1006G『Dream with Sazerac组』eco阅读作业贴

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

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注：Carlo Gesualdo，16世纪作曲家和歌剧家的另类，旋律中充满暴力，纵欲。Carlo Gesualdo是个王子，20岁却娶了个24岁的离过婚的妻子。后来，其叔父与其妻子偷奸不成，反向Carlo 告发妻子的婚外情，Carlo血腥的杀了妻子和他的情人。这已然成为Carlo人生的转折点。Carlo再次结婚后，一日三次的虐待妻子，并找来一群小伙子搭伙。Carlo喝巫婆的毒药自杀。
Carlo在18世纪，一直到20世纪都备受推崇。1950年，时代周刊还称他为“Ahead of his time”！
Carlo Gesualdo
Lurid(involves a lot of violence, sex, or shocking detail.) rhythmsJan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition
The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory. By Glenn Watkins. W. W. Norton; 416 pages; $39.95 and £28. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE lives of 16th-century composers of unaccompanied madrigals(a song sung by several singers without any musical instruments.) do not by and large make promising subjects for lurid films and operas. Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa (near Naples), is the exception. Descended from Norman rulers of Sicily and a Medici mother, he took a twice-widowed 24-year-old bride when he was 20, then bloodily murdered her and her lover (as local custom required) when his uncle, having himself failed to seduce her, informed Carlo of his wife’s infidelity(婚外情，occurs when a person who is married or in a steady relationship has sex with another person).(长句)
Things went downhill from there. The prince abused his next wife, and was subject to fits of melancholy(an intense feeling of sadness) that could be lifted only by thrice-daily beatings from a team of young men retained for the purpose. He ended his life tormented(extreme mental suffering) by the spells and potions of a rejected former concubine(上层阶级的人的情人) who turned to witchcraft. (Carlo 一生的简介。)
Werner Herzog made a mountain out of this in his “Death for Five Voices”, purportedly a documentary, in 1995. In the same year, Alfred Schnittke’s opera about Gesualdo added the (false) detail that he killed his own child, as if the facts were not colourful enough already. Aldous Huxley, who listened to Gesualdo’s music while taking mescaline, was so carried away by it that he once made up stories about him in a lecture. Bernardo Bertolucci has a film project about Gesualdo that is in development now. But it is the eerie(strange and frightening, and makes you feel nervous) passion of Gesualdo’s music, not the drama of his life, which led Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg to him. Both composers regarded Gesualdo as to some extent a model for their own musical innovations.
An 18th-century history of music described Gesualdo’s harmonies, which veer in and out of familiar scales, as “harsh, crude and licentious”. In 1956 Time magazine headlined a review of a Gesualdo recording as “Ahead of his time”, a questionable idea since it presupposes that the history of music is travelling in a single preordained direction. There was a boom of interest in Gesualdo among musicologists in the 1950s, and although performance of his music continues to thrive, Glenn Watkins, an American scholar of renaissance music and the leading authority on Gesualdo’s works, reports that academic interest in him is waning, for now. Mr Watkins published a study of Gesualdo’s life and music, with a preface by Stravinsky, in 1973; his new book traces the ebb and flow of Gesualdo’s reputation over the centuries, and tries to explain it.
But it does not try very hard. Mr Watkins gets lost rambling among minor details, and prefers musing over questions to answering them. He makes no attempt to explain musical terms: readers who do not know what a “diatonic, homophonic pronouncement of a frottola rhythm” is will be none the wiser after reading about it here. Mr Watkins writes that this book is part historiography, part cultural history, part autobiography, and “might well be called a notebook”. This is one notebook which probably should have remained in a drawer.

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

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The Obama presidency, one year on
Time to get toughBarack Obama’s first year has been good, but not great—and things are going to get a lot harderJan 14th 2010
From The Economist print edition
HOW far away it seems, that bitingly cold, crystal-clear morning when almost 2m people filled the Mall from Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument to hear the new president talk of the victory of hope over fear, of unity of purpose over conflict and discord. Recalling the dark days of the war of independence, he pledged(保证，发誓), like George Washington, that in the face of common danger Americans under his leadership would come forth to meet it. One year on, how well has he done?
(Obama过去一年政绩回顾。)
Not too badly, by our reckoning (see article). In his first 12 months in office Mr Obama has overseen the stabilising of the economy, is on the point of bringing affordable health care to virtually every American citizen, has ended the era of torture, is robustly prosecuting the war in Afghanistan while gradually disengaging from Iraq; and perhaps more precious than any of these, he has cleared away much of the cloud of hatred and fear through which so much of the world saw the United States during George Bush’s presidency.
More generally, Mr Obama has run a competent, disciplined yet heterodox administration, with few of the snafus(混乱的状况) that characterised Bill Clinton’s first year. Just as important have been the roads not taken. Mr Obama has resisted the temptation to give in to the populists in his own party and saddle Wall Street with regulations that would choke it. He has eschewed(避免) punitive taxation on the entrepreneurs who animate the economy; and he has even, with the notable exception of a boneheaded tariff on cheap Chinese tyres, turned a deaf ear to the siren-song of the protectionists. In short, what’s not to like?
Only one thing, really; but it is a big one, and it is the reason why most of the achievements listed above must be qualified. Mr Obama has too often remained above the fray, too anxious to be liked, and too ready to do the popular thing now and leave the awkward stuff till later. Far from living up to the bracing rhetoric of his inaugural, he has not been tough enough. In this second year of his presidency, to quote his formerly favourite preacher, his chickens will come home to roost.
It could have been so much betterAt home Mr Obama’s dangerous diffidence explains why the health bill that now seems likely to pass, while on balance a good thing rather than a bad one, is still a big disappointment. Yes, it makes provision for tens of millions of Americans who lack insurance, and many more who fear being cast into that boat should they lose their jobs. But it is expensive, and it takes only hesitant steps in the crucial direction of cost control. Constantly rising health-care charges threaten the entire federal government with bankruptcy. So it is tragic that the most comprehensive health reform in generations does so little to tackle this problem. Yet that,alas, is exactly what you would expect to happen if a president leaves the details to be written by Democrats in Congress, barely reaches out to the admittedly obstructive Republicans on issues such as tort reform, and remains magisterially aloof from much of the process.(长句)
Mr Obama’s failure to take on the spend-alls in his own party will cost him politically. His ratings are falling, and in November’s mid-term elections he looks likely, at the very least, to lose his supermajority in the Senate. Some critics argue that instead of focusing on health, he should have concentrated on jobs (the unemployment rate is two points higher than the 8% peak he predicted). That seems unfair: health care was the core part of his campaign and something America had to tackle. What has spooked the voters is the sheer cost of the scheme—and the idea that Mr Obama is unable to tackle the deficit.
They are right to be worried. The national debt is set to reach a market-rattling $12 trillion by 2015, more than double what it was when Mr Obama took over. It made sense for the government to pump money into the economy in 2009; but this year Mr Obama must show how he intends to deal with the debt. So far, he has not offered even an outline of how he intends to do so. Because he failed to be harsh with congressional Democrats (whose popularity ratings, incidentally, were a fraction of his), he will now have to do more with Republicans.
Not by carrots aloneThis same reluctance to get tough, or even mildly sweaty, is felt in America’s dealings with other nations. His long-drawn-out decision on Afghanistan mirrored that on health care. Yes, by sending more troops, he did more-or-less the right thing eventually. But it seemed as if the number of troops was determined by opinion polls, rather than the mission in hand. And the protracted dithering was damaging to morale.
Mr Obama has been on a goodwill tour of the world, proffering the open hand rather than the fist. Yet he has nothing much to show for it, other than a series of slaps in the face. Israel dismissed his settlement freeze. Going to China with human rights far down the agenda and the Dalai Lama royally snubbed seems to have done Mr Obama no good at all, judging by the fiasco that was the climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Co-operation between the “G2” was supposed to help fulfil Mr Obama’s grandiose( bigger or more elaborate than necessary) promise that his presidency would be “the moment when…our planet began to heal”. Hitting the reset button on relations with Russia has produced nothing more than a click. Offering engagement with the Iranians was worth a go, but has produced nothing yet. This generosity to America’s enemies also sits ill with a more brusque approach to staunch allies, such as Japan (see article), Britain and several east European countries.
Some worry that Mr Obama will always be a community organiser, never a commander-in-chief. In fact he did not get to the White House by merely being nice, but by being bold and often confronting awkward subjects head-on. It is not too late for him to toughen up. Firm talk about the budget in his state-of-the-union message would help. Now that the administration’s priority has shifted from engaging Iran to imposing sanctions, Mr Obama may be able to apply the stick and not the carrot. He is due to see the Dalai Lama. He might even, if he can relearn the virtues of bipartisan dealmaking, bully a climate-change bill through Congress. But this will all be a lot more difficult than anything he did in his first year.

rafaelUID: 2702393

The British economy
Stuck in the mudThe British economy is struggling to get out of the mireJan 26th 2010 | From The Economist online
Getty Images
BRITAIN’S long-awaited exit from recession has moved from thwarted prediction to firm fact. But the welcome news came with a painful sting. The economy barely crawled forward, expanding by just 0.1% between the third and the fourth quarters of 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday January 26th. This was much feebler than the median forecast among City economists for an increase of 0.4%.
The recession lasted a year and a half and was both the longest and deepest since the mid-1940s (when national output fell in the aftermath of the second world war). Indeed the slump of 4.8% in GDP last year was the steepest since 1931, when national output fell by 5.1%.

Britain’s recession was the longest among the G7 economies, which typically had downturns lasting a year, although Italy’s lasted for five quarters. It was not the most severe, measured from the pre-recession peak to the trough. That unfortunate accolade went to Japan (8.6%) followed by Germany (6.7%) and then Italy (6.5%). Their earlier recovery meant, however, that Britain’s 6.0% fall in output between early 2008 and the third quarter of 2009 was surpassed only by Japan (7.7%)(see daily chart).
All these figures will be revised in due course. Usually this is a routine matter but in the run-up to a general election, which must be held by June 3rd at the latest, but is widely expected to be on May 6th, any changes will be politically potent. In Britain, the ONS has already moderated its initial estimate of a fall in GDP of 0.4% in the third quarter of 2009, to 0.2%. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, will be hoping that the meagre increase in national output for the fourth quarter may be pushed up when the official number-crunchers, armed with more information, revisit the figures on February 26th and March 30th. Business surveys have suggested a more robust upturn and the labour market has been more resilient than expected.
But there is a potential pitfall for Mr Brown. The ONS will unveil its initial estimate of GDP in the first quarter on April 23rd. If this were to show a return to recession the news would torpedo Labour’s already slender hopes of averting a Conservative victory. Such a relapse could happen because the main rate of VAT, a consumption tax charged on most goods and services, went up to 17.5% on January 1st, following 13 months when it had been lowered to 15% in order to combat the recession. Since consumers brought purchases forward in late 2009 to dodge the impending increase they are likely to cut back now, hindering a further expansion in national output.
Looking longer ahead, the outlook is for a pretty modest recovery this year. GDP will increase by 1.4% in 2010 according to the average of 28 independent forecasts in early January assembled by the Treasury (which itself predicted 1.25% in December). Much of the recovery will come from a turnaround in the stockbuilding cycle, as inventories are run down far less than before.
Ensuring that this fragile upturn is sustained will require some skill from policymakers. The recovery has been helped by an extraordinary stimulus, both fiscal and monetary. The budget deficit has burgeoned to a post-war record, the base rate is at a 300-year low and the policy of “quantitative easing” has been vigorously pursued. As Britain belatedly leaves recession behind, so the Treasury and the Bank of England will want to execute their own “exit strategies”. Co-ordination will be vital. The tougher the fiscal tightening, the easier monetary policy can remain. But none of these crucial decisions will be made until Britain has a new government after the general election.

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

⊙﹏⊙b汗 ~~ 这么长的文章，居然读过一遍后没有保存，只能重头来过。

Anyway，讲民主的文章，还是头一回看到，以米国人的角度。

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注：美国的人权、民主报告：判断一个政权民主与否，关键是the mechanics of multi-party democracy？

Democracy's decline

Crying for freedom

Jan 14th 2010 | BUDAPEST AND KABUL
From The Economist print edition

A disturbing decline in global liberty prompts some hard thinking about what is needed for democracy to prevail(盛行，战胜)

MORE than at any time since the cold war, liberal democracy needs defending. That warning was issued recently by Arch Puddington, a veteran American campaigner for civil and political rights around the world.

This week the reasons for his concern became clearer. Freedom House, a lobby group based in Washington, DC (where Mr Puddington is research director), found in its latest annual assessment that liberty and human rights had retreated globally for the fourth consecutive year. It said this marked the longest period of decline in freedom since the organisation began its reports nearly 40 years ago.

Freedom House classifies countries as “free”, “partly free” or “not free” by a range of indicators that reflect its belief that political liberty and human rights are interlinked. (定义国家民主的标准：)As well as the fairness of their electoral systems, countries are assessed for things like the integrity of judges and the independence of trade unions. Among the latest findings are that authoritarian regimes(政权，社会制度) are not just more numerous; they are more confident and influential(有影响力的).

In its report entitled “Freedom in the World 2010: Global Erosion of Freedom”, the American lobby group found that declines in liberty occurred last year in 40 countries (in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the ex-Soviet Union) while gains were recorded in 16. The number of electoral democracies went down by three, to 116, with Honduras, Madagascar, Mozambique and Niger dropping off the list while the Maldives were reinstated. This leaves the total at its lowest since 1995, although it is still comfortably above the 1990 figure of 69.

Taken as a whole, the findings suggest a huge turn for the worse since the bubbly mood of 20 years ago, when the collapse of Soviet communism, plus the fall of apartheid, convinced people that liberal democracy had prevailed for good. (长句：插入语)To thinkers like America’s Francis Fukuyama, this was the time when it became evident that political freedom, underpinned by economic freedom, marked the ultimate stage in human society’s development: the “end of history”, at least in a moral sense.

In the very early days after the Soviet collapse, Russia and some of its neighbours swarmed with Western advisers, disseminating(disseminate，散布，宣传) not only the basics of market economics but also the mechanics of multi-party democracy. And for a short time, these pundits(博学者) found willing listeners.

Today, the idea that politicians in ex-communist countries would take humble lessons from Western counterparts seems laughable. There is more evidence of authoritarians swapping tips. In October, for example, the pro-Kremlin United Russia party held its latest closed-door meeting with the Chinese Communist party. Despite big contrasts between the two countries—not many people in Russia think there is a Chinese model they could easily apply—the Russians were interested by the Chinese “experience in building a political system dominated by one political party,” according to one report of the meeting.(长难句：插入语)

For freedom-watchers in the West, the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat. Semi-free countries, uncertain which direction to take, seem less convinced that the liberal path is the way of the future. And in the West, opinion-makers are quicker to acknowledge democracy’s drawbacks—and the apparent fact that contested elections do more harm than good when other preconditions for a well-functioning system are absent. It is a sign of the times that a British reporter, Humphrey Hawksley, has written a book with the title: “Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About the Vote?”.

A more nuanced(细微差别，微妙的) argument, against the promotion of electoral democracy at the expense of other goals, has been made by other observers. Paul Collier, an Oxford professor, has asserted that democracy in the absence of other desirables, like the rule of law, can hobble a country’s progress. Mark Malloch-Brown, a former head of the UN Development Programme, is still a believer in democracy as a driver of economic advancement, but he thinks that in countries like Afghanistan, the West has focused too much on procedures—like multi-party elections—and is not open enough to the idea that other kinds of consensus might exist. At the University of California, Randall Peerenboom defends the “East Asian model”, according to which economic development naturally precedes democracy. (差异化的叙述不同人对民主的观点)

Whatever the eggheads may be saying, there are some obvious reasons why Western governments’ zeal to promote democracy, and the willingness of other countries to listen, have ebbed. In many quarters (including Western ones), the assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and its bloody aftermath, seemed to confirm people’s suspicion that promoting democracy as an American foreign-policy aim was ill-conceived or plain cynical.

In Afghanistan, the other country where an American-led coalition has been waging war in democracy’s name, the corruption and deviousness of the local political elite, and the flaws of last year’s election, have been an embarrassment. (打着民主的旗号，发动战争。美国在阿富汗战争的失败。)In the Middle East, America’s enthusiasm for promoting democracy took a dip after the Palestinian elections of 2006, which brought Hamas to office. (美国推进民主的热情)The European Union’s “soft power” on its eastern rim has waned as enlargement fatigue has grown.

But perhaps the biggest reason why democracy’s magnetic power has waned is the rise of China—and the belief of its would-be imitators that they too can create a dynamic economy without easing their grip on political power. (指责中国，或许中国强劲的经济势头，使其他国家争相模仿中国的社会制度，尤其是一党专政，这才是影响民主化进程最大的原因。)In the political rhetoric of many authoritarian governments, fascination with copying China’s trick can clearly be discerned.

For example, Syria’s ruling Baath party talks of a “socialist market economy” that will fuel growth while keeping stability. Communist Vietnam has emulated China’s economic reforms, but it was one of the states scolded by Freedom House this year for curbing liberty. Iran has called in Chinese legal experts and economists. There are limits to how much an Islamic republic and a communist state can have in common, but they seem to agree on what to avoid: Western-style freedom.

Even Cuba, while clinging to Marxist ideas, has shown an interest in China’s economic reforms. And from the viewpoint of many poor countries, especially in Africa, co-operating with China—both economically and politically—has many advantages: not least the fact that China refrains from delivering lectures on political and human freedom.(难句：插入语) The global economic downturn—and China’s ability to survive it—has clearly added to that country’s appeal. The power of China (and a consequent lessening of official concern over human rights) is palpable in Central Asia. But as dissidents(持不同政见的人) in the region note, it is not just Chinese influence that makes life hard for them; it is also the dithering of Western governments which often temper(调和，锻炼) their moral concerns(道德上的关切) with commercial ones.(指出另一个影响民主化进程的原因：不只是中国的经济影响，还包括西方政府对那些国家处于道德的关切变质为经济上的援助。)

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

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1999年，联合国教科文组织倡导教育“扫盲”。虽然，在资金方面有了较大的改善，但情况依然不容乐观。教育资源并没有被充分利用，教师的缺勤率较高，这些都是一些欠发达地区普遍存在的问题。

Education
Reaching the poorestEnrolling the world’s poorest children in school needs new thinking, not just more money from taxpayersJan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition
DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya’s arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein’s blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand. (描述肯尼亚东北部一个小村子里早晨学校的情景。借此引出教育贫穷的尴尬。)
The lack of basic kit is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of “Reaching the Marginalised”, a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO.
In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank’s researchers made spot checks. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador. (即使是有了充足的费用，公办教育教师的缺勤率依然偏高。)
Despite the inspiring rhetoric that accompanied the adoption of the UN’s “Education For All” goals in 1999, progress has been patchy(掩盖). The numbers of unenrolled school-age children dropped by 33m in 2007 compared with 1999. About 15m of that fall came in India alone (though UNESCO says statistics may understate the problem by up to 30%). In countries like Liberia and Nigeria the numbers have hardly budged since 1999. Of the 72m still outside school, 45% are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dig, and it grows still gloomier. Two-thirds of the fall in out-of-school numbers was in 2002-04. Since then, improvement has been scanty, though getting the final chunk of children into school is necessarily the trickiest task as the easy cases are already solved. The hardest job is enrolling children from remote areas, who speak minority languages; or come from cultures that place little value on schooling or (in India) from castes that have been long excluded from it. In more than a third of the 63 countries for which such data were available, more than 30% of young adults have fewer than four years of schooling. Nineteen of these countries are in Africa; the remaining three are Guatemala, Pakistan and Nicaragua.
The UNESCO report shows stark(突出的，完全不同的) differences within the 80-plus countries it covers. In Nigeria about 10% of young Yoruba-speaking adults have under four years of schooling; for Hausa-speakers the figure is over 60%. Focusing on ethnicity or regional disparities can be controversial. The governments of Turkey and India are unhappy about the report’s mentions of, respectively, Kurdish girls and low-caste children.
Attending school is only the first step towards education. Even spending time in school does not guarantee good outcomes. In Ghana, for example, sixth-graders sitting a simple multiple-choice reading test scored on average the same mark that would be gained by random guessing.
So what to do? More government spending—as suggested by the report—is unlikely to be a complete answer. Others, such as James Tooley, a British academic who advises a chain of low-cost for-profit schools in India, say private-sector education in poor countries routinely outperforms the free, taxpayer-subsidised version. Teachers turn up; parents complain if standards slip or pupils flounder.
Another answer may be performance-related pay for teachers. Two researchers, Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California at San Diego and Venkatesh Sundararaman of the World Bank, tested that idea in 300 state-run schools in Andhra Pradesh in India. The extra pay was three times more effective in boosting student test scores than spending the same money on teaching materials. When schools are poorly run, studying what is wrong is the most vital subject of all.

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

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Tech.view
Into the wild green yonderThe end of an era(年代，时代，纪元)
for piston planes?Jan 22nd 2010
From Economist.com
DRIVE up to Mojave in the high desert, 100 miles north-east of Los Angeles, and you begin to realise why each small town along the way has its own municipal airport. Remote as it may seem, this is merely the edge of a huge wilderness that gets sparser, lonelier and more barren the deeper you venture into it. The desert air is crystal-clear and the skies cloudless for over 300 days of the year. A light aircraft is really the only way to get around.
The story is much the same in many other parts of rural America. Across the country, there are more than 5,200 airports serving “general aviation(航空)” (small private planes and the like) compared with only 600 or so for scheduled flights. Of the 220,000 general-aviation aircraft registered in the United States, 75% are powered by a single piston engine. Their average age is over 35 years.
At a recent gathering at the Mojave Air and Space Port—home of America’s private space industry and next door to Edwards Air Force Base, where the Shuttle lands when the weather is poor in Florida—your correspondent was one of the few to have actually driven to the event. Most had flown there in their own aircraft. There was the usual flock of elderly Cessna, Piper and Beechcraft two- and four-seaters, along with a handful of vintage(旧式的) biplanes and restored military trainers. Apart from one jet, all the planes on the apron had two things in common: a piston engine, and a dire(可怕的，极端的) need for avgas.
Avgas (aviation fuel) is nothing like the stuff you pump into a car’s tank at a petrol station. The exigences of flight require aircraft engines not only to be more reliable, but also to deliver more power per unit weight than car engines. Any additional weight detracts from the useful payload the plane can carry aloft(在…之上). Aircraft engines also operate at 70% or more of full power while they are in the air, unlike car engines which spend most of their time on the road cruising at 20% of full power. Aero-engines also have to cope with(处理) the drop-off in performance that comes as the plane gains altitude and the air gets thinner.
For these reasons and more, avgas has a much higher octane rating than petrol blended for cars. It is effectively a super-premium grade with an equivalent(等价的，同意义的) pump (or “anti-knock”) rating of 100 octane. It also has a much lower, and more uniform, vapour pressure than petrol—to prevent the fuel from vaporising as the air pressure drops with altitude. “Vapour lock” (bubbles) in the fuel-line can starve an engine, causing it to stall and the plane to fall precipitously out of the sky. All told, avgas is an expensive brew costing around $5 a gallon in the United States and $9 or more in Europe.
In blending avgas, distillers have to add tetra-ethyl lead to protect the valve-seats on the exhaust side of the engine from erosion, while raising the fuel’s octane number and preventing the engine from “knocking”. The latter is caused when the fuel detonates prematurely instead of burning in a controlled fashion. Such detonation can destroy the pistons, cylinder linings and valves within seconds.
A fuel’s resistance to detonation is measured by comparing its performance to that of pure iso-octane (an isomer with the chemical name 2,2,4 trimethylpentane). Iso-octane represents the 100-point on the octane scale; a fuel having 90% of the resistance to detonation of pure iso-octane is rated as 90 octane.
Several grades of avgas are available with octane ratings ranging from 82 to 115, but the type most widely used in the United States is 100LL—a low-lead version the 100-octane aviation fuel used previously. Dyed blue to distinguish it from other grades, 100LL contains two grams of tetra-ethyl lead per American gallon, compared with the previous version’s four grams per gallon. Even so, today’s low-lead avgas still contains four times more tetra-ethyl lead than was in the highest-octane petrol (Sunoco-260) ever produced for street use in America.
The problem, of course, is that tetra-ethyl lead is the toxic(有毒的) substance that was banned from use in petrol in 1996 for health reasons. Back then, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted aviation fuel a reprieve—provided there was continued progress towards a suitable alternative. Over the past decade, the general-aviation industry has examined over 200 different blends in an effort to find a “transparent replacement” for 100LL. In performance terms, nothing has come close, it claims.
But that was before the Friends of the Earth petitioned the EPA in 2006 to regulate emissions from piston-engined aircraft under the Clean Air Act. The agency has since set a deadline for reducing the acceptable levels of all forms of atmospheric lead by an order of magnitude. The new standard goes into effect in 2011. That, more or less, spells an end of general aviation’s sweetheart deal on leaded fuels.
With a gun to its head, the industry is finally scrambling to find an answer. Some of the more recent piston engines used in light aircraft have come with lower compression ratios and hardened valve seats, which allows them to use a similar fuel to the 87-octane lead-free (Regular) petrol used in cars. Others have been certified to run on the more expensive 91-octane lead-free (Premium) grade also found on the forecourt.
However, without 100LL, the industry reckons(预计，猜想) that most existing aircraft engines will have to be de-rated from their currently-certified power levels to avoid fuel-detonation issues. The loss of power will reduce significantly the payload they can carry—possibly to the point of making them useless. Unable to use different fuels, the only alternative will be to fit such aircraft with new engines. As the engine and its fuel system accounts for nearly half the cost of a light aircraft, many of America’s private planes could find themselves grounded because of the cost of conversion to lead-free petrol or diesel.
No question, diesel(柴油机，内燃机) (or something like it) is the aviation fuel of the future. Many of the light planes being built in Europe these days run on it—as much for cost as for air-quality reasons. Teledyne Continental Motors, one of the biggest suppliers of piston engines for general aviation in America, is now developing a range of diesel engines—in a bid to compete with Thielert of Germany, which currently dominates the aero-diesel market. The attraction is that, with a few minor tweaks, diesel engines can be made to run on the widely available fuel (Jet A) used in jet planes. That would simplify airport logistics no end, reducing the number of fuels that need to be handled and stored separately on the premises.
Meanwhile, another possible replacement for avgas is a biofuel(生物燃料)developed by a Purdue University spin-out called Swift Enterprises in Indiana. After testing the product, the Hughes Technical Centre in New Jersey, part of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), reported that the Swift biofuel had an octane rating of over 104, packed 13% more energy per gallon, performed better in detonation tests and, though one pound a gallon heavier, provided fuel savings of 8% compared with 100LL.(长难句)
Apart from containing no lead, the new fuel is said to offer a 25% reduction in emissions (when its extended range is taken into account). Made from cellulosic biomass (switch grass and agricultural waste are the preferred feedstocks), Swift’s renewable fuel appears to be a blend of esters, furans, aromatic hydrocarbons and straight-chain alkanes derived from sugars. Unlike first-generation biofuels such as E-85, the Swift product contains no alcohol—and could therefore qualify as a “transparent replacement” for 100LL. The FAA prohibits the use of all forms of alcohol (not just ethanol, the main ingredient of E-85) in aviation fuel, because alcohols tend to absorb water, and that can cause fuel to freeze at high altitudes.
Swift reckons it can make its avgas replacement for $2 a gallon. Sceptics think that is a bit optimistic. But even if it costs twice as much to produce, it could still finish up costing not all that much more than avgas does today. Those superannuated biplanes criss-crossing the Mojave desert may yet get a reprieve.

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

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After the earthquake
A plan for HaitiHaiti’s government cannot rebuild the country. A temporary authority needs to be set up to do itJan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition
MORE than a week after the earth convulsed(震撼，使抽搐) beneath(在…之下) it, Haiti has still to plumb(探索) the depths of suffering and want. The numbers are still only more-or-less informed guesses, but their magnitude(大小，重要，震级，量级) is grim: perhaps 200,000 killed, 250,000 more injured and some 3m in desperate need of help. The generosity of the world’s response has also been profound. Barack Obama led the way, dispatching 16,000 American troops and marines, but others, from Europe to Brazil, Cuba, China and Israel, responded too. Immediate promises of aid added up to around nearly $1 billion.
The urgent task is to connect this supply of help with the demand. That is proving extraordinarily hard (see article). Seven days after the earthquake, the United Nations had got food to only 200,000 people. Lessons from other disasters are not always relevant to Haiti. The Asian tsunami, for example, struck a ribbon of remote, mainly rural, areas. The governments of the affected nations could lead the relief effort. But Haiti’s institutions were weak even before the disaster. Because the quake devastated(毁灭) the capital, both the government and the UN, which has been trying to build a state in Haiti since 2004, were decapitated, losing buildings and essential staff. So did many NGOs. The president, René Préval, and his cabinet have been reduced to meeting in a police station.
Into that vacuum(空间，真空的) stepped the United States. (长难句：)Inevitably the dispatch of marines, Black Hawks and an aircraft-carrier looked to some like an invasion (after all, they have been there before). A brief caricature of great-power prickliness ensued as the Americans took charge of the airport and seemed to some others to give priority to their own flights. But by mid-week the airport was receiving three times as many flights as it did before the earthquake. The American forces are well-equipped for the vital task of setting up a supply chain for aid. That is what they are doing under a sensible division of labour eventually hammered out (the Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping force remains in charge of security, and the UN will co-ordinate the aid effort). Certainly most ordinary Haitians seemed pleased to see the Americans.
They are just desperate for water, food, fuel, medicines and shelter. Contrary to some reports, there were only isolated cases of looting and fighting. But delay and disarray has cost many lives. The longer it lasts, the more likely that desperation turns to violence. The UN called for more peacekeepers. Brazil offered 800; it may take weeks to muster the rest. If ever a situation cried out for the UN to have a standing army at its disposal, as The Economist has urged, this is it.

nvligreUID: 2689384

Linguistics（语言学）
Babelicious!（漂亮的）
Bigger languages are also simpler ones
Jan 25th 2010 | From The Economist online
WHY do some languages drip with （充盈）verb endings, declensions that show how a noun is used, and other grammatical bits and pieces, while others rely on word order and context? The former category tends to include languages spoken by small groups in isolated settings like the Amazon or New Guinea. The latter include such languages as English and Mandarin. （提出问题—解决问题）
This fact has made scholars wonder if languages simplify as they spread. Researchers have wondered（惊奇） if second-language learning of such conquering languages as English have led them to shed grammatical baggage. Many features of grammar are, in linguistic terms, “overspecified”—meaning redundant. The “s” on the end of “the two boys” is overspecified, since “two” shows that more than one boy is concerned. So, the theory goes, as adults learn languages, with abilities that have withered compared to children’s native acquisition, the dispensable bits are dispensed with. But some linguists have simply assumed that all languages get simpler over time, or that few social factors correlate with complexity.
As they describe in the Public Library of Science, Gary Lupyan of the University of Pennsylvania and Rick Dale of the University of Memphis set out to find some more solid evidence that expansion simplifies language. They took the 2,236 languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures and looked for correlations with the number of speakers of each language, the size of the area in which it is spoken, and the number of neighbouring languages. They looked for correlations with the languages’ inflectional morphology, meaning the mostly obligatory prefixes, suffixes and other parts packed into individual words that carry specific meanings.（进一步说明linguists的complexity）
一下分别说明怎么complexity
They found clear evidence that big, spreading languages have fewer of these features. They have fewer case-markings on nouns. Verbs are less likely to vary with person, place, time and so forth. Mandarin官方语言）,for example, has no obligatory past tense at all; an extra word can come after the verb to indicate it happened in the past, or this can be left to context. By contrast, Yagua, spoken in Peru, has an obligatory five-way distinction. Past-tense verbs must show whether the event happened a few hours ago, a day before, a week to a month ago, and so on.
The number of speakers of each language correlated best with morphological complexity, better than the area the language is spread over or the number of neighbours. This makes sense because a language with a large population of speakers has probably already been learned by many non-natives in the past. A language with many neighbours today would be, by this rationale, more likely to become simpler in the future, if the language spreads. Of course, languages in families share certain features, but Dr Lupyan and Dr Dale found that their results were significant even when language family and region were factored out.
This leaves the question of why languages would become complex at all. Dr Lupyan and Dr Dale offer several hypotheses. One involves the different needs of child and adult learners. Complex morphology is especially hard for adults to learn, but it may help children, as the redundancy reduces the need for non-linguistic factors for understanding. (Las casas blancas tells a Spanish-speaking child three times that there are multiple white houses.) An alternative hypothesis is that complex morphology improves economy and clarity of expression, something that is desirable so long as it is not too difficult to learn. A final possibility is simply that smaller language groups more faithfully transmit the grammar to their children, overspecification and all, even if it has no use.
One thing is clear. Linguists have long known, despite the prejudices of those in rich societies, that “simple” people with primitive technologies do not speak simple languages. By the definitions used here, the native languages of North America and South America are the most complicated in the world, while Europe’s are the simplest.

nvligreUID: 2689384

Green energy
Smarting from the windTurbines can now “see” the wind before it arrives, and take appropriate actionJan 26th 2010 | From The Economist online
（T）GATHERING energy from the wind may seem a straightforward process. Air whips past the blades of a turbine, forcing it to sp in. The turbine turns a generator. The generator turns out electricity. Yet in practice things are not so simple. Wind generators are, necessarily, erected in places where powerful winds are common. If they are not properly angled towards the more howling of these gales, they can be damaged or destroyed. Tweaking and adjusting turbines so that their blades can harness the strongest air currents rather than be harmed by them is a normal part of turbine management. But technology being developed by Torben Mikkelsen, of Risoe DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark, and his colleagues looks set to make the process easier. Dr Mikkelsen is working on a way for individual generators to scan the air upwind and adjust the position of their blades in anticipation.
The basic technology, called lidar (short for light detection and ranging) has been around since the 1970s. It is similar to radar in that it sends out electromagnetic waves and then analyses those waves that bounce back, to determine what they bounced off. The difference is that radar depends on radio waves. These have long wavelengths and therefore bounce only off large things. Lidar uses light waves. Light has a much shorter wavelength and is readily reflected from small objects—one reason that human vision relies on it. Crucially, the light waves used in wind lidar are reflected by tiny, naturally occurring particles like water droplets, dust, pollen and salt crystals that drift along at the precise speed of the wind（区别lidar和radar.
Dr Mikkelsen and his colleagues worked out that they could use lidar to scan incoming wind and determine how it was behaving before it struck the turbine. To try this idea out, they first placed lidar devices at the base of 120-metre-tall wind turbines at Hovsore, the Danish test site for such devices. The lidars scanned the approaching winds with a laser that produced infra-red light with a wavelength of 1.55 microns. Reflected light was detected by a device so sensitive that it could pick up one returning photon（光子） (the quantum-mechanical particles of which light is composed) out of every thousand billion fired by the laser. The device measured wind movement at 40, 60, 80, and 100 metres above the ground, and 100-200 metres in front of the turbine. The data it collected were then compared with wind measurements taken by cup anemometers (the sort that spin when struck by wind, to record its speed) in order to calibrate the lidar. That done, the computer which analyses the lidar data can be connected to the motors that adjust the pitch of the turbine blades, in order to maximise energy production and reduce damage. （介绍Mikkelen如何将lidardevicec付诸于实践）
The team found they were able to get accurate measurements at all heights around the turbine, but realised that installing the device on the ground was far from ideal. By shining the lasers into the air from below they were analysing a cone that had its point at the base of the turbine. This gave them an understanding of wind speeds, but little sense of how winds were changing as they closed the 200-metre distance to the turbine. To capture this important information, the laser-created cone of the lidar needed to be sent out from the centre of the turbine itself.
Placing a lidar in the centre of a turbine proved difficult, because of the centrifugal force generated by the turbine’s rotation. To help the lidar cop, the researchers replaced their classic lidar device, which used mirrors to direct the light, with a newly developed fibre-optic system. As Michael Harris of Natural Power, a British wind-energy company that is collaborating with Dr Mikkelsen, puts it, the centre of a turbine is like a tumble drier. Because the light is travelling through cables, the new device is much less likely to go out of alignment.
Another problem that the team ran into with central-turbine installation was electrical interference from the generator. The detector in the lidar is extremely sensitive and is easily upset by spurious currents. The solution, the researchers realised, was to wrap the lidar in shielding material that conducts surplus electricity to earth.
The result is a system than can improve electricity production by 5%. This may not sound much, but for a single 4-megawatt turbine it is worth around $38,000 a year. Further economic benefits come from lengthening the life of the blades and the generator itself

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

Apple unveils the iPad

Steve Jobs and the iPad of hope

Apple's innovation machine churns out another game-changing device

Jan 27th 2010 | SAN FRANCISCO | From The Economist print edition

“HEROES and heroics” is one of the central themes of the current season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which prides itself on showcasing contemporary artists who challenge conventional ways of doing things. On January 27th the centre played host to one of the heroes of the computing industry: Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, who launched the company’s latest creation, the iPad. Mr Jobs also has a reputation for showcasing the unconventional. He did not disappoint.(介绍Jobs)

The iPad, which looks like an oversized Apple iPhone and boasts a colour screen measuring almost ten inches (25cm), promises to change the landscape of the computing world. It is just half an inch thick and weighs 1.5lb (680 grams). “It’s so much more intimate(私人的，至交) than a laptop, and so much more capable than a smartphone,” Mr Jobs said of the device, which will be available in late 7arch.

The new iPad has important limitations, which critics were quick to point out. It does not have a camera or a phone and users cannot run multiple applications on it at the same time. (iPad没有摄像、手机功能、不能同时运行多个程序。)But Apple should be able to correct such flaws in due course. Together with a host of other touch-screen “tablet” computers that are expected to reach shops over the next year or so, the iPad looks set to revolutionise the way in which digital media are consumed in homes, schools and offices.

The flood of devices is likely to have a profound impact on parts of the media business that are already being turned upside-down by the internet. The move from print to digital has not been easy for newspaper or magazine publishers. Readers have proved reluctant to pay for content on the web. Companies are unwilling to pay as much for online advertisements as for paper ones—hardly surprising, given the amount of space on offer. The iPad will probably accelerate the shift away from printed matter towards digital content, which could worsen the industry’s pain in the short term. Yet publishers hope that tablets will turn out to be the 21st-century equivalent of the printed page, offering them compelling new ways to present their content and to charge for it. “This is really a chance for publishers to seize on a second life,” says Phil Asmundson of Deloitte, a consultancy.

It does not come as a surprise, then, that Apple has already attracted some blue-chip media brands to the iPad’s platform. During his presentation Mr Jobs revealed that the company had struck deals with leading publishers such as Penguin and Simon & Schuster. They will provide books for the iPad, to be found and paid for in Apple’s new iBooks online store. More agreements ought to be signed before the first iPads are shipped in March. Users will also be able to download applications that give them access to electronic versions of newspapers such as the New York Times, which presented an iPad app at the launch.

Apple’s media partners no doubt have mixed feelings about dealing with Mr Jobs. Apple is now widely demonised in the music industry for dominating the digital downloading business with its iTunes store. The firm has been able to control the price of music, boosting sales of iPods but not bringing the record companies a great deal of money. That said, Apple did provide a way for the music business to make a profit online, which had hitherto eluded it. Apple’s sleek iPhone has also given plenty of content producers a platform on which they can charge for their wares.

The firm’s record suggests that it will be able to make one of the computing industry’s most fervent(强烈的,炽热的，热心的)rue. Technology companies have repeatedly tried to make a success of tablets or similar devices. But the zone between laptops and mobile phones has been something of a Bermuda Triangle for device-makers, points out Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies, a consultancy. “Products launched in there have usually disappeared from the radar screen,” he says.

Among them are previous generations of tablet-style computers. In the 1990s various companies experimented with the machines, including Apple. When its Newton personal digital assistant failed to take off, Mr Jobs killed the project. Tablets were once again briefly in the limelight when Microsoft’s Bill Gates predicted they would soon become people’s primary computing device—powered, of course, by his company’s software. That did not come to pass because consumers were put off by tablets’ high prices, clunky user interfaces and limited capabilities. Instead the devices, which cost almost as much as proper PCs, have remained a niche product used primarily in industries such as health care and construction.

Why are tablets causing so much excitement these days? One reason is that innovations in display, battery and microprocessing technologies have greatly reduced their cost. Apple’s iPad is priced at between $499 for the basic version and $829 for one with lots of memory and a 3G wireless connection, bringing it within the reach of ordinary consumers. Another reason for optimism is that interfaces have improved greatly. The iPad boasts a big virtual keyboard, which pops up when needed. It also features multi-touch, meaning that two fingers can be used to change the size of a photo. Furthermore, tablets will benefit from the fact that people have become accustomed to buying and consuming content in digital form (see chart on previous page).

All this explains why other firms are eyeing the tablet market too. Dozens of prototypes were on show at a consumer-electronics trade fair in Las Vegas earlier this month, including ones from Motorola, Lenovo and Dell. Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of NVIDIA, a maker of graphics chips, reckons this is the first time he has seen telecoms firms, computer-makers and consumer-electronics companies all equally keen to produce the same product. “The tablet is the first truly convergent electronic device,” he says.

yanghan1167UID: 2722895

好词好句

难词

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注：互联网改变生活。

A special report on social networking

A world of connections

Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better, says Martin Giles

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, currently in progress, is famous for making connections among the global great and good. But when the delegates go home again, getting even a few of them together in a room becomes difficult. To allow the leaders to keep talking, the forum’s organisers last year launched a pilot version of a secure online service where members can post mini-biographies and other information, and create links with other users to form collaborative(合作的) working groups. Dubbed the World Electronic Community, or WELCOM, the forum’s exclusive online network has only about 5,000 members.

But if any service deserves such a grand title it is surely Facebook, which celebrates its sixth birthday next month and is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google. The globe’s largest online social network boasts(自夸，以…夸口说) over 350m users—which, were it a nation, would make Facebook the world’s third most populous after China and India. (全球最大的网络社区)That is not the only striking statistic associated with the business. Its users now post over 55m updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. As it has grown like Topsy, the site has also expanded way beyond its American roots: today some 70% of its audience is outside the United States.

Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other globetrotting sites, such as MySpace, which concentrates on music and entertainment; LinkedIn, which targets career-minded professionals; and Twitter, a networking service that lets members send out short, 140-character messages called “tweets”. All of these appear in a ranking of the world’s most popular networks by total monthly web visits (see chart 1), which also includes Orkut, a Google-owned service that is heavily used in India and Brazil, and QQ, which is big in China. On top of these there are other big national community sites such as Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, and Cyworld in South Korea, as well as numerous smaller social networks that appeal to specific interests such as Muxlim, aimed at the world’s Muslims, and ResearchGATE, which connects scientists and researchers.

Going public

All this shows just how far online communities have come. Until the mid-1990s they were largely ghettos(犹太人区) for geeks who hid behind online aliases. Thanks to easy-to-use interfaces and fine-grained privacy controls, social networks have been transformed into vast public spaces where millions of people now feel comfortable using their real identities online. ComScore, a market-research firm, reckons(认为，计算；猜想，料想) that last October big social-networking sites received over 800m visitors. “The social networks’ greatest achievement has been to bring humanity into a place that was once cold and technological,” says Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm.

Their other great achievement has been to turn themselves into superb tools for mass communication. Simply by updating a personal page on Facebook or sending out a tweet, users can let their network of friends—and sometimes the world—know what is happening in their lives. Moreover, they can send out videos, pictures and lots of other content with just a few clicks of a mouse. “This represents a dramatic and permanent upgrade in people’s ability to communicate with one another,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley veteran who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Ning, an American firm that hosts almost 2m social networks for clients.(这为人们彼此之间联系出了激动人心和永久的提升)

And people are making copious use(丰富多彩的应用)
of that ability. Nielsen, a market-research firm, reckons that since February 2009 they have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. Measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy (see chart 2). Last October Americans spent just under six hours surfing social networks, almost three times as much as in the same month in 2007. And it isn’t just youngsters who are friending and poking one another—Facebook-speak for making connections and saying hi to your pals. People of all ages are joining the networks in ever greater numbers.

Social-networking sites’ impressive growth has attracted much attention because the sites have made people’s personal relationships more visible and quantifiable than ever before. They have also become important vehicles for news and channels of influence. Twitter regularly scores headlines with its real-time updates on events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks and on the activities of its high-profile users, who include rap stars, writers and royalty. And both Twitter and Facebook played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama to victory in the presidential race.

Delivery time

But like Mr Obama, social networks have also generated great expectations along the way on which they must now deliver. They need to prove to the world that they are here to stay. They must demonstrate that they are capable of generating the returns that justify the lofty valuations investors have given them. And they need to do all this while also reassuring users that their privacy will not be violated in the pursuit of profit.

In the business world there has also been much hype around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted are services such as Yammer, which produces a corporate version of Twitter, and Chatter, a social-networking service that has been developed by Salesforce.com.

To sceptics(怀疑的人) all this talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making. They argue that even a huge social network such as Facebook will struggle to make money because fickle networkers will not stay in one place for long, pointing to the example of MySpace, which was once all the rage but has now become a shadow of its former self. Last year the site, which is owned by News Corp, installed a new boss and fired 45% of its staff as part of a plan to revive its fortunes. Critics also say that the networks’ advertising-driven business model is flawed.

Within companies there is plenty of doubt about the benefits of online social networking in the office. A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The executives’ biggest concern was that social networking would lead to social notworking, with employees using the sites to chat with friends instead of doing their jobs. Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. (社交网络都要比他们批评者认为的健壮的多，即使并不是每个网站都将繁荣，并且社交网络的技术已经在为拥护它们的商业公司盈利)Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.

nvligreUID: 2689384

Railways and slime moulds
A life of slimeNetwork-engineering problems can be solved by surprisingly simple creaturesJan 21st 2010 | From The Economist print edition
FROM adhesives that mimic （模拟）the feet of geckos（壁虎） to swimsuits modelled on shark skin, biologically inspired design has taken off in recent times. （可以用作仿生学的例子）Copying nature’s ideas allows people to harness the power of evolution to come up with clever products. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea a step further by using an entire living organism—a slime mould—to solve a complex problem. （科技进步的例子）In this case, the challenge was to design an efficient rail network for the city of Tokyo and its outlying towns.
Slime moulds are unusual critters—neither animal, nor plant nor fungus. If they resemble anything, it is a colonial amoeba（给slime moulds下定义）. Physarum polycephalum, the species in question, consists of a membrane-bound bag of protoplasm and, unusually, multiple nuclei. It can be found migrating across the floor of dark, damp, northern-temperate woodlands in search of food such as bacteria. It can grow into networks with a diameter of 25cm.
When P. polycephalum is foraging, it puts out protrusions of protoplasm（原生质）, creates nodes and branches, and grows in the form of an interconnected network of tubes. As it explores the forest floor, it must constantly trade off the cost, efficiency and resilience of its expanding network.
Since the purpose of this activity is to link food sources together and to transport nutrients around the creature, Atsushi Tero at Hokkaido（原来北海道是这么说的） University in Japan and his colleagues wondered if slime-mould transport networks bore any resemblance to human ones. As they report in Science, they built a template with 36 oat flakes (a favoured food source) placed to represent the locations of cities in the region around Tokyo. They put P. polycephalum on Tokyo itself, and watched it go.
They found that many of the links the slime mould made bore a striking resemblance to Tokyo’s existing rail network. For P. polycephalum had not simply created the shortest possible network that could connect all the cities, but had also included redundant connections that allow the creature (and the real rail network) to have resilience to the accidental breakage of any part of it. P. polycephalum’s network, in other words, had similar costs, efficiencies and resiliencies to the human version.
How the creature does this is unknown, but Mark Fricker of Oxford University, who is one of Dr Tero’s colleagues, speculates that the forces generated by protoplasm pulsating back-and-forth through the multinuclear cell are interpreted and used to determine which routes to reinforce, and which connections to trim.
Tokyo’s is not the first transport network to be modelled in this way. A study published in December by Andrew Adamatzky and Jeff Jones of the University of the West of England used oat flakes to represent Britain’s principal cities. Slime moulds modelled the motorway network of the island quite accurately, with the exception of the M6/M74 into Scotland (the creatures chose to go through Newcastle rather than past Carlisle).
Of course, neither Dr Tero nor Dr Adamatzky is suggesting that rail and road networks should be designed by slime moulds. What they are proposing is that good and complex solutions can emerge from simple rules, and that this principle might be applied elsewhere. The next thing is to discover and use these rules to enable other networks to self-organise in an “intelligent” fashion without human intervention—for example, to link up a swarm of robots exploring a dangerous environment, so that they can talk to each other and relay information back to base. The denizens of Carlisle, meanwhile, may wonder what objection slime moulds have towards their fine city.

nvligreUID: 2689384

The book of JobsIt has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at onceJan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial （善变的）and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times三次改变. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers（手机制造商） had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.
（用于创新的例子）
As rivals rushed to copy Apple’s approach, the computer, music and telecoms（任何电子通讯装置） industries were transformed. Now Mr Jobs hopes to pull off the same trick for a fourth time. On January 27th he unveiled his company’s latest product, the iPad—a thin, tablet-shaped device with a ten-inch touch-screen which will go on sale in late March for $499-829 (see article). Years in the making, it has been the subject of hysterical online speculation in recent months, verging at times on religious hysteria: sceptics in the blogosphere jokingly call it the Jesus Tablet. （引出apple推出又一新产品）
The enthusiasm of the Apple faithful may be overdone, but Mr Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.
Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. 全心全意的Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.
Keep taking the tabletsTablet computers aimed at business people have not worked. Microsoft has been pushing them for years, with little success. Apple itself launched a pen-based tablet computer, the Newton, in 1993, but it was a flop. The Kindle has done reasonably well, and has spawned a host of similar devices with equally silly names, including the Nook, the Skiff and the Que. Meanwhile, Apple’s pocket-sized touch-screen devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch, have taken off as music and video players and hand-held games consoles.
The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids. Its large screen will make it an attractive e-reader and video player, but it will also inherit a vast array of games and other software from the iPhone. Apple hopes that many people will also use it instead of a laptop. If the company is right, it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music and video players and games consoles.开拓新市场 Different industries are already converging on this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer-makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style “app store” for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.
If the past is any guide, Apple’s entry into the field will not just unleash fierce competition among device-makers, but also prompt consumers and publishers who had previously been wary of e-books to take the plunge, accelerating the adoption of this nascent technology. Sales of e-readers are expected to reach 12m this year, up from 5m in 2009 and 1m in 2008, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm.
Hold the front pixels（像素）Will the spread of tablets save struggling media companies? Sadly not. Some outfits—metropolitan newspapers, for instance—are probably doomed by their reliance on classified advertising, which is migrating to dedicated websites. Others are too far gone already. Tablets are expensive, and it will be some years before they are widespread enough to fulfil their promise. In theory a newspaper could ask its readers to sign up for a two-year electronic subscription, say, and subsidise the cost of a tablet. But such a subsidy would be hugely pricey, and expensive printing presses will have to be kept running for readers who want to stick with paper.
Still, even though tablets will not save weak media companies, they are likely to give strong ones a boost. Charging for content, which has proved difficult on the web, may get easier. Already, people are prepared to pay to receive newspapers and magazines (including The Economist) on the Kindle. The iPad, with its colour screen and integration with Apple’s online stores, could make downloading books, newspapers and magazines as easy and popular as downloading music. Most important, it will allow for advertising, on which American magazines, in particular, depend. Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale （全部）switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses.
If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

nvligreUID: 2689384

Rising Angola
Oil, glorious oilThe country’s breakneck growth is slowly benefiting the massesTWO years ago, oil-rich Angola was reckoned to have one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. In both 2006 and 2007 real GDP had surged by around 20%, and double-digit growth rates were widely predicted for at least the next five years. Then oil prices crashed with the global recession. Last year the economy is estimated to have grown, at best, by 1.5%. But it is bouncing back. Some say Angola will be among the world’s top five performers again this year, with growth exceeding 8%.
After four decades of strife,（冲突不和） Angola was a basket case（瘫痪的人，无助的人）. A 14-year war of independence against its former Portuguese masters until 1975 had been followed by nearly three decades of fighting between the communist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Jonas Savimbi’s pro-Western National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) that ended in 2002. Out of a population of 7m in 1980, some 1.5m were killed and more than 4m forced to flee their homes. A whole generation had missed their education. Infrastructure, political institutions and social services had to be rebuilt, often from scratch.（作为一个例子----战争所带来的负面影响）
The pace of development since peace returned eight years ago has been staggering. Angola feels like a gigantic building site, as roads, ports, railways, hotels, shopping centres, hospitals, universities—even whole new towns—rise up out of the bush. The capital, Luanda, has changed out of all recognition, as the dilapidated red-tiled colonial buildings and encroaching slums make way for a forest of elegant high-rise hotels, offices and apartment blocks.
None of this would be possible without Angola’s vast oil reserves, estimated at 13 billion barrels. Discovered in the 1950s, oil was one of the few things that drew investment throughout the civil war. Production rose from 172,000 barrels a day in 1975 to 800,000 in 2002. Today, it stands at 1.9m, making Angola sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest producer after Nigeria. Oil accounts for more than half of the country’s GDP, 80% of the government’s revenues and 90% of export earnings.
Last year’s slump in （暴跌）oil prices from an average of nearly $100 a barrel in 2008 to just over $50 pushed Angola’s current account and budget into deficit for the first time since the war. Despite a rebound in oil prices, the ruling MPLA, now wedded to a market economy, is trying to slash public spending this year to 37% of GDP, down from last year’s 50%. Long resistant to outside interference, particularly from the West, it has also accepted a 27-month IMF standby loan of $1.4 billion.
Despite this dip in fortunes, the country has barely paused for breath, relying on international lines of credit for infrastructure projects, with China to the fore. Since 2002, China’s Eximbank has lent Angola $4.5 billion. The secretive China International Fund, which is privately owned, has provided another $3 billion; some say the figure may rise to $9 billion.
Angola is repaying all of this in oil, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Iran to become China’s biggest supplier. Two fellow Portuguese-speaking countries, Brazil and Portugal, have provided another $1.8 billion and $1.4 billion in credit lines. Foreign direct investment, at $15.5 billion in 2008, up from $6.8 billion in 2005, now accounts for over half the total for southern Africa. In the 1990s it averaged just $600m a year.
Yet Luanda is one of the world’s trickiest places to do business in. It is sticky, dirty, chaotic and hugely expensive for visitors (see article). Logistics are a nightmare. As the country has no manufacturing base to speak of, most items have to be imported, which pushes prices up. The ports are clogged. The rubbish-strewn streets, potholed and still usually made of mud, are jammed with traffic. Red tape snags almost every activity. Electricity is patchy. Taxes are low, with a top income-tax rate of 17% and a corporation tax of 35%, but they are hideously complex. （制造业的重要性）There are few skilled locals. Corruption and nepotism are pervasive. Angola is near the bottom of the corruption-perceptions index published by Transparency International, a Berlin-based watchdog.
Moreover, the petrodollar influx has yet to improve ordinary Angolan lives very much. On paper, GDP a head (at purchasing-power parity) has more than doubled since 2002, to $6,300 in 2008, lifting its IMF ranking to 98th out of 181 countries measured, just above China. But last year’s UN human development index put Angola near the bottom in almost every category: life expectancy is 46 years; infant mortality is 180 per 1,000 live births (against less than ten in America and Europe); one-third of adults are illiterate. While the new elite lives sumptuously, two-thirds of the 17m Angolans survive on less than $2 a day. Civil and political liberty is limited.

Nirvana`UID: 2720283

Dry cold
A drying out of the stratosphere may help explain recent temperature trends at the Earth’s surface

The stratosphere(同温层, 平流层)—specifically, the lower stratosphere—has, it seems, been drying out. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, and the cooling effect on the Earth’s climate due to this desiccation(干燥) may account for(说明, 占) a fair bit of the slowdown in the rise of global temperatures seen over the past ten years. These are the somewhat surprising conclusions of a paper by Susan Solomon of America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and her colleagues, which was published online by Science on January 28th. Whether the trend will continue, stop or reverse itself, though, is at present unknown.

The stratosphere sits on top of the troposphere(对流层), the lowest, densest(密集的; 稠密的; 浓密的) layer of the atmosphere. The boundary between the two, the tropopause(对流顶层), is about 18km above your head, if you are in the tropics(回归线, 热带), and a few kilometres lower if you are at higher latitudes(纬度) (or up a mountain). The tropopause separates a rowdy(粗暴的; 喧闹的) below from a sedate above. In the troposphere, the air at higher altitudes((尤指海拔)高度, 高处) is in general cooler than the air below it, an unstable situation in which warm and often moist(潮湿的) air below is endlessly buoying up into cooler air above. The resultant(作为结果而发生的, 合成的) commotion(骚动, 暴乱) creates clouds, storms and much of the rest of the world’s weather. In the stratosphere(同温层, 最上层), the air gets warmer at higher altitudes, which provides stability.

The stratosphere—which extends up to about 55km, where the mesosphere(中间层) begins—is made even less weather-prone(俯伏的, 面向下的) by the absence of water vapour, and thus of the clouds and precipitation(猛然摔下[落下], 猛冲) to which it leads. This is because the top of the troposphere is normally very cold, causing ascending(上升的, 向上的) water vapour to freeze into ice crystals that drift and fall, rather than continuing up into the stratosphere.

A little water manages to get past this cold trap. But as Dr Solomon and her colleagues note, satellite
measurements show that rather less has been doing so over the past ten years than was the case previously. Plugging(堵, 塞) the changes in water vapour into a climate model that looks at the way different substances absorb and emit infrared(红外线的) radiation, they conclude that between 2000 and 2009 a drop in stratospheric water vapour of less than one part per million slowed the rate of warming at the Earth’s surface by about 25%.

Such a small change in stratospheric water vapour can have such a large effect precisely because the stratosphere is already dry. It is the relative change in the amount of a greenhouse gas, not its absolute level, which determines how much warming it can produce, and this change was about 10% of the total.

By comparison with the greenhouse effect caused by increases in carbon dioxide, the stratospheric drying is hardly massive(厚重的, 大块的). Dr Solomon and her colleagues peg( 固定, 限制) the 2000-2009 cooling effect at about a third of the opposite effect they would expect from the carbon dioxide added over the same decade, and only a bit more than a twentieth of the warming expected from the rise in carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution. But it is surprising, nonetheless.

It is for the most part only in the tropics that tropospheric air can be drawn up into the stratosphere; it is also in the tropics that one finds the most spectacular thunderstorms, and these can reduce the temperature at the top of the troposphere, deepening the cold trap that ascending water vapour must pass through and thus impeding its rise. Over the past decade this stormy effect seems to have been pronounced(讲出来的, 显著的, 断然的, 明确的), with the coldest parts of the tropical troposphere getting about a degree colder. But why this should be is not clear. Sea-surface temperatures, which drive the big tropical storms, have been high, and during the past few years have seemed to correlate(和...相关) with increased coldness aloft.(在高处; 在上面) At other times, though, they have seemed to predict a wetter stratosphere.

Dr Solomon cannot say what is driving(操纵) the change she and her colleagues have studied, nor how long it will last. It may be one of many aspects of the climate that flop around(扑拍, 跳动), seemingly at random, over periods of years to decades. Or it might be something driven by a long-term change, such as the build-up of greenhouse gases (or, conceivably, layers of sooty(煤烟熏黑的, 乌黑的) smog(烟雾). Dr Solomon suspects the former, because of the way the relationship between the stratosphere and the sea-surface temperature has changed. Patterns of sea-surface temperature which come and go, rather than absolute levels that continue to rise, may be the important thing.

That said, it is possible that the changes in the stratosphere are linked to the effects humans are having on the atmosphere at large, and that the drying may persist in providing a brake on warming. Or it may be, as others have suggested in the past, that the long-term trend, as the troposphere warms up, will be to a wetter, more warming lower stratosphere, too. Whether this is the case depends on physical subtleties that are currently undecided, but it is not implausible(难信的, 不象真实的). If it were true, then the current drying would be more a blip(尖头信号, 标志) than a trend.

A better understanding of matters as diverse as how water vapour actually gets across the tropopause and how the stratosphere circulates at the global scale might help sort(分类, 整理, 拣选) the question out, and Dr Solomon’s high profile contribution may help focus researchers on those problems. Meanwhile, the good news (if further research bears it out(证实)) that the world’s warming has been slowed, at least for a few years, needs to be leavened(使发酵, 影响) with the realisation, yet again, that there are significant uncertainties in science’s understanding of the climate — and thus unquantifiable(不可测量的,难以计算的) risks ahead.