1006G备考日记 by miki7cat-Never quit, keep up with it.

miki7catUID: 2533330

等了一个星期，原来的帖子还是没能够恢复。刚好小组也进行到了第二阶段，于是重开吧。

之前的日记https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1029255-1-1.html


在主楼记录我的错别字

institution
attitude
security
contemporary
technology 忘了n

miki7catUID: 2533330

今天完成的任务
单词：27-31


[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.18]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042731-1-1.html

Comment:
In the beginning of the article, the author quotes a statemen, said by Emma Duncan, which asserts Copenhagen offers the chance to do better. However, it can be inferred from this special report that the assertion is lack of conviction.

On the one hand, it is admittedly increaced that the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases, but nobody really knows what such a rise would lead to. Even scientists could reckon the trends in "likely", "probably", or "50% risk of", which is means nothing.

On the other hand, since the UNFCCC was signed, disasters have increased in frequency, Carbon-dioxide emissions have been 30% higher, and the glaciers in south-eastern Greenland have picked up speed. Then, what is the aim of UNFCCC？

I agree with the statement that "any global climate deal will work only if the domestic policies through which it is implemented are both efficient and effective". Being effective means we must have knowledge about what is the crucial reason of global warming and being efficient means we must have a framework for climate change. The reality, unfortunately, is we have neither.

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词32-35

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.19]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1043113-1-1.html

Comment

Unfortunately, it remains to be seen whether globalisation will help the art market recover.

To highlight that globalisation brings the art market significant benefits, the author compared the biggest buyers in 2007 to that in 2003, and found a regional spread and tripled increase in total number. In the second paragraph of the report, we could find that the period from 2003 to 2007 is the boom, even the world art market reack its peak in 2007. It is thus admittedly true that globalisation promoted the prosperity of art market. But how about the present global economic situation? Is there other more potential regional spread for the market? The report should provide more statistica, the data after 2007, to illustrate the art market profitting by globalisation.




词句摘抄

At its peak in 2007 顶点

bail-out救市

a move that此举

in the longer run

yachts, jets, cars, jewellery and so on  奢侈品（luxury items）

the proportion of all luxury spending that went on art increased 关于比例的表达

Last year China overtook France as the world’s third-biggest art market after America and Britain (see chart 1), and some 25% by value（some也可以表示大约） of the 100,000-plus works of art sold by Christie’s went to buyers from Russia, Asia and the Middle East.

a handful of individuals少量

In Paris Galerie Segoura has closed, as has Salvatore Romano in Florence.类比句型

taking the lion’s share

muscle in on areas

chalked up记账

miki7catUID: 2533330

今天完成的任务：
单词：36-39
[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.20]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1043352-1-1.html


Comment

The title, "A wary respect", is very interesting. Both countries need each other, but do not trust each other. America believe that it could eclipse British power without bloodshed because of a shared cultural and political heritage. Now it is worrying about that the rise of China will result in global wars, which are precipitated by Germany and Japan, because China is similar to these two countries in remaining tenaciously authoritarian. Many Chinese, on the other hand, are suspicious of American intentions and resentful of American power. They are easily persuaded that the West wants to block China's rise.

I think there is nothing for America to worry about that China's military power could challenge its wider military dominance in the region. Even if the China's leadership changes in 2012 and 2013, the main policy direction will not change. In addition,since the Taiwan issue is an internal affair of China, it seems a ironic thing that America pays attention to the “presidential polls” of Taiwan held in 2012.


词句摘抄

in theory

in effect = actually

China is exploring the rubble of the global economy in hopes of accelerating its own rise.

Authoritarian though China remains, the two countries’ economic philosophies are much closer than they used to be.

status quo 现状

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词：40-44

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.21]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1043638-1-1.html

Comments 今天写的好短。。。

The forecasters' expectation is the economy bounce back to its old self, but it seems impossible. First, as this auther mentioned, Friedman’s story is heartening, but it can come unstuck in two, or more I believe, ways. Each of the three scenarios the report gave is
a presumable trajectory but is considered the economic problem in one of the multiple aspects. While the world economy is recovering, the factors which will bring the economy harm or help are changing. Second, if the "pre-crisis normal" lead the economy to the present disaster, is it wise to regain the same pace as before rather than to try to find a "new normal"?




词句摘抄
But the next five years will not resemble the five preceding the crisis. Not every change wrought by the financial breakdown will be reversed. The world economy is fitfully getting back to normal, but it will be a “new normal”.

caught on = becomes popular

harbour心怀

deep recessions are generally followed by strong recoveries. He likened the economy to a piece of string stretched taut on a board. The more forcefully the string is plucked, the more sharply it snaps back.

Friedman’s story is heartening, but it can come unstuck in two ways.

would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money.虚拟语气

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词 45-49

一会儿打算背一下今天这篇文章，觉得会有用。
[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.22]

https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1044038-1-1.html

Comments

It will be seen that there are three different voice in the health-care reforms. The version of the bill already passed by the House of Representatives contains a “public option”, which the Democrats desire to add to the bill. The Senate version though tick most Democratic boxes, the “public option” was stripped off it. What this means that the divergance between the Senate and House is the role the government should play in the new health-care system, whether to build a government-backed insurance institution that would compete with private insurers in order to keep costs down and guarantee access or just to build government-regulated exchanges that should encourage competition among private insurers. The third voice is from Republicans, who fight the bill on the ground of cost. Of course, I think the cost must be taken serious attention, pariticularly when America is running huge deficits that it urgently needs to tackle.




词句摘抄
at a high price高昂的代价
government-backed政府支持
tick most Democratic boxes
mostly on the ground of cost大多以成本为理由
factors in
stumbling block


我觉得这篇写得特别好，每个句子都值得学习。

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词50-end
这是第二遍，不知道什么时候能看出背单词的效果来。

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词 第三遍开始 1-4

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.23]&[12.24]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1044413-1-1.html

太长了，又看了很多资料，对于词句的关注不是很多。明天再贴词句的摘录吧。

My comment

Because opposing the motion, I will contest the proposer's opening remarks. And I found the proposer, Mr Kaplan, have lost the focus point --- whether senior executives are worth what they are paid.

Firstly, thanks to the Mr. Kaplan's explanation, I have a rudimentary knowledge of how CEO pay is measured. The following I expect should have been his demonstration that every part of pay is worth and appropriate. However Mr. Kaplan only illustrates one of his points, that CEO pay has not gone up in recent years, with two graphs. Regardless of the evidence's persuasiveness, the point itself is no relevance to the discussion --- whether CEOs are overpaid or not --- because the executives' pay might be unjustified from the beginning.

Second, Mr Kaplan argues that CEOs are paid for performance. Admittedly, CEOs who perform well are paid higher than the ones who are underperformed, and this phenomenon seems convincing to prove that executive pay  is tied to performance. But it is possible that they are all paid higher than the values of what they performed, and this is a unreasonable argument too.

Third, the arguer attempts to overthrow the criticism --- CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and not performance --- by pointing that CEO tenure has declined and boards have got tougher on their executives when they do not perform. The question remained: are the executives worth what they are paid? If senior executive are traditionally overpaid on the whole, it is difficult to suppose that  a executive will earn the pay justified, even though under a tougher control by boards.

miki7catUID: 2533330

没抽出时间来背单词……

晚上研究了一下从word粘贴掉色的问题，发了个“教学贴”，颇有成就感，哈哈！
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1045472-1-1.html


[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.25]https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1045209-1-1.html

My comment
Well, I will continue with my rebuttal of the claims made by the proposer. Mr. Kaplan argues that a robust system of pay-for-performance is widely used by most US companies, on the ground of that most financial-company CEOs received the lion's share of their pay in stock and option and these CEOs will lose large amounts of wealth and their jobs when their companies perform poorly. As he also mentioned, CEOs earn a lot and their stock appreciates when their companies perform well. The fact is that a company consists of many people, most of which are the ordinary workers. Performing different roles in the company though, everyone attributes to the success of the company. So I wonder if the ordinary workers' pay is measured in a similar way to their executive's, assuming the measuring way is as reasonable as Mr. Kaplan argued. If not so, why could CEOs themselves earn a lot from the success of their companies while the shop workers could not? I strongly agree with Mr. Wooldridge's point that Mr. Kaplan should demonstrate that outstanding bosses can boost the performance of the organisations that they head, not only earning their pay but also benefitting workers, shareholders and consumers.


蓝色-生词
绿色-认识但组合成专有名词
红色-可借鉴的词句

Rebuttal statements
Defending the motion
Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Nell Minow argues that top executive compensation was a major cause of the financial crisis. She bases her conclusion on two "outlier【离群】" examples, Angelo Mozillo and Aubrey McClendon, that she calls "anecdotes".
Against the motion
Nell Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library
The headlines are writing my rebuttal【反驳】 for me.
Goldman Sachs【高盛，投资银行】 set aside【If you set something aside for a special use or purpose, you keep it available for that use or purpose.】 $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46% from a year ago. While its net income has tripled, its core investment banking business is down 31%.
The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Oct 23rd 2009 | Adrian Wooldridge
It seems that experts are just as passionate【A passionate person has very strong feelings about something or a strong belief in something.】 on the subject of executive pay as the general public.
Mr Kaplan argues that the most powerful criticism of executive pay-that bosses get upside and no downside-is simply false. He points out that three of the most maligned bosses in the financial services sector, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America, all lost small fortunes in 2008. CEOs as a group lost roughly 40% of their wealth in 2008.
Ms Minow argues that her rebuttal is being written by the headlines. Financial service companies are once again paying huge bonuses despite the fact that their companies have been propped up【To prop up something means to support it or help it to survive.】 by public money. She points out that CEOs enjoy the unique privilege【A privilege is a special right or advantage that only one person or group has.】 of being able to appoint the people who decide their pay. She also reiterates【If you reiterate something, you say it again, usually in order to emphasize it.】 the point that there are plenty of devices such as golden parachutes【A golden parachute is an agreement to pay a large amount of money to a senior executive of a company if they are forced to leave. (BUSINESS)】 that cannot possibly be justified by performance.
In his expert evidence Rakesh Khurana tries to focus on fundamental questions such as what the purpose of compensation is. He argues that the market for CEOs is a highly distorted【If you distort a statement, fact, or idea, you report or represent it in an untrue way.】 one because CEOs themselves can influence the process and performance is hard to measure. He suggests that extreme pay differentials【A differential is a difference between things, especially rates of pay.】 can damage companies by attracting the wrong sort of bosses and demotivating the rank and file【The rank and file are the ordinary members of an organization or the ordinary workers in a company, as opposed to its leaders or managers. (JOURNALISM)】. He also worries about the legitimacy【合理性】 of the system. One survey suggests that only 13% of people trust what CEOs say.
So far the voting is going heavily against the motion. But I wonder how far this is driven by emotion rather than a reasoned assessment of the evidence. I would urge the participants to pay close attention to the wording of the motion-particularly the key phrases 'one the whole' and 'deserve'. We need to focus more on the overall picture, around the world as well as in the United States, rather than on a few attention-grabbing anecdotes. And we need to think more closely about the word 'deserve'. Mr Kaplan's best chance of turning the voting around is to demonstrate that outstanding bosses can boost the performance of the organisations that they head, not only earning their pay but also benefitting workers, shareholders and consumers.
The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Oct 23rd 2009 | Steven N. Kaplan

Nell Minow argues that top executive compensation was a major cause of the financial crisis. She bases her conclusion on two "outlier" examples, Angelo Mozillo and Aubrey McClendon, that she calls "anecdotes". The plural【The plural of a noun is the form of it that is used to refer to more than one person or thing.】 of anecdote is data. And the data, that is the pay at a broad sample of financial companies, simply do not support her conclusion. Ironically, neither do her two anecdotes.【文中the plural of anecdote即为前文中的anecdotes，只是换了一种表达方式而已。】
Ms Minow makes the following claims. (1) Incentive compensation rewarded top financial executives for the quantity of transactions, not the quality. (2) Top CEOs, like Mr Mozillo, took large amounts of money out of their companies before their companies failed. (3) The CEOs knew they were making bad investments, but did so anyway because they could make more money doing so. (4) CEOs get upside, but no downside. (5) The post-meltdown awards create incentives that reward management, but damage shareholders and everyone else.
These claims are false. As David Yermack of NYU pointed out in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America:
"all lost small fortunes in 2008. The 2008 compensation of Messrs Pandit, Mack, and Lewis was approximately minus $105 million, minus $40 million, and minus $108 million, respectively, after taking account of【If you take something into account, or take account of something, you consider it when you are thinking about a situation or deciding what to do.】 the losses on the stock that each CEO owned in his firm. Other CEOs in the financial industry had similarly bad years. Kerry Killinger of Washington Mutual lost more than $25 million before being ousted【If someone is ousted from a position of power, job, or place, they are forced to leave it. (JOURNALISM)】 in September, Kennedy Thompson of Wachovia lost more than $30 million before being fired in June, and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric lost more than $60 million ... These CEOs' financial reversals【A reversal of a process, policy, or trend is a complete change in it.】 were part of a robust【Someone or something that is robust is very strong or healthy.】 system of pay-for-performance widely used by most U.S. companies."
Yermack also points out that James Cayne lost most of his billion-dollar fortune when Bear Stearns failed and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The fact is that most financial-company CEOs received the lion's share of their pay in stock and options. And they kept most of that pay as shares in their companies which they never cashed in【If you cash in something such as an insurance policy, you exchange it for money.】. When the crisis hit and their stock prices sank, those CEOs lost a large fraction of their wealth and, in many cases, their jobs.
As I wrote in my first entry, this is true, in general, of the overall CEO market. CEOs earn a lot and their stock appreciates when their companies perform well. CEOs lose large amounts of wealth and their jobs when their companies perform poorly. It is irresponsible to claim that CEOs do not bear any downside risk. In 2008, CEOs as a group lost roughly 40% of their wealth.
In direct contradiction to Ms Minow's conclusion, the financial CEOs were compensated in the end for the quality of their transactions. The CEOs did not take much off the table. The CEOs had a substantial amount of downside risk. In fact, those CEOs would have been much better off【If you say that someone would be better off doing something, you are advising them to do it or expressing the opinion that it would benefit them to do it.】 if they had not engaged in the transactions they did.
It is worth adding that David Yermack is a noted researcher on CEO pay who studies large samples over long periods. He has written several articles highly critical of specific CEO pay practices, like corporate jet usage. Nevertheless, his conclusion on the relation of CEO pay to the financial crisis is diametrically opposed【If you say that two things are diametrically opposed, you are emphasizing that they are completely different from each other.】 to Ms Minow's (as is his characterisation of the CEO market in general).
A study of CEO incentives in a broader group of financial institutions during the crisis by Rudi Fahlenbrach and Rene Stulz of Ohio State (and a former president of the American Finance Association) confirms Yermack's analysis and also clearly refutes Ms Minow's conclusion.
Ironically, even her two anecdotes about Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide and Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake Energy
fail to support her case.
Unlike the other CEOs mentioned above (and most financial-institution CEOs), Mr Mozillo did manage to sell a lot of his stock. Unfortunately for him, the SEC has charged him with securities fraud【诈骗】 and insider trading. And it is unlikely to lead to a good outcome for him. If found guilty, he potentially will end up paying three times what he took out. Clearly, he appears to have behaved badly, but he did not get away with it.
As for Mr McClendon, he runs an energy company. How could he possibly have had anything to do with the financial crisis?
The preponderance of the data and, even Ms Minow's "outlier" "anecdotes," therefore, fail to provide any evidence that top executive compensation had much to do with the financial crisis.
Top executive compensation did not cause the financial crisis. Instead, the crisis was caused by loose monetary【Monetary means relating to money, especially the total amount of money in a country. (BUSINESS)】 policy, a global capital glut【If there is a glut of something, there is so much of it that it cannot all be sold or used.】, over-high leverage at investment banks, mandates from Congress to provide mortgages【A mortgage is a loan of money which you get from a bank or building society in order to buy a house.】 to people who could not afford them, flawed ratings【A rating of something is a score or measurement of how good or popular it is.】 from the rating agencies and poor incentives at mortgage origination (not the CEO) level. Consistent with this【与此一致的是】, the financial crisis has spread to financial institutions in other countries with very different pay practices.
The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Oct 23rd 2009 | Nell Minow
The headlines are writing my rebuttal for me.
Goldman Sachs set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46% from a year ago. While its net income has tripled, its core investment banking business is down 31%. The Toronto Star quotes Goldman's CFO【首席财务官】, David Viniar, using an unforgivable oxymoron in a conference call【电话会议】 with reporters: "Our competitors are paying people quite well [and are] very willing to pay employees guaranteed bonuses of very high amounts." (emphasis added)
Mr Viniar also showed that he has a very short memory, arguing that Goldman is operating without any government guarantee, ignoring the reality of the government guarantee that kept the system going just a year ago.
These bonuses have nothing to do with paying for performance. How much of Goldman's bouncing back is due to the government's guarantees and the hundreds of billions of dollars it poured into Goldman, Wall Street, and other subsidies and outright welfare payments to the very institutions that came close to bringing down the entire economy? Shouldn't the American people expect some sort of discounted calculation of the bonuses that reflect a market-based assessment of performance? Once again, Wall Street is all about capitalism when it comes to the upside, but all about socialism when it comes to the downside, that is, from each, according to his ability, to each, whatever he can get away with.
Also this week, we had the testimony【In a court of law, someone's testimony is a formal statement that they make about what they saw someone do or what they know of a situation, after having promised to tell the truth.】 of Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the government's financial rescue programme before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The serial offender AIG has promised $198m in bonus pay to its employees next March, according to the testimony, and there is very little the government or anyone else can do about it. Because the bonus agreements were entered into before the bailout, the government has no legal authority to stop them. All Special Master Kenneth Feinberg can do is ask the company not to pay the bonuses and rattle his sabre about the pay he can control going forward, hoping that the threat of clamping down on the 25 executives at each of the covered companies he does have authority over will be enough of an incentive to force a change. In the meantime, once again, pay is uncoupled from【脱节】 performance. Even the company has given up on trying to make that case, relying instead on opportunity costs to justify the bonuses and arguing that these kinds of payments are necessary in order to keep the employees from leaving. Based on their past performance and their unwillingness to tie future pay to genuine measures of sustainable growth, I suggest that the best choice for shareholders is to let them leave.
Mr Barofksy gave the committee a Treasury Department report on the last set of outrageous【If you describe something as outrageous, you are emphasizing that it is unacceptable or very shocking.】 AIG bonuses. It concluded in part that "Treasury invested $40 billion of taxpayer funds in AIG, designed AIG's contractual executive compensation restrictions, and helped manage the Government's majority stake in AIG for several months, all without having any detailed information about the scope of AIG's very substantial, and very controversial, executive compensation obligations." If a private entity had been asked for emergency funds, it is unthinkable that any money would have been advanced without establishing some control over compensation. There are two reasons for this. The first is agency costs. Anyone (other than Secretary Henry Paulson, apparently) putting money at risk will want to ensure that it will not be inappropriately appropriated【If someone appropriates something which does not belong to them, they take it, usually without the right to do so. (FORMAL)】. The second is the high likelihood【If something is a likelihood, it is likely to happen.】 that the previous incentive structure was a significant factor in the bad decisions and catastrophic【Something that is catastrophic involves or causes a sudden terrible disaster.】 risk management that created the need for the funds in the first place.
And really, that is all the argument one needs. By definition, the incentive compensation was badly designed, as proved by the results. However, I will respond to some of the points raised by Professor Kaplan.
First, we disagree on the calculations that support the conclusion that CEO play has been declining. Our figures, based not on theoretical pay but on realised pay, are as follows.

Clearly actual pay is the better measure of pay effectiveness. I also question the validity of the Equilar survey figures. They are based on the reported total compensation in the summary compensation table, which is even further from reality than the "expected pay", as it is just an accounting cost.
I do not understand why he brings up the net worth of CEOs; that has no relationship whatsoever【You use whatsoever after a noun group in order to emphasize a negative statement.】 to their pay, its relationship to performance, or its effectiveness at aligning CEOs' interests with shareholders'.
Second, Professor Kaplan states, "The typical CEO is paid for performance. Boards increasingly fire CEOs for poor performance." The second sentence has no relationship to the first. Boards may fire CEOs for poor performance, but they pay them boatloads of
money for that performance on the way out of the door. Just look at Ken Lewis's departure from Bank of America. Disastrous performance that apparently included lying (about what else? bonuses) and an unprecedented vote of no confidence from shareholders that removed him as chairman, may indeed have caused him to be fired (though the board did not use that term). But his $53m retirement package does not feel like pay for performance to me.
Professor Kaplan tries to obscure【If one thing obscures another, it prevents it from being seen or heard properly.】 the point by bringing in law firm partners, athletes and other highly-paid professionals. Partners in law firms are paid according to formulas set by the partnership. As in any other private firm, there are no agency costs to worry about and they can do whatever they like. Athletes, movie stars and recording artists, who have a much greater range and far greater elasticity【弹性】 in compensation, engage in vigorous arm's length negotiations on pay; their pay is not set by boards they appoint, as CEOs' is.
And it is hard for me to understand how anyone could point to the US or UK government authorising excessive pay as a validation of the system. As noted above, the government has repeatedly failed as regulator or as provider of capital in curbing outrageously destructive executive compensation.
Here are seven deadly sins found in executive compensation plans. Each of them is conclusive evidence that the system is out of whack.
1. Making up for losses in stock value with other grants of cash or stock.
2. Imputed years of service to increase retirement benefits.
3. Setting the performance goals too low or other phony metrics to trigger bonuses.
4. Dividends on unvested stock.
5. Outrageous departure packages.
6. Stock options that are not performance-based or indexed.
7. Perquisites and gross-ups.

miki7catUID: 2533330

test：
Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shop floor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.

miki7catUID: 2533330

今天眼睛很疼，可能是昨天用眼过度的缘故。
背了单词5-8
[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.26]看了一半，实在看不了了，明天再补上comment

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词 9-12

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.26]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1045471-1-2.html

My comment
Since my major in Information Security at college just covers the subject of this article, I have a lot of comments to make on it from the professional perspective. The article introduced several method of password cracking, and described to audiences how powerful the password crackers. In fact, depending on the computer technology, there are many approaches to protect our passwords from being cracked. Unfortunately, just like the article mentioned, it is a very general appearance that some people write their usernames and passwords down on scraps of paper, and some others save them with a document including even the information of their bank account. The lack of safe consciousness will bring a great loss.

Tech.view
Passwords aplenty
Dec 18th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From Economist.com
How to stay sane as well as safe while surfing the web
surfing【Surfing is the activity of looking at different sites on the Internet, especially when you are not looking for anything in particular. (COMPUTING)】

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 all the ingenious【Something that is ingenious is very clever and involves new ideas, methods, or equipment.】 technology which, once debugged by the world’s most acquisitive【If you describe a person or an organization as acquisitive, you do not approve of them because you think they are too concerned with getting new possessions.】 consumers, will wind up【终止】 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【A book or piece of paper that is dog-eared has been used so much that the corners of the pages are turned down or torn.】 set of notes that really ought to be locked up in a safe. This is his list of logons 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.

He admits to flouting【If you flout something such as a law, an order, or an accepted way of behaving, you deliberately do not obey it or follow it.】 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【这个纯属娱乐，翻译成：天理不容】, writing them down on scraps of paper. So his new year’s resolution is to set up a proper software vault【储藏室A vault is a secure room where money and other valuable things can be kept safely.】 for the various passwords and ditch【If you ditch something that you have or are responsible for, you abandon it or get rid of it, because you no longer want it. (INFORMAL)】 the dog-eared list.

Your correspondent’s one consolation 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【If you have an aversion to someone or something, you dislike them very much.】 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 characters interspersed with【If one group of things are interspersed with another or interspersed among another, the second things occur between or among the first things.】 symbols, people resort to writing them down on Post-it notes left lying around the office or home for all and sundry【All and sundry means everyone.】 to see.

Apart from stealing passwords from Post-it notes and the like, intruders【An intruder is a person who goes into a place where they are not supposed to be.】 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 methods【暴力破解法】 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.

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Thermodynamics is the branch of physics that is concerned with the relationship between heat and other forms of energy.】—the notion of entropy (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 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【2的64次方】 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【To draw something from a particular thing or place means to take or get it from that thing or place.】 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【A test, system, or procedure that is rigorous is very thorough and strict.】, is to use a mnemonic【A mnemonic is a word, short poem, or sentence that is intended to help you remember things such as scientific rules or spelling rules.】 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【robust在上一篇文章里形容的是system，这里用来形容password】 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, 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.

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.27]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1045738-1-1.html

Art.view
Back to the future
Dec 19th 2009
From Economist.com
The taste for clutter and realism is curiously buoyant
curious【If you describe something as curious, you mean that it is unusual or difficult to understand.】
buoyant【A buoyant economy is a successful one in which there is a lot of trade and economic activity.】

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.

Of the two auctions, Sotheby’s was by far【You use the expression by far when you are comparing something or someone with others of the same kind, in order to emphasize how great the difference is between them. For example, you can say that something is by far the best or the best by far to indicate that it is definitely the best.】 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【If you discount an idea, fact, or theory, you consider that it is not true, not important, or not relevant.】 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. They are happy to pay over the odds 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 industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893. His works are often dark social commentaries featuring streets and portsides, full of ships’ rigging 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 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 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 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【代表】 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. “It has everything you could want: the old man, the clock, the knickknacks,” 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【Someone who is naked is not wearing any clothes.】. 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.

My comment
I’m not sure whether the understanding below is correct of what Mr Mason said, which is “People are discounting the coming inflation and buying quality. They know that inflation has always been the art dealer’s friend.” In my opinion, art, as one of investable assets, would hold investors’ value in longer term, and additionally the old-fashioned ones are proved valuable by having been sold many times and collected by many people, so that people “are happy to pay over the odds for top-ranking pictures” , discounting the coming inflation and buying quality. Moreover, it is because inflation will make the prices of art works higher that inflation has always been the dealer’s friend.

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词：13-17请教大家为什么我背第三遍了，看到很多单词还是跟第一遍看一样……
[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][12.28]https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1046212-1-1.html

A special report on entrepreneurship
Global heroes
Mar 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Despite the downturn, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge

IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of【If something happens in the midst of an event, it happens during it.】
the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed【尤用於被动语态crowd round (sb.) noisily in great numbers, either to attack or admire】 business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in【If you engage in an activity, you do it or are actively involved with it. (FORMAL)】 a frenzy【Frenzy or a frenzy is great excitement or wild behaviour that often results from losing control of your feelings.】 of networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect【If people erect something such as a building, bridge, or barrier, they build it or create it. (FORMAL)】 a huge tent to take the overflow. The aspiring【If you use aspiring to describe someone who is starting a particular career, you mean that they are trying to become successful in it.】
entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in【(a) be involved in an activity 参加某活动 (b) make a contribution to sth; have a share in sth 对某事起作用﹑ 有贡献; 参与】 forging【If one person or institution forges an agreement or relationship with another, they create it with a lot of hard work, hoping that it will be strong or lasting.】 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【官僚主义】 of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil【Turmoil is a state of confusion, disorder, uncertainty, or great anxiety.】 of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with【If you work hand in glove with someone, you work very closely with them.】 big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening【An intervening period of time is one that separates two events or points in time.】 decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming【If you roam an area or roam around it, you wander or travel around it without having a particular purpose.】 the globe.
【Joseph Alois Schumpeter (8 February 1883 – 8 January 1950)was an economist and political scientist born in Moravia, then Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation. In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power.】
【Keynesian economics (also called Keynesianism (pronounced /ˈkeɪnziən/) and Keynesian Theory) is a macroeconomic theory based on the ideas of 20th-century British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle.】

Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe【a distinct variety or sort : TYPE *persons of the same political stripe*】 have embraced【If you embrace a change, political system, or idea, you accept it and start supporting it or believing in it. (FORMAL)】 entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists【这里应该是比喻义An evangelist is a person who travels from place to place in order to try to convert people to Christianity.】. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire【讽刺Keynesian economists？】. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”

This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right
【You can refer to people who support the political ideals of socialism as the left. They are often contrasted with the right, who support the political ideals of capitalism and conservatism.】, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.

The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to【可用来替换always】 be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers【A high-flyer is someone who has a lot of ability and is likely to be very successful in their career.】 from around the world still flock to America’s universities and clamour to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel【You can use gospel to refer to a particular way of thinking that a person or group believes in very strongly and that they try to persuade others to accept.】.

The company that arranged the oversubscribed【If something such as an event or a service is oversubscribed, too many people apply to attend the event or use the service.】 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【To mentor someone means to give them help and advice over a period of time, especially help and advice related to their job.】, 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【If you say that someone is a leading light in an organization, campaign, or community, you mean that they are one of the most important, active, enthusiastic, and successful people in it.】 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【A guru is a person who some people regard as an expert or leader.】, Raj Jaswa, is the president of TiE’s Silicon Valley chapter【a local branch of an organization】.

The globalisation of entrepreneurship is raising the competitive stakes【You can use stakes to refer to something that is like a contest. For example, you can refer to the choosing of a leader as the leadership stakes.】 for everyone, particularly in the rich world. Entrepreneurs can now come from almost anywhere, including once-closed economies such as India and China. And many of them can reach global markets from the day they open their doors, thanks to the falling cost of communications.

For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up【as, 或者whether…or…谓语多用be的原形，引导让步虚拟从句，这种用法通常采用倒装结构。这种用法非常正式。】. 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Something that is disproportionate is surprising or unreasonable in amount or size, compared with something else.】 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【You use expressions such as `by no means', `not by any means', and `by no manner of means' to emphasize that something is not true.】
all start-ups are innovative: most new corner shops do much the same as old corner shops. And not all entrepreneurial companies are either new or small. Google is constantly innovating despite being, in Silicon Valley terms, something of a long-beard.

This narrower definition of entrepreneurship has an impressive intellectual pedigree【Someone's pedigree is their background or their ancestors.】 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【To deviate from something means to start doing something different or not planned, especially in a way that causes problems for others.】 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【A think-tank is a group of experts who are gathered together by an organization, especially by a government, in order to consider various problems and try and work out ways to solve them.】 on entrepreneurship, makes a fundamental distinction between “replicative”【 If you replicate someone's experiment, work, or research, you do it yourself in exactly the same way. (FORMAL)】 and “innovative” entrepreneurship.

Five myths

Innovative entrepreneurs are not only more interesting than the replicative sort, they also carry more economic weight because they generate many more jobs. A small number of innovative start-ups account for a disproportionately large number of new jobs. But entrepreneurs can be found anywhere, not just in small businesses. There are plenty of misconceptions about entrepreneurship, five of which are particularly persistent. The first is that entrepreneurs are “orphans【If a child is orphaned, their parents die, or their remaining parent dies.】
and outcasts【An outcast is someone who is not accepted by a group of people or by society.】”, to borrow the phrase of George Gilder, an American intellectual【An intellectual is someone who spends a lot of time studying and thinking about complicated ideas.】: lonely Atlases battling a hostile world or anti-social geeks inventing world-changing gizmos【A gizmo is a device or small machine which performs a particular task, usually in a new and efficient way. People often use gizmo to refer to a device or machine when they do not know what it is really called. (INFORMAL)】 in their garrets【A garret is a small room at the top of a house.】. 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 of【A roll call of a particular type of people or things is a list of them.】
business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. Ramana Nanda, of Harvard Business School (HBS), and Jesper Sorensen, of Stanford Business School, have demonstrated that rates of entrepreneurship are significantly higher in organisations where a large number of employees are former entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship also flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston. This is partly because entrepreneurship in such places is a way of life—coffee houses in Silicon Valley are full of young people loudly talking about their business plans—and partly because the infrastructure is already in place, which radically reduces the cost of starting a business.

The second myth is that most entrepreneurs are just out of short trousers. Some of today’s most celebrated figures were indeed astonishingly young when they got going: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all dropped out of college to start their businesses, and the founders of Google and Facebook were still students when they launched theirs. Ben Casnocha started his first company when he was 12, was named entrepreneur of the year by Inc magazine at 17 and published a guide to running start-ups at 19.

But not all successful entrepreneurs are kids. Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines, a business that pioneered no-frills discount flying in America. The Kauffman Foundation examined 652 American-born bosses of technology companies set up in 1995-2005 and found that the average boss was 39 when he or she started. The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.

The third myth is that entrepreneurship is driven mainly by venture capital. This certainly matters in capital-intensive industries【资本密集型产业】 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【A sliver of something is a small thin piece or amount of it.】 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【A triumph is a great success or achievement, often one that has been gained with a lot of skill or effort.】 of the venture-capital industry, but Messrs Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections.

Monitor, a management consultancy that has recently conducted an extensive survey of entrepreneurs, emphasises the importance of “angel” investors, who operate somewhere in the middle ground between venture capitalists and family and friends. They usually have some personal connection with their chosen entrepreneur and are more likely than venture capitalists to invest in a business when it is little more than a budding idea.

The fourth myth is that to succeed, entrepreneurs must produce some world-changing new product. Sir Ronald Cohen, the founder of Apax Partners, one of Europe’s most successful venture-capital companies, points out that some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products. Richard Branson made flying less tedious by providing his customers with entertainment. Fred Smith built a billion-dollar business by improving the delivery of packages. Oprah Winfrey has become America’s richest self-made woman through successful brand management.

The fifth myth is that entrepreneurship cannot flourish in big companies. Many entrepreneurs are sworn enemies of large corporations, and many policymakers measure entrepreneurship by the number of small-business start-ups. This makes some sense. Start-ups are often more innovative than established companies because their incentives are sharper: they need to break into the market, and owner-entrepreneurs can do much better than even the most innovative company man.

Big can be beautiful too

But many big companies work hard to keep their people on their entrepreneurial toes. Johnson & Johnson operates like a holding company that provides financial muscle and marketing skills to internal entrepreneurs. Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. Jorma Ollila transformed Nokia, a long-established Finnish firm, from a maker of rubber boots and cables into a mobile-phone giant; his successor as boss of the company, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now talking about turning it into an internet company. Such men belong firmly in the pantheon【You can refer to a group of gods or a group of important people as a pantheon. (WRITTEN)】 of entrepreneurs.

Just as importantly, big firms often provide start-ups with their bread and butter. In many industries, especially pharmaceuticals and telecoms, the giants contract out innovation to smaller companies. Procter & Gamble tries to get half of its innovations from outside its own labs. Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow.

But how is the new enthusiasm for entrepreneurship standing up to the worldwide economic downturn? Entrepreneurs are being presented with huge practical problems. Customers are harder to find. Suppliers are becoming less accommodating. Capital is harder to raise. In America venture-capital investment in the fourth quarter of 2008 was down to $5.4 billion, 33% lower than a year earlier. Risk, the lifeblood of the entrepreneurial economy, is becoming something to be avoided.

miki7catUID: 2533330

今天完成的任务
单词18-22

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https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1046472-1-1.html


An evolutionary biologist on religion
Spirit level
Dec 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Why the human race has needed religion to survive

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【Something that is dense contains a lot of things or people in a small area.】 but skillfully packed account of faith【A faith is a particular religion, for example Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam.】 from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas Wade recalls the place where he first felt sanctity: Eton College chapel.

The “beauty of holiness” in a British private school is a far cry from【Something that is a far cry from something else is very different from it.】 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【Hunter-gatherers were people who lived by hunting and collecting food rather than by farming. There are still groups of hunter-gatherers living in some parts of the world.】 peoples who survived into modern times give an idea of religion’s first forms: the ecstasy【Ecstasy is a feeling of very great happiness.】 of dusk-to-dawn tribal dances, for example.

Charles Darwin, whose idea of the sacred also came from an English private school, witnessed religion at its most primordial【You use primordial to describe things that belong to a very early time in the history of the world. (FORMAL)】 when he went to Australia in 1836. He found it horrifying【If you describe something as horrifying, you mean that it is shocking or disgusting.】: “nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of blazing fires, all moving in hideous 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【A propensity to do something or a propensity for something is a natural tendency that you have to behave in a particular way. (FORMAL)】 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. Critics of religion, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, suggest that faith is a useless (or worse) by-product 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 if one accepts the idea of group selection. Groups which practised religion effectively and enjoyed its benefits were likely to prevail over【~ (against/over sb/sth) (fml 文) fight successfully (against sb/sth); defeat 战胜（某人[某事物]）; 击败】 those which lacked these advantages.

Of course, the picture is muddied 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 tried to monopolise access to the divine, and the authorities sought to control sacred ecstasy.

Still, the modifications that religion has undergone should not, in Mr Wade’s view, distract from【If something distracts you or your attention from something, it takes your attention away from it.】 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 obedience to rules, and group solidarity based on common participation in ecstatic 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 tend to eschew【If you eschew something, you deliberately avoid doing it or becoming involved in it. (FORMAL)】 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. He endorses the radical view that the story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is myth, rather than history. He sympathises with daring ideas about Islam’s beginnings: so daring that many of its proponents 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, the book stumbles. 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 is inaccurate in places.

These objections aside, this is a masterly 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 effect not only of chapel, but also of songs like “Jolly Boating Weather”.

My comment

This article introduces a book—  The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures—written by Nicholas Wade. As it lays the basis for a rich dialogue between biology, social science and religious history, the book should be a masterly one. In addition, I find it creative that explaining the religion’s evolution by analogy with Darwin’s theory of origin of species. This usage of “origin of species” and “natural selection” might be useful to analyze the topics about culture too. However, rather than a writing material, the value of this article is only to provide me with an extended reading. This book aside, any topic relevant to religions continues to confuse me.