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

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.02]https://bbs.gter.net/post.php?action=reply&fid=23&tid=1042548

Film
Floating in the Digital Experience
Zoë Saldana and Sam Worthington in James Cameron’s “Avatar,” which pushes the 3-D envelope.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 30, 2009
pushes the 3-D envelope【If someone pushes the envelope, they do something to a greater degree or in a more extreme way than it has ever been done before.】
1. HOW much our world of moving-image【动态图像】 entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote【遥控】 (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

2. And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with【When newspapers or magazines run a particular item or story or if it runs, it is published or printed.】 the exciting if cryptic
【神秘的】headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon【If you project a film or picture onto a screen or wall, you make it appear there.】 a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility【灵活性】, as though actuated【If a person is actuated by an emotion, that emotion makes them act in a certain way. If something actuates a device, the device starts working.】 by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

3. Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to【紧紧抓住】 their exclusive【Something that is exclusive is used or owned by only one person or group, and not shared with anyone else.】 rights ferociously【If you describe actions or feelings as ferocious, you mean that they are intense and determined.】. Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively【If someone's behaviour is obsessive, they cannot stop doing a particular thing or behaving in a particular way.】, but they also seemed captivated【If you are captivated by someone or something, you find them fascinating and attractive.】.

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in【If you root around or root about in something, you look for something there, moving things around as you search. (in BRIT, also use root about)】, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating【变异】 for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

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

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

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

My comment
In recent years, people seem to be back to the cinema rather than watching movies on televisions or computers. I make an inference that there would be two reasons. The one is living standards have risen these years, so that the cost of going to the cinema, even if frequently, has not been unaffordable. The other is that people now are becoming more and more to urge on and to pursue a feast for the eyes, instead of being satisfied with viewing a new released movie. The 3-D technology exactly performs this vision enjoyment so attractively that it is conceivable how "Avatar", which pushes the 3-D envelope,
will be successful in catching the moviegoers' eyes.

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[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.03]
https://bbs.gter.net/viewthread.php?tid=1047863&highlight=

Beyond Righteousness and Gain
by Zhou Guoping

1. "A virtuous【A virtuous person behaves in a moral and correct way.】 man is concerned with righteousness【n.正直；正当；正义】 while a mean man, with gain,” Confucius says. The "righteousness" and "gain" have long been a central theme in the Chinese philosophy of life. But, what if I am neither virtuous nor mean?

2. There was once a time when almost everyone claimed to be a gentleman and every word uttered was about righteousness. At that time, there might have been some truly virtuous men who were so righteous as to give up whatever was profitable. But, more likely, one might meet hypocrites【n.伪善者；伪君子】 who used righteousness as a fig leaf【People sometimes refer disapprovingly to something which is intended to hide or prevent an embarrassing situation as a fig leaf. (JOURNALISM)】 for their cupidity, or pedants believed in whatever passed for righteousness. Gone are the old days. The social trend has taken on a dramatic change unawares: the reputation of righteousness nosedived, truly virtuous men became extinct, hypocrites dropped the fig leaf and the scales fell from the eyes of the pedants. Without exception, they all joined in the scramble for gains. It is believed that the philosophy of life has changed and a new interpretation of righteousness and gain looms【If a worrying or threatening situation or event is looming, it seems likely to happen soon. (JOURNALISM)】 large: seeking material gains is not the exclusive patent of the mean, but a golden rule for all.

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

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

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

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

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

8. Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it." With it I couldn’t agree more. I did admire him for his easy and humorous way in describing the quandary of life. However, a deep ponder over it has brought home to me that Shaw’s standpoint is no other than "possessing", which keeps us stranded in a double dosage tragedy of life: it' s a pain not to possess your heart' s desire, and a tedium, to have possessed it. However, if we shift the standpoint from "possessing" to "creating", and look at life with an esthetic eye, we can interpret Shaw’s words the other way round: there are two comedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire, so you still have the opportunity to seek or create it. The other is to get your heart’s desire, and then you are able to enjoy tasting or experiencing it--Of course, life can never be free from pains, and a wealth hunter can not dream of the sadness of a man who places a premium on his true disposition. However, to be free from the mania for possession may at least save you many petty worries and pains, and let you enjoy a graceful life. 1 have no intention to prescribe the esthetic viewpoint as the cure for a corrupt world. I just want to express a belief: there is a life more worth living than the one haunted by righteousness and gain. And, this belief will help me sail through the unpredictable waters of my future life.

My comment
I think the essay tells us a sense, that is: to be yourself and then you will have a graceful life. Our philosophy of life should be an aesthetical one, rather than an ethical one or utilitarian one. And the author asserts that the true meaning of life lies in creating. In my opinion, the "aesthetical life" and "creating" are both in a broader sense. Not everyone enjoys writing or painting and could create appealing essay and other kinds of article works, but everyone could find the beauty of their own life. Take my own feeling as an example. My major is about the Internet. The topology of net structure is always confusing, and the program instructions are so tedious and changeless that I couldn't connect it with creating in a narrow sense, but I am really happy and passionate about my life. This is must because, just what the author mentioned in his essay, the career that I am pursuing has unfolded my true disposition.

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.04]https://bbs.gter.net/viewthread.php?tid=1048419&highlight=

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

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

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

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

“No, not at all.”

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

5. “Now, if you were to say that what God sees as going to occur cannot not occur and that what cannot not occur happens of necessity, and make a problem of the word ‘necessity,’ I will answer that it is absolutely true but is, indeed, a problem, not so much for logicians as for theologians. All I can tell you is that this future event from the point of view of divine knowledge is necessary, but from its own nature is utterly and entirely free. There are actually two necessities, one of them simple—as that all men are mortal—and the other conditional—as that when you see a man walking it is necessary that he be walking. Whatever you know cannot be otherwise than as you know it. But this conditional necessity is different from the simple kind in that it is not caused by the thing’s nature but by the addition of the condition. It is not necessary that a man go for a walk, even though it is necessary, when he is walking, that he is walking. It is in the same way that if divine providence sees anything in its eternal present, that must necessarily be, even though there is no necessity in its nature. God can see as present future events that happen as a result of free will. Thus, they are, from God’s point of view, necessary, although in themselves they do not lose the freedom that is in their nature. All those things, then, that God knows will come to be will, indeed, come to be, some of them proceeding from free will, so that when they come to be they will not have lost the freedom of their nature, according to which, until the time that they happened, they might not have happened. So why is it important that they are not necessary if, from the aspect of divine knowledge, it turns out that they are tantamount to【adj [pred 作表语] ~ to sth equal in effect to sth; as good as sth 与某事物效果相等; 与某事物相同】 being necessary? It is like the examples I proposed to you a moment ago of the rising sun and the walking man. While these things are happening, they cannot not be happening, but of the two, only one was bound to【adj [pred 作表语] ~ to do sth 1 certain to do sth 一定做某事；2 obliged by law or duty to do sth 有法律责任或有义务做某事的】 happen while the other was not. In the same way, the things God sees in his eternal present will certainly happen, but some will happen because of the necessity of things and others will happen because of those who are doing those actions. From the aspect of divine knowledge, then, they are necessary, but considered in themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. So are things that you look at with the senses singular, but if you look at them from the point of view of reason, they are universal.

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

My comment
According to this article, I naturally consider the God, or called the Creator, as a excellent program. One part of the created world which is bound to happen, as the sun rise everyday,
is an established execution of the program. The other part of the created world which consist of those holding self-consciousness, such as a man, is a subprogram with "switch" statement, which will automatically change the results according to the different cases offered by the man's wills. So, unbelieving the presence of an entity God though, I have the faith that the law of nature is fair to everyone, and the good will be reward while the bad must be punished.

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.07]
https://bbs.gter.net/viewthread.php?tid=1049364&highlight=

看这篇的时候没有编辑软件，所以没能标注好词好句。

My comment
Frankly, I hardly grasp the main point of the article, but there is awareness that it seems the author maintains a critical attitude towards the methods of expression of the two writers. In the critical view of the author, Committed, as well as Cleaving —the other book mentioned in this article — to a certain extent, demonstrates a so conversational writing that readers will abandon the book because of the repeated information, which offers a insights into the dilemma of modern marriage though. And about Cleaving, the description about sex leads the readers to concern with sexual activity more instead of the characters' actual appeal.

miki7catUID: 2533330

A题库到180
单词，复习29/30

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

30# miki7cat

嘻~客气啦，互相监督，嘿。。
好多的comments啊，good~赞，呵。。

miki7catUID: 2533330

赶快来补个日志。显卡风扇出问题，返厂维修去了，两天没电脑用……
10日+11日
单词1.2.3，复习之前背过的
A题库过完第一遍
又是好几天Comment没有做……哭……

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.12]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1050520-1-1.html

Illiberal politics
America's unjust sex laws
Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition
An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world
illiberal【If you describe someone or something as illiberal, you are critical of them because they do not allow or approve of much freedom or choice of action.】
harsh【Harsh actions or speech are unkind and show no understanding or sympathy.】

IT IS an oft-told【Oft- combines with past participles to form adjectives that mean that something happens or is done often. (LITERARY)】 story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile【A paedophile is a person, usually a man, who is sexually attracted to children.】 enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting【vt.(武力或口头上的)攻击，袭击】 a child. Yet Megan’s parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.

In their grief【表示因为，基于】, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, “Megan’s laws” had spread to every American state.
America’s sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists【A rapist is a man who has raped someone.】 and child-molesters are given long prison sentences.

When released, they are put on sex-offender registries【A registry is a collection of all the official records relating to something, or the place where they are kept.】. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America’s example, either importing Megan’s laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.

Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America’s approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly【A plan or action that is self-defeating is likely to cause problems or difficulties instead of producing useful results.】 harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet【原意为棘轮机构，这里应为引申义。If you describe a situation as a ratchet, you mean that it is bad and can only become worse. (mainly BRIT)】 effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

A whole Wyoming of offenders
In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries—more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being “party to the crime of child molestation” because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.

Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a “click to print” icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters with the offender’s mugshot【A mug shot is a photograph of someone, especially a photograph of a criminal which has been taken by the police. (INFORMAL)】 on trees near his home. Small wonder most sex offenders report being harassed【不断打扰﹑ 骚扰（某人）】. A few have been murdered. Many are fired because someone at work has Googled them.

Registration is often just the start. Sometimes sex offenders are barred from living near places where children congregate. In Georgia no sex offender may live or work within 1,000 feet (300 metres) of a school, church, park, skating rink or swimming pool. In Miami an exclusion zone of 2,500 feet has helped create a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge.

Make the punishment fit the crime
There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.

Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.

It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive【You use compulsive to describe people or their behaviour when they cannot stop doing something wrong, harmful, or unnecessary.】 molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.

In America it may take years to unpick this. However practical and just the case for reform, it must overcome political cowardice, the tabloid media and parents’ understandable fears. Other countries, though, have no excuse for committing the same error. Sensible sex laws are better than vengeful ones.


My comment
This is a very useful article for us (who are preparing for the AW), either offering an example for the issues about law or showing a fascinating argument in the part of "Make the punishment fit the crime".

By reading the article, I arose a question: if we say a law is unjust, which certain aspects does the injustice of the law appear in？ The purpose of law should be to regulate the behaviour of members of a community or country, and laws is compulsory and to target a particular group of people. As it describes the states must establish sex-offender registries and the sex offenders must be put on the registries, the sex-offender law is strict to the police who should found registries and keep track of all the sex offenders on the registries and to everyone who ever has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a child, but parents to check whether a child-molester lives nearby is optional. So, I could not help considering the registration as a kind of punishment for the paedophiles. And the injustice of sex-offender law is the unjust punishment. What's more, it is also unjust for the police to be asked for too much responsibility. Beyond these phenomena, is there other aspects of law, either the law in this article or the others, could be unjustly described?

miki7catUID: 2533330

累了一天，心情也很低落。什么都还没做。

miki7catUID: 2533330

今天只来得急看完和标注好词句了

Google Ends Policy of Self-Censorship in China
By Austin Ramzy / Beijing
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010

After years of struggling to build its China operations, Google has threatened to pull out of the country following a sophisticated【complicated and refined; elaborate; subtle 复杂的; 精良的; 精细的; 尖端的】 cyberattack on its corporate infrastructure【n.结构，基础设施】. The California-based Internet giant also announced on Tuesday that it will drop its self-censorship of its Chinese-language Google.cn search engine, which the company had previously filtered to prevent it from returning results on topics that angered Chinese authorities.

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, wrote on the company's official blog that Google uncovered a broad hacking attempt in December that was targeted at more than 20 technology, finance, media and chemical companies. A primary target may have been the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. "These attacks and the surveillance【[U] careful watch kept on sb suspected of doing wrong （对涉嫌者的）监视】 they have uncovered — combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China," he wrote. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quickly issued a statement【发表声明】 that Google's allegations【act of alleging 陈述; 宣称; 声称; 辩解.】 raised serious concerns. "We look to the Chinese government for an explanation," the Jan. 12 statement read. "The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy."

This morning in Beijing, Google.cn was returning results for sensitive topics like the Dalai Lama and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. Previously, a search for "Tiananmen" would only return results about the square itself, while noting that because of government restrictions some content was unavailable. Now Google.cn links to pages that include information about the bloody government crackdown【A crackdown is strong official action that is taken to punish people who break laws.】 in 1989, though the page appears to have fluctuated【(of an attitude or a state) change continually and irregularly; waver （指态度或状态）变化不定, 动摇】 between uncensored and censored over the course of the day.

Google has long struggled to expand its China operations. After its search engine was routinely blocked or slowed by China's system of Internet controls, it created the filtered Google.cn in 2006. The hope was that by censoring select results, it would speed up searches for Chinese users.

But the decision to offer a censored search page prompted an outcry from human-rights activists and some members of Congress that the company was turning a blind eye to its "Don't be evil" motto for the sake of access to the lucrative【A lucrative activity, job, or business deal is very profitable.】 Chinese market. "Google came into the market bending some of its own rules," says Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting in Beijing. "It was intoxicated with【If you are intoxicated by or with something such as a feeling or an event, you are so excited by it that you find it hard to think clearly and sensibly. (LITERARY)】 the prospect of this enormous and still just-beginning-to-develop market. I think it always knew it was already having a little bit of misgiving【n.疑虑，担忧，害怕】 about being in the market, but it couldn't pass it up."

In the end, Google's compromises【n.妥协，折中】did little to help its position on the mainland. Average Chinese Web users never warmed to the company's services, and it came under repeated attacks from the authorities and state media for providing links to pornography【Pornography refers to books, magazines, and films that are designed to cause sexual excitement by showing naked people or referring to sexual acts.】. "They were trying to find a way to compromise without completely bending over and it turned out they couldn't win," says Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet. "Over the past year they've been under growing pressure from the government to censor more tightly and been condemned【vt.（for）谴责；判…刑，宣告…有罪】 in the Chinese media for exposing children to porn【=pornography】." Baidu, a Chinese search engine with a Google-lookalike home page, has used its better relationship with authorities and its indigenous【~ (to sth) (fml 文) belonging naturally (to a place); native 本地的; 土产的; 当地的; 土生土长的】 appeal as a domestic company to surge past Google. Baidu was the first choice for 77% of Chinese Internet users, compared to 13% for Google, according to a September 2009 survey by the state-run【国营】 China Internet Network Information Center.

By dropping its censorship, the company stands to regain some of the moral clout. Today, several Chinese bloggers delivered flowers to the company's Beijing headquarters to thank it for its new stand. "It's a public message that some people in China are picking up on【If you pick someone up on something that they have said or done, you mention it and tell them that you think it is wrong. (mainly BRIT)】," says MacKinnon. "A large Internet company, the largest in some ways and most influential globally, is saying publicly that the Chinese government's behavior is unacceptable, and that can't fail to resonate."

Google says it will discuss with the government how it will go about running an uncensored search engine in China. "We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," wrote Drummond, the Google executive, on the Google blog. Given the company's tempestuous【If you describe a relationship or a situation as tempestuous, you mean that very strong and intense emotions, especially anger, are involved.】 four years in China, the odds【probability or chance (that a certain thing will or will not happen) 可能性; 机会】 the authorities will now compromise are slim【a. (机会)少的】.

— With reporting by Jessie Jiang / Beijing

miki7catUID: 2533330

再请最后两天假，回来会补齐所有作业

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.20]https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1052619-1-1.html

Using Light and Genes to Probe the Brain
Optogenetics emerges as a potent tool to study the brain's inner workings
By Gary Stix
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-light-in-the-brain

In 1979 Francis Crick, famed co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, published an article in Scientific American that set out a wish list of techniques needed to fundamentally improve understanding of the way the brain processes information. High on his wish list was a method of gaining control over specific classes of neurons while, he wrote, “leaving the others more or less unaltered.”

Over the past few years Crick’s vision for targeting neurons has begun to materialize thanks to a sophisticated【a.老练的；精密的，尖端的；】 combination of fiber optics and genetic engineering. The advent of what is known as optogenetics has even captured popular attention because of its ability to alter animal behavior—one research group demonstrated how light piped into【in pipes 用管道输送】 a mouse’s brain can drive it to turn endlessly in circles. Such feats have inspired much public comment, including a joke made by comedian Jay Leno in 2006 about the prospect for an optogenetically controlled fly pestering George W. Bush.

Controlling a subordinate or a spouse with a souped-up laser pointer may be essential for science-fiction dystopia and late-night humor, but in reality optogenetics has emerged as the most important new technology for providing insight into the numbingly complex circuitry of the mammalian brain. It has already furnished clues as to how neural miswiring underlies neurological and mental disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia.

A seminal【Seminal is used to describe things such as books, works, events, and experiences that have a great influence in a particular field. (FORMAL)】 event that sparked widespread neuroscience interest came in 2005, when Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University and at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt demonstrated how a virus could be used to deliver a light-sensitive gene called channelrhodopsin-2 into specific sets of mammalian neurons. Once equipped with the gene (taken from pond algae), the neurons fired when exposed to light pulses. A box on Crick’s list could be checked off: this experiment and ones that were soon to follow showed how it would be possible to trigger or extinguish selected neurons, and not their neighbors, in just a few milliseconds, the speed at which they normally fire. Hundreds of laboratories worldwide have since adopted Deisseroth’s technique.
A 38-year-old psychiatrist by training who still sees patients once a week, Deisseroth entered the field of bioengineering because of his frustration over the inadequate tools available to research and treat mental illness and neurodegenerative disorders. “I have conducted many brain-stimulation treatments in psychiatry that suffered greatly from a lack of precision. You can stimulate certain cells that you want to target, but you also stimulate all of the wrong cells as well,” he says. Instead of just observing the effects from a drug or an implanted electrode, optogenetics brings researchers closer to the fundamental causes of a behavior.

Since 2005 Deisseroth’s laboratory—at times in collaboration with leading neuroscience groups—has assembled a powerful tool kit based on channelrhodopsin-2 and other so-called opsins. By adjusting the opening or closing of channels in cell membranes, opsins can switch neurons on or turn them off. Molecular legerdemain can also manipulate just a subset of one type of neuron or control a circuit between groups of selected neurons in, say, the limbic system and others in the cortex. Deisseroth has also refined methods for delivering the opsin genes, typically by inserting into a virus both opsin genes and DNA to turn on those genes.

To activate the opsins, Deisseroth’s lab has attached laser diodes to tiny fiber-optic cables that reach the brain’s innermost structures. Along with the optical fibers, electrodes are implanted that record when neurons fire. “In the past year what’s happened is that these techniques have gone from being something interesting and useful in limited applications to something generalizable to any cell or question in biology,” Deisseroth says.

Most compelling, however, are experiments that have demonstrated the relevance of optogenetics to both basic science and medicine. At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago last October, Michael Häusser of University College London reported on an optogenetics experiment that showed how 100 neurons could trigger a memory stored in a much larger ensemble of about 100,000 neurons, suggesting how the technique may be used to understand memory formation.

Last spring Deisseroth’s group published an optogenetics study that helped to elucidate the workings of deep-brain stimulation, which uses electrodes implanted deep in the brain to alleviate the abnormal movements of Parkinson’s disease. The experiment called into question【call sth in/into `question: doubt sth or cause sth to be doubted 怀疑某事物; 使某事物受怀疑】 the leading theory of how the technology works—activation of an area called the subthalamic nucleus. Instead the electrodes appear to exert their effects on nerve fibers that reach the subthalamic nucleus from the motor cortex and perhaps other areas. The finding has already led to a better understanding of how to deploy deep-brain electrodes. Given its fine-tuned specificity, optoelectronics might eventually replace deep-brain stimulation.

Although optogenetic control of human behavior may be years away, Deisseroth comments that the longer-range implications of the technology must be considered: “I’m not writing ethics papers, but I think about these issues every day, what it might mean to gain understanding and control over what is a desire, what is a need, what is hope.”

Note: this story was originally printed with the title "A Light in the Brain"

My comment
This article explains a new technology which is known as optogenetics. Although I am not entirely clear how the technology works, it seems that it provides methods for stimulating the deep-brain neurons in order to alleviate the abnormal movements of Parkinson's disease. If these techniques were to application to treat mental illness and neurodegenerative disorders, it would be a seminal event in the field of medicine. And inevitably, issues over ethics would be along with this advancement as well.

miki7catUID: 2533330

[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.21]https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1053017-1-1.html

Electromagnetic manufacturing
It's a knockout
Jan 14th 2010
From The Economist print edition
Engineers find a new way to punch holes through steel
knockout【If you describe someone or something as a knockout, you think that they are extremely attractive or impressive. (INFORMAL)】

ELECTROMAGNETIC pulses (EMPs) are usually associated with warfare【n.战争(状态)；斗争，冲突】. The idea is to use a blast of energy to fry the enemy’s computers and telecommunications gear. One common way proposed to do this is with an atomic【a.(关于)原子的；原子能(武器)的】 bomb. In a less extreme fashion, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. They are already employed industrially to shape soft and light metals, such as aluminium and copper. Now a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, has found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through industry’s metallic【a.金属(制)的；有金属特性的，像金属的】heavyweight—steel. This could transform manufacturing by doing away with the need to use large, heavy presses to make goods ranging from cars to washing machines.

Verena Kräusel and her colleagues performed their trick by beefing up【If you beef up something, you increase, strengthen, or improve it.】 an existing electromagnetic-forming machine. Such machines use a bank of【A bank of things, especially machines, switches, or dials, is a row of them, or a series of rows.】 capacitors【A capacitor is a device for accumulating electric charge.】 to discharge a current rapidly through a coil. The coil converts the current into a powerful magnetic field. When the component to be worked is placed next to such a machine, the coil induces in it a corresponding field. Like poles repel, and the repulsion between the two fields is strong enough to make the metal distort.

Dr Kräusel and her colleagues boosted the power of their machine by strengthening its coil and speeding up the rate at which the capacitors dump their charge. The result is an extremely strong field—one that delivers enough pressure when it hits the steel to punch out the material next to it, leaving a hole behind. The impact pressure on the steel is about 3,500 atmospheres. That is the weight of three small cars pressing on an area only a centimetre or so square.

The result is that the machine is able to punch holes 30mm in diameter through the type of sheet steel used to build car bodies, which is usually around 1mm thick. The group have also used their machine to punch holes in hardened steel, including stainless steel. And, besides punching holes in steel, such a machine could also be used to form shapes out of the metal without the need to use a mould or a die.

Firms such as Germany’s giant carmaker Volkswagen are sponsoring the project because forming steel components with an EMP device provides a number of advantages. Although using a heavy press to bend metal and cut holes in it is fast, the tearing action at the edges of the holes leaves ragged【a.褴褛的；不规则的；粗糙的】, sharp tailings, known as burrs. This means that parts stamped out this way have to be cleaned up, usually by hand, which increases production costs. The need to keep replacing the stamps and dies used by the press, as they become blunt【a.钝的】, also adds to the expense.

Lasers are one alternative. They can cut cleaner holes in steel, but they are slower than stamping because they need to burn their way around the part. They are also expensive to operate. An electromagnetic punch, however, stamps its hole without tearing the metal, which means no burrs are left behind, and it never gets blunt. In fact, says Dr Kräusel, her machine can punch a hole clean through a sheet of steel in a fifth of second—compared with the 1.4 seconds needed by a laser.

The team members are now carrying out further development work on the coil. They expect factories to take up the idea quickly, because it is a modification of equipment that is already familiar. The size of holes that can be cut depends on the size of the coil, so specific coils will be needed for each application. Specific punches, however, are needed for traditional presses, so this would not seem to be a deterrent—especially as an EMP device should be able to deliver consistently accurate blows without wearing itself out. A hole, new technology, as it were.

My comment
I can draw an example from this article, that is the two contrary applications of electromagnetic pulses, which might be the example for the two aspects of things. Usually associated with warfare, however, EMPs have peaceful uses. These two opposite uses drive me to remind a sentence I read before: things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them, and some alteration can make the sentence an appropriate thesis statement: things to be advantage or disadvantage are judged not from their natures but from the natures of the purposes they are used for.

miki7catUID: 2533330

单词 list2 + 难题分析