1006G 备考日记by C。——认真是一种可怕的力量。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

好久没翻精华帖了 该打！
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-305238-1-1.html
这个咋一看很不错 后来一想 前面的effective writing 其实有说过了尤其关于这部分——

The conclusion then ties the introduction and body together, and provides some sort of link putting it all together. It should not just restate what you wrote in the introduction and the body of your essay - you should try to come up with a way to paraphrase what you have written. The idea is to restate the main idea of your essay without using the exact same language you used in the essay itself.

如果不是effective writing就是其它材料 总之 有印象 记好了

这个有启发：

It is also important that you provide a real life example to support your position in the issue analysis essay. So get reading, or talk to your friends about current issues that you can call on to support your stance. Microsoft, Intel - these are good for technology. Just find the basics, you don't need to come up with an obscure example, just something that shows you command a very good understanding of the issue.

不过关于life example的使用 我还是有点不确定 怎么在一篇体现你学术能力的文章里用上一些生活化的例子 在我看来 挑战挺大的 有点像走钢索 需要真功夫 anywhy  不试试不知道 有机会要卖弄下

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

01.02.
READING:

HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically (adv. 在算法上) rather than photographically (adv. 摄影般地, 逼真地).

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic (marked by an often perplexing brevity) headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights ferociously (extremely intense). Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with
the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits (recognition by name of a person contributing to a performance (as a film or telecast))
, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge (the most advanced)digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead — something that most moviegoers don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put (speaking in a direct honest way that sometimes upsets people), something is happening before our eyes. We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish (slightly yellow)tint — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered prints and bad projection have helped thwart the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback — that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of (a large number or amount) similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar American homes — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially (adv.空间地; 占有空间地; 存在于空间地)in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

And yet we still watch movies. And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right? （意思是电影屏幕和剧本都没有改变？）It has and it hasn’t, as we will only understand as film continues to disappear. These days instead of falling in love with the movies at home in front of the television, new generations fall in love with movies they watch on hand-held devices that, however small, play images that are larger than those Edison showed to customers before the invention of the Vitascope. A teenager watching a movie on her iPhone might not be looking at an actual film. But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema.（翻译不出来）

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”

You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world. But even when seated third row center and occupying two mental spaces, you understand that you and the movie inhabit separate realms. When I watched “The Dark Knight” in Imax, I felt that I was at the very edge of the screen . “Avatar,” in 3-D, by contrast, blurs that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more. Like a video game designer, Mr. Cameron seems to want to invite you into the digital world he has created even if, like a film director, he wants to determine your route.
Perched(to place on a perch, a height, or a precarious spot) between film and digital, “Avatar” shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.（这句话理解不了…）


Comment:
I guess the author must be enlightened a lot by the movie of Avatar, which interests me much more then before since I’ve heard it is a film that changes your idea of what movie is.
Back to this article, the author has discussed the reform of movie from, as he advises, the preproduction to the projection. Indeed, also the ways we enjoy it have been changed rapidly with the developing of technology involved in it. We might feel lucky for having such bleeding-edge tech device to show us the virtual image so reality that it seems we are being through them. And there may have an unpredicted future on movie industry for we have no idea about what the technology would bring us and the human being’s wisdom, too. It is a trend for film to abandon the old ways to find new ones to content the need of customers. We’ll see.

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

汗。。。竟然有广告，来看看C，加油~~

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

153# AdelineShen

是啊 好⊙﹏⊙b汗

嘿嘿 hug~~

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

01.03.
READING:
Beyond Righteousness and Gain
by Zhou Guoping

"A virtuous man is concerned with righteousness while a mean man, with gain,” Confucius says. The "righteousness" and "gain" have long been a central theme in the Chinese philosophy of life. But, what if I am neither virtuous nor mean?

There was once a time when almost everyone claimed to be a gentleman and every word uttered was about righteousness. At that time, there might have been some truly virtuous men who were so righteous as to give up whatever was profitable. But, more likely, one might meet hypocrites who used righteousness as a fig leaf for their cupidity, or pedants believed in whatever passed for righteousness. Gone are the old days. The social trend has taken on a dramatic change unawares: the reputation of righteousness nosedived (a sudden extreme drop), truly virtuous men became extinct, hypocrites dropped the fig leaf and the scales fell from the eyes of the pedants. Without exception, they all joined in the scramble for gains. It is believed that the philosophy of life has changed and a new interpretation of righteousness and gain looms large: seeking material gains is not the exclusive patent of the mean, but a golden rule for all.

"Time is money" is a vogue word nowadays. Nothing is wrong when entrepreneurs apply it to boost productivity. But, when it is worshipped as a motto of life and commercialism takes the place of other wisdom of life, life is then turned into a corporation and, consequently, interpersonal relations into a market.

I used to mock at the cheap "human touch". But, nowadays even the cheap “touch” has become rare and costly. Can you, if I may ask, get a smile, a greeting, or a tiny bit of compassion for free?

Don’t be nostalgic, though. It is in fact of little help if you try to redeem the world or salvage the corrupt minds through preaching various brands of righteousness. Nevertheless, beyond righteousness and gain, I believe, there are other attitudes towards life; beyond virtue and meanness, there are other individualities. Allow me to coin a sentence in the Confucian style: "A perfect man is concerned with disposition (a tendency or willingness to behave in a particular way)."

Indeed, righteousness and gain, seemingly poles apart, have much essence in common. Righteousness calls for a devotion to the whole society while gain drives one to pursue material interests. In both cases, one’s disposition is over- looked and his true “self” concealed. "Righteousness" teaches one to give while "gain" induces one to take. The former turns one’s life into a process of fulfilling endless obligations while the latter breeds a life-long scramble for wealth and power. We must remember, however, the true value of life is beyond obligations and power. Both righteousness and gain are yoked by calculating minds. That’s why we often find ourselves in a tense interpersonal relationship whether Mr. Righteousness is commanding or Mr. Gain, controlling.

If "righteousness" stands for an ethical philosophy of life, and "gain," a utilitarian one, what I mean by "disposition" is an aesthetical philosophy of fife, which advocates taking your disposition as the operational guidance for your fife, whereby everyone is allowed to keep his true "self". You do not five for the doctrines you believe in or the materials you possess. Instead, your true "self" makes you who you are. The true meaning of life lies not in giving or possessing, but in creating, which actively unfolds your true disposition, or, in other words, the emotional gratification you obtain through the exertion of your essential power. Different from giving, which is the performance of an external responsibility, creating is the realization of one’s true self. The difference between creating and possessing is more than crystal clear. Let’s take creative writing as an example: "Possessing" focuses on the fame or social status a piece of writing may bring, while "creating" highlights the pleasure in the process of writing. A man of disposition seeks nothing but the communication of feelings while in company, and the cultivation of taste while possessing something. More valuably, in a time when most people are busy hunting for wealth and being hunted by it, a man of disposition is always at ease in social intercourses. Here I' m not talking about the leisure of traditional Chinese scholar-officials, nor the complacency of conservative peasants, but about a peaceful mind coming from a non-materialistic attitude towards life. Using the writing example again, I’ve been wondering why a writer needs to be prolific. If he dreams of being enshrined, an immortal short poem is enough. Otherwise, he could be pretty much satisfied with a carefree life. In this sense, writing is merely a way for such a life.

Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it." With it I couldn’t agree more. I did admire him for his easy and humorous way in describing the quandary (state of perplexity or doubt)
of life. However, a deep ponder over it has brought home (to make unmistakably clear) to me that Shaw’s standpoint is no other than "possessing", which keeps us stranded in a double dosage tragedy of life: it' s a pain not to possess your heart' s desire, and a tedium, to have possessed it. However, if we shift the standpoint from "possessing" to "creating", and look at life with an esthetic eye, we can interpret Shaw’s words the other way round: there are two comedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire, so you still have the opportunity to seek or create it. The other is to get your heart’s desire, and then you are able to enjoy tasting or experiencing it--Of course, life can never be free from pains, and a wealth hunter can not dream of the sadness of a man who places a premium on his true disposition. However, to be free from the mania for possession may at least save you many petty worries and pains, and let you enjoy a graceful life. I have no intention to prescribe the esthetic viewpoint as the cure for a corrupt world. I just want to express a belief: there is a life more worth living than the one haunted by righteousness and gain. And, this belief will help me sail through the unpredictable waters of my future life.

COMMENT:
Mr. Zhou’s essays always are full of things guiding us to think throughout. He points out a fact in nowadays that all the people seem pursue money more than anything else. They don’t even have time to stop to say hello and give a smile to the pass-bys. Definitely, more money could our material life better, but somehow it is an obstacles for us to pursue the spiritual world. If you are not persuaded, try to listen to the voice of what the teenage all complain about.
As what the author says, we don’t choose righteousness nor gain, but disposition, what we obtain from creating. My poor understanding of disposition is that the things we gain form our belief lays our daily life. For instant, what you are doing now is based on what you are pursuing, what you are pursuing is based on what you believe in. The process of this circle produce disposition.
Martial life is important, so does the spiritual. The point is not just following what the ancestor had said in their days. Considering our stand today is much more meaningful. Taking the philosophy of life today serious would help us out , what the author says, of unpredictable waters of future life.

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

01.03.
READING:
Mr. Zhou’s essays always are full of things guiding us to think throughout(ly). He points out a fact in （删掉）nowadays that all the people seem （to）pursue money more than anything else. They don’t even have （any）time to stop to say hello and（换为or） give a smile to the pass-bys. Definitely, more money could （缺个动词吧。。比如make？）our material life better, but somehow it is an obstacles for us to pursue the spiritual world. If you are not persuaded, try to listen to the voice of what the teenage all complain about.
As what the author says, we don’t choose righteousness nor gain, but disposition, what we obtain from creating. My poor understanding of disposition is that the things we gain form our belief lays our daily life. For instant, what you are doing now is based on what you are pursuing, what you are pursuing is based on what you believe in. The process of this circle produce disposition.
Martial life is important, so does（是不是应该是：is?） the spiritual. The point is not just following what the ancestor had said in their days. Considering our stand today is much more meaningful. Taking the philosophy of life today serious（ly） would help us out , what the author says, of unpredictable waters of future life. （用插入语，good!学习~呵。。）
123runfordream 发表于 2010-1-3 18:58

不晓得改的对不对，担待~呵。。

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

01.02.
READING:

And yet we still watch movies. And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks like a duck (in stereo), nothing has changed, right? （意思是电影屏幕和剧本都没有改变？）
123runfordream 发表于 2010-1-2 21:47

我的理解是：做了一个比喻：

鸭子（大屏幕的电影）和呷呷的叫的鸭子（立体声的电影），实际上都是鸭子
也就是说，不管采取什么样的途径看电影（后面说的，TV，vitascope,iphone或者是前面的3-D），其实都是在看电影。因此后面作者举例有：

A teenager watching a movie on her iPhone might not be looking at an actual film. But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint of cinema

https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1047481-3-1.html.

有错的话，还请担待，担待，呵。。。请指正，呵。。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

to Q:

基本都是被你改对了 我真是粗心 嘿嘿 谢谢哈！
下次检查完了再贴

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

01.04.

reading:

The Consolation of Philosophy （节选）
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
Translated by David R. Slavitt

“As we have agreed, I think, things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them. Let us consider, then, insofar as we can, what the nature of divine substance must be so that we can have some inkling of the kind of knowledge the divine mind has. All who live by reason agree that God is eternal, and we must therefore think about what eternity means. This will clarify what the divine nature is and also what divine knowledge must be. Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, perfect possession of limitless life, which we can better understand perhaps by comparing it to temporal things. One who lives in time progresses in the present from the past and into the future. There is nothing in time that can embrace the entirety of his existence. He has no idea about tomorrow and has already lost his hold on the past. In this day-to-day life, he lives only in the transitory moment. Whatever is in time—even though, as Aristotle says, time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity—is still not what may correctly be called ‘eternal.’ Its life may be infinitely long, but still it does not comprehend its entire extent simultaneously. It is still waiting for the future to reveal itself and it has let go of much of the past. What may properly be called eternal is quite different, in that it has knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past. It is in an eternal present and has an understanding of the entire flow of time.

“Those philosophers are wrong, then, who took Plato’s dictum that the world had no beginning and had no end and inferred from that that the created world is co-eternal with the Creator. It is one thing to proceed through infinite time, as Plato posits, but quite another to embrace the whole of time in one simultaneous present. This is obviously a property of the mind of God. God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of time in the immediacy of his being. The endless and infinite changing of things in time is an attempt to imitate eternity, but it cannot equal its immobility and it fails to achieve the eternal present, producing only an infinite number of future and past moments. It never ceases to be and therefore is an imitation of eternity, but it is balanced on the knife edge of the present, the brief and fleeting instant, which we may call a kind of costume of eternity. But since it is not equal to that eternal state, it falls from immobility to change, from the immediacy of a continuing present to the infinite extent of past and future moments, and it confers on whatever possesses it the appearance of what it imitates. And since it could not abide in permanence, it seized instead on the infinite flow of time, an endless succession of moments, and in that way could appear to have a continuity, which is not the same as permanence. All this is to say that if we use proper terms, then, following Plato, we should say that God is eternal but the world is perpetual.

“Now, since every judgment is able to comprehend things only according to the nature of the mind making that judgment, and since God has an eternal and omnipresent nature, his knowledge surpasses time’s movements and is made in the simplicity of a continual present, which embraces all the vistas of the future and the past, and he considers all this in the act of knowing as though all things were going on at once. This means that what you think of as his foreknowledge is really a knowledge of the instant, which is never-passing and never-coming-to-be. It is not pre-vision (praevidentia) but providence (providentia), because, from that high vantage point (a position or standpoint from which something is viewed or considered especially: POINT OF VIEW), he sees at once all things that were and are and are to come. You insist that those things of the future are inevitable if God can see them, but you must admit that not even men can make inevitable those things that they see. Your seeing them in the present does not confer any inevitability, does it?”

“No, not at all.”

“And if you accept the distinction between the human and the divine present, then it would follow that, just as you see things in the temporal present, he must see things in the eternal present. So his divine prescience does not change the nature of things, but he sees them in his present time just as they will come to be in what we think of as the future. And he cannot be confused but sees and understands immediately all things that will come to pass whether they are necessitated (necessitate: to make necessary) or not—just as you can see at the same time a man walking on the ground and the sun rising in the sky, and, although the two sights coincide, you understand immediately that the man’s walking is willed and the sun’s rising is necessitated. And it is similarly true that his observation does not affect the things he sees that are present to him but future in terms of the flow of time. And this means that his foresight is not opinion but knowledge based on truth and that he can know something is going to happen and at the same time be aware that it lacks necessity.

“Now, if you were to say that what God sees as going to occur cannot not occur and that what cannot not occur happens of necessity, and make a problem of the word ‘necessity,’ I will answer that it is absolutely true but is, indeed, a problem, not so much for logicians as for theologians. All I can tell you is that this future event from the point of view of divine knowledge is necessary, but from its own nature is utterly and entirely free. There are actually two necessities, one of them simple—as that all men are mortal—and the other conditional—as that when you see a man walking it is necessary that he be walking. Whatever you know cannot be otherwise than as you know it. But this conditional necessity is different from the simple kind in that it is not caused by the thing’s nature but by the addition of the condition. It is not necessary that a man go for a walk, even though it is necessary, when he is walking, that he is walking. It is in the same way that if divine providence sees anything in its eternal present, that must necessarily be, even though there is no necessity in its nature. God can see as present future events that happen as a result of free will. Thus, they are, from God’s point of view, necessary, although in themselves they do not lose the freedom that is in their nature. All those things, then, that God knows will come to be will, indeed, come to be, some of them proceeding from free will, so that when they come to be they will not have lost the freedom of their nature, according to which, until the time that they happened, they might not have happened. So why is it important that they are not necessary if, from the aspect of divine knowledge, it turns out that they are tantamount (汗
还是没背下这小破词equivalent in value, significance, or effect) to being necessary? It is like the examples I proposed to you a moment ago of the rising sun and the walking man. While these things are happening, they cannot not be happening, but of the two, only one was bound to happen while the other was not. In the same way, the things God sees in his eternal present will certainly happen, but some will happen because of the necessity of things and others will happen because of those who are doing those actions. From the aspect of divine knowledge, then, they are necessary, but considered in themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. So are things that you look at with the senses singular, but if you look at them from the point of view of reason, they are universal.

“And now you may perhaps object that it lies in your power to change your intention and thereby to frustrate providence and turn it into nonsense, because whatever providence may have foreseen, you can do something else. And my answer is that you can decide to do something else, but the truth of providence will have seen that as well in its eternal present, and whatever you may try to do that is different or unpredictable will have been understood and predicted, whichever way you turn, so that you cannot avoid or evade divine foreknowledge, just as you cannot escape being seen by an eye that is focused on you, even though you decide to dart one way when you had been going in another direction. And what would you reply? That it is within your power to alter divine knowledge, since you were going to do this but abruptly changed your mind and chose instead to do that, and therefore divine knowledge must have changed just as quickly? It is not at all the case. Divine prescience runs ahead of everything and recollects it to the eternal present of its own knowledge. It does not change because it does not need to, having already foreseen the change you made at the last moment. God has this complete knowledge and understanding and vision of all things not from the unfolding of the events themselves but from the simplicity of his own perfect knowledge. It is in this light that we can answer the question you posed a while back about our providing a part of God’s knowledge. The power of his knowledge includes everything in an eternal present and does not at all rely on the unfolding of later events. In this way, man’s freedom is maintained in its integrity, and therefore God’s rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and appropriately, because free will is operating and men are not compelled by necessity. God has prescience and is a spectator from on high, and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. In this way, our hopes and our prayers are not at all in vain. Our prayers, if they are of the right kind and are pleasing to God, are not without effect. And the conclusion, then, is clear, that you must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things.”

Comment:
I don’t quite get the actual meaning about this “philosophy” article at first. Actually, that kind of article is not easy to understand in our mother language, not even in a foreign language we are studying. And I don’t think this would be a comment at all for I am not sure these pieces of tiny thoughts could be so called comment.
The part of explaining about necessities, to be honest, confused me a lot. When I came to the last paragraph, then, suddenly, the word “destiny” came into me. Maybe we consider too much about what God have seen in our life and always try to find out what exactly it is. When we fail down, we might think God knows it. It seems like that we can not escape from what have been designed in life by God. Realizing that would make us passive about our future and life.
In the conclusion, as what the author says, “Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things”. Indeed, we suck, maybe just because we suck, for thinking too much about the undetermined things by ourselves.
I am curious about the destiny. Those comment words above are so facial. Someday, I can get more.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

01.05.
READING:

The role of the business school
Deans debate
Dec 1st 2009
From Economist.com
http://www.economist.com/business-education/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15006681

How do business schools remain relevant in today’s changing world? AS THE clamour grows for more regulation to address the corporate failings that led the world into a two-year recession, business schools sense a chance to drive the agenda. By producing academic research that can inform the debates within Washington and Brussels, there is a chance to become relevant once again. But business is also changing its mind about it wants from MBA students. The super-confident, gung-ho (extremely or overly zealous or enthusiastic) leader, that was once their calling card, has fallen out of fashion. So can schools adapt to a changing world?
To find out, The Economist spoke to two prominent business deans from either side of the Atlantic: Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of Spain’s IE Business school, and Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in America.

Has the role of the business school changed as a result of the economic crisis?
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño: Actually management is very much demanded these days. Management is everywhere. All our universities are demanding programmes in management from many different quarters: for engineers, for doctors, for architects.
But some things have changed. The presence of the visible hand [of regulation] is now more explicit. This means that business schools may have a role in preparing members of governments and the administration. The collaboration between the public and private is becoming one of the fastest growing areas of business schools.
We also see more demand for entrepreneurship courses. In times of crisis managers need to reinvent their existing businesses, launch new products and diversify. But also there are many opportunities for the creation of new business—start-ups in fields like technologies, biotechnology, in energy, even in education.
Then we also see some things changing at business schools. We field the demand from the real world to develop research which can actually address the real problems of business. This will probably affect the profile of professors. Not only must they be solid in terms of their research skills and teaching skills, they should also be able to interface with the top management.

Have you seen a change in what professors are researching over the last two years?
Paul Danos: Research grinds slowly. Let's take a marketing professor who's an expert on internet marketing. Well that hasn't changed because of this crisis. Some people say "everything has changed," well it's not true. Most of the courses that we teach MBAs have not changed because of the crisis.
I think the change has come at a higher level. It's the level of: can leaders be made to be both responsible and analytical enough to understand the complexity of the world? And why did the leaders, the regulators, the CEOs and the board members miss these risk factors? Well you can debate that but it doesn't change everything. It doesn’t even change everything in finance. Finance is primarily the same as it was before the crisis. When you get to a higher level though, when you start asking CEOs and board members to contemplate their responsibilities, then you have to think about it in a different way. So it's subtle, nuanced (nuance: a subtle distinction or variation).
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño: This brings me to another thing that many of our schools are currently contemplating: that all the areas evolve over time. So in finance, as Paul was saying, the golden rules are still valid. But the institutions, the concepts of risk, the ways of assessing risk have evolved in the past years. We need people to come back to school. Managers cannot just rely on what they learned 30 years ago in their MBA programmes. This is a clinical profession like medicine, like architecture, where you need to update your knowledge. So something that may come out from this crisis is the need of managers to come back to school and update their knowledge and validate what they do in the real world.
Paul Danos: I think one thing I've walked away from the crisis with is that no-one can know it all.
You need the right kind of probing mindset when you attack problems of such complexity because no one could have ever seen the combination of factors before. So it's not the understanding of every eventuality—which is impossible—it's the right mindset.
So at Tuck we have instituted a whole series of small scale, deep courses where students are forced into that sceptical mindset of truly questioning the foundation of theories. Now that sounds esoteric, but it's really practical.
My main takeaway was not that it was an ethics problem, not that people were cheating overtly, it is that people were using the wrong mental attitude when they approached extremely complex problems that they hadn't seen before. Practice can hypnotise you into using old models and old ways of thinking. When you talk to people about the risk management systems in the big banks and at the Fed and at the regulators, it's amazing how they put together old models and old ways of thinking and tried to lay it on top of a new system.
So it proved that they weren't doing it right; they just didn't have the right mental attitude about the models and how they worked and how they hooked up. So we're trying to reinvestigate that.

Does that imply that schools have historically failed to inculcate that attitude in their students?
Paul Danos: The crisis was not caused by the broad 90% of our students who went into businesses. It was caused by the dynamics of the interplay between big banks and the regulators. Now you might say [that] those are business people too and they were trained at business schools. True, but ordinary corporations didn't do what banks did. I'm on boards of corporations and we weren't blinded, we weren't 40-to-1 leveraged. So this particular virus was in the banking system, and I think it can be analysed. I really think, at the end of the day, even though the banks themselves were irresponsible, the real irresponsibility was with the regulators because when everything else fails, the regulators are supposed to keep things safe and keep people from doing unsafe things and they didn't do it.

Can business schools exert any leverage over regulators?

Paul Danos: I think so. We have a group at Tuck right now that is made up of several schools—finance professors and economists—and they are writing white papers on many aspects of regulation. So they, as an independent party, are trying to get their voice into Washington and into Europe about the future of regulation and the future regime. They are able to get into congressional and other hearings, but it's just one voice. You know how politics is: there are many voices and lobby groups trying to influence the future of regulation.

Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño: My impression is that we still need to develop many new things in financial theory and the way we assess risk. Again, we are attending the early stages of these sciences. If you look at medicine 200 years ago and the remedies that were applied to some illnesses we get horrified now. So we will probably see some changes and here academics are actually paying the best possible service to society. Again, now we need good management. We need to recover the golden rules of what is good management, what is establishing the mission for a company. And from business schools I think we can train regulators because they need a very solid technical preparation that they lack. If you look at public administrations, people in both national, local and federal administrations, they need more preparation in finance, in management in order to take better decisions.
Paul Danos: For instance, we're doing a lot of work with healthcare delivery which is a big, important topic. If you talk to people who try to deliver healthcare, one of the biggest problems is that there's very little management education. I'm not talking about high-level finance, I'm talking about the basics of budgets, of cost containment, of deficiency. Very little of that is part of the medical-school training.
I think that in every aspect of society some amount of management education is necessary in order for those institutions to deliver the services that they intend to deliver at a reasonable cost.

Is the nature of leadership changing?
Paul Danos: If you looked at the top-level demand from executives for our programmes, it's almost all about leadership. And it's really interesting how it has evolved. So much is now focused on a teamwork-based leadership model that really emphasises self-awareness. It's a very humanistic philosophy. It's not the person that charges ahead and rallies the troops. It's more of a person that is sensitive to the situation and to themselves.
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño: It is a different sort of leadership than the one which has grown in the past decade. It is not charismatic leadership, but teamwork. We will also see in the future many institutions getting rid of this spirit of elitism or arrogance which has contributed to create this atmosphere of overconfidence. They [believed that they] were actually beyond any controls or rules—that Nietzschean moral of the super-masters. We will get back to more controls, the golden rules, more supervision, getting rid of superficial things. History is very recurrent and we are attending again a move of the pendulum.

Comment：
Debate again. The trend of returning to school is coming after the financial crisis. Some may think it is that necessary to go back to the campus or whether it is worth. What are the business schools going to teach their students during the crisis? Those simple questions are only things once remained in my head. Through this debate, these two professors do tell us the new direction of the course. I think the gold rule for everything is that learning from the history and dealing with the current situation. As what I thought, management education should not only focus on leadership but also should be sensitive about the trend of business. But what’s the relation between those two? The managers are charged of people recourses. The financial crisis should not affect them though. I should read the material more.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

words：

L1
Abstemious
Acquiesce
L2
Agronomy
Alacrity
Altruism
Anathema
Animosity
Antediluvian
L3
Aorta
Aphorism
Apocalyptic
L5
Braggadocio
Bravura
Bromide
L6
Catalyst
Cauterize
Centurion
Chauvinistic
Chivalrous

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

01.06.
READING：
Planet hunting
Looking in the shadowsJan 5th 2010
From Economist.com
The search for a second Earth gets serious

IN THE 19th century astronomers spent a lot of time seeking shadows crossing the sun. They were searching for Vulcan, a putative planet inside the orbit of Mercury, by looking for its transits. These are the moments when, viewed from Earth, the hypothetical planet would cross the solar disc. Sadly, there was no Vulcan to be found, but the method itself is sound, and it is the modus operandi (a method of procedure especially: a distinct pattern or method of operation that indicates or suggests the work of a single criminal in more than one crime) of Kepler, an American spacecraft that has been trailing the Earth, in the same orbit, since March 2009.

Kepler is a telescope that looks simultaneously and continuously at more than 150,000 stars, recording the amount of light coming from them. It is seeking the tiny, periodic diminutions of illumination caused by planetary transits and, on January 4th, the team running it announced that five such patterns had shown up in the first six weeks of the probe’s operation.

The past 15 years have shown that planets are commonplace. More than 400 have been located around stars other than the sun, by looking for the wobbles (an uncertainly directed movement) in parent stars that orbiting planets cause. A decent wobble, though, requires a massive planet, so the wobble method does not favour the discovery of Earth-sized objects. Kepler, however, can find such planets. The Earth itself, in transit, reduces the amount of light an observer would see from the sun by about 0.01%. That is well within Kepler’s range.

In fact, the planets found so far are significantly larger than Earth. Four are about the size of Jupiter and one about the size of Neptune. They also have much shorter orbits, ranging from 3.3 to 4.9 terrestrial (belonging to the class of planets that are like the earth (as in density and silicate composition)) days. Neither of these facts is surprising. Even using the transit method, big planets are easier to spot than small ones, and to be sure that a flicker in brightness is caused by a planet rather than some property of the star itself, it must occur at regular and predictable intervals. Hundreds of flickers that might have been caused by planets with longer orbits have been seen, but have not yet have been confirmed as transits.

What this does mean, though, is that the planets in question are are much closer to their stars than Earth is, and thus much hotter (1200-1650ºC), as well as being larger. But they are not as hot as the most peculiar discoveries Kepler has made. These are two planet-sized objects that are far hotter (at 12,000ºC) than their distances from their parent stars suggest they should be. That means they are giving out energy of their own, yet they are too small to be stars. One theory is that they are youngsters, giving off heat as they collapse inwards due to the pull of their own gravity, but nobody knows for sure.

None of these discoveries favours the underlying reason why planet-hunting is such a popular sport—the hope that, one day, a life-bearing planet will turn up. For that, more numbers will have to be crunched (crunch (the) numbers:to do a lot of calculations in order to find an answer), and planetary atmospheres analysed for signs of oxygen. The hunt, however, is on in earnest. If Earth-sized planets are out there, they will soon be found.

1.伏尔甘 [Vulcan]
古罗马的火神，等同希腊的赫菲斯托斯。伏尔甘专门象征破坏性的火，如火山爆发或火灾。因此他的神庙通常位于城郊。他的主要节期伏尔甘节，届时罗马家庭之长行祭礼，向火中投小鱼。人们常向伏尔甘祈求免除火灾。

2. Mercury.

The planets of our solar system are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

我们太阳系的行星有水星、金星、地球、火星、木星、土星、天王星、海王星。

Comment:
It got me again.
I am such an idiot that have little knowledge about astronomy; the worse is having little interests in it. Undoubtedly, I don’t understand this article well. But it does remind me of an issue about the meaning of exploring the out space. As the author mentions in the end, why planet-hunting are so popular, which may enlighten us that is it really possible to emigrate to other planets and how long it is going to be? Since earth is just a tiny planet in the universe, the huge world outside it is still a mystery and will be for a long time, long enough that we can see that happened.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

刚小组小讨论了下argument 调查研究问题的攻击与否问题。
我的资料吸收明显有问题。
不行不行，这样下去AW必死无疑。
不能死....

miki7catUID: 2533330

不要急，慢慢来。我们明天看题库的时候注意一点，也许能挑出些有代表性的题目讨论一下。