Adeline的economist阅读分析帖

AdelineShenUID：2630498

useful words and expressions:

spur innovation
plough subsidies into... 对...进行投资
grave challenges 严重的挑战

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Economist的debate真的很赞，我要好好挖掘一下。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Robert W. Taylor（computer scientist) (born 1932).
Taylor is, arguably, the major figure in the development of the Internet, the personal computer, and the technologies that support the computer revolution worldwide.
His work is recognized in 1999 by the award of the National Medal of Technology. The citation reads: "For visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including initiating the ARPAnet project -- forerunner of today's Internet -- and advancing groundbreaking achievements in the development of the personal computer and computer networks."
In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering awarded him along with Butler W. Lampson, Charles P. Thacker and Alan Kay their highest award, the Draper Prize. The citation reads: "for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers."
He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1965–69), founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) (1970–83), and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center (SRC) (1983–96).[1] Taylor is retired and living in California.
Taylor early recognized that "The Internet is not about technology; it's about communication. The Internet connects people who have shared interests, ideas and needs, regardless of geography."
The Mother of All Demos could not have happened without Bob Taylor who directed funding to the famous Douglas Engelbart 1968 public demonstration in San Francisco to several thousand computer experts. Dr. Engelbart, Bill English, Jeff Rulifson and the rest of the Human Augmentation Research Center team at SRI showed on a big screen how he could manipulate a computer remotely located in Menlo Park, while sitting on a San Francisco stage, using his mouse.
"It was stunning," Bob Taylor says. "It really woke a lot of people up to a whole new way of thinking about computers -- not just as number crunchers."
Looking forward, Bob Taylor in 2000,[2] voiced two concerns about the future of the Internet: control and access.
1. Comparing the Internet to a highway network, he argues there needs to be a system of licensing users of the Internet just as people need licenses to drive on the roads. "There are many worse ways of endangering a larger number of people on the Internet than on the highways," he warns. "It's possible for people to generate networks that reproduce themselves and are very difficult or impossible to kill off. I want everyone to have the right to use it, but there's got to be some way to insure responsibility."
2. Bob Taylor feels strongly that there should be no economic barrier to going on-line. "Will it be freely available to everyone? If not, it will be a big disappointment."

AdelineShenUID：2630498

唔。。。已经5月19号了，离6月26日托福二战还有37天，如果我打算8月18号考G，那么离GRE还有12+30+31+17=90天 OMG，我每天做个倒计时吧。。。时间越来越紧迫了，不能再玩儿了。。。

T的主要任务：口语和听力。阅读写作还是每天economist吧，我要把debate拿来好好回味一下整理一下，然后aw的那些官方范文的精析继续做一下。每天早上8点到9点半好好听和说。晚上用来做economist和阅读精析，还要继续研究ETS官网充分掌握北美机考G的特点。

G的主要任务：作文、类反、阅读都得抓。阅读和作文现在还是看economist吧，到6月再做新的调整，到时需要更系统的做些事情了。类反要重新开始抓，准备先过猴哥。

5月19日 离二战T还有37天 离二战G还有90天

tasks：

8：00-9：30 听力口语

上课时间 猴哥类反

明晚可能有个跟MSU一些dean的opening dinner，回来后看economist

other tasks：

查找国内外环保企业区别和运行概况

AdelineShenUID：2630498

嗯，起床了洗完头了，听力时间。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

今晚去跟一些MSU的老师吃饭了，顺便叫上了Bela和小HK一起。
聊的很开心，主要是8G。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Reporting the gender pay gap
Jul 25th 2007, 17:14 by The Economist | Lisbon
THE Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), Britain’s gender-equity watchdog, has just issued its valedictory report before it is subsumed into the all purpose Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
They note, quite rightly, that things are better than when they started, but there is still some way to go before full gender equality is achieved. However, one minor note, a blogging point if you will, about the way in which certain statistics are presented. They state that:

Women who work full-time earn, on average, 17% less per hour than men working full-time. For women who work part-time, the gap in pay relative to full-time men is a huge 38% per hour.

While this is true, it is a little misleading, as has been noted before. Why compare female part time wages to male full time? Why not to male part time? It's difficult to shake off the feeling that it is deliberate, done in the knowledge that the qualifier will get dropped. As indeed happens in The Guardian:

A "part-time pay gap" will take 25 years to close and the "full-time pay gap" 20 years, in a system that now pays women 38% less per hour than men for working part time and 17% for full-timers;

The Independent unfortunately manages to garble it completely:

...women working part-time earn 38 per cent less than men working part-time.

But enough of such Disrealian observations. It is accepted in a certain sector of the political landscape that the very existence of such a pay gap is proof positive that discrimination exists. In American politics, a similar figure (women earn 71 cents to every dollar received by men) is routinely employed to the same purpose.
Which rather means that someone has some explaining to do about Table 13 here (please note that these are exactly the same figures from which  the EOC originally derived their estimations of the gender pay gap: same year, same source). One group of workers receives, on average, only 90% of the mean hourly wage of the other. For men the gap is 12%. For women 20%. For part time workers (comparing part time to part time) the gap widens to 25%. Beleaguered male part time workers suffer a 39% gap.
It's worth noting, however, that all of those receiving the higher pay also have earlier retirement ages, higher pensions and greater job security. They're even also more likely to receive a gong at the end of their careers as a note of the self-sacrifice with which they have pursued public service careers.
For, yes, on every count, public sector hourly mean wages are higher than those in the private sector. If we take the first argument seriously, that the existence of a pay gap is proof of discrimination, then we must ask why almost everyone is so viciously bigoted against workers in the private sector?
Of course, the more parsimonious explanation seems to be that there are alternative explanations of the gap.  Perhaps public sector workers are more highly skilled, or more productive, or take fewer career breaks, or simply have stronger unions. (Would it be unworthy to suggest that it helps, too, when you can vote your boss out of office?)  But if we’re willing to accept such arguments to explain the public/private gap, we should be at least as prepared to entertain them in the case of women.
Othwerwise, there's a problem.  While the gender pay gap is widely acknowleged to be shrinking, even if too slowly for some, the public/private gap is growing, as Table 13 shows.  That’s even before we look into the increasing disparity in pension provision. Perhaps it's time for a new unit to be created in the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to deal with this clear and obvious bias? And if we do create such a creature, how do we induce civil servants to stamp out discrimination in their favour?

AdelineShenUID：2630498

赞辰辰...乃确实也很辛苦，嗯...

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哎。。。又无心学习了。。。

一天不做完实验，一天没心情好好学习。。。

神哪。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Information overload

This house believes that if the promise of technology is to simplify our world, it is failing.

About this debate:

Technology users are discovering that the proliferation of information tools, services, and channels makes managing their own personal and professional information increasingly difficult. A growing chorus of voices is sounding the alarm that information overload is diminishing people’s ability be effective. Are there better ways to manage the vast amounts of information assaulting users on a daily basis? What is the right balance between new tools and information streams, on the one hand, and minimizing the impact of information overload on the other? Are people losing their ability to reflect rather than just react?

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The moderator's opening remarks

Our first debate in this series involved a vital area of public policy. For this second debate the focus is firmly on the individual, and the impact of technology on our lives. The question at hand should make us all examine our own use of technology, and perhaps produce surprising answers.
We all use technology. Everyone reading or taking part in this debate is of course connected to the internet. For that, at least, let us be thankful.
But even as it opens up extraordinary new possibilities, is technology making our lives too complicated? I am able to write this opening statement far away from my desk, courtesy of wireless connectivity, on a hotel veranda overlooking the English Channel on a Sunday morning: miraculous simplicity! Yet my wife, whose birthday we are celebrating here, may view it differently: an unfortunate complication of her special day. This debate is about a question many of us grapple with on a daily basis.
Two dimensions of the issue emerge from the thoughtful opening statements. First, Richard Szafranski, a partner at Toffler Associates, raises the broad impact of technology on our environment: its contribution to global warming, the creation of new chemical compounds with uncertain impact on life and health, the invention of weapons of mass destruction. Surely, he argues, such things complicate our lives.
Second, and more palpably, there is the matter of the breakneck development of personal technology. Mr Szafranski argues that the abundance of this stuff is such that we suffer from "over-choice" as well as "surplus complexity": all those ring tones to choose from and personal devices to be baffled by. Far from simplifying our lives, choosing between so many options is hard and increasingly complicated work.
John Maeda, president elect of the Rhode Island School of Design, accepts that technology can add complexity to our lives, and we can all empathise with tales of maddening computer crashes and infuriating printer glitches. But, he claims, it also has the capacity to remove even greater complexity that existed beforehand: who wouldn't grapple with a fidgety hearing-aid if in the end it overcomes deafness?. Furthermore, he believes, we are tech "explorers", experimenting and adapting technologies to our needs over time: he raises the prospect that we are entering a time of simplification, a "Renaissance of design-led development." In short, "the bad rap given to technologies today will be only temporary."
Where does the balance lie? That is what I hope this debate will clarify. Mr Maeda reckons there is 90% upside and 10% downside; Mr Szafranski, without putting a number on it, thinks it's the other way around. What do you think?
One last word before the debate begins. You have, rightly, on previous occasions looked closely and critically at the wording of the propositions. In this case, as Mr Szafranski notes, it might be objected that technology didn't "promise" anything, though I think it's probably fair to say that many people assumed (and tech companies routinely claim) that its purpose is to simplify not complicate. "It didn't work," asserts Mr Szafranski. Or did it?

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The proposer's opening remarks

Standing back, we now can be fairly certain that the science and engineering that enabled humans to create today's engines of industrialisation, electrification, physics, medicine, genetics and the appliances of the information age also added significant complexity to our lives. Technology warmed the planet, added pollutants to the atmosphere and oceans, affected life forms by changing the background magnetic field (including adding increased extremely low-frequency radiation), enabled nuclear weapons and created thousands of chemical compounds that can help or hurt life. One cannot conclude that the convergent effects—social, environmental, political, economic, legal, psychological—of these technological developments simplified living or our lives. Technology has failed to simplify our lives.
Coping with the challenges caused by a warming planet will not be simple. Knowing the health effects—the effects on humans and other living organisms—of various pollutants and combinations of pollutants and appropriately dealing with them will not be simple. Understanding the biological consequences of changed magnetic fields and increased point and area sources of radiation is not uncomplicated. The problems associated with nuclear weapons' proliferation are only less complex than the problems that would arise from the use of such weapons. And it becomes increasingly difficult to assay the interactions, the lag times and the health consequences of the chemicals we ingest, even those we consume intentionally. Simpler lives? No.
Dealing with any one of these challenges is not simple; they are multi-dimensional and have converged and co-exist. "Technology"—shorthand for the fruits of science and engineering—and its convergent unintended and intended consequences have complicated our lives.
Take some familiar but trivial examples. The technologies that enable mass customisation, the internet and wireless devices and their applications, but a small sample, cause humans two problems that complicate our lives immensely. First, over-choice. Second, surplus complexity. Over-choice describes the human response to alternatives and variations so numerous, so potentially satisfying and so complex that humans can no longer decide easily. "Surplus complexity" is unnecessary and unwanted complexity.
We—hundreds of millions of us and growing—embrace the very technologies that make our lives and our relationships more difficult and fill many of our waking moments with activity. We love—to the point of gluttony—to communicate, play, invent, learn, imagine and acquire. Information technology has given us tools to do all of those anywhere and round the clock. We are awash in the benefits that high-bandwidth fixed and mobile wireless communications, email, text messages, pictures, games, data and information give us, including instant access to thousands of products. The seductive ease with which we can engage in any and all of those activities, or quests or endeavours makes it difficult and stressful to not be overwhelmed by choices. Choosing takes time and our time is not unlimited. Devices and applications that save us labour in one area may merely allow us, and sometimes seem to compel us, to invest labour in other areas.
We say or hear, "I must do my email tonight, or by tomorrow I'll have over 600 to read." We want to buy a pot. Search on "pottery" and get 254,000,000 results. We want to find the John Li we met at a conference. Search on "John Li" and get 8,600,000 results. Do I do email, narrow the searches, eat dinner, pick up my laundry or call a friend? Because technology has spawned numerous complex variations I must repeatedly go through the act of evaluating and choosing — a labour of deciding. Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us.
Over-choice is made more likely and burdensome by the complexity resident in each of the choices that are presented to us. There are hundreds of choices within the seemingly simple one of getting a cellular telephone and choosing a provider and a plan. Some phones also are Pocket PCs with CDMA and GSM, video-players, music-players, web browsers, calculators and so forth. One must decide where and when the complexity becomes surplus. Choosing ring tones from among the surplus complexity evident in the thousands of tones available is almost unfathomable over-choice.
Businesses know that solutions to over-choice, on the one hand, and engineered surplus complexity, on the other, can produce revenue. Their solutions may complicate the problems. It may be that few consumers have or take the time to read a website's terms of services, privacy policy or licensing agreement before hitting "I agree." The willing or inadvertent disclosure of information about behaviour and the data bases that record past searches create the potential for precise marketing. Behavioural marketing, for example, uses data from multiple sources, including data in the public domain and data acquired by a target's past web searches, to push tailored products and services. More choices. When surplus complexity is engineered into a product—of a product's, say, 41 features, the consumer only wanted two—consumers pay for unnecessary and unused features. Unbundling is seen by some businesses or some industries as such radical customisation that it is priced prohibitively. We live in the multifaceted bundles that technology has enabled.
The system as a whole, the system we create and sustain and live in, now has so many and so complex separate parts that understanding consequential interactions, potential outcomes—intended and unintended—and long-term effects is more difficult than ever in human history. One might argue that the genesis of problems like over-choice and surplus complexity is in human frailty or human wants satisfied by technology, but, without technology, more simplicity would endure. Technology is the beneficial culprit that allowed us to do this.
One cannot conclude that humans making bad choices are the real culprit unless one ascribes to the unborn—past and future—the ability to choose. Technology, personified as defendant, could probably prove "I made no promises." Just so, but the issue under consideration is less any specific promise asserted than it was the promising possibilities of making our lives simpler that lured us, as we humans employed technology to solve problems and create opportunities.
It did not work.

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The opposition's opening remarks

Technology exists to advance and enhance our world in new ways. Sometimes it lets us add a new capability to our daily routine like the guilty pleasure of SMS-ing during a boring meeting. In other cases technology literally takes the pain away, as anyone with a successful hip replacement can attest. Adopting any technology is a conscious act of adding complexity to our lives. However while adding new complexities, a successful technology is able to at least dampen and at times completely remove the greater complexities that existed prior.
Fitting a hearing aid to your ear on a daily basis adds complexity, but the benefit of being able to hear significantly better makes life simpler. Keeping the fire of your Blackberry constantly lit drives you crazy, but your BB lets you be CEO while slipping away to attend your son's soccer game. Automobiles keep you stuck in traffic and expend excessive energy, but these same technologies can transport you to the mountains or beach for repose. When looking at your life overall, there should be no doubt that technology has simplified many aspects of your existence. It has given you options to live your life how you want and when you want in ways that were never before possible. And truly, what is more simple than being free?
The bad rap given to technologies today will be only temporary. Yes my wireless Bluetooth headset sometimes forgets that my iPhone exists even when they are only a millimeter apart. Yes a few months ago my computer crashed for the first time in three years and I lost all my data. Yes my laser printer and I will dance an odd lovers game of "I could have sworn I told you to print but you don't seem to notice me." But we are in a transitional period where technologies are brittle not because they are failing per se — they are just new and experimental. And yes, we are all the unlikely guinea pigs that are happier on some days than others. Do you think the people that first owned and drove automobiles lived untroubled lives? I think not, but the benefits likely outweighed any setbacks otherwise we would still be riding horses today.
Remember that computers did not really take off until less than ten years ago. They were these big, ugly, and clunky boxes with even bigger "TV sets" attached to them. Now within a size smaller than my fist a computer that is hundreds of times more powerful sits within my palm. And within a few months it will become twice as powerful. In the history of humankind, there have never been similar technological advances happening at the incredible rate of change today. The glitches are there because we are all explorers, and just haven't been told we are thus so.
Recognise simplicity as being about two goals realised simultaneously: the saving of time to realise efficiencies, and later wasting the time that you have gained on some humanly pursuit. Thus true simplicity in life is one part technology, and the other part away from technology. Much confusion lies today in the fact that technology has invaded many of our recreational activities such as music listening and video viewing. Thus as explorers in technology, we have ventured out of just the "got-to-have" categories of pacemakers and other life-saving necessities, into the "nice-to-have" categories of iPods and other life-styling gadgetry. Our thirst for exotic experiences in technology only pushes us further down the path of increasing unpredictability. Engaging new technologies is about embracing new inventions and the passion for cultural advancement — it is a game usually only reserved for the young that we can now play no matter how old we are.
We voluntarily let technology enter our lives in the infantile state that it currently exists, and the challenge is to wait for it to mature to something we can all be proud of. Patience is a virtue I am told, and I await the many improvements that lie ahead. To say that technology is failing to simplify our lives misses the point that in the past decade we have lived in an era of breakneck innovation. This pace is fortunately slowing and industries are retrenching so that design-led approaches can take command to give root to more meaningful technology experiences. There are advanced developments underway at MIT, CMU, and Stanford for improving user interfaces, data visualisation, network reliability, and energy management that will reduce the 10% of downsides we feel today compared with the 90% of upsides brought on by both life-saving and life-styling technologies.
The conveniences gained of extended life spans, click-to-buy anything off of the web, and even online dating are all concrete examples of enhancement that vastly simplify our lives. They make our lives more complex in addition: a longer life means more to think about, an online purchase can come in the wrong colour, and a virtual date can go awry. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Often you will find that the answer is: Yes. When any newer technology is concerned, you are adopting the cause of innovation and as such should expect some turbulence along the way. In the near future we will see a renaissance in design-led technology developments that will reduce the bumpiness we currently experience to give way to simplicity every day. Technology will unite with design and the arts in unprecedented harmony such that not only will our lives be simplified, but more importantly satisfying.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

宋爷爷让我们写一篇关于cloud的paper，在翻economist的debate的时候竟然看到一篇相关的debate 哈~

AdelineShenUID：2630498

This house believes that the cloud cannot be entirely trusted.

about this debate

There is nothing the computer industry likes better than a big new idea. Cloud computing is the latest example, and companies large and small are already joining the fray. The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered as a service, over the internet, from vast warehouses of shared machines. Many things work this way already, from email and photo albums to calendars and shared documents. Albeit more slowly, companies are also moving some of their applications into the cloud. But is this a good idea? Can providers of these computing clouds be trusted? Are these mainframes in the sky reliable enough? What happens if data get lost? What about privacy and lock-in? Will switching to another cloud be difficult?