1006G 备考日记by C。——认真是一种可怕的力量。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.28.
不来更要断网啦。
今天考两门试。任务完成得不多。
1.单词L20.21（好好规划下，这样下去不行。。。）
2.comments 在写 估计明天才能上传
3.看了两个精华帖。鉴于今晚电脑+网络的抽筋，明日详解。

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补——
READING：
A special report on entrepreneurship

Global heroes

Mar 12th 2009 From The Economist print edition

Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge
IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed（to crowd into or around） business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.
Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.
Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists（an enthusiastic advocate）. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”
This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.
The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers from around the world still flock（to gather or move in a flock ） to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel（ something accepted or promoted as infallible truth or as a guiding principle or doctrine）.
The company that arranged the oversubscribed（to subscribe for more of than is available） conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive (existing everywhere) influence abroad. TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 by a group of Indian transplants who wanted to promote entrepreneurship through mentoring, networking and education. Today the network has 12,000 members and operates in 53 cities in 12 countries, but it continues to be anchored in the Valley. Two of the leading lights at the meeting, Gururaj Deshpande and Suren Dutia, live, respectively, in Massachusetts and California. The star speaker, Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford; one of the most popular gurus(one who is an acknowledged leader or chief proponent), Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.
The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.
For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. This special report will use the word in a narrower sense to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. The defining characteristic of entrepreneurship, then, is not the size of the company but the act of innovation.
A disproportionate number of entrepreneurial companies are, indeed, small start-ups. The best way to break into a business is to offer new products or processes. But by no means all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.
This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree(the origin and the history of something broadly) going right back to Schumpeter. Peter Drucker, a distinguished management guru, defined the entrepreneur as somebody who “upsets and disorganises”. “Entrepreneurs innovate,” he said. “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.” William Baumol, one of the leading economists in this field, describes the entrepreneur as “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. Howard Stevenson, the man who did more than anybody else to champion the study of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, arguably the world’s leading think-tank on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative” and “innovative” entrepreneurship.
Five myths
Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent. The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans and outcasts”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos(=gadget:an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty) in their garrets. In fact, entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity. Entrepreneurs may be more independent than the usual suits who merely follow the rules, but they almost always need business partners and social networks to succeed.
The history of high-tech start-ups reads like a roll-call(list) of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business.
The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19.
But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.
The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries such as high-tech and biotechnology; it can also help start-ups to grow very rapidly. And venture capitalists provide entrepreneurs with advice, contacts and management skills as well as money.
But most venture capital goes into just a narrow sliver of business: computer hardware and software, semiconductors, telecommunications and biotechnology. Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. Google is often quoted as a triumph of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.
Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.
The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.
The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.
Big can be beautiful too
But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon of entrepreneurs.
Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.
But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.
Misfortune and fortune
The downturn is also confronting supporters of entrepreneurial capitalism with some awkward questions.
Why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks? And why has the free-wheeling culture of Wall Street produced such disastrous results?
For many the change in public mood is equally worrying. Back in 2002, in the wake of the scandal over Enron, a dubious energy-trading company, Congress made life more difficult for start-ups with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation on corporate governance. Now it is busy propping up failed companies such as General Motors and throwing huge sums of money at the public sector. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of America’s House of Representatives, worries that potential entrepreneurs may now be asking themselves: “Why not get a nice, safe government job instead?”
Yet the threat to entrepreneurship, both practical and ideological, can be exaggerated. The downturn has advantages as well as drawbacks. Talented staff are easier to find and office space is cheaper to rent. Harder times will eliminate the also-rans and, in the long run, could make it easier for the survivors to grow. As Schumpeter pointed out, downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways.
Schumpeter also said that all established businesses are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet”. Today the ground is far less solid than it was in his day, so the opportunities for entrepreneurs are correspondingly more numerous. The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years.
There are many reasons for this. First, the information revolution has helped to unbundle (to give separate prices for equipment and supporting services)existing companies. In 1937 Ronald Coase argued, in his path-breaking article on “The Nature of the Firm”, that companies make economic sense when the bureaucratic cost of performing transactions under one roof is less than the cost of doing the same thing through the market. Second, economic growth is being driven by industries such as computing and telecommunications where innovation is particularly important. Third, advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry.
Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression. Opinion polls suggest that entrepreneurs see a good as well as a bad side to the recession. In a survey carried out in eight emerging markets last November for Endeavor, a pressure group, 85% of the entrepreneurs questioned said they had already felt the impact of the crisis and 88% thought that worse was yet to come. But they also predicted, on average, that their businesses would grow by 31% and their workforces by 12% this year. Half of them thought they would be able to hire better people and 39% said there would be less competition.
Comment：
We are talking the unemployment and the crisis much more than the entrepreneurs since the global recession had impact our life all over the world. This article helps me find a clearer reorganization about the entrepreneurs, who deserve the title of “hero”, which include that how the business started and how intellectual they’ve been. Though nowadays the trend of entrepreneurs is getting younger and younger, there are still a large part of brilliant entrepreneurs not so young. Those entrepreneurs gather together to show us what is so called entrepreneurship. Introspection is a practical way for the development of personality, so as to the development of business for the businessmen. The heroes handle the problem making them more like the heroes.

PS: what a terrible comments. I am depressed. Gee…

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123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.29.
READING：
propensity：an often intense natural inclination or preference
ruthlessly：→ruthless： having no pity
Hellenic：of or relating to Greece, its people, or its language specifically : of or relating to ancient Greek history, culture, or art before the Hellenistic period
Hebrew：希伯来人，希伯来语，犹太人;希伯来语的，希伯来人的。
the Messiah：a) Jesus Christ, who Christians believe has been sent by God to save the world from evi；lb) a great religious leader who, according to Jewish belief, will be sent by God to save the world
masterly：having the power and skill of a master
？：
felt sanctity
the Dead Sea Scrolls
He says there is no basis for a mother-and-child cult in the religion of Israel.

sides with
his densely but skilfully packed account of

All religion is concerned in varying degrees with metaphysical ideas, moral norms and mystical experience. But in the great religions, the moral and the mystical have often been in tension. The more a religion stresses ecstasy, the less it seems hidebound by rules—especially rules of public behaviour, as opposed to purely religious norms. And religious movements (from the “Deuteronomists” of ancient Israel to the English Puritans) that emphasise moral norms tend to eschew the ecstatic.（此段深得我喜爱！）


comments：
Religion is always an area attracting me a lot, because of mysterious. Especially the faith lays muslin or other religions. I was a litter scared when I met one of my friends who is a very sincere Muslim I though it is terrible only because I don’t know it much and had some misunderstanding about it. He told me their family pray five times every day to thank God for giving them such a good life with feeding food and housing place. People believe in god may just want a basis for their emotions. When you suffer a lot, then you survive, you might feel grateful, and think it is all by God’s protect.
Well, back to this article, there is an argument between God create men or the theory of Darwin which is Darwinism. That is the Evolution War happened in the United States. This article is an introduction about a new book on religion. As it is described with modern thinking about religion, I expect and appreciate the work a lot. Hope I have a chance to take a look.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

小小组的任务还没整出来 郁闷..
单词背了两个list 糟糕的是忘得差不多了 再加力气 前段时间的痛苦就白受了
悬梁刺股背单词！

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.30.
READING:
elaborate：(to expand something in detail).
withering：(acting or serving to cut down or destroy)
overhaul：(to examine thoroughly )
sided with:( side with∕against：to support or argue against a person or group in a quarrel, fight etc)
alluded：(to make indirect reference)

The president was told during a private briefing on Tuesday morning while vacationing here in Hawaii that the government had a variety of information in its possession before the thwarted bombing that would have been a clear warning sign had it been shared among agencies, a senior official said.


Comments:
Terrorism probably is the most sensitive and serious topic nowadays especially in the United States. There is an old saying in China that” While the priest climbs a post, the devil climbs ten”. It seems the war between terrorism and American government administration that becomes more and more intellectual. America has the top high-tech device for security; however what had happened made Mr. Obama criticize the failure of system and the government agencies. The calamity of 911 had never gone away but still stayed in people’s memory. But it seems long ago enough, and since American government had put so much fiscal policy on it, also the battles on the Al Qaeda, which may make people, lose their nervousness.
Besides this issue, I would like to know much about the psychical situations of the people in the Al Qaeda. As I know, Mr. Abdulmutallab is a lonely person who has little communication with his classmates— he doesn’t have friend at all. I might need to do more research about psychology to comfort my curiosity.

单词 开始可以静下心看进去了 嘿嘿 加油哈

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

Cmm加油加油↖(^ω^)↗

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

140# AdelineShen

thanks a lot.  same to you！

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.31.——last day of this year. FIGHTING!

READING:

Beauty(节选）
By Scott Russell Sanders

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics（量子力学）, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit planet should be able to gauge(to measure precisely the size, dimensions, or other measurable quantity of) the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug(a strong pulling force) of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit(a circular path)
and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra(代数) and geometry(几何学) and even trigonometry(三角学) in a pinch(=at a pinch:used to say that you could do something if necessary in a difficult or urgent situation), but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, (August 8, 1902 – October 20, 1984) was a British theoretical physicist and a founder of the field of quantum physics

Comment:

Wow, nice “beauty”!
After reading some of others’ comments about this essay, I thought all of us had been attracted by it. As what I had considered that beauty is just a feeling once you meet it at the first moment spreading all your whole body as you touch the electricity, refreshing you. what this article delivers to me is the same as what the author try to tell us the beauty of the nature. I do remember the landscape of a creek laying aside the village, the whole countryside held on my eyes as a wonderful picture, and the comfortable touching by the breeze. That’s the beauty I had ever been feeling. There are still plenty of beauty natures waiting for us. I bag people don’t screw this up. This is the only planet we can survive. Don’t make it a past we cant never go back.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

基本作业完成了 补充作业只完成了笔记部分
这三天要抱下佛脚 不能毁了好好的GPA
奋战 加油 （哎 其实好痛苦啊~~）

海王泪UID: 2673613

C～～呵呵～新年快乐！！！
保GPA行动就在新的一年里开始吧！！燃！！！
加油！！

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

C。加油！

plukaUID: 2721764

GPA……俺也是这周就考试。新的一年里一起为保GPA而奋斗吧~~

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

144# 海王泪

呵呵 新年快乐
你也加油哈 辛苦了~~~

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

145# qxn_1987

Q，(*^__^*) 嘻嘻…… 加油诶！

回复在这里你怎么看得到。。。我傻了。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

146# pluka

嗯嗯，现在眼里就俩G了。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

2010.01.01——happy new year！！！
READING:
The World in 2010
The Americas
Canada's northern goal
Nov 13th 2009
From The World in 2010 print edition
By Jeffrey Simpson, OTTAWA


The Arctic is no longer the forgotten frontier


Canada is a northern nation. “O Canada”, the national anthem, speaks of “true north, strong and free”. But for most Canadians, 80% of whom live within 200km (124 miles) of the United States border, the Far North (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) is a vast area never visited, largely unknown, usually forgotten and populated only by aboriginal peoples with quaint customs. All that will start to change in 2010.

Pangnirtung, population 1,300, on the east coast of Baffin Island, a settlement mostly known for Inuit art and a nearby national park, will see construction start on a C$42m ($40.5m) harbour for the small Inuit fishing fleet. At Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, cabins used by polar-bear researchers will be upgraded. At Eureka, on Ellesmere Island, an atmospheric laboratory will be overhauled. At Iqaluit, capital of the Nunavut territory, tens of millions of dollars will be spent on badly needed housing, a research institute and a research vessel.

Add to that oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea; C$100m for social housing; the same sum for geology research; another C$90m for economic-development projects; C$85m to improve Arctic research stations. The result is activity such as the Far North, from Alaska in the west to Baffin Bay in the east, has never before seen. And still to come—delayed by debilitating(debilitate: to impair the strength of) squabbles among Canada’s shipbuilders and the usual cost overruns of military projects—are three Arctic patrol ships and a polar icebreaker, plus the publication of plans for a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the north coast of Baffin Island. Later in the year, if all goes according to plan, the federal government will select a community that will get a High Arctic Research Station.

During the cold war, Canada and the United States constructed a Distant Early-Warning detection system against any attack by Soviet bombers. Apart from this DEW line, Canada paid little heed militarily to the Far North. Soviet and American submarines roamed under the Arctic ice without Canada having any ability to monitor them. The Canadian government outfitted a few Inuit with baseball hats and rifles, called them Rangers, and forgot about the region.

Now, the rush is on to discover the Far North, quite literally in the sense of research into atmosphere, ice and animals; and more urgently to get ready for the widening of sea lanes caused by global warming. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice and more scope for mineral and fossil-fuel exploration, more foreign ships traversing(something that crosses or lies across) the north, and potential conflicts with other Arctic states over the seabed, sea lanes, and sea and land borders.

The Arctic is full of unresolved border delineations. Canada and the United States disagree over the maritime boundary between Alaska and Yukon. Canada and Denmark have both planted flags on tiny Hans Island. Canada will continue working in 2010 to prepare its claim under a United Nations convention for underwater rights extending as far as the North Pole, a claim that will surely conflict with one already filed by Russia.

No country agrees with Canada’s contention that the Northwest Passage (there are actually two or three possible routes) belongs to Canada. The United States, Russia and the European Union all believe the passage constitutes an international strait. The trickiest decision for Canada is whether to consider the United States as friend or rival in the Far North, a decision that has to come soon. Do the two countries co-operate in managing the sea lanes? Do they sort out their maritime border dispute? Do they support each other against Russia, or go their own ways?

Canada’s belated interest in its Far North is somewhat ironic given that climate change has hit the Far North harder than any other part of the Earth, and yet Canada’s record in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is the worst in the G8. In the Kyoto climate-change protocol, Canada pledged to reduce emissions by 6% from 1990 levels by 2008-12; instead, emissions have risen by 27% and will rise again in 2010, especially if development intensifies in the tar sands of Alberta.

No matter who governs Canada in 2010—the country’s fractured political system has thrown up a series of unstable governments—all parties agree that the rush to research, develop and protect the Far North has become a national priority. The Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, made the Far North one of his signature issues after being elected in 2006. That the other parties now agree with this priority, without giving him any credit of course, means that the days of benign neglect of the Far North are over.

Global warming changes the world not only through the atmosphere but the islands, the seas, also the North Pole. That makes the conflict between countries having separate territories in one continent, such as Canada and United states. It seems like that it is the time for Canada made a decision, took a stand on the Far North issue.
Well, I thought that’s what I’ve got now from this article. I am quite unmilitary with this problem; therefore I had searched the global warming issue for sometimes. Talking the Copenhagen will be perfect even there still are a lot of things need to discover for me, and find out what are they. I am working on it. Hope the next comment can satisfy me.