1006G[REBORN FROM THE ASHES组]备考日记 by 正常点——任何的失败都有太多的必然

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

75# pluka

你也稀饭他哈？看来偶们是志同道合的一代哦~~:lol

kulewy531UID: 2603031

回踩你一个！阅读笔记做得真是认真啊！

aladdin.ivyUID: 2596664

75# pluka

恕我无知……这头像是谁啊？

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment:

The last part of the financial debate report has finally explained the two contrary remarks clearly. Among the rebuttal statements, what the two groups really concern is the effective of pay-performance policy and the main culprit of financial crisis. The murder of global economy is the one who makes use of money from others to invest in his business. In order to realize his plot and secure his legitimacy, he has to create numerous financial instruments, which leads to disastrous capital blankness. What’s more, according to the stubborn facts, it is certain that the executive compensation has nothing to do with financial crisis. Although the opposed group claimed the poor performance executives leaved their position with outrageous departure package, one still needs to consider the possibility of the unemployed executives to be re-occupied and the price they have paid for it.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Golden parachute:

Contractual benefits that assure a high-level employee of generous payments if a company is taken over and he or she is dismissed as a result.

金降落伞:合同中规定的保证高层雇员因公司被收购而遭解职时可获得的一大笔钱的福利。


Leverage:

金融杠杆(leverage)简单地说来就是一个乘号（*）。使用这个工具，可以放大投资的结果，无论最终的结果是收益还是损失，都会以一个固定的比例增加，所以，在使用这个工具之前，投资者必须仔细分析投资项目中的收益预期，还有可能遭遇的风险，其实最安全的方法是将收益预期尽可能缩小，而风险预期尽可能扩大，这样做出的投资决策所得到的结果则必然落在您的预料之中。另外，还必须注意到，使用金融杠杆这个工具的时候，现金流的支出可能会增大，必须要考虑到这方面的事情，否则资金链一旦断裂，即使最后的结果可以是巨大的收益，您也必须要面对提前出局的下场。

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Tech.view
Passwords aplenty
Dec 18th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From Economist.com
How to stay sane as well as safe while surfing the web
AT THIS time of the year, your correspondent crosses the Pacific to Japan for a month or so. He repeats the trip during the summer. He considers it crucial in order to keep abreast of（跟上） all the ingenious technology which, once debugged(调整) by the world’s most acquisitive（贪婪的） consumers, will wind up（终结，关门大吉） in American and European shops a year or two later.

Each time he packs his bags, though, he is embarrassed by having to include a dog-eared set of notes that really ought to be locked up in a safe. This is his list of logons（注册） and passwords for all the websites he uses for doing business and staying in touch with the rest of the world. At the last count, the inch-thick list accumulated over the past decade or so—your correspondent’s sole copy—includes access details for no fewer than 174 online services and computer networks.



Alamy
He admits to flouting the advice of security experts: his failings include using essentially the same logon and password for many similar sites, relying on easily remembered words—and, heaven forbid, writing them down on scraps of paper. So his new year’s resolution is to set up a proper software vault（库，拱顶，地窖） for the various passwords and ditch（摆脱，甩开） the dog-eared list.

Your correspondent’s one consolation（安慰） is that he is not alone in using easily crackable words for most of his passwords. Indeed, the majority of online users have an understandable aversion to strong, but hard-to-remember, passwords. The most popular passwords in Britain are “123” followed by “password”. At least people in America have learned to combine letters and numbers. Their most popular ones are “password1” followed by “abc123”.

Unfortunately, the easier a password is to remember, the easier it is for thieves to guess. Ironically, the opposite—the harder it is to remember, the harder it is to crack—is often far from true. That is because, not being able to remember long, jumbled sets of alphanumeric（文字数字） characters interspersed with symbols, people resort to writing them down on Post-it notes left lying around the office or home for all and sundry to see.

Apart from stealing passwords from Post-it notes and the like, intruders basically use one of two hacks to gain access to other people’s computers or networks. If time and money is no problem, they can use brute-force（强力） methods that simply try every combination of letters, numbers and symbols until a match is found. That takes a lot of patience and computing power, and tends to be the sort of thing only intelligence agencies indulge in.

A more popular, though less effective, way is to use commercial software tools such as “L0phtCrack” or “John the Ripper” that can be found on the internet. These use dictionaries, lists of popular passwords and rainbow tables (lookup tools that turn long numbers computed from alphanumeric characters back into their original plain text) to recover passwords.

According to Bruce Schneier, an independent security expert, today’s password crackers “can test tens—even hundreds—of millions of passwords per second.” In short, the vast majority of passwords used in the real world can be guessed in minutes. And do not think you are being smart by replacing the letters “l” or “i” in a password with the number “1”; or the letter “s” with the number “5” or the symbol “$”. Cracking programs check all such alternatives, and more, as a matter of course(习以为常).

What should you do to protect yourself? Choose passwords that are strong enough to make cracking them too time consuming for thieves to bother.

The strength of a password depends on its length, complexity and randomness. A good length is at least eight symbols. The complexity depends on the character set. Using numbers alone limits the choice to just ten symbols. Add upper- and lower-case letters and the complexity rises to 62. Use all the symbols on a standard ASCII keyboard and you have 95 to choose from.

The third component, randomness, is measured by a concept borrowed from thermodynamics（热力学）—the notion of entropy（熵） (the tendency for things to become disordered). In information theory, a tossed coin has an entropy of one “bit” (binary digit). That is because it can come down randomly in one of two equally possible binary（二） states.

At the other extreme, when you set the encryption of a Wi-Fi link, you are usually given the choice of 64-bit or even 128-bit security. Those bit-numbers represent the entropy (or randomness) of the encryption used. A password with 64 bits of entropy is as strong as a string of data comprising 64 randomly selected binary digits. Put another way, a 64-bit password would require 2 raised to the power of 64 attempts to crack it by brute force—in short, 18 billion billion attempts. A 64-bit password was finally cracked in 2002 using brute-force methods. It took a network of volunteers nearly five years to do so.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the American government’s standards-measuring laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland, recommends 80-bit passwords for state secrets and the like. Such security can be achieved using passwords with 12 symbols, drawn from the full set of 95 symbols on the standard American keyboard. For ordinary purposes, that would seem overkill. A 52-bit password based on eight symbols selected from the standard keyboard is generally adequate.

How to select the eight? Best to let a computer program generate them randomly for you. Unfortunately, the result will be something like 6sDt%k&3 that probably needs to be written down. One answer, only slightly less rigorous, is to use a mnemonic constructed from the first letters (plus contractions) of an easily remembered phrase like “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (MCa1otFA) or “To be or not to be: that is the question” (2Bo-2b:?).

Given a robust 52-bit password, you can then use a password manager to take care of the dozens of easily guessable ones used to access various web services. There are a number of perfectly adequate products for doing this. In an early attempt to fulfil his new year’s pledge(保证), your correspondent has been experimenting with LastPass, a free password manager that works as an add-on to the Firefox web browser for Windows, Linux or Macintosh. Versions also exist for Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on the Mac.

Once installed and given a strong password of its own, plus an e-mail address, LastPass encrypts all the logons and passwords stored on your computer. So, be warned: forget your master password and you could be in trouble—especially if you have let the program delete (as it urges you to let it do) all the vulnerable logons and passwords on your own computer.

Thereafter, to visit various web services, all you have to do is log into LastPass and click the website you wish to check out. The tool then automatically logs you on securely to the selected site. It will even complete all the forms needed to buy goods online if you have stored your home address, telephone number and credit-card details in the vault as well.

Your correspondent looks forward to using the service while travelling around Japan over the next month or so. To be on the safe side, however, his dog-eared list of passwords will still go with him.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment:

Well, it is said that the strength of a password depends on its length, complexity and randomness. To realize this ideal objective, software vendors provide a password manager to throw light upon this plight. However, it is unwise to reckon the password generated from the computer is really random. In fact, the so-called random number is produced by fixed computer operating. In that case, if the first number is fixed, the followed ones can get from some operating system. So it is naive to believe the randomness created by the computer program. On the other hand, it is still fortunate to figure out the progress in safety awareness. No one can satisfy his appetite by depending on his over-simple or seemed delicate password in such a dangerous world. Information war is not as unfamiliar as it was 20 years ago. No wonder mankind spare no efforts to find out more effective ways to secure their private information, especially for the ones that concerned with their fortune. In spite of the subsequent decipher, the increasing attention on safety still paves way for the future information safety system. After all, the most horrible thing is not facing the risk, but ignoring the danger without awareness.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

补充：
haven-forbid that ：但愿...不要发生
dog-eared:翻旧了的，折角的

plukaUID: 2721764

Comment:
...
So it is naive to believe（believe in) the randomness created by the computer program.
zhengchangdian 发表于 2009-12-27 23:37

Comment:
...
On the other hand, it is still fortunate to figure out the progress in safety awareness.  
zhengchangdian 发表于 2009-12-27 23:37

figure out似乎更多的用在理解原因或者找出解决方案上面，比单纯的了解、知道多那么一点背景。

:)

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Art.view
Back to the future
Dec 19th 2009
From Economist.com
The taste for clutter(喧闹) and realism is curiously buoyant（轻飘，乐呵呵）
WHILE the contemporary art market constantly seeks the new—new names, new imagery, new media or simply new novelty—another curious corner of the art market has remained steadfastly old-fashioned, cluttered and sentimental. With bad weather coming, much of London may have been preparing to shut down early for Christmas last week. But Christie’s sale of Victorian and British Impressionist pictures on December 16th and Sotheby’s sale of Victorian and Edwardian paintings the next day were surprisingly busy.

Sotheby's

Of the two auctions, Sotheby’s was by far more successful, fetching £4.4m ($7.1m) for works by some of the best-known names of the period, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Alfred Munnings, Dame Laura Knight and Charles Spencelayh. The cover lot, Spencelayh’s “The Old Dealer”, sold for a record price for the artist at auction. The buyer was David Mason, a London dealer who joined his father’s firm, MacConnal-Mason, when he was just 17. Mr Mason, who has seen recessions come and go in the 53 year he has been in the business, said afterwards: “Prices today reflect what is happening out there. People are discounting the coming inflation and buying quality. They know that inflation has always been the art dealer’s friend.”

Buyers in every sector of the art market, from Chinese porcelain to Old Masters, now seem to follow a pattern（按照样式来）. They are happy to pay over（支付，交付） the odds（优势，可能性） for top-ranking pictures, but leave the rest untouched. Nearly 40% of the lots in Sotheby’s sale were bought in. Its success lay in the high prices achieved for those that sold, half of which were bid up beyond their high estimate. Some pieces went for as much as four times what the auction house had predicted.

John Atkinson Grimshaw is a painter who celebrated（赞颂，表扬） industry, commerce and conspicuous（突出的） wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893. His works are often dark social commentaries featuring streets and portsides（左舷）, full of ships’ rigging（装置，设备） and lamplight that seems visually interchangeable with moonlight. Eight years ago Mr Mason sold an 1881 Grimshaw entitled “Prince’s Dock, Hull” to an American collector for £130,000. Consigning the picture to Sotheby’s, that same American saw his Grimshaw sell to an anonymous bidder for £397,250 (including commission and taxes), the third highest price achieved for the artist at auction.

Spencelayh, the son of an iron and brass founder, rose to be a prolific（多产的，丰富的） member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a favourite of Queen Mary. His work is, if anything, even more unfashionable-looking than Grimshaw’s. Spencelayh, who died in 1928, liked to paint fussy（过分装饰的） interiors. The most sought after are realistic pictures of men, often gathered around a table in a room full of clutter, with glazed jugs, books, umbrellas and pieces of velvet（天鹅绒） jumbled together. There is usually a pipe or two on the table, and there is nearly always a clock hanging on the wall.

A Manchester cotton merchant named Levy supported Spencelayh from the early 1920s. He offered the artist and his wife a house to live in and bought a number of his paintings. When Levy's widow, Rosie, auctioned his collection in 1946, the picture that fetched the highest sum was “The Old Dealer”, which Spencelayh had painted in 1925. It was sold again in 1973, where it was bought by Richard Green, a London dealer, on behalf of an American collector for about £30,000.

Consigned last week to Sotheby’s by this same collector, it sold for more than ten times that (£337,250 including commission and taxes) to Mr Mason. Mr Green, an earlier owner, was the underbidder（喊价对手）. “It has everything you could want: the old man, the clock, the knickknacks（小玩意，花哨的小物件）,” Mr Mason said afterwards. “It is quite simply the best example of a Spencelayh I have ever seen.” Mr Mason said he bought the picture for stock, with no particular collector in mind.



“On the Cliffs” (pictured above) is one of a series of pictures that Laura Knight painted of women sitting high above the water on the Cornish coast. In one of the earliest examples, “Daughter of the Sun”, the women were naked. That picture did not sell when Knight exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1912, and Knight later cut it up and sold the pieces after it had become damaged. She continued to be inspired by the Cornish theme in the years before the end of the first world war, after she and her husband moved to London. In “On the Cliffs” one woman is sewing while the other may be threading a needle. Both are strong, calm figures. Behind them the sea, silvery, shimmering and full of light, has the same idyllic quality of water painted at the time by the Scottish Colourists. But there are no men in any of Knight’s pictures of this period, reminding viewers that war was close at hand.

“On the Cliffs” sold to an anonymous bidder for £646,050, nearly twice the top estimate. Even at that price, many regard the painting as a bargain. In July, Galen Weston, a Canadian billionaire whose family owns Fortnum & Mason, bought the companion picture, “Wind and Sun”. It cost him £914,850.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment：

Art has always been a popular topic since mankind created cave paintings to record their daily life. It is believed that the arts reveal the otherwise hidden ideas and impulses of a society. In other words, the purpose of art is to upset the tradition. To illustrate this point of view clearly, here’s a good example. As known to all, the aesthetic conception has adjusted to the wave of change all the time. During the period of Renaissance, the famous painter Botticelli created a languished Venus to express the melancholy of goddess to come to this misery world. From then on, painters began to impute their creations with humanity, especially to depict emotions in the eyes of goddess. After that, Venus with soft and gentle profile symbolized the desire for love in numerous art works. And until the outbreak of Tiziano’s boldness and unrestraint could a voluptuous Venus greet us. In this development of aesthetic perception, one can draw a definite conclusion that the aim of art is overthrow the past.

What’s more, one can gain a new revelation from the selling of “On the Cliff”. It is really amazing to find that a delicate art work can be sold out when it has been cut up and damaged. At the same time the courage of Knight to wreck his own work is also worth celebrating. Maybe this act can be seen as a new way to preserve a work of art. In sum, art has always played an important role in overthrowing the tradition and providing new energy for the future life.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

A special report on entrepreneurship

Global heroes

Mar 12th 2009 From The Economist print edition

Despite the downturn（衰退）, 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（中间） of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed（目光炯炯的） Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed（聚众） business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil（菜油） company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy（疯狂，狂乱） of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect a huge tent to take the overflow（解决资源过剩）. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging（放弃） 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（沟通） big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives（观点，看法） have changed in the intervening（干预） decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming（漫游，闲逛） the globe.

Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe haveembraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists（布道者）. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire（讽刺）. 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（主流）, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure（基础设施） of universities and venture capitalists（风险资本家） 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（有抱负的人，轻便马车） from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour（喧闹，吵嚷） to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel（真理，主义，福音书）.

The company that arranged the oversubscribed（超额认购，过多的被认购） conference in Bangalore, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), is an example of America’s pervasive 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, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter.

The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes（赌注） 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（不成比例） 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（街头小店）. 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（长胡子）.

This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree（家谱，系谱） 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（智囊团） 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（占） 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（孤儿和流浪者）”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks（怪胎） inventing world-changing gizmos（小玩意） in their garrets（阁楼）. 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（点名） 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（面包圈） 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（特许经营） 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（狭长的一小片） 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（死对头） 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（业主企业家） 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（控股） company that provides financial muscle（财力） 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（胶靴） and cables（电缆） 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（万神殿） 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（生命线） 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（恶棍，骗子）? And why has the free-wheeling（滑行，自由轮） 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（支撑） 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（失败者） 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（冷水淋浴） 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（松绑） 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.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

86# pluka

一直以来，我总是忽略believe in，而且figure out确实用小了，嘿嘿，谢谢啦！:handshake

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

这次的题目感觉好像一直在谈创新的事情，不是很有话说的 :mad:

Comment：


As the old saying goes, a hero is known in the time of misfortune. At present, the world is suffering from an unprecedented disaster that hurls the global economy into the abyss. However, this downturn inevitably provides opportunities for bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices. The fact that these innovative entrepreneurs overthrow the traditional rules and recombine resources in new ways really accelerates the global economy metabolism. In other words, the upgrading staffs’ personal quality and the declining detrimental competition would pave way for the further economic development.

As the establishment of turbulent balance may be too recondite to receive for the public, a better way to clarify this issue is to merely concentrate on the main point. No matter what different circumstances the numerous entrepreneurs are embraced, one thing they share in common is that to maximize their profits is the underlying objection in the pursuit of self-achievement. As a consequence, the entrepreneurs could simplify the complicated and changeable situation and make breakthroughs only if they go on straight and ignore the distractions.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

An evolutionary biologist on religion

Spirit level
Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Why the human race has needed religion to survive

Alamy
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures. By Nicholas Wade. Penguin Press; 310 pages; $25.95. Buy from Amazon.com


WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas Wade recalls the place where he first felt sanctity（圣洁，神圣）: Eton College chapel.

The “beauty of holiness” in a British private school is a far cry from（与…迥然不同） the sort of religion that later came to interest him as a science journalist at Nature magazine and then the New York Times. To examine the roots of religion, he says, it is important to look at human beginnings. The customs of hunter-gatherer peoples who survived into modern times give an idea of religion’s first forms: the ecstasy of dusk-to-dawn（黄昏到黎明） tribal dances, for example.

Charles Darwin, whose idea of the sacred also came from an English private school, witnessed religion at its most primordial（原始） when he went to Australia in 1836. He found it horrifying: “nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of blazing fires, all moving in hideous（可怕的） harmony…”

Whatever Darwin’s personal sensibilities, Mr Wade is convinced that a Darwinian approach offers the key to understanding religion. In other words, he sides with those who think man’s propensity（倾向，癖性） for religion has some adaptive function. According to this view, faith would not have persisted over thousands of generations if it had not helped the human race to survive. Among evolutionary biologists, this idea is contested（有争议的）. Critics of religion, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, suggest that faith is a useless (or worse) by-product（副产品） of other human characteristics.

And that controversy leads to another one. Does Darwinian selection take place at the level only of individuals, or of groups as well? As Mr Wade makes clear, the notion of religion as an “adaptive” phenomenon makes better sense（更有意义） if one accepts the idea of group selection. Groups which practised（实践）
religion effectively and enjoyed its benefits were likely to prevail over those which lacked these advantages.

Of course, the picture is muddied（模糊不清） by the vast changes that religion went through in the journey from tribal dancing to Anglican hymns. The advent of settled, agricultural societies, at least 10,000 years ago, led to a new division of labour, in which priestly castes（僧侣阶级） tried to monopolise（独占） access to the divine（神学家，造物主）, and the authorities sought to control sacred ecstasy.

Still, the modifications（改良，修正） that religion has undergone（经历，经受，遭受）
should not, in Mr Wade’s view, distract from（分散…的注意力） the study of faith’s basic functions. In what way, then, does religion enhance a group’s survival? Above all, by promoting moral rules and cementing cohesion, in a way that makes people ready to sacrifice themselves for the group and to deal ruthlessly with outsiders. These arguments are well made. Mr Wade has a clear mind and limpid prose style which guides the reader almost effortlessly through 200 years of intellectual history. Perhaps, though, he oversimplifies the link between morality, in the sense of （在…的意义上）obedience to rules, and group solidarity based on common participation in ecstatic（狂喜的）
rites.

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（道德规范） tend to eschew the ecstatic.

Max Weber, one of the fathers of religious sociology, contrasted the transcendental feelings enjoyed by Catholic mass-goers with the Protestant obsession with behaviour. In Imperial Russia, Peter the Great tried to pull the Russian Orthodox church from the former extreme to the latter: to curb its love of rite and mystery and make it more of a moral agency like the Lutheran churches of northern Europe. He failed. Russians liked things mystical, and they didn’t like being told what to do.

As well as giving an elegant summary of modern thinking about religion, Mr Wade also offers a brief, provocative history of monotheism（一神教）. He endorses（赞同，批准） the radical（激进的） view that the story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is myth, rather than history. He sympathises（同情） with daring ideas about Islam’s beginnings: so daring that many of its proponents（支持者） work under false names. In their view, Islam is more likely to have emerged from dissident Christian sects in the Levant than to have “burst out of Arabia”, as the Muslim version of sacred history teaches.

At times（有时）, the book stumbles（失误）. In describing the interplay between Hellenic and Hebrew culture at the dawning of Christianity, Mr Wade makes exaggerated claims. He says there is no basis for a mother-and-child cult in the religion of Israel. In fact there are many references in the Hebrew scriptures to the Messiah and his mother; the Dead Sea Scrolls have made this even clearer. And his micro-history of Christian theology（神学） is inaccurate in places.

These objections aside, this is a masterly（高妙的） book. It lays the basis for a rich dialogue between biology, social science and religious history. It also helps explain a quest for collective ecstasy that can take myriad forms. Perhaps his brief autobiographical reference to Eton should have noted the bonding（粘结） effect not only of chapel, but also of songs like “Jolly Boating Weather”.