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AdelineShen
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发表于 2010-4-4 09:38:20 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

本帖最后由 AdelineShen 于 2010-6-7 15:46 编辑

从4月4号开始，每天阅读分析一篇economist放上来，每日更新，至少坚持一个月，旨在训练自己的阅读和作文水平~

Adeline要加油！~

虽然不怎么应景，还是发张吴先生的《双燕》调节下心情~(*^__^*) 嘻嘻……

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沙发

发表于 2010-4-4 10:19:47 |只看该作者

加油吧

主要回答美国留学申请、文科申请、美国生活问题，谢绝一切商业推广合作。

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板凳

发表于 2010-4-4 10:49:29 |只看该作者

A special report on America's economy
Time to rebalanceAmerica’s economy is set to shift away from consumption and debt and towards exports and saving. It will be its biggest transformation in decades, says Greg Ip (interviewed here)Mar 31st 2010 | From The Economist print edition

STEVE HILTON remembers months of despair after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Customers rushed to the sales offices of Meritage Homes, the property firm Mr Hilton runs, not to buy houses but to cancel contracts they had already signed. “I thought for a moment the world was coming to an end,” he recalls.
In the following months Mr Hilton stepped up efforts to save his company. He gave up options to buy thousands of lots that the firm had snapped up across Arizona, Florida, Nevada and California during the boom, taking massive losses. He eventually laid off three-quarters of its 2,300 employees. He also had its houses completely redesigned to cut construction cost almost in half: simpler roofs, standardised window sizes, fewer options. Gone were the 12-foot ceilings, sweeping staircases and granite countertops everyone wanted when money was free. Meritage is now catering to the only customers able to get credit: first-time buyers with federally guaranteed loans. It is clawing its way back to health as a leaner, humbler company.
(从Meritage的境况出发引出下文要详细阐述的美国经济转变）

The same could be said for America.（不错的过渡句 The same could be said for...） Virtually every industry has shed jobs in the past two years, but those that cater mostly to consumers have suffered most. Employment in residential construction and carmaking is down by almost a third, in retailing and banking by 8%. As the economy recovers, some of those jobs will come back, but many of them will not, because this was no ordinary recession. The bubbly asset prices(泡沫资产价值）, ever easier credit and cheap oil that fuelled America’s age of consumerism are not about to return.
（随着经济的复苏，有些job可以回来，但很多泡沫资产价值再也回不来了）

Instead, America’s economy will undergo one of its biggest transformations in decades. This macroeconomic shift from debt and consumption to saving and exports will bring microeconomic changes too: different lifestyles, and different jobs in different places. This special report will describe that transformation, and explain why it will be tricky.
（report的Thesis Statement：美国经济将经历几十年来的重大转变）

The crisis and then the recession put an abrupt end to the old economic model. Despite a small rebound recently, house prices have fallen by 29% and share prices by a similar amount since their peak. Households’ wealth has shrunk by $12 trillion, or 18%, since 2007. As a share of disposable income（税后所得） it is back to its level in 1995. And if consumers feel less rich, they are less inclined to spend. Banks are also less willing to lend: they have tightened loan standards, with a push from regulators who now wish they had taken a dimmer view of exotic mortgages and lax lending during the boom.
Consumer debt rose from an average of less than 80% of disposable income 20 years ago to 129% in 2007. If other crises of the past half-century are any guide, America’s consumers will spend the next six or seven years reducing their debt to more manageable levels, reckons the McKinsey Global Institute. This is already changing the composition of economic activity. Consumer spending and housing rose from 70% of GDP in 1991 to 76% in 2005 (see chart 1). By last year it had fallen back to 73%, still high by international standards.
（通过数据证明美国经济面临的严重危机）

The effect on the economy of deflated assets, tighter credit and costlier energy are already apparent. Fewer people are buying homes, and the ones they buy tend to be smaller and less opulent. In 2008 the median size of a new home shrank for the first time in 13 years. The number of credit cards in circulation has declined by almost a fifth. American Express is pulling back from credit cards and is now telling customers how to use their charge cards (which are paid off in full every month) to control their spending.
Normally, deep recessions are followed by strong recoveries as pent-up demand reasserts itself. In the recent recession GDP shrank by 3.8%, the worst drop since the second world war. In the recovery the economy might therefore be expected to grow by 6-8% and unemployment to fall steadily, as happened after two earlier recessions of comparable depth, in 1973-75 and 1981-82.
（通常紧跟着巨大的经济危机会有strong recoveries)

No bounce-backBut this particular recession was triggered by a financial crisis that damaged the financial system’s ability to channel savings to productive investment and left consumers and businesses struggling with surplus buildings, equipment and debt accumulated in the boom. Recovery after that kind of crisis is often slow and weak, and indeed some nine months into the upturn GDP has probably grown at an annual rate of less than 4%. Unemployment is well up throughout the country (see map), though it declined slightly in February.
(然而这次危机的复苏却很慢）

So if America is to avoid the stagnation that afflicted Japan after its bubbles burst, where is the demand going to come from? In the short term the federal government has stepped up its borrowing—to 10% of GDP this year—to counteract the drop in private consumption and investment. Over the next few years this stimulus will be withdrawn. Barack Obama wants the deficit to come down to around 3% of GDP by the middle of this decade, though it is not clear how that will be achieved. Indeed, if the rest of the economy remains moribund, the government may be reluctant to withdraw the stimulus for fear of pushing the economy back into recession.
Tighter credit and lower consumer borrowing are not the only drivers of economic restructuring. A less noticed but significant push comes from higher energy prices.（过渡句） A strengthening dollar and ample supply kept oil cheap for most of the 1990s, feeding America’s addiction to imports. That began to change a few years before the crisis as the dollar fell and emerging markets’ growing appetite put pressure on global production capacity.
A fourfold increase in oil prices since the 1990s has rearranged both consumer and producer incentives. Sport-utility vehicles are losing popularity, policies to boost conservation and renewable energy have become bolder, and producers have found a lot more oil below America’s soil and coastal seabed. Imports of the stuff have dropped by 10% since 2006 and are likely to come down further. When natural-gas prices followed the rise in oil earlier this decade, exploration companies used new methods to get at gas trapped in shale formations from Texas to Pennsylvania. Abundant domestic shale gas should radically reduce America’s gas imports.
（能源价格上升的影响）

America’s economic geography will change too. Cheap petrol and ample credit encouraged millions of Americans to flock to southern states and to distant suburbs (“exurbs”) in search of big houses with lots of land. Now the housing bust has tied them to homes they cannot sell. Population growth in the suburbs has slowed. For the present the rise of knowledge-intensive global industries favours centres rich in infrastructure and specialised skills. Some are traditional urban cores such as New York and some are suburban edge cities that offer jobs along with affordable houses and short commutes.
（经济的地理结构的转变表现在越来越多的人选择到郊区生活）

A burst of productivity could lift incomes and profits. That would enable consumers to repay some of their debt yet continue to spend. The change in the mix of growth should help: productivity in construction remains low, whereas in exports the most productive companies often do best. But the hobbled financial system will make it hard for cash-hungry start-ups to get financing, so innovation will suffer.

The outlook for business investment depends on whether it is for equipment or buildings. Spending on equipment is expected to be fairly strong, having largely avoided excess in the boom period, and indeed in the fourth quarter of 2009 it raced ahead at an annual rate of 19%. In February John Chambers, the boss of Cisco Systems, a maker of networking gear, called it “one of the most robust, positive turnarounds I’ve seen in my career”. Demand for new buildings is far lower: empty shops and offices attest to ample unused capacity. And business investment typically accounts for only 10-12% of GDP, so it will never be a full substitute for consumer spending.
（对investment的投资有上升趋势，对building的投资far lower）

The road to salvationAs consumers rebuild their savings, American firms must increasingly look abroad for sales. They have a lot of ground to make up. Competition from low-wage countries, mostly China, has increasingly taken over the markets of domestic industries such as furniture, clothing or consumer electronics. Yet shifts in the pattern of global growth and the dollar are laying the groundwork for a boom in exports. “There’s a world view that the United States is the consumer of the world and emerging markets are the producer,” says Bruce Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan Chase. “That has changed.” He reckons that America will account for just 27% of global consumption this year against emerging markets’ 34%, roughly the reverse of their shares eight years ago.
（美国应该放眼国外销售市场，但是来自低收入国家如中国的竞争很激烈）

The cheaper dollar will resuscitate some industries in commoditised markets, but the main beneficiaries of the export boom will be companies that are already formidable exporters. These companies reflect America’s strengths in high-end services（高档产品） and highly skilled manufacturing such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, software and engineering, as well as creative services like film, architecture and advertising. Thanks to cheap digital technology, South Korea and India now knock out the sort of low-budget films that compete with standard American fare. But only Hollywood combines the creativity, expertise and market savvy to make something like “Avatar” which has earned $2.6 billion so far, some 70% of which came from abroad.（对比，例子，在文章中运用地非常精到） That adds up to several jumbo jets.
（美国高档产品和创新性服务的收入还是很有优势的）

Exports are a classic route to recovery after a crisis. Sweden and Finland in the early 1990s and Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea in the late 1990s bounced back from recession by moving from trade deficit to surplus or expanding their surplus. But given its size and the sickly state of most other rich countries’ economies, America will find it much harder. It has been exporting more to emerging markets than to developed ones for several years, but if other countries, particularly China, do not sufficiently boost domestic demand, “the unwinding of the global imbalances could reverse quite quickly in 2010,” says an IMF staff paper.
（通过几个发达国家过去的经验指出：传统的经济复苏的方式是出口，但这对于美国来说更加困难，除非中国的国内需求do not sufficiently boost)

America’s current-account deficit, the broadest measure of its trade and payments with the rest of the world, shrank from 6% of GDP in 2006 to 3% last year (see chart 2). Could it come down to zero? It nearly did in 1991 after five years of booming exports. This time the deficit started out a lot larger and the rest of the world is weaker. Still, even stabilisation around 3% would be a blessed relief because it would slow the growth in America’s indebtedness to foreigners.
（美国的财政赤字降低）

America’s imbalances were years in the making and will not be undone overnight. But the elements of a rebalanced economy are already visible a 40-minute drive to the south of Mr Hilton’s offices in Scottsdale, Arizona. Around the same time that Mr Hilton was watching sales of his homes dry up, Brian Krzanich, head of global manufacturing at Intel, was finalising plans（定计划） to spend $3 billion retooling his company’s massive semiconductor factories in nearby Chandler. Mr Krzanich knew perfectly well there was a recession going on. Intel’s sales were down and 3% of the staff at the factories had been laid off. But he also knew that once global demand rebounded, Intel would have to be ready to produce a new generation of cheaper, smaller and more efficient chips. “Unless you think your business is going to shrink for an extended period, like seven years, it always pays to make that investment,” he says. In the last quarter of 2009 Intel, helped by resurgent demand for technology, enjoyed record profit margins, and Mr Krzanich was approving overtime.
Mr Hilton, for his part, runs his company on the assumption that the days of easy money and exuberant consumers are gone for ever. In his office he has a yellowed copy of the Wall Street Journal from September 18th 2008, the week when Lehman failed and American International Group was bailed out. “Worst crisis since the 30s with no end in sight”, reads one headline. “I wish I’d had that article in 2005,” says Mr Hilton. He keeps it around as an antidote any time he is “feeling all happy and slappy”.
（呼应开头，以Mr Hilton的故事结尾，同时加入和Brian Krzanich的对比，表现美国经济的转变）

Die luft der Freiheit weht
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AdelineShen
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地板

发表于 2010-4-4 11:18:04 |只看该作者

COMMENT：

In this report the author asserts that America is facing a transformation of economy from a luxry consumption one to a saving one. The prices of the houses are falling, consumer debts are increasing and banks are less willing to lend. Deflated asset, tighter credit and costlier energy put an end to the old structure of American economy. More people tend to choose to live in distant suburbs with cheap petrol and ample credit. The investment in business turns to equipments and turns away from buildings. The best way to help recover America's economy is to look abroad for sales. Although some low-wage countries like China has increasingly taken over domestic markets such as furniture and clothing, America still stand out in high-end products and highly innovative services like film industry. Nowadays America's current account deficit is shranking and it's a good hint of recovery. It is still a long way before America is able to recover from the economy crisis. However, with the transformation of the economy structure, it is believed that America's economy will boon soon from its highly ennovative service and high-tech industry.

Die luft der Freiheit weht
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5楼

发表于 2010-4-5 10:59:23 |只看该作者

本帖最后由 AdelineShen 于 2010-4-5 14:18 编辑

American politics after health reform
Now what?Barack Obama needs to use a bruising victory to unleash the promise of his presidencyMar 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

LAST November Henry Kissinger compared Barack Obama to a chess grandmaster who had played his opening in six simultaneous matches, but hadn’t completed a single game. Now the president has won the first of those matches with an audacious checkmate snatched from a seemingly hopeless position. But the rest of the chessboards are still gridlocked.
(用比喻引出话题）

The health-care victory this week was a huge achievement for Mr Obama (see article). After the Democrats in January suddenly lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate many, reputedly including his own chief of staff, urged him to play for a draw and settle for a much more modest bill than the 2,400-page behemoth that he signed into law on March 23rd. Instead, the president buckled down: he dumped the (more expensive) House version of the bill, concentrated on the Senate version and criss-crossed the country, making powerful speeches and twisting arms. In short, he took charge, and started doing all the things he ought to have been doing a lot earlier.

His reward, however, is merely the right to continue playing. Had health reform failed after Mr Obama had invested so much of his personal authority in it, his presidency would have been crippled; and a president who is weak at home tends to be perceived as weak abroad as well. Success thus gives Mr Obama a chance to get his presidency back on track, but hardly guarantees it. That depends on him learning from his mistakes and not exaggerating the extent of his success.

A polarising momentHealth care itself is a good example. Universal health coverage has been a goal of Democrats for decades, so Mr Obama’s achieving something pretty near to it has perked up morale in his own party. But he has done a rotten job of selling it to everybody else. Most polls show more Americans oppose Obamacare than approve of it, though that may be changing a little. The signs still point towards his party being kicked hard in the mid-term elections; and the Republicans, not one of whom voted for the bill, say that they will repeal it if they can.
Conservative anger was predictable—and may well backfire. But this is a much worse bill than it might have been. This newspaper supported the final version of Obamacare, but only because we have long maintained that a country as rich as America should provide decent health coverage to all its citizens. Because the bill does almost nothing to control costs, it was a huge missed opportunity. American business, which anyhow feels unloved by this White House, will suffer the consequences (see article).

That is why Mr Obama now needs to produce a credible plan to tackle America’s vast budget deficit. The national public debt is predicted almost to double in the next decade. Beefing up the woefully weak cost-control mechanisms in the health bill will help (and might impress independent voters). But in the end, bringing America’s budget under control requires radical reform to all entitlements. Sadly Mr Obama has repeatedly failed to sketch out how he might go about that.

In theory, budget-cutting offers more room than health care did to lure in those obstructive Republicans: fiscal responsibility is supposedly dear to the hearts of the political right. The hitch is that they show few signs of wanting to help out. They have the excuse that Mr Obama initially did far too little to woo moderate Republicans on health care, handing the project over to leftish Democrats in Congress. But conservatives can claim Obama is hellbent on increasing the power of the government over the economy. By passing a huge stimulus package and then “socialising” an industry that accounts for one-sixth of GDP, Mr Obama, they say, has dragged America further leftward than any president since FDR.

That is unfair. Stimulus was needed. And if the tea-party crowd examined the free-market paradise they think existed before Mr Obama signed the bill, they would find that their government already spent more per citizen on health than most OECD countries do. But, as with the appearance of being anti-business, Mr Obama needs to squash his apparent addiction to big government quickly. There would be no better way than spelling out where he is going to take a hatchet to government spending; but he may also have to revise other costly schemes. His proposed climate-change bill, whose chances of becoming law before the mid-terms look slim, would be much improved if boondoggles were removed from it. Another apparently lost cause, immigration reform, is unpopular with conservatives, but is supported by many businesspeople. The re-regulation of Wall Street is harder for the Republicans to oppose. But in each case the president needs to show more determination and leadership than he has thus far.
Abroad, too, there are chess games in need of bolder gambits. As with health care last year, there has been a lot of verbiage and not much steel. In foreign capitals Mr Obama was starting to be seen as a feeble, perhaps even a one-term, president. China humiliated him by sending a junior minister to lecture him at Copenhagen. Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, recently treated Hillary Clinton to a show of indifference. Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu has spent much of the past month cocking a snook at the White House. Now Mr Obama looks more like a winner, he should act like one.
Second lifeIt is three months since a deadline for Iran to resolve its nuclear proliferation issues expired; where are the tougher sanctions Mr Obama threatened? If health care showed the virtues of a president getting involved, then so too can the Middle East peace process. A start seemed to be made this week (see article) but it needs to be followed through. A stronger president would make much clearer to the Chinese that he will not give in to Sinophobic protectionist pressures from Congress, but he won’t take instructions about talking to the Dalai Lama either.
Second chances are rare in politics. Mr Obama now has one. Does he want to be remembered as a president who eventually drove through health care but achieved little else? Or will this week mark a turning-point where this enigmatic man became a much more determined, effective president?

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发表于 2010-4-5 23:07:38 |只看该作者

COMMENT

Well, I am not very famaliar with the American health-care system. After searching for some background information, I come to realize the complexity of this issue. The health care reform has great connection with the debts deficit of America and the recover of American economy. As far as I am concerned, it is necessary to reform the health-care system, but the government should not go too far in this road. How can this reform help improve the health-care of the poor? Will the reform threaten the economy of America?

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发表于 2010-4-6 15:52:04 |只看该作者

本帖最后由 AdelineShen 于 2010-4-6 17:59 编辑

A special report on managing information
Data, data everywhere
Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headachesFeb 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.
Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.
(三个并列的例子证明data aboundance:Wal-Mart, Facebook, human genome analysis )

All these examples tell the same story:(用于举例的一个不错的句型和结构。不要总是for example, for instance, 不如说几个例子，然后总结这些例子证明了什么观点） that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to(学习一下这个句型！） unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
But they are also creating a host of new problems.(转折) Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
(在小让步指出well managed data的好处之后，转折指出information abundance的两个主要危害：exceed the available storage space & hard to ensure data security)

Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry(引申出一个危害）,” he says.
“We are at a different period because of so much information,” says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts.(不错的句子！) Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.
Epistemologically speaking(认识论逻辑来说), information is made up of a collection of data and knowledge is made up of different strands of information. But this special report uses “data” and “information” interchangeably because, as it will argue, the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart. Given enough raw data, today’s algorithms and powerful computers can reveal new insights that would previously have remained hidden.(TS)

The business of information management—helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data—is growing by leaps and bounds(非常迅速，突飞猛进）. In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.(很不错的例子说明data abundance导致的data management)

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.（data scientist的出现也是一个说明data abundance的好例子！） Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.(从job of statistician表明data abundance）

More of everythingThere are many reasons for the information explosion.(本段讲信息爆炸的原因） The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet(soar表示急剧上升，plummet表示急剧下降，形成鲜明对比，这两个词用的很好）, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools. For example, there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world’s 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.

Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information.（the second reason) Between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class. As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information growth, notes Mr Cortada. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well. “Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement,” says Sinan Aral, a business professor at New York University. Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down, he explains. Researchers are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level.

The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore’s law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months. The software programs are getting better too. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, reckons(nice word) that the improvements in the algorithms driving computer applications have played as important a part as Moore’s law for decades.

A vast amount of that information is shared. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.
People have long groused that they were swamped by information. Back in 1917 the manager of a Connecticut manufacturing firm complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent.” Yet what is happening now goes way beyond incremental growth. The quantitative change has begun to make a qualitative difference(nice sentence!).

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects.(TS) “What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level,” says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. “Every day I wake up and ask, ‘how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?” says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.

Sophisticated quantitative analysis is being applied to many aspects of life, not just missile trajectories or financial hedging strategies, as in the past. For example, Farecast, a part of Microsoft’s search engine Bing, can advise customers whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 225 billion flight and price records. The same idea is being extended to hotel rooms, cars and similar items. Personal-finance websites and banks are aggregating their customer data to show up macroeconomic trends, which may develop into ancillary businesses in their own right. Number-crunchers have even uncovered match-fixing in Japanese sumo wrestling.

Dross into gold“Data exhaust”—the trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted—is becoming a mainstay of the internet economy. One example is Google’s search engine, which is partly guided by the number of clicks on an item to help determine its relevance to a search query. If the eighth listing for a search term is the one most people go to, the algorithm puts it higher up.

As the world is becoming increasingly digital, aggregating and analysing data is likely to bring huge benefits in other fields as well.（又开始讲好处了） For example, Mr Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, sit on a presidential task force to reform American health care. “Early on in this process Eric and I both said: ‘Look, if you really want to transform health care, you basically build a sort of health-care economy around the data that relate to people’,” Mr Mundie explains. “You would not just think of data as the ‘exhaust’ of providing health services, but rather they become a central asset in trying to figure out how you would improve every aspect of health care. It’s a bit of an inversion.”

To be sure, digital records should make life easier for doctors, bring down costs for providers and patients and improve the quality of care（TS）. But in aggregate the data can also be mined to spot unwanted drug interactions, identify the most effective treatments and predict the onset of disease before symptoms emerge. Computers already attempt to do these things, but need to be explicitly programmed for them. In a world of big data the correlations surface almost by themselves.

Sometimes those data reveal more than was intended. For example, the city of Oakland, California, releases information on where and when arrests were made, which is put out on a private website, Oakland Crimespotting. At one point a few clicks revealed that police swept the whole of a busy street for prostitution every evening except on Wednesdays, a tactic they probably meant to keep to themselves.
But big data can have far more serious consequences than that. During the recent financial crisis it became clear that banks and rating agencies had been relying on models which, although they required a vast amount of information to be fed in, failed to reflect financial risk in the real world. This was the first crisis to be sparked by big data—and there will be more. （金融危机体现了big data的危害——这个例子个人感觉有点牵强啊）

The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. At the turn of the 20th century new flows of information through channels such as the telegraph and telephone supported mass production. Today the availability of abundant data enables companies to cater to small niche markets anywhere in the world. Economic production used to be based in the factory, where managers pored over every machine and process to make it more efficient. Now statisticians mine the information output of the business for new ideas.
“The data-centred economy is just nascent,” admits Mr Mundie of Microsoft. “You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now.” This special report will point to where it is beginning to surface.

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发表于 2010-4-6 18:34:59 |只看该作者

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The effect of information abundance is being felt everywhere in my life, from recreation to research, from leisure time to work hour. Every morning I open my computer, I become sunk in all sorts of information, from facebook to forums online, from Google news to scientific report. Sometimes it drives me crazy to browse through so much information and feel really anxious.

As the report puts it, information exposure has both advantages and disadvantages. The large amount of data help people know more about the world as a whole and sometimes it also help predict the future, thus preventing some tragedy. Unfortunately, too much data has exceeded the available storage space and make it harder to protect private information. With the development of science and technology, which makes the capability of digital devices soar and prices plummet, and the wide spread of higher education, the influence of data abundance will become wider and wider.

As long as well managed, the large amount of information will do a lot good to human beings. Nowadays jobs connected with data analysis are becoming more and more popular. Data management is not only important for the development of the whole society, it is also essential for individuals in our daily life.

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发表于 2010-4-7 05:25:34 |只看该作者

本帖最后由 AdelineShen 于 2010-4-7 05:53 编辑

A special report on social networking
A world of connectionsOnline social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better, says Martin Giles (interviewed here)Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Ian Whadcock
THE annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, currently in progress, is famous for making connections among the global great and good. But when the delegates go home again, getting even a few of them together in a room becomes difficult. To allow the leaders to keep talking, the forum’s organisers last year launched a pilot version of a secure online service where members can post mini-biographies and other information, and create links with other users to form collaborative working groups. Dubbed the World Electronic Community, or WELCOM, the forum’s exclusive online network has only about 5,000 members.
But if any service deserves such a grand title it is surely Facebook, which celebrates its sixth birthday next month and is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google.(facebook在online communication方面绝对是个好例子！） The globe’s largest online social network boasts over 350m users—which, were it a nation, would make Facebook the world’s third most populous after China and India. That is not the only striking statistic associated with the business. Its users now post over 55m updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. As it has grown like Topsy, the site has also expanded way beyond its American roots: today some 70% of its audience is outside the United States.

Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other globetrotting sites, such as MySpace, which concentrates on music and entertainment; LinkedIn, which targets career-minded professionals; and Twitter, a networking service that lets members send out short, 140-character messages called “tweets”. All of these appear in a ranking of the world’s most popular networks by total monthly web visits (see chart 1), which also includes Orkut, a Google-owned service that is heavily used in India and Brazil, and QQ, which is big in China. On top of these there are other big national community sites such as Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world’s Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers.
Going publicAll this shows just how far online communities have come. Until the mid-1990s they were largely ghettos for geeks who hid behind online aliases. Thanks to easy-to-use interfaces and fine-grained privacy controls, social networks have been transformed into vast public spaces where millions of people now feel comfortable using their real identities online. ComScore, a market-research firm, reckons that last October big social-networking sites received over 800m visitors. “The social networks’ greatest achievement has been to bring humanity into a place that was once cold and technological,” says Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm.
Their other great achievement has been to turn themselves into superb tools for mass communication. Simply by updating a personal page on Facebook or sending out a tweet, users can let their network of friends—and sometimes the world—know what is happening in their lives. Moreover, they can send out videos, pictures and lots of other content with just a few clicks of a mouse. “This represents a dramatic and permanent upgrade in people’s ability to communicate with one another,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley veteran who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Ning, an American firm that hosts almost 2m social networks for clients.

And people are making copious use of that ability. Nielsen, a market-research firm, reckons that since February 2009 they have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger（趋势越来越明显，lead这个词用的不错！）. Measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy (see chart 2). Last October Americans spent just under six hours surfing social networks, almost three times as much as in the same month in 2007. And it isn’t just youngsters who are friending and poking one another—Facebook-speak for making connections and saying hi to your pals. People of all ages are joining the networks in ever greater numbers.
Social-networking sites’ impressive growth has attracted much attention because the sites have made people’s personal relationships more visible and quantifiable than ever before. They have also become important vehicles for news and channels of influence. Twitter regularly scores headlines with its real-time updates on events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks and on the activities of its high-profile users, who include rap stars, writers and royalty. And both Twitter and Facebook played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama to victory in the presidential race（Twitter&Facebook在政治上的作用！）.
Delivery timeBut like Mr Obama, social networks have also generated great expectations along the way on which they must now deliver. They need to prove to the world that they are here to stay. They must demonstrate that they are capable of generating the returns that justify the lofty valuations investors have given them. And they need to do all this while also reassuring users that their privacy will not be violated in the pursuit of profit.
Illustration by Ian Whadcock
In the business world there has also been much hype around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted are services such as Yammer, which produces a corporate version of Twitter, and Chatter, a social-networking service that has been developed by Salesforce.com.
To sceptics all this talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making. They argue that even a huge social network such as Facebook will struggle to make money because fickle networkers will not stay in one place for long, pointing to the example of MySpace, which was once all the rage but has now become a shadow of its former self. Last year the site, which is owned by News Corp, installed a new boss and fired 45% of its staff as part of a plan to revive its fortunes. Critics also say that the networks’ advertising-driven business model is flawed.
Within companies there is plenty of doubt about the benefits of online social networking in the office. A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The executives’ biggest concern was that social networking would lead to social notworking, with employees using the sites to chat with friends instead of doing their jobs. Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.（两个不利的地方：social notworking&leak sensitive corporate information)
This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.

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发表于 2010-4-7 06:11:09 |只看该作者

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Online social networking has become an important part of our everyday life. I have all kinds of online social network such as My Space, Facebook and renren in China. Through such social networking, I can easily contact with my friends all over the world in a minute. It also helps me know what is happening in the life of my friends or even the life of many famous people so that I can have a more broaden horizon of view. In many cases, I learn new information from the social networking, which might be very important for my decision making. The convenience it has created to keep in touch with my distant friends also make us feel closer. However, sometimes I waste too much time on the social networking, which obviously reduce my work effecience. Also I do worry about my private information in the social networking system.

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发表于 2010-4-8 20:35:42 |只看该作者

本帖最后由 AdelineShen 于 2010-4-8 20:44 编辑

India’s extreme north-east
Entering the dawn-lit mountainsA struggle to reach Arunachal Pradesh and survive its roads
Apr 7th 2010 | From The Economist online
Day one | Day two
Day oneIT IS dark, raining, five hours from our journey’s beginning or end, and the gatekeeper of Arunachal Pradesh doesn't like my permit. Or visa, perhaps that should be, Arunachal being as difficult to enter as almost any country. The seven-day “protected area permit” now being sniffed at by a torch-lit figure in khaki took me almost a year to get, including lobbying in several state and central government departments. Among a long list of conditions, it says I will “not be allowed to discuss the controversial issues which would affect the relations between China and India.”

I have not yet broken this rule. The border-guard is more concerned that the permit, though signed and counter-signed, has not been rubber-stamped. With the assurance of a man trained to look for stamp-marks, not to read English, he says I may not pass. I puff out my cheeks. He shakes his head. I mobilise my travel companion, a close female friend of Arunachal’s chief minister’s son, who is eagerly awaiting her arrival.
A few minutes later we are rolling on, quitting the plains of Assam and starting a climb that continues, almost unbroken, to the Tibetan plateau at 15,000 feet (4,500 metres).
Foreign journalists find it especially difficult to enter Arunachal. Precious few have managed it in recent years. But non-Arunachali Indians, or “aliens” as they are known locally, also struggle. They require an “inner-line permit”, named after the boundary imposed by India’s former British rulers to divide oil-rich, tea-growing Assam from the rugged North-East Frontier Tracts, as Arunachal Pradesh—literally, land of the dawn-lit mountains—was then known. Previously ruled from Assam, it was made a state in 1987. This was part of an effort to cement India’s hold on an area seized by China during a brief, bloody border war in 1962, and still claimed by it. Chinese hawks refer to most of Arunachal as “South Tibet”, which drives Indians apoplectic.
But India’s efforts to normalise its far north-east have been lacklustre. Arunachal, a vast area, though home to less than 1.5m people, has few roads and most are dreadful. The rutted way to Bumla, a frontier-post popular with Indian tourists, requires an off-road vehicle; from Bumla, a smooth two-lane Chinese highway can be seen stretching away into Tibet. The inner-line permit, typically issued to migrant workers for six months, provided they have a local sponsor, has also kept the region isolated. Yet there is a benefit to this.
It has spared Arunachal the swarms of settlers from West Bengal and Bihar that have swamped other parts of the north-east. Thus insulated, to the relief of most Arunachalis, the state has kept many fragile traditions alive. Despite in-roads made by Hindu and Christian missionaries, many of its 26 main tribes are mostly animist: worshipping the sun and moon, a practise known as “Donyi-Polo”. In western Tawang district, most sorely coveted by China, hundreds of Buddhist nuns and monks study in seminaries blissfully untouched by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution that destroyed Tibet's monasteries. Members of the local Monpa tribe, of Tibetan origin, practise river-burial, whereby corpses are chopped into 108 pieces and thrown into a foaming torrent to ensure the deceased is reincarnated in human form.

After a brief stop in Bomdila, a mostly-Monpa town halfway to Tawang, we start early the next day. At 1,000 feet the morning sun picks out scattered rhododendron flowers, crimson specks in a variegated green swath of juniper, oak and pine. The road winds around itself, climbing precipitously towards the Sela pass, the entrance to the long Tawang valley. It is pot-holed, crumbling and made treacherous by mud and ice, certainly nothing to boast of. Yet its creator, the state-run Border Roads Organisation (BRO), is enormously proud of its shoddy work.
Every mile or two, it advertises itself in way-side slogans, offering advice to drivers and trumpeting its feats. Some are rousing: “Your BRO!” Others are poetic: “Danger creeps where safety sleeps.” One or two are saucy: “Be gentle on my curves”. My favourite owes more to its location than content. It reads, “Life is a journey, don't end it here,” and is daubed on a bridge, at the foot of the Tawang valley, that is popular for river-burials.
Day twoAS A boy, Lama Leta watched a party of khaki-suited British surveyors tramp through his village on their way to map the border with Tibet. “That’s what we thought they were doing anyway,” says the 91-year-old Monpa peasant (pictured below). “We knew nothing about the British.”
The British didn’t know much about them. After fixing India’s north-eastern frontier in 1914, in an agreement with Tibet, autonomous then, they largely ignored the region. Tibetan officials continued to levy taxes in Tawang, a traditional Tibetan satellite and the birth-place of the sixth Dalai Lama in 1682. Mr Leta, who lives on the edge of Tawang’s main town in an encampment for poor Tibetan refugees—his late wife’s community—remembers those officials too.
Descending from the Tibetan plateau with their fur-clad retinue, the Tibetans used to winter comfortably in Tawang. Then when spring came, they moved from village to village, collecting a share of the new harvest and transporting it on the shoulders of local peasants back to Tibet. They gave nothing in return, except access to the Tibetan salt trade, and considered the Monpas an inferior lot. “But they were our rulers,” says Mr Leta. “Nobody questioned them.”
In 1951, shortly after India established an administrative outpost in Tawang, China occupied Tibet. That brought the two giant nations face-to-face, separated by a border that China’s new communist government, which claimed most of Arunachal, did not recognise. In 1959 the current Dalai Lama fled to Tawang, first taking refuge in its great 17th-century monastery, one of the biggest outside Lhasa. Three years later the Chinese army came too. After weeks of high tension on the border, Chinese soldiers scattered India’s shivering, poorly-trained troops and seized much of Arunachal as well as, in the western Himalayas, a big chunk of Kashmir.

In Tawang’s hillside villages, where white stone houses flutter with colourful prayer-flags, the Chinese troops are remembered rather fondly for having leant a hand in the fields. “They were little men but they were always ready to help. We had no problem with them,” says Mem Namsey, a sinewy 83-year-old bent over a staff. A few weeks later, the Chinese withdrew. “We weren’t sorry to see the back of them either,” Mr Namsey chuckles.
With subsequently no access to Tibet, and little economic development from India, Tawang’s people were isolated. But if this stirred resentment against India, an entity few had much idea of, it was quickly doused by outrage over the crimes of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. The destruction of its monasteries spread a loathing of China that endures. Some educated Monpas even maintain that the Chinese army’s good behaviour in Tawang was part of some nefarious communist plot. “They behaved well in Tibet, too, before they destroyed the monasteries and molested the monks and nuns,” says Thupten Gendun, a former monk who acted as a translator for the current Dalai Lama when he visited Tawang last year. “They would have done the same here.”
Sino-Indian relations, broadly speaking, are much improved. Yet there has been a pronounced chill lately, provoked partly by China re-emphasising its claim to Tawang. As a result, last year China sought to block a $60m loan from the Asian Development Bank for projects in Arunachal. It also objected furiously to the Dalai Lama’s recent visit. Whipped up by scare-mongering media, some Indian commentators said that, sooner or later, fresh conflict was inevitable. But few educated people in Tawang (nearly half its 45,000 people are illiterate) expect this. “India is too strong now,” says Mr Gendun. Though he, like many others, suspects that China could repeat its 1962 triumph if it tried.
After nearly half a century of peace, most Monpas seem relaxed about living in the dragon’s shadow. Banners welcoming the Dalai Lama, who has visited Tawang five times since 1959, are still on display in its main bazaar. But so, these days, are stacks of cheap Chinese goods—shoes, toys, crockery and clothing. A gang of youths lounging there, sporting feathered hairdos and drain-pipe jeans, said the threat of Chinese aggression was the least of their concerns. They cited two others: unemployment and a fear that the current trickle of alien settlers in Tawang would one day become a flood.

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发表于 2010-4-11 19:45:23 |只看该作者

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发表于 2010-4-12 23:18:23 |只看该作者

Britain 2010: An election briefing
Who speaks for Britain?With a month to go, voters seem to think Labour deserves to lose the election but the Conservatives don’t deserve to win it. An unexpectedly close race could hand an important role to a third party for the first time in almost four decadesApr 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THIS time next month, a government may have fallen, and New Labour gone to its rest alongside Thatcherism. But the mood in 2010 is very different from the buzzing eagerness of 1997, when the Labour Party swept the Conservatives from power. This time the polls are close; party positions are far less distinct than party rhetoric; many voters are undecided; and a big chunk of them are more apprehensive about the future than elated by it.
Five years ago Labour won an unprecedented third consecutive victory. Five months ago it looked as if that would have to be the limit of its ambition. Labour seemed tired and divided, its leader, Gordon Brown, ham-fisted and hated. The Tories, redeemed from political Siberia by a fresh-faced centrist, David Cameron, were streets ahead in polling, and had only to hold on to win.
But things moved on. The prime minister, bloodied but unbudgeable, urged voters to “take a second look at Labour” and “a long, hard look” at the Conservatives. They did. And decided they either didn’t know what the Tories stood for or didn’t like it. By the end of March a hung parliament, in which no party enjoys an overall majority, seemed a plausible outcome.
The background to all this is one of wrenching change and uncertainty, on several fronts. For a decade and a half Britain enjoyed solid growth. The City of London was the world’s biggest international financial centre. Jobs grew on trees. Heavy spending on public services pulled up their quality a fair bit. Most Britons grew more tolerant of diversity (or maybe more indifferent to it). And there was a certain swagger on the world stage. Mr Brown, chancellor of the exchequer for ten years, preached the virtues of Anglo-Saxon capitalism to benighted folk in other lands. As prime minister, Tony Blair intervened militarily hither and yon.
So the shock was considerable when, in 2008, Britain slid into its worst recession since the 1930s, taking longer than other big countries to crawl out. Banks needed handouts. Factories closed. Now prospects for growth are wan and the budget deficit eye-wateringly large. Spending will be cut back and taxes are already rising. People are frightened about their economic future, and their children’s.
That increases unease in another area: social cohesion and behaviour. Britain has just undergone its biggest wave of immigration in history. Race relations were already mixed when Islamist attacks in London in July 2005 threw them into the headlines. Other questions were raised by the influx of workers from central and eastern Europe, such as what Britain’s own working class was for. And while new people were arriving, old problems were disappearing only slowly, including binge-drinking, crude, rude young people and dysfunctional families. As opportunities evaporate, anxiety about identity and entitlement seems to be sharpening.
The third big shock has to do with foreign policy and defence. As it limps away from the war in Iraq and struggles with the cost, in money and lives, of another in Afghanistan, Britain is re-evaluating its place in the world. Not for the first time, it faces the prospect of relegation from the Premier League of nations with worldwide influence. This time a long, strong fiscal squeeze will make it hard to spend as much on diplomacy, defence and foreign aid as keeping a top spot requires.
So this election matters more than many. The central choice is, as usual, between the two main parties, Labour and Conservative. But with the polls close, the Liberal Democrats are in the spotlight too. And in a very tight election any of the parties in the devolved bits of the United Kingdom—the Scottish National Party, the Welsh Plaid Cymru and four Northern Ireland parties—could also hold the balance of power.
The issues most on voters’ minds as they head to the polls are the economy, health and education, immigration, and law and order, according to Ipsos MORI, a polling firm that tracks these things. Policy differences are not always clear-cut (though party manifestos due out soon will seek to make them so). Austerity is on the way whoever wins, though both the Tories and the Lib Dems would cut the deficit faster than Labour. No main party has made immigration the strident issue the Tories did (disastrously) in 2005, though it is cropping up more as the election nears. Foreign wars, too, are less divisive this time than last. The biggest foreign-policy gaps are over Europe, with the Lib Dems its loudest cheerleaders and the Tories the most sceptical.
If the debate over economic and fiscal policy is mainly about judgment (when to cut, how much and where), big differences of principle emerge in the argument over education. Recognising that the failure of the school system to equip a great many children for life or work is Britain’s Achilles heel, the Conservatives (and indeed the Lib Dems) want to shake it up with the kind of supply-side reforms that New Labour has given up on.
But this election is in fact less about ideology than it is about values and personalities. The Tories talk of reducing the role of the state and strengthening families; Labour, drifting to the left, laments the persistence of privilege and promises “fairness” in distributing pain or gain. In the end, it may come down to how well the party leaders project competence and empathy, or even whether a televised preference for pancakes or bacon butties echoes the voters’ own. Britain’s parliamentary elections are becoming ever more presidential.

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发表于 2010-4-13 10:52:30 |只看该作者

本帖最后由 AdelineShen 于 2010-4-13 12:36 编辑

Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation （RBRC） Reports 12 Percent Increase in Collection Numbers for 2007
http://www.jrj.com　 2008年01月23日 21:11　 PRNewswire
【字体：大中小】【页面调色版】

　　ATLANTA, Jan. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC), a non-profit public service organization dedicated to recycling rechargeable batteries and cell phones, today reported a twelve percent increase in collection numbers, with more than 6.3 million pounds (2.8 million kilograms) of rechargeable batteries recycled in the U.S. and Canada through its Call2Recycle(TM) program.
Call2Recycle, the most comprehensive nationwide rechargeable battery and cell phone recycling program, provides a convenient way to collect and recycle old cell phones and used rechargeable batteries found in cordless electronic products, such as cordless power tools, two-way radios, cordless and cellular phones, laptop computers, digital cameras and camcorders.

"We are proud to report an increase in rechargeable battery collection numbers this year, which is a true testament to the efforts and participation of our many retail, consumer and community partners who have joined forces to further raise awareness of rechargeable battery recycling," said Doug Smith, Chairman of the RBRC Board of Directors and Director of Corporate Environmental Affairs for Sony Electronics. "Additional factors such as state and local legislation and grassroots involvement have helped boost overall environmental awareness and underscore the importance of rechargeable battery recycling."

The following are among the many efforts and activities that helped contribute to the increase in collection numbers:

-- Circuit City Expanded Recycling Campaign: Circuit City became the first retailer to expand upon the Call2Recycle program by introducing a new consumer initiative that increases its participation in the program and further educates consumers on the importance of protecting the environment. In addition to regular Call2Recycle collection boxes currently available in Circuit City stores throughout the U.S., Circuit City also distributed individual collection bags to all customers that made an online purchase.

-- "New York City Rechargeable Battery Law" (Local Law 97 of 2005): Legislation went into effect on December 1, 2006, prohibiting the disposal of rechargeable batteries as solid waste and requiring all New York City retailers that sell rechargeable batteries and products that contain them to collect used batteries. With more than 300 Call2Recycle locations in New York City, RBRC was named as the solution to help local retailers comply with the new law and offer a means for consumers to drop off used rechargeable batteries free of charge.

-- New Mexico Recycling Awareness Month: Together with the New Mexico Recycling Coalition and the City of Albuquerque, RBRC supported a public awareness campaign during New Mexico Recycling Awareness Month encouraging consumers to recycle their used rechargeable batteries and old cell phones at Call2Recycle locations throughout the Albuquerque area. Since 2003, participating city agencies throughout Albuquerque have successfully collected more than 6,000 pounds of rechargeable batteries through Call2Recycle.

-- Ten-Year Anniversary in Canada: RBRC celebrated its ten-year anniversary in Canada, where more than 7,000 collection locations throughout the country participate in the Call2Recycle program, including major retailers, community organizations and public agencies. Collection rates have increased steadily year over year, with a total of more than two million pounds (one million kilograms) of rechargeable batteries and cell phones collected over the last ten years. In 2007, RBRC collected more than 500,000 pounds (229,000 kilograms) of rechargeable batteries, an increase of nine percent over last year.

-- Canadian Participants'' Initiatives: RBRC, along with Program Ambassador and hockey legend, Guy Lafleur, worked with several partners across Canada to educate consumers, retailers, businesses, communities and public agencies on the importance of rechargeable battery and cell phone recycling.

- In Montreal, RBRC celebrated the recycling partnership of the City of Montreal and the Montreal Fire Department who have organized collection sites at every fire station throughout the City to enable residents to drop-of their used rechargeable batteries and cell phones at locations close to home.

- In Calgary, RBRC presented the National Recycling Leadership Award to the Alberta Environment Action on Waste team for their coordination of a six-month call-to-action campaign that encouraged businesses, communities and public agencies in Alberta to join Call2Recycle. This campaign resulted in the addition of 41 new collection locations that, together with other locations in Alberta, collected more than 33,446 pounds (15,203 kilograms) of rechargeable batteries during the campaign period, an increase of 31 percent from the previous year.

- In Vancouver, RBRC recognized its partnership success with London Drugs, whose stores serve as RBRC collection locations throughout Western Canada

For more information or to find the nearest participating drop-off location, call 1-877-2-RECYCLE or go online at www.call2recycle.org.

About RBRC

The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC) is a nonprofit, public service organization dedicated to rechargeable battery and cell phone recycling. There are over 50,000 retail, business, and community collection locations that participate in RBRC''s rechargeable battery recycling program throughout Canada and the United States. RBRC is funded by more than 350 manufacturers and marketers of portable rechargeable batteries and products. RBRC''s public education campaign and recycling program is the result of the rechargeable power industry''s commitment to conserve natural resources and prevent cell phones and rechargeable batteries from entering the solid waste stream. Cell phones collected through the Call2Recycle(TM) program will be recycled or refurbished and resold when possible with a portion of the proceeds benefiting select charities. Contributions or gifts to RBRC are not tax deductible. For more information, call 1-877-2-RECYCLE or visit www.call2recycle.org.

Source: Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation

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the wind of freedom blows

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AdelineShen
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发表于 2010-4-13 10:54:25 |只看该作者

今天来一个Battery Recycling的专题，先去吃饭。。。

Die luft der Freiheit weht
the wind of freedom blows

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