【clover】 ECO analysis by CC ~

chaliaUID: 2589767

我的eco阅读贴


每天一篇eco的文章,并完成下列作业

1.好词好句摘抄
2.分析行文结构以及逻辑推理技巧
3.挖掘可以作为自己文章里example的事例，观点，人物
4.通篇再阅读，提高自己的阅读能力和速度


5.每周两次,将阅读笔记汇总   总贴链接   https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1054162-1-2.html

1)逻辑推理展开技巧
2)好词好句
3)example

chaliaUID: 2589767

先占一楼,作为目录,方便查找~

chaliaUID: 2589767

Women and work

We did it!

The rich world’s quiet revolution: women are gradually taking over the workplace

Dec 30th 2009 | From The Economist print edition

Getty Images

AT A time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.

Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times. Just a generation ago, women were largely confined to repetitive, menial jobs. They were routinely subjected to casual sexism and were expected to abandon their careers when they married and had children. Today they are running some of the organisations that once treated them as second-class citizens. Millions of women have been given more control over their own lives. And millions of brains have been put to more productive use. Societies that try to resist this trend—most notably the Arab countries, but also Japan and some southern European countries—will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens.例子

This revolution has been achieved with only a modicum of friction (see article). Men have, by and large, welcomed women’s invasion of the workplace. Yet even the most positive changes can be incomplete or unsatisfactory. This particular advance comes with two stings. The first is that women are still under-represented at the top of companies. Only 2% of the bosses of America’s largest companies and 5% of their peers in Britain are women. They are also paid significantly less than men on average. The second is that juggling work and child-rearing is difficult. Middle-class couples routinely complain that they have too little time for their children. But the biggest losers are poor children—particularly in places like America and Britain that have combined high levels of female participation in the labour force with a reluctance to spend public money on child care.

Dealing with the juggle

These two problems are closely related. Many women feel they have to choose between their children and their careers. Women who prosper in high-pressure companies during their 20s drop out in dramatic numbers in their 30s and then find it almost impossible to regain their earlier momentum. Less-skilled women are trapped in poorly paid jobs with hand-to-mouth child-care arrangements. Motherhood, not sexism, is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less. And those mothers’ relative poverty also disadvantages their children.

Demand for female brains is helping to alleviate some of these problems. Even if some of the new theories about warm-hearted women making inherently superior workers are bunk (see article), several trends favour the more educated sex, including the “war for talent” and the growing flexibility of the workplace. Law firms, consultancies and banks are rethinking their “up or out” promotion systems because they are losing so many able women. More than 90% of companies in Germany and Sweden allow flexible working. And new technology is making it easier to redesign work in all sorts of family-friendly ways.

Women have certainly performed better over the past decade than men. In the European Union women have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000. In America three out of four people thrown out of work since the “mancession” began have been male. And the shift towards women is likely to continue: by 2011 there will be 2.6m more female than male university students in America.例子

The light hand of the state

All this argues, mostly, for letting the market do the work. That has not stopped calls for hefty state intervention强有力的国家干预 of the Scandinavian sort. Norway has used threats of quotas to dramatic effect. Some 40% of the legislators there are women. All the Scandinavian countries provide plenty of state-financed nurseries. They have the highest levels of female employment in the world and far fewer of the social problems that plague Britain and America. Surely, comes the argument, there is a way to speed up the revolution—and improve the tough lives of many working women and their children?

If that means massive intervention, in the shape of affirmative-action programmes 倾斜政策and across-the-board benefits for parents of all sorts, the answer is no. To begin with, promoting people on the basis of their sex is illiberal and unfair, and stigmatizes its beneficiaries. And there are practical problems. Lengthy periods of paid maternity leave带薪产假 can put firms off hiring women, which helps explain why most Swedish women work in the public sector and Sweden has a lower proportion of women in management than America does.

But there are plenty of cheaper, subtler ways in which governments can make life easier for women. Welfare states were designed when most women stayed at home. They need to change the way they operate. German schools, for instance, close at midday. American schools shut down for two months in the summer. These things can be changed without huge cost. Some popular American charter schools now offer longer school days and shorter summer holidays. And, without going to Scandinavian lengths, America could invest more in its children: it spends a lower share of its GDP on public child-care than almost any other rich country, and is the only rich country that refuses to provide mothers with paid maternity leave. Barack Obama needs to measure up to his campaign rhetoric about “real family values”.

Still, these nagging problems should not overshadow the dramatic progress that women have made in recent decades. During the second world war, when America’s menfolk were off at the front, the government had to summon up the image of Rosie the Riveter, with her flexed muscle and “We Can Do It” slogan, to encourage women into the workforce. Today women are marching into the workplace in ever larger numbers and taking a sledgehammer to the remaining glass ceilings.

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1.词语摘抄

Menial adj. (指工作) 卑贱的,不体面的 n.  (干粗活的)家仆
cross the 50% threshold超过xx的临界值
were largely confined to局限于
Sexism n. 男性至上主义，轻蔑女性
second-class citizens 二等公民
modicum of friction 少量的冲突和摩擦
by and large 总的来说，大体而言
juggle xx and xx is difficult 同时应付xx和xx是件困难的事
prosper in xxx
在xx地方取得成就
hand-to-mouth
仅能糊口的
alleviate
v.减轻,缓和
Scandinavian adj. 北欧诸国的
Stigmatize v. 侮辱
Beneficiary
n.受益者
Glass ceiling 无形的障碍

2. 好用的例子
Rosie the Riveter女铆钉工人罗西  代表了二次世界大战中首次参加工作的600万美国妇女，从那以后，女人实现了伟大的经济独立
During the second world war, when America’s menfolk were off at the front, the government had to summon up the image of Rosie the Riveter, with her flexed muscle and “We Can Do It” slogan, to encourage women into the workforce.

chaliaUID: 2589767

Gone but not forgotten

Details of how people killed off species in the past may have implications for whether they do so in the future

Jan 25th 2010 | From The Economist online

Between 50,000 and 5,000 years ago roughly half of the earth’s larger mammals (species that were sheep-sized or bigger) went extinct. The distribution of these extinctions in time and space suggests strongly that humans were responsible. Large mammals in Africa, which had evolved进化 alongside humans for millions of years, were for the most part spared. The species which died out elsewhere—178 of them, possibly more—tended to do so at around the time that在..时候 they first encountered modern humans coming forth out of Africa with pointy sticks, good throwing arms and large appetites. Ecologists have shown that wiping out big animals is surprisingly easy, since big animals reproduce slowly, which means that a small increase in the rate at which predator食肉动物s pick them off瞄准射死 can have a large effect on the population, especially if the predators prefer hunting juveniles未成年. Hence the now widely accepted argument that humans come with original ecological生态的 sin罪行 built in.

本文的论点:目前普遍的看法是人类活动导致了ecological sin

As a large and recent extinction event this topic would be worth studying even if it did not have implications for how people think about themselves. When extinction is becoming commonplace普通的, a better understanding of its mechanisms is prudent慎重的. Research in this area has recently been throwing up some surprising and intriguing有趣的 complexities. In North America, new evidence suggests that both mammoths猛犸 and horses co-existed with humans a lot longer than had previously been expected, suggesting the extinctions could not have been simple wham-bam-yummy-leg-of-lamb affairs. Evidence from bones and teeth has led to researchers accepting that mammoths and native horses last roamed漫步 America between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, which fits nicely with humans turning up about 14,000 years ago. But saying when the last of a species roamed on the basis of bones is an error-prone易错的 affair; the chances that the last of a dying race will pass away in some sort of ready-made ossuary are slim.

分论点1:动物的灭绝不一定人们为了猎食而刻意造成的

论据:猛犸象和马的骨骼分析数据表明,他们在人类出现后的1000年还继续存活着

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late December, Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues from various other places looked instead at DNA evidence from frozen sediments沉淀物 in Alaska. They argue that specific layers within these sediments can be reliably dated, and that DNA cannot easily have moved into these layers from older or younger ones; as a result, they can say with some conviction that there were still mammoths and horses roaming Alaska 10,500 years ago, well after humans got there. This is not to say humans did not cause the extinction—just that there was considerably more cohabitation同居 beforehand事先.

分论点2: 进一步确认人类和原始动物有一段共存的时间

论据: 阿拉斯加冻土层沉淀物中的DNA数据现实,在人类到达那之后,原始动物依旧存在

Another recent paper points out that hunting and other environmental changes can interact with each other in complex ways. In November Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin and her colleagues published in Science their studies of a dung fungus and other ecological markers that provide insight into how the landscape of the north-eastern United States changed after people got there. They show that an initial collapse in the population of some large herbivores食草动物 directly preceded an increase in the level of fire in the area. One possibility is that removing the big herbivores allowed woody plants that they previously kept under control to flourish, building up the fuel available for fires; those fires then reshaped the landscape, changing the distribution of plants to be found there, which may in turn have caused problems for herbivores who had been fine with the way things were. This offers a way for the hunting of one species, through a chain of ecological cause and effect, to spell bad news for another. Such effects could spread the ecological damage beyond the original prey at the same time as drawing out the actual extinction.

分论点3:捕猎和环境之间的复杂关系,使得人类活动间接的引发了物种的灭绝

论据:美国东北部地区,人类为取火导致丛林的毁坏,使得食草动物大批灭绝

Elsewhere, though, what looked to some like?? a slow death has been redefined as a quick one. At a site in New South Wales called Cuddie Springs there have been claims that stone tools and the bones of large animals—giant wombats and the like—can be found side by side in sediments spanning 10,000 years of prehistory. Now a new study by Rainer Grün of the Australian National University and colleagues in Quaternary Science Reviews brings that long and comparatively recent period of cohabitation into doubt, providing evidence from new dating techniques that the animal teeth in the sediments are older than the tools those teeth are found alongside. The idea, dear to some, that humans cohabited with Australia’s megafauna for 20,000 years or so is thus dealt a blow严重的打击.

分论点4:人类并未与动物共存很久.

论据:新的数据表明沉积物中动物骨骼比人类石器出现的更早

The evidence that humans were in some way responsible for these deaths remains strong. And to read a moral道德 into that causation原因 (reada A into B,理解B时加进A)remains, for the most part, unhelpful. There has been some disquiet忧虑 at the idea that the first people in the Americas and Australia, almost wiped out themselves by the imperial spread of Europeans over the past 500 years, might be turned by such evidence from victims into perpetrators犯罪者, their claims to compassion怜惜 and restitution赔偿 thus diminished缩小减弱. To think less of the people who populated those landscapes of another age because of the unforeseen consequences of their actions would be foolish, just as it would be to take a history of human-associated extinctions as normalising, naturalising or even excusing the extinctions now going on and likely in the future. But if further understanding of these past extinctions—an understanding that explains the sometimes lengthy periods of cohabitation and the complex network of ecological knock-on effects that must have been involved—shows how similar disruptions分裂 might be avoided in the future, it would be hard not to see it, in some respects, as making good of an earlier ill.

结论:人们应该深入探讨为什么非故意的却导致了物种的灭亡,从而更好的处理如何与动物共存的问题

桔子susanUID: 2754084

我昨天读的也是这一篇。CC分析的很好呢，受益匪浅，共同加油吧！

importalyuUID: 2404583

从你的笔记中学到很多精读的方法和做笔记的方式，学习。

chaliaUID: 2589767

Markets

Bubble warning

Markets are too dependent on unsustainable不能证实的,不能支持的
government stimulus刺激物. Something’s got to give

Jan 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Alamy/Shutterstock

THE effect of free money is remarkable. A year ago investors were panicking and there was talk of another Depression. Now the MSCI world index of global share prices is more than 70% higher than its low in March 2009. That’s largely thanks to interest rates of 1% or less in America, Japan, Britain and the euro zone, which have persuaded investors to take their money out of cash and to buy risky assets.

论点1：政府调整利率，自由资本在市场是有很大作用的。

论据：利率降低了1%,使得股票价格指数上升了70%

For all the panic last year, asset values never quite reached the lows that marked other bear-market熊市 bottoms, and now the rally止跌回升 has made several markets look pricey价格高的,昂贵的 again. In the American housing market, where the crisis started, homes are priced at around fair value on the basis of rental yields, but they are overvalued by almost 30% in Britain and by 50% in Australia, Hong Kong and Spain.

论点2：资产价格并未跌倒最低谷,就开始回升，甚至过高了。

论据：在美国楼市价格基本同合理价格基本持平，而其他国家已经被高估了。

Stockmarkets are still shy of迟疑，对…有所顾忌 their record peaks in most countries. The American market is around 25% below the level it reached in 2007. But it is still nearly 50% overvalued on the best long-term measure, which adjusts profits to allow for考虑到，顾及 the economic cycle, and is on a par同等 with two of the four great valuation peaks in the 20th century, in 1901 and 1966.

论点3：证券市场与它高峰时期相比，还是有略微逊色

论据：尽管比07年低了25％，但是还是和20世纪的高峰期基本持平。

Central banks see these market rallies as a welcome side- effect of their policies. In 2008, falling markets caused a vicious凶狠的，严重的 circle of debt defaults and fire sales by investors, pushing asset prices down even further. The market rebound复兴，反弹 was necessary to stabilise稳定，稳固 economies last year, but now there is a danger that bubbles are being created (see article).

小结：政府对自己的降低1％利率的政策带来的效果很满意，虽然资本价格已经回升，市场复兴了，但是经济泡沫是否也在慢慢形成呢？

Forever blowing bubbles吹泡?

Aside from high asset valuations, the two classic symptoms of a bubble are rapid growth in private-sector credit and an outbreak爆发 of public enthusiasm for particular assets. There’s no sign of either of those. But the longer the world keeps its interest rates close to zero, the greater the danger that bubbles will appear—most likely in emerging markets新兴市场, where growth keeps investors optimistic and currency pegs import loose monetary policy, and in commodities商品.

但是只要利率继续走低，就会有出现更大的经济泡沫的危险。

Central banks have a range of tools they can use to discourage the growth of bubbles. Forcing banks to adopt higher capital ratios may curb限制，克制 speculative投机的 excesses过度. As Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued this week, the rise in American house prices could have been limited through better regulation of the banks. The most powerful tool, of course, is the interest rate. But central banks are wary of谨慎的，小心的 using it to pop bubbles because it risks crushing镇压，击溃 growth as well. And, with the world economy in its current fragile state疲软局势，脆弱局势, they are rightly unwilling to jack up增加，提高
interest rates now.

论点：在经济疲软时期，央行不愿意通过提高利率

论据：央行希望商行adopt higher capital ratios来控制房价

But even if governments judge that the risks posed by由…引起，产生 raising rates now outweighs大于，超过 that of keeping them low, investors still have plenty of reasons to worry. The problem for them is not just that valuations look high by historic standards. It is also that the current combination of high asset prices, low interest rates and massive fiscal deficits is unsustainable.

论点3：提高利率不一定是弊大于利的

论据：人们不仅关注房价被高估，低利率和高政府赤字的这种组合也是令人担忧的。

Interest rates will stay low only if growth remains slow. But if economies grow slowly, then profits will not rise fast enough to justify current share prices and incomes will not rise far enough to justify the prevailing普遍的，占优势的 level of house prices. If, on the other hand, the markets are right about the prospects前景 for economic growth, and the current recovery is sustained, then governments will react by cutting off the supply of cheap money低息贷款 later this year.

It doesn’t add up

But the more immediate risks may be posed by fiscal policy. Many governments responded to the crisis by, in effect实际上, taking the debt burden off the private sector’s balance-sheets and putting it on their own. This caused a huge gap to open up in government finances. Deficits in America and Britain, for instance, stand at more than 10% of GDP.

政府通过把危机转移到自己身上的方式解决问题，但是这种财政政策引发了高赤字，只会增大风险。

Most developed-country governments have managed to finance these deficits fairly easily很容易 so far. In the early stages of the crisis, investors were happy to opt for选择 the safety of government bonds. Then central banks resorted to诉诸于..采取.. quantitative easing (QE), a polite term for礼貌 the creation of money. The Bank of England, for example, has bought the equivalent of one year’s entire fiscal deficit. There are signs, however, that private-sector investors’ appetite for government debt may be just about sated厌腻的, as they contemplate深思熟虑，细想 the vast amount of government bonds that are due to be issued this year and the ending of QE programmes. The yields on ten-year Treasury bonds and British gilts have both risen by more than half a percentage point since late November.

政府发行债券，银行买了一部分，个人投资者对这个倒不是特别感兴趣。这导致政府债券收益率比去年11月上升了0.5个百分点。

Investors (along with this newspaper) would like to see governments unveil揭露，公之于众 clear plans for reducing those deficits over the medium term, with the emphasis on spending cuts rather than tax increases. But politicians are nervous about the likely reaction of electorates全体选民, not to mention the short-term economic impact of fiscal tightening, and are proving reluctant勉强的 to specify where the cuts will be made.

投资者期待政府给出明确的降低赤字的计划，政府在勉强的给出了削减指出的方向，一方面又怕得罪了选民。

Markets have already tested the ability of the weakest governments to bear the burden of their debt. Dubai had to turn to its wealthy neighbour, Abu Dhabi, for help. In the euro zone, doubts have been raised about the willingness of Greece to push through the required austerity紧缩 measures. Electorates are likely to chafe at发怒 the cost of bringing down government deficits, especially if the main result is to repay foreign creditors. That will lead to currency crises and cross-border disputes like the current spat小争吵，口角 between Iceland, Britain and the Netherlands over the bill for compensating depositors in Icelandic banks (see article). Such disputes will lead to further outbreaks of market volatility波动.

巨大的赤字给不少政府带来了负面影响。

Investors tempted to take comfort from the fact that asset prices are still below their peaks would do well to remember that they may yet fall back a very long way. The Japanese stock market still trades at a quarter of the high it reached 20 years ago. The NASDAQ trades at half the level it reached during dotcom mania. Today the prices of many assets are being held up by unsustainable fiscal and monetary stimulus. Something has to give.有些事情必须舍弃

银落UID: 2632560

Forever blowing bubbles
是指。。总是处于产生泡沫的状态。。

chaliaUID: 2589767

8# 银落

哦～原来是这样。。谢谢落落大人指点拉～

chaliaUID: 2589767

A special report on social networking

A world of connections

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

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

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

通过达沃斯论坛的新开设的一个网上实名group，引出网络改变了人们的交流方式。

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

给出目前市场占有率最高的facebook的例子，进一步说明网络社交的普及

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

给出除了facebook之外，其它的一些网络group等，说明网络作为社交工具，在各国在各个领域都有很大一批的使用者。

Going public

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

网络社交网站在个人隐私的保护上的进步，实现了网络实名，使得网络已经不再是冷漠和空虚的了，这是个很大的飞跃。

Their other great achievement has been to turn themselves into superb卓越的，杰出的 tools for mass communication. Simply by updating a personal page on Facebook or sending out a tweet, users can let their network of friends—and sometimes the world—know what is happening in their lives. Moreover, they can send out videos, pictures and lots of other content with just a few clicks of a mouse. “This represents a dramatic and permanent upgrade in people’s ability to communicate with one another,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley veteran who has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Ning, an American firm that hosts almost 2m social networks for clients.

同时，网络社交方式更方便快捷的让人们更新自己的最新消息，这又是一大优势

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

因为网络沟通的各种优势，各国的各个年龄段的人都在通过网络进行社交沟通活动

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

社交网络不仅使人们的交际量化了，同时也成为了新闻的传播和影响的一个重要工具。

Delivery time

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

在人们的高度期望之下，社交网络必须证明它不会改变，并保证人们的隐私不被用作商业用途。

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

In the business world there has also been much hype天花乱坠的广告，大肆宣传 around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to创造 describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted兜售，招揽 are services such as Yammer, which produces a corporate version of Twitter, and Chatter, a social-networking service that has been developed by Salesforce.com.

在商业领域，运营商试图将网络社交的方式引入到工作领域。

To sceptics持怀疑态度的人们 all this talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of带有…的味道，有点像… another internet bubble in the making. They argue that even a huge social network such as Facebook will struggle to make money because fickle善变的 networkers will not stay in one place for long, pointing to the example of MySpace, which was once all the rage风靡 but has now become a shadow of its former self前期，前任. Last year the site, which is owned by News Corp, installed a new boss and fired 45% of its staff as part of a plan to revive恢复 its fortunes. Critics also say that the networks’ advertising-driven business model is flawed有错误的，有缺陷的.

持怀疑态度的人认为，致力于建立网络关系的人是善变的，任何社交网络都无法长久，所以不能在广告的驱动下把它引入到工作领域。

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

公司的管理层认为引入网络社交，会影响员工的工作，并可能导致商业机密的泄露

This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper成功，繁荣, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace接受 them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.

报道将会详细的说明，社交网络会持续的发展下去并对商业公司起到积极作用。

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Tablet computing
The book of Jobs
It has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at once

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Jon Berkeley

APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at在…表现杰出，擅长于… taking existing, half-baked adj. 半生不熟的，未完成的，不完整的ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial adj. 善变的and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstreamn. 主流. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.

As rivals rushed to copy Apple’s approach, the computer, music and telecoms industries were transformed. Now Mr Jobs hopes to pull off v. 脱，努力实现，赢得the same trick for a fourth time. On January 27th he unveiled v.  使公诸于众, 揭幕, 揭开; 显露, 除去面纱his company’s latest product, the iPad—a thin, tablet-shaped device with a ten-inch touch-screen which will go on sale in late March for $499-829 (see article). Years in the making, it has been the subject of hysterical adj.  歇斯底里的, 异常兴奋的online speculation n.  思索; 推测; 沉思; 投机in recent months, verging at times on religious hysteria: sceptics n. 怀疑(论)者，多疑的人，无神论者 in the blogosphere博客世界jokingly call it the Jesus Tablet. The enthusiasm of the Apple faithful may be overdone,v.  做得过分, 夸张, 过度; 过火but Mr Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.

Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation,n.  恐惧, 忧虑, 惊惶 for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy,n. 著作权侵害, 剽窃free content and the dispersal n.  疏散; 散布; 分散; 传播of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not muchkeeneron the Kindle,an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wieldingv.  使用, 运用a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking adj. 畏缩的，犹豫不决的market, or no market at all.


Keep taking the tablets

Tablet computers aimed at business people have not worked. Microsoft has been pushing them for years, with little success. Apple itself launched a pen-based tablet computer, the Newton, in 1993, but it was a flop n.  砰然落下; 失败; 拍击声. The Kindle has done reasonably well, and has spawned v.大量产生a host of similar devices with equally silly names, including the Nook, the Skiff and the Que. Meanwhile, Apple’s pocket-sized touch-screen devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch, have taken off as music and video players and hand-held games consoles n.控制器. The iPad is, in essence本质上，大体上，其实, a giant iPhone on steroids.n.估计就是衍生品或者同类产品的意思Its large screen will make it an attractive e-reader and video player, but it will also inherit v.继承a vast array of一系列 games and other software from the iPhone. Apple hopes that many people will also use it instead of a laptop. If the company is right, it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music and video players and games consoles. Different industries are already converging on云集this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer-makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray n.争论, 打架: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style “app store” for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.

If the past is any guide, Apple’s entry into the field will not just unleashfierce competition among device-makers, but also prompt consumers and publishers who had previously been wary of谨慎小心 e-books to take the plunge,冒险尝试accelerating the adoption of this nascent adj.发生中的,初期的technology. Sales of e-readers are expected to reach 12m this year, up from 5m in 2009 and 1m in 2008, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm.

Hold the front pixels n.  像素, 色素

Will the spread of tablets save struggling media companies? Sadly not. Some outfits n.  用具, 机构, 配备—metropolitan newspapers, for instance—are probably doomed by their reliance on classified advertising, which is migrating to dedicated专门的，专用的 websites. Others are too far gone already. Tablets are expensive, and it will be some years before they are widespread enough to fulfill their promise. In theory a newspaper could ask its readers to sign up for a two-year electronic subscription, say, and subsidise资助，补助 the cost of a tablet. But such a subsidy would be hugely pricey, and expensive printing presses will have to be kept running for readers who want to stick with paper.

Still, even though tablets will not save weak media companies, they are likely to give strong ones a boost. Charging for content, which has proved difficult on the web, may get easier. Already, people are prepared to pay to receive newspapers and magazines (including The Economist) on the Kindle. The iPad, with its colour screen and integration with Apple’s online stores, could make downloading books, newspapers and magazines as easy and popular as downloading music. Most important, it will allow for advertising, on which American magazines, in particular, depend. Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses.

If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs收益大于成本. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget n.  小器具; 小玩意; 小配件 will not resurrectv.  使复活; 使再活跃; 使复苏; 使再流行; 复活 them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

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Breeding better oysters
Shelling out n. 去壳，去皮，炮击
A new breed of oyster may encourage aquaculture n. 水产业，水产养殖
Jan 28th 2010 | LOS ANGELES | From The Economist print edition

MUCH of the bounty n.慷慨, 恩惠, 宽大 of the ocean is, these days, far less plentiful than it used to be. Scarcity n.缺乏; 不足has made oysters expensive, turning this unattractive mollusc n.软体动物 into a delicacy n.精美; 娇嫩; 柔软; 优雅 for the rich. That could change if researchers find a way to breed a faster growing and larger oyster.

As many gardeners and farmers know, crossbreeding n. 杂交育种two wimpy adj. <俚>懦弱的specimens n.范例, 样品, 标本 sometimes produces strong offspring—an effect known as hybrid vigour. Hybrid vigour is common in plants and is found in some animals—though, some speculate, it may be lacking in European royalty. 例子

Several years ago Dennis Hedgecock of the University of Southern California and his colleagues discovered that oysters can hybridise v. 杂交，使杂交. If a tiny inbred adj. 天生的，近亲繁殖的strain called “oyster 6” is bred with the similarly puny adj.  微小的, 微不足道的, 弱小的“oyster 7”, the result is a large and fast-growing oyster—“oyster 6x7”—which is easy to open and produces tens of millions of eggs. The problem, though, is that when oyster 6x7 is bred with itself, the resulting offspring are puny again. The hybrid does not, in the jargon俗话说, breed true.

If new hybrids were easy to generate in quantity, that would not matter. But oysters 6 and 7 themselves produce only around a million eggs per adult, and their shells are hard to open. Oyster farms each need tens of billions of eggs to operate commercially. Constantly regenerating the hybrid is not a viable adj.  能养活的, 能生育的approach.

To get around this problem, Dr Hedgecock and his colleagues took some other puny inbreds and created a second hybrid line, oyster 8x9. This is also big, fast-growing and easy to open, and, like oyster 6x7, it produces tens of millions of eggs. The trick is that although it too does not breed true itself, when it is hybridised with 6x7 to produce a super-duper 6x7x8x9 crossbreed, the outcome is just as large, fast-growing and tasty. The result of this two-stage crossbreeding process is that, though none of the hybrids involved breeds true by itself, a marketable hybrid oyster can nevertheless be turned out in large quantities. That is the hope, although the proof will come next year, when the hybrids are grown on a commercial scale.

Of course, it would help if more were known about what creates hybrid vigour in the first place. To this end, Dr Hedgecock has been looking at how hybrid oysters express their genes. He has done so by collecting and analysing the animals’ messenger RNA. This molecule, as its name suggests, carries genetic information from the DNA of a cell’s nucleus to the places where proteins are made under genetic instruction. If a great deal of messenger RNA for a particular gene exists in an animal’s cells, it may indicate that this gene is particularly active. So far, the work has revealed that 350 genes (of the 23,000 in the oyster genome) are expressed differently in the hybrid oysters than in the parent strains. The next step is to sort out what these genes do and which are responsible for large size and rapid growth.

If hybridisation works out, oyster farming could follow the same path as salmon n.  鲑鱼, 鲜肉色, 大麻哈鱼farming, and turn a delicacy for the wealthy into the food of the masses. Unlike salmon, moreover, oysters are filter n.  过滤器, 用于分隔过滤的东西feeders that clean up the water column, making oyster farms healthy parts of the ocean. Salmon farms are environmentally controversial. Oyster farms should please consumers and environmentalists alike.

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Railways and slime moulds n. 粘菌
A life of slime n.  软泥; 粘泥;
Network-engineering problems can be solved by surprisingly simple creatures

Jan 21st 2010 | From The Economist print edition

FROM adhesives that mimic the feet of geckos n. 壁虎to swimsuits modeled on shark skin, biologically inspired design has taken off in recent times. Copying nature’s ideas allows people to harness v. 利用the power of evolution to come up with clever products.例子 Now a group of researchers has taken this idea a step further by using an entire living organism—a slime mould—to solve a complex problem. In this case, the challenge was to design an efficient rail network for the city of Tokyo and its outlying adj.  在外的, 偏僻的, 边远的towns.

Slime moulds are unusual critters n.  生物—neither animal, nor plant nor fungus n.  菌类; 蘑菇. If they resemble anything, it is a colonial amoeba n.  变形虫; 阿米巴. Physarum绒泡菌属polycephalum, 多头绒泡菌the species in question, consists of a membrane-bound膜结合的bag of protoplasm n.  原形质and, unusually, multiple nuclei n.  核心, 原子核, 核子. It can be found migrating across the floor of dark, damp n.  湿气, northern-temperate adj.  温和的,适度的 woodlands in search of food such as bacteria. It can grow into networks with a diameter直径of 25cm.

When P. polycephalum is foraging, v.  搜寻粮草, it puts out protrusions n. 伸出突出of protoplasm, creates nodes and branches, and grows in the form of an interconnected network of tubes. As it explores the forest floor, it must constantly trade off物物交换 the cost, efficiency and resilience n.弹回; 恢复力of its expanding network.

Since the purpose of this activity is to link food sources together and to transport nutrients around the creature, Atsushi Tero at Hokkaido University in Japan and his colleagues wondered if slime-mould transport networks bore any resemblance to human ones. As they report in Science, they built a template模板,样板 with 36 oat n.燕麦, 麦片粥 flakesn. (a favored food source) placed to represent the locations of cities in the region around Tokyo. They put P. polycephalum on Tokyo itself, and watched it go.

They found that many of the links the slime mould made bore a striking resemblance to和…很相似 Tokyo’s existing rail network. For P. polycephalum had not simply created the shortest possible network that could connect all the cities, but had also included redundant adj.多余的connections that allow the creature (and the real rail network) to have resilience to the accidental breakage of any part of it. P. polycephalum’s network, in other words, had similar costs, efficiencies and resiliencies to the human version.

How the creature does this is unknown, but Mark Fricker of Oxford University, who is one of Dr Tero’s colleagues, speculates that the forces generated by protoplasm pulsating v.有规律的跳动back-and-forth through the multinuclear cell are interpreted and used to determine which routes to reinforce v.  加强; 加固; 增加and which connections to trim. v. 整理,修剪; 消减;

Tokyo’s is not the first transport network to be modeled in this way. A study published in December by Andrew Adamatzky and Jeff Jones of the University of the West of England used oat flakes to represent Britain’s principal cities. Slime moulds modelled the motorway network of the island quite accurately, with the exception of the M6/M74 into Scotland (the creatures chose to go through Newcastle rather than past Carlisle).

Of course, neither Dr Tero nor Dr Adamatzky is suggesting that rail and road networks should be designed by slime moulds. What they are proposing is that good and complex solutions can emerge from simple rules, and that this principle might be applied elsewhere. The next thing is to discover and use these rules to enable other networks to self-organise in an “intelligent” fashion without human intervention—for example, to link up a swarm of一群robots exploring a dangerous environment, so that they can talk to each other and relay information back to base. The denizens n.居民, 外来语, 外籍居民 of Carlisle, meanwhile, may wonder what objection slime moulds have towards their fine city.

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Scarcity n.缺乏; 不足and globalisation
A needier adj.贫穷的, 生活艰苦的, 贫困的era
The politics of global disruption, n.分裂; 瓦解; 崩溃 and how they may change

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”, argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion n.流产;堕胎;失败 and gun ownership; Internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights.

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity不足,缺乏. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore n.  矿石, 含有金属的岩石 and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic adj.  人口统计学的 change and state failure. How will that change politics?

In the domestic debates of some rich democracies, things are shifting already. In Europe the talk is of how to distribute the pain of cutting public debts. In America the return of mad-as-hell populism looks like a turn away from the politics of abundance (see article). Now, a report for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC, and the Centre on International Co-operation at New York University* looks at international politics in an age of want.

The sort of problems governments increasingly face, they say, will be much less predictable than those associated with old great-power rivalries. Pressure from demography, climate change and shifts in economic power builds up quietly for a long time—and then triggers n. 触发器装置，(枪的)扳机 abrupt shifts.

They claim that the current global system is ill-designed for such a world. It is not just that the foreign policies of big countries are in flux在不断变化(词组). Rather, the way states deal with new threats is, in the jargon n.专门术语, 梦话, 行话, “stove-piped炉子管道”. As a UN panel n.座谈小组said in 2004, “finance ministers tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes.”

The authors say that what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering n. 熔补，铸补but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign n.  皇帝, 君主, 金磅power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

What would all that mean in practice? They cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation as the sort of institutions they want more of: bodies that use technical expertise—leaving aside the IPCC’s mistake over the melting of Himalayan glaciers—to induce countries to recognise their mutual adj.  相互的; 共有的interests. Such agencies can promote foresight, and help governments think harder about the consequences of failure (unlike traditional diplomacy, which likes muddling n.  困惑, 混浊状态 along). They propose an Intergovernmental Panel on Biological Safety along the lines of the IPCC to improve biosecurity; they also suggest boosting the G20 by giving it a secretariat n.  书记, 部长职位, 秘书之职 and getting national security chiefs together.

Many of these ideas may go nowhere; national sovereignty n.统治权; 主权国家; 主权; is hugely resilient. But to those who call the whole exercise pointless, they cite Milton Friedman, who, when monetarism was being mocked v.  嘲弄, 轻视, 模仿; 嘲弄, 嘲笑in the 1970s, replied “our basic function [is] to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

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Green.view
Dry cold
A drying out of the stratosphere n.同温层,最上层may help explain recent temperature trends at the Earth’s surface
Feb 1st 2010 | From The Economist online

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

The stratosphere sits on top of the troposphere n.对流层, the lowest, densest adj.  密集的; 浓厚的layer of the atmosphere. The boundary between the two, the tropopause n. 对流顶层, is about 18km above your head, if you are in the tropics, and a few kilometres lower if you are at higher latitudes (or up a mountain). The tropopause separates a rowdy adj.  吵闹的, 粗暴的below from a sedate adj.  安静的; 稳重的 above. In the troposphere, the air at higher altitudes is in general cooler than the air below it, an unstable situation in which warm and often moist air below is endlessly buoying up
使浮起,使不下沉;使在空中飘浮into cooler air above. The resultant commotion n.骚动; 暴乱 creates clouds, storms and much of the rest of the world’s weather. In the stratosphere, the air gets warmer at higher altitudes, which provides stability.

The stratosphere—which extends up to about 55km, where the mesosphere n.中间层; 中气层begins—is made even less weather-prone天气多发by the absence of water vapour, and thus of the clouds and precipitation n.降雨 to which it leads. This is because the top of the troposphere is normally very cold, causing ascending water vapour to freeze into ice crystals that drift and fall, rather than continuing up into the stratosphere.

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

Such a small change in stratospheric water vapour can have such a large effect precisely because the stratosphere is already dry. It is the relative change in the amount of a greenhouse gas, not its absolute level, which determines how much warming it can produce, and this change was about 10% of the total.
By comparison with the greenhouse effect caused by increases in carbon dioxide, the stratospheric drying is hardly massive. Dr Solomon and her colleagues peg v.坚持不懈地工作 the 2000-2009 cooling effect at about a third of the opposite effect they would expect from the carbon dioxide added over the same decade, and only a bit more than a twentieth of the warming expected from the rise in carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution. But it is surprising, nonetheless.

It is for the most part only in the tropics that tropospheric air can be drawn up into the stratosphere; it is also in the tropics that one finds the most spectacular thunderstorms, and these can reduce the temperature at the top of the troposphere, deepening the cold trap that ascending water vapour must pass through and thus impeding its rise. Over the past decade this stormy effect seems to have been pronounced, with the coldest parts of the tropical troposphere getting about a degree colder. But why this should be is not clear. Sea-surface temperatures, which drive the big tropical storms, have been high, and during the past few years have seemed to correlate with 1. (使)相同于, 符合于, 接近于2. 把…联系起来increased coldness aloft adv.在空中 在高处. At other times, though, they have seemed to predict a wetter stratosphere.

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

That said, it is possible that the changes in the stratosphere are linked to the effects humans are having on the atmosphere at large, and that the drying may persist in providing a brake on warming. Or it may be, as others have suggested in the past, that the long-term trend, as the troposphere warms up, will be to a wetter, more warming lower stratosphere, too. Whether this is the case depends on physical subtleties n.  稀薄, 精明, 微妙that are currently undecided, but it is not implausible. adj.  难信的; 不象真实的 If it were true, then the current drying would be more a blip n.  雷达上显示的点; 清脆的短音 than a trend.

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