [1], [6], suggest that human quality of life could decline substantially in the near future. Increasing competition for resources could therefore lead to heightened civil strife and more frequent wars [7]. Continued environmental degradation demands that countries needing solutions be identified urgently so that they can be assisted in environmental conservation and restoration. Identifying those nations whose policies have managed successfully to reduce environmental degradation should be highlighted to inspire other nations to achieve better environmental outcomes for their own long-term prosperity.

Policy makers require good information on which to base their decisions to reduce environmental degradation and restore ecosystems [8]. In the spirit of minimizing carbon emissions [9], environmental performance can be measured via international rankings to provide benchmarks against which improvements can be assessed [8]. Many such rankings exist, such as the City Development Index (CDI), Ecological Footprint (EF), Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), Genuine Savings Index (GSI), Human Development Index (HDI), Living Planet Index (LPI), and the Well-Being Index (WI)（好多指标，大多是知道缩写不知道全名） [reviewed in 8]. However, all such indices have problems associated with their inability to describe the complexity of ‘sustainable’ development, lack of comprehensiveness, and arbitrary or subjective assumptions regarding normalization and weighting [8]. Most indices also incorporate (often arbitrarily) indicators of human health and economic performance, so the emphasis on the environmental component per se is diluted or confounded. Indeed, each set of criteria used to rank nations depends on the particular goal of the ranking itself, the assumptions associated with the data (i.e., precision, robustness, extent), and the hypotheses posed to explain among-nation trends.

Economists and social scientists have attempted to explain trends among countries for various indices of environmental performance based primarily on human population density, wealth and governmental structure and efficacy, with varying results. Perhaps the most controversial is the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis [10] and the theory of ecological modernization [11] which argue that environmental performance and per capita wealth follow a U-shaped relationship among countries. In other words, instead of higher environmental impact associated with increasing wealth and the corollary of higher per capita resource consumption [12]–[15], the EKC predicts that beyond a certain threshold, wealthier societies can reduce environmental degradation via cleaner technologies and higher demand for sustainable behavior from their citizenry [10]. This evidence for the EKC hypothesis is equivocal; some analyses suggest that measures of environmental degradation (i.e., deforestation [16], air and water pollution [11], and number of threatened birds and mammals [17], [18]) increase initially with economic growth, but then decline after a threshold. However, others suggest that increasing economic development leads to higher species endangerment [11], [17], and general levels of species threat [19]. There is also evidence for an interaction between a country's wealth and its rate of deforestation or afforestation – poor countries with little forest cover consume that remaining portion more quickly than do poor countries containing relatively more forests [20].

In addition to metrics of wealth, other indices of socio-economic performance such as human population size and density, and governance quality correlate with environmental performance measures [15], [21]–[25]. Indeed, human population density is positively associated with the number of threatened species per country [11], [18]. Although the influence of governance type and quality on environmental performance is still hotly debated [25], political corruption (the ‘unlawful use of public office for private gain’) [23], [24] is expected to erode environments and exacerbate biodiversity loss [23]. Corruption has been linked to deforestation [20], [25], [26], CO2/NOx emissions, land degradation, organic pollution in water [25] and an index of environmental ‘sustainability’ [27], although others have not found evidence for a relationship between change in natural forest cover and mean governance scores [23].

One of the principal reasons results are inconsistent and the relationship continues to be debated is that the importance of different correlates varies among regions [28], and there are many different methods used and assumptions made regarding metrics and exceptions [8], [11], [15], [25]. Our goal here is to provide a set of simple, yet novel metrics of environmental impact that rank countries by their proportional (relative to resource availability per country) and absolute (total degradation as measured by different environmental metrics) resource consumption, deforestation, pollution and biodiversity loss. These metrics are intended to improve policy and practice in the regions identified as having the poorest environmental performance so that global benefits will arise; we contend that the beneficiaries of policies that our ranking system could influence would be global in extent, such as international trade treaties, carbon taxation, and development aid. We use the unit of ‘country’ as a basis for environmental impact rank because a government's decisions affecting the state of the environment can be realistically best made at this level [29]. We provide different rankings that combine important (and readily available) variables of past and current environmental impact (forest loss, natural habitat conversion to managed/crop/urban uses, marine captures, fertilizer use, water pollution, carbon emissions and species threat), but do not confound environmental performance with indicators of human health (e.g., EPI) or economics (e.g., GSI). Our indices are also transparently and objectively constructed, and are particularly robust to the inclusion/exclusion of component metrics.

Specifically, we aimed to: (i) provide a rank of proportional environmental impact to determine how countries perform with respect to their available resources, (ii) provide a rank of total (absolute) resource use to determine which countries have the highest (and lowest) impact at the global scale, (iii) examine concordance among the different measures of environmental impact within our composite indices to test whether a country's performance is uniform across the environmental spectrum, (iv) determine the correlation between our environmental impact ranks and existing indices of environmental performance; (v) test for correlations between environmental impact ranks and those associated with population size, governance quality and wealth using non-parametric, parametric and structural equation models, and (vi) test the EKC hypothesis that relative environmental impact is nonlinearly related to per-capita wealth.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

CO2 Effects on Plants Increase Global Warming

Sunday, May 2, 2010 Palo Alto, CA—

Trees and other plants help keep the planet cool, but rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are turning down this global air conditioner(不错的比喻）. According to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in some regions more than a quarter of the warming from increased carbon dioxide is due to its direct impact on vegetation. This warming is in addition to carbon dioxide’s better-known effect as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. For scientists trying to predict global climate change in the coming century, the study underscores the importance of including plants in their climate models.

“Plants have a very complex and diverse influence on the climate system,” says study co-author Ken Caldeira of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology. “Plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but they also have other effects, such as changing the amount of evaporation from the land surface. It’s impossible to make good climate predictions without taking all of these factors into account.”

Plants give off water through tiny pores in their leaves, a process called evapotranspiration that cools the plant, just as perspiration cools our bodies. On a hot day, a tree can release tens of gallons of water into the air, acting as a natural air conditioner for its surroundings. The plants absorb carbon dioxide for photosynthesis through the same pores (called stomata). But when carbon dioxide levels are high, the leaf pores shrink. This causes less water to be released, diminishing the tree’s cooling power.

The warming effects of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas have been known for a long time, says Caldeira. But he and fellow Carnegie scientist Long Cao were concerned that it is not as widely recognized that carbon dioxide also warms our planet by its direct effects on plants. Previous work by Carnegie’s Chris Field and Joe Berry had indicated that the effects were important. “There is no longer any doubt that carbon dioxide decreases evaporative cooling by plants and that this decreased cooling adds to global warming（额。。。好新鲜的关于global warming的观点）,” says Cao. “This effect would cause significant warming even if carbon dioxide were not a greenhouse gas.”

In their model, the researchers doubled the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and recorded the magnitude and geographic pattern of warming from different factors. They found that, averaged over the entire globe, the evapotranspiration effects of plants account for 16% of warming of the land surface, with greenhouse effects accounting for the rest. But in some regions, such as parts of North America and eastern Asia, it can be more than 25% of the total warming. “If we think of a doubling of carbon dioxide as causing about four degrees of warming, in many places three of those degrees are coming from the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and one is coming from the direct effect of carbon dioxide on plants.”

The researchers also found that their model predicted that high carbon dioxide will increase the runoff from the land surface in most areas, because more water from precipitation bypasses the plant cooling system and flows directly to rivers and streams.（额。。。又是一个神奇的新观点） Earlier models based on greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide had also predicted higher runoff, but the new research predicts that changes in evapotranspiration due to high carbon dioxide could have an even stronger impact on water resources than those models predict. “

These results really show that how plants respond to carbon dioxide is very important for making good climate predictions,” says Caldeira. “So if we want to improve climate predictions, we need to improve the representation of land plants in the climate models. More broadly, it shows that the kind of vegetation that’s on the surface of our planet and what that vegetation is doing is very important in determining our climate. We need to take great care in considering what kind of changes we make to forests and other ecosystems, because they are likely to have important climate consequences.”

The study is published in the May 3-7 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image caption: Map of globe, showing percentage of predicted warming due to the direct effect of carbon dioxide on plants. Carbon dioxide warms the Earth because it is a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but it also causes plants to provide less evaporative cooling. A study by Long Cao and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science finds that in some places (darkest orange) over 25% of the warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a result of decreased evaporative cooling by plants.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

comment:

Well, this is an interesting scientific report for me. Actually I'm very interested in researches about global warming, all kinds of. The finding in this report is bright new for me. Before reading this material, I only know that the reason why carbon dioxide is able to increase global warming is its effect as a greenhouse gas. In this report, the researchers give a bright new explaination of carbon dioxide as the gas blamed for global warming. High concentration of carbon dioxide will decrease evaporate cooling by plants, which will add to global warming. Also, the decrease of evaporate cooling will make more water flow directly into streams and rivers, which will increase the run-off from land surface.

This idea sounds interesting for me. The decrease of evaporation will increase global warming? But we also know that water vapor is also a kind of green house gas and it is even more influential than carbon dioxide. If less water vapor is in the air, will the world get warmer or colder? I am curious about this problem. Who can answer this question?

Anyway, global warming is such a complex problem and almost nobody can solve it soon. I think it is very interesting to make investigations about global warming all around the world and try to help make some useful plan for the global environment. That's one of my big dreams.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

DEBATE: Fair Trade

This house believes that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer.

BACKGROUND READING

The president and trade
Go sell

As Barack Obama embraces exports, trade friction loomsMar 11th 2010 | CHICAGO AND WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition
A GLOOMY office park in suburban Chicago is the home of NewMedical Technology. At the moment the young company has only one main product, silicone strips to reduce scarring after surgery. But in its tiny warehouse, employees busily pack boxes to be shipped to Brussels. In the past year the firm’s business has expanded quickly; NewMedical now exports to South America, Europe and Asia.

It is the type of growth Barack Obama dreams of. Consumers are nursing battered balance sheets and the government is wallowing in debt. That puts the burden on exports to carry the recovery; Mr Obama wants them to double over the next five years.

On March 11th, as The Economist went to press, the president was rolling out（延伸） a batch of initiatives to help the process along. The most significant responds to complaints that national security controls interfere with exports. The current system will be replaced with a one-time notification. The review time would drop to 30 minutes from the current one-to-two months for 85% of the 3,300 affected products.

Standards governing how exporters allow foreigners to handle products with potential military applications will be simplified. The Export-Import Bank’s authorised financing will rise, with special attention to small companies like NewMedical. Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute notes that America’s export financing has shrunk dramatically, from 25% of relevant merchandise in the 1970s to 3%. More symbolic steps include naming an “export promotion cabinet” and reactivating a private sector advisory board on trade, chaired by the chiefs of Boeing and Xerox.

How much difference will this make? Exports are unlikely to double; in 60 years the only time that has happened is when inflation was puffing up the figures. Yet exports seem bound to grow since the rest of the world is growing faster than America and the dollar is weak. The trade deficit shrank last year, because exports fell less than imports (see chart).

The administration is trying to get more companies to export; less than 1% now do, and of them 58% export to just one country. Yet getting small firms to export more won’t help the economy much in the near term, says Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College. The big firms that export most of America’s goods don’t need promotion, they need better access.

Mr Obama has expressed more support lately for completing free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea, the Doha round of world trade talks, and the Trans Pacific Partnership, but that has not translated into results. Only the Panama deal is likely to be done soon; progress on the others has slowed to a crawl over Democrats’ concerns about violence against unions in Colombia and America’s inability to sell more cars to South Korea.

Ron Kirk, Mr Obama’s trade representative, knows that whatever their economic merits, trade agreements need political support. He sought to make Dallas “the capital of NAFTA” when he was its mayor. But his wife comes from a family of autoworkers and he knows that “as much fun as it is to go to Geneva, the battle for free trade will be won in Detroit.” The affable Mr Kirk says at least the South Korea and Colombia deals have vocal domestic advocates urging progress. “There is no one knocking on my door saying they’re excited about moving Doha forward,” he says.
It doesn’t help free trade that Sander Levin, a congressman from Michigan closely allied with trade unions, has just become chairman of the House of Representatives committee overseeing trade (though the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, reckons Mr Levin’s voting record on trade is much the same as that of Charles Rangel, the outgoing chairman).

Given the miserable state of the world economy, protectionist pressures have been remarkably quiescent. In the United States, Mr Obama’s foolish tariff on Chinese tyres has, thankfully, yet to trigger a flood of imitations.

Yet dangers loom. Mr Obama has stepped up his criticism of China’s fixed exchange rate. A group of senators has urged him to side with（与某人站在同一边） a paper company that wants the Commerce Department to treat China’s pegged currency as a subsidy subject to countervailing duties（反倾销税）.

Separately, speculation is mounting that the Treasury will label China a currency manipulator, a step it twice declined to take last year. Brazil is about to impose tariffs on American goods after the World Trade Organisation ruled America unfairly subsidises cotton. With employment still shrinking and the mid-terms approaching, free trade faces a rocky path ahead.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

OPINIONS

FOR：

Is this what happened in China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan? Not quite. Each carefully managed their export-led growth using exchange-rate policies, government investment and industrial strategies, and access to markets in other countries. The rest of the world still complains that each of these countries is protectionist. If trade liberalisation is a silver bullet, these cases show that it needs a special kind of gun and a carefully selected target.

Some contrary examples reinforce the point that trade policy must be integrated into a country's overall economic strategy. In Africa several countries liberalised trade in the 1980s and 1990s. For many, this was seen as an antidote to the protectionist, import-substitution industrialisation of the 1960s and early 1970s. But what came next was a disappointment. New export industries did not magically emerge. To the contrary, what mostly occurred were rising unemployment and deindustrialisation.

Sometimes people need protecting. International trade and commerce can either help to make their lives better or make their plight worse. The fact that protectionists use fair trade arguments does not render illegitimate all efforts to make the effects of trade fairer. People get this. All those who pay that little bit more for fair-trade coffee (and they are doing so in increasing numbers) are not undermining free trade. They are simply doing their bit to make it fairer.