【clover】ECO analysis by mintsh

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恩~my joyful journey with the economist set off!
   嘿嘿~很期待clover的魔鬼计划~~谁让我们都是拍不死的小强呢？:lol

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1# mintsh
占楼~~作为目录

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2# mintsh
1月26日

China's battered image

Bears in a China shop

The “peaceful rise” hits some turbulence; but China’s economy is not about to crash

Jan 14th 2010
From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Derek Bacon

    THE thunderous applause that China has become used to has suddenly been drowned by catcalls（嘘声）. Celebration that it had seen the light on climate change turned to condemnation of its spoiling role at Copenhagen. Foreign complaints about the jailing of a human-rights activist and the execution of a mentally disturbed British drug-smuggler（毒品走私） recalled the bad old days of hectoring from Western governments. Barack Obama is (at last) due to meet the Dalai Lama, and his government has gone through with the sale of arms to Taiwan. And Google, an internet giant that had been notoriously（臭名昭著地） willing to tailor its services in China to repressive（抑制的，镇压的） local regulations, has said it may quit the market (see article). Even China’s strongest suit, its booming economy, has been damned. Rather than cheering China’s success in shrugging off（摆脱） the “Great Recession” of 2009, some analysts say China’s prosperity comes at the expense of the rest of the world and claim that, anyway, it is heading for a crash. One describes it as “Dubai times 1,000, or worse”.
开头段列举了目前中国所陷入的种种困境，下面主要针对经济的前景给出论证。

    Two Chinese bubbles, in other words, seem about to pop. One is a confection of naive optimism that the rise of a continent-sized, authoritarian power could be accommodated in the global system without serious strains. The other is a “bubble economy”, characterised by excessive lending, overinvestment and overvalued share and house prices. The obvious comparison is to Japan in the 1980s. When this bubble bursts, argue pessimists, China will suffer a prolonged slump similar to Japan’s after its bust two decades ago.感觉这里似乎有点语法错误，也可能是我一下子没读懂

    It is tempting to link the two bubbles: the myth of China’s smooth ascent is exploding because its economic miracle has proved partly illusory. In fact, China’s government may be right to see the economic gloom as in part wishful thinking from outsiders repelled by its repressive political system.The truth is, the economy is not yet a Japan-style bubble.

    China has defied the pessimists many times in recent years. In 2008, when America stumbled, they argued that China’s export-led economy would be struck by a collapse in American spending. Instead, the two decoupled from each other. When China’s government announced its stimulus package in November 2008, the pessimists claimed that it contained little new money. In fact, it turned out to be perhaps the biggest and most successful intentional monetary and fiscal stimulus in history. (Strangely, the same critics are now complaining that the regime pumped too much money into the economy.)

    China’s statistics are notoriously dodgy. But the claim that the recovery is a fake does not stand when so many hard numbers are pointing sharply upwards. Car sales jumped by 53% in 2009. Industrial profits rose by 70% in the three months to November compared with a year earlier. The most recent trade figures show exports up by 18%, year on year, and imports up by a staggering 56%. Imports, which can be checked against trade partners’ data, confirm that domestic demand is robust. （非限制性定语从句）

    There are many alarming similarities between China today and Japan in the late 1980s—but there are also big differences. For instance, Japan’s property boom was fuelled mainly by credit. By contrast, one quarter of Chinese homebuyers pay cash, and the average mortgage covers only 50% of a property’s value. And unlike Japan in the 1980s, China is a poor country in the early stages of development. Its high investment-to-GDP ratio is often flagged as evidence of overinvestment, yet its capital stock per person is only 5% of America’s or Japan’s. As for overcapacity, most of last year’s investment boom went into infrastructure, not manufacturing. Unlike Japan, which built “bridges to nowhere”, China really does need more infrastructure. Nor is the country on the verge（边缘） of financial crisis— and even if share and house prices do collapse, the result is likely to be a pause, not a prolonged period of Japanese-style stagnation (see article).倒装句

这几段主要论述了中国目前经济与日本在80年代的异同，对中国快速从金融危机中复苏给以了肯定。

    No three-bears economy 没搞懂意思。。

    That does not mean China has a Goldilocks economy. Bank lending is growing too fast, which may be fine if it is flowing into useful investments, but not if it is fuelling asset prices. （if ..but not if …句型）The risk of bubbles and excess capacity will grow unless policy is tightened soon. The People’s Bank of China has just raised banks’ reserve requirements, but it needs to act more boldly to lift interest rates and curb bank lending. That means that the yuan must be allowed to rise. China’s main excuse for holding down the yuan—to support battered exporters—is no longer tenable in light of the rebound in exports. （in light of…）Recent warnings about an imminent Chinese crash are premature, but unless China acts, the bears(感觉这里是指对中国经济不看好的言论) will one day be proved right.

     Before then, however, the continued rise of the Chinese economy will exacerbate（加剧，使恶化）
the diplomatic and political trials its government has faced in recent weeks. China’s growing economic clout brings with it demands that the country should play a more responsible role in global affairs. The exchange rate and carbon emissions are only two areas in which its policies will be expected to take into account the interests of the world as a whole as well its own citizens’. And at home, the government may not be able indefinitely to rely on economic advance to buy off（贿赂，收买） demands for greater political freedom.

     This week the Chinese blogosphere, usually intensely nationalistic and sensitive to any pinprick（这里应是指抨击） from a foreign government, journal or company, rallied to Google’s defence. 中间用来作修饰的状语让整个句子生色少For China’s government, that may be more ominous than a shelf of gloomy brokers’ reports—and another reminder that politics, not the economy, remains China’s biggest problem.

指出目前中国经济仍然存在的问题，结尾处将经济问题与政治问题结合起来，西方惯有的对中国政治民主程度不够，包容度不够的抨击。（汗）

这里的一些论述可以对 经济与政治相关方面的话题起到启示作用。 例如 谷歌问题 是由政治领域所引发的对经济领域的影响。汇率和出口问题影响双边外交和国家声誉。

mintshUID: 2460474

这是1月27号
               囧。。昨天贴到备考日志去了

The Muslim Brothers' new leader

Which way now?

An influential movement sounds unusually hesitant

Jan 21st 2010 | CAIRO | From The Economist print edition

ReutersBadeea bids to bedazzle(使目眩，使眼花缭乱)

THE election of a new leader of the Muslim Brotherhood（宗教性的兄弟会）, one of the Arab world’s most influential movements, has aroused an oddly muted response, not just from the group’s critics but from fellow-travelling Islamists as well. Muhammad Badeea, a media-shy 66-year-old veterinarian, whose elevation to the post of the Brothers’ “supreme guide” was announced on January 16th, is the eighth leader of a movement founded in 1928, with millions of sympathisers across the Muslim world. Nowadays he and his cohorts（军团） face mounting challenges from without and within.（同时从外部和内部）

Seen by some as a wellspring of global Islamist extremism and by others as a moderate and modernising defender of Muslim identity, （非常好的分词结构）the Brotherhood has long carried influence far beyond the borders of Egypt, where it remains the strongest opposition party, despite sporadic（偶尔发生的）
persecution and an official ban imposed since 1954.

Recent years have seen both triumphs and setbacks.
Hamas（哈马斯）, a Palestinian（巴勒斯坦） affiliate of the Brotherhood, won the Palestinian general election in 2006, forcibly ousted Fatah, its secular rival, from the territory a year later and has run the Gaza Strip since. Other close ideological kin include the leading opposition parties in Jordan约旦, Kuwait科威特, Morocco摩洛哥 and Yemen也门, as well as groups that have been banned and chased out of still more authoritarian states, such as Algeria阿尔及利亚, Syria叙利亚 and Tunisia突尼斯.

Yet in many of these places the Brotherhood’s brand of conservative pan-Islamism（泛。。）, which nowadays generally eschews（避免） violence and agrees to play by the rules of the secular state even if it thinks them unfair, may be losing ground. A growing number of young people, frustrated by paternalism and impatient for change, seem attracted to more radical trends, such as arch-fundamentalist, Saudi-influenced Salafism that harks back to（重回）
a pure form of Islam said to have prevailed in the religion’s earliest days, not to mention violent jihadism. More moderate and even secular movements have also gained ground among ordinary people in various Arab countries. In others, state repression has limited the Brotherhood’s sway（支配，统治）.

In Egypt itself, where Mr Badeea will preside over（主持）
the movement’s headquarters, relentless waves of arrests, followed by trials in special “state security” courts, have crippled its organising power. With a general election due later this year, President Hosni Mubarak’s government appears determined to avoid a repeat of its humiliation in 2005, when Brotherhood candidates, running necessarily as independents, won a good fifth of seats and would have got many more without the state’s blunt interference at the polls（对投票选举的直接介入）. Egypt’s interior minister, a man of few words who heads a police force often charged with brutality, recently ominously declared that, although the Brothers had achieved electoral success in the past, “the situation is now different.”

The Brothers’ decision to choose Mr Badeea, a relative conservative who ran the group’s recruitment and indoctrination arm and has the cachet of repeated spells in Egyptian prisons,这里没搞得太清楚，是因啥有了威望？ may reflect this darkening atmosphere. Signs of increased hostility from a state that has often preferred to accommodate rather than confront the Brotherhood have persuaded many of its members of a need to retrench（节省，紧缩开支） and lie low（猜测，放低姿态，韬光养晦？） for the time being. As in past periods of repression, the group may resort to stressing what some Brothers anyway consider its main purpose: to spread “correct” Islamic values rather than play politics. But with Mr Mubarak ageing after 28 years in office and social unrest in Egypt spreading, some Brothers also reckon a period of political change is at hand—and that they should avoid confrontation to preserve their strength for the future.

Yet despite the famed internal discipline that has sustained the Brotherhood for decades, finding a replacement for Mr Badeea’s 81-year-old predecessor, Mehdi Akef, exposed wide schisms（教会分立，分裂）. A younger, more liberal faction, including many Brothers who gained prominence in trade unions in the 1980s, had hoped to rise to the fore. Instead, elections in December to Egypt’s 15-man “guidance council”, which in turn, in consultation with（在与。。的磋商中） a broader international council, elects the supreme guide, saw a solid win for conservatives. In an unprecedented breach of Brotherhood tradition, Mr Akef’s second-in-command（二把手）, a relative reformist, resigned in protest at what he charged were flawed electoral procedures. Non-Egyptian branches were also said to have been dismayed by the outcome and by the promotion of a relative unknown to the top post（最高职位）.

Like Mr Badeea, many of the Brotherhood’s new Egyptian leaders belong to a generation that suffered extreme torture after a wave of arrests in 1965. They remain loyal to the memory, if not fully to the radical ideology, of Sayyid Qutb, a Brotherhood intellectual who was arrested in the same sweep, then hanged for writings that promoted rebellion against “infidel异教徒” regimes. Qutb is widely seen as a fount泉 of inspiration for radical jihad. Since being allowed to re-emerge in Egyptian politics in the 1970s, the Brotherhood has repeatedly and vehemently激烈地，热烈地，强烈地
renounced the violence that Qutb espoused for political ends, except in the cause of defending Muslim land; hence its support for Hamas in Palestine. Yet the new leadership’s loyalty to Qutb’s philosophy inevitably raises concerns. Some suspect Egypt’s government of itself promoting the conservatives’ rise by arresting moderate Brothers to make the movement look less appealing.

In his acceptance speech, Mr Badeea stressed his belief in peaceful, democratic action. The Brotherhood sees neither Egypt’s government nor Western powers as hostile, he said. But he did condemn what he called “this global system that accepts freedom and democracy for its own people but denies our people the same.” A bitter struggle, it seems, will continue.      

My summary

Part one new words for me

bedazzle使目眩，使眼花缭乱

Brotherhood宗教性的兄弟会

cohorts军团

sporadic偶尔发生的
Hamas哈马斯
Palestinian巴勒斯坦Jordan约旦
Kuwait科威特
Morocco摩洛哥
Yemen也门
Algeria阿尔及利亚 Syria叙利亚
Tunisia突尼斯

pan- 表示泛。。的
eschew 避免
retrench 节省
schism 教会分立，分裂
second-in-command 二把手，副指挥官

infidel 异教徒
fount 泉
vehemently 激烈地，热烈地

Part Two 好词好句积累

face mounting challenges from without and within 内外交困

Seen by some as a wellspring of global Islamist extremism and by others as a moderate and modernising defender of Muslim identity, （非常好的分词结构）

Carry influence far beyond….其所带来的影响远超。。。

Recent years have seen both triumphs and setbacks. 好句，最近几年既经历了失败也有过胜利

Chase out of 将。。驱逐出境
Lose ground 退却，失败

Hark back to 重回

sway vt/vi 改变。。观点，影响，动摇 n支配，统治

Preside over 主持

later this year, President Hosni Mubarak’s government appears determined to avoid a repeat of its humiliation in 2005

appear determined to avoid a repeat of …..

blunt interference at the polls（对投票选举的直接介入）

in consultation with 在与。。进行磋商中

see a solid win for 目睹。。方的稳固得胜

They remain loyal to the memory, if not fully to the radical ideology
if not 句型的使用

Part three 对行文构思和文章结构的把握

在开头时先点出，新穆斯林兄弟会领导人的选举上任所引起的出乎意料的冷淡反应。进而在后段简述该组织的历史沿革和它面临的近年来的不利趋势。然后再从回到为何选举Mr Badeea的问题上来，最后通过对Badeea背景介绍和其最近表态来揣测未来局势。

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1月28日

Green energy

Smarting感到疼痛 from the wind

Turbines can now “see” the wind before it arrives, and take appropriate action

Jan 26th 2010 | From The Economist online

Torben Mikkelsen

GATHERING energy from the wind may seem a straightforward process. Air whips past the blades of a turbine涡轮机, forcing it to spin. The turbine turns a generator. The generator turns out electricity. Yet in practice things are not so simple. Wind generators are, necessarily, erected in places where powerful winds are common. If they are not properly angled towards the more howling of these gales大风, they can be damaged or destroyed. Tweaking稍微调整
and adjusting turbines so that their blades can harness the strongest air currents 利用，驾驭强劲的气流rather than be harmed by them is a normal part of turbine management. But technology being developed by Torben Mikkelsen, of Risoe DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark, and his colleagues looks set to似乎将 make the process easier. Dr Mikkelsen is working on a way for individual generators to scan the air upwind 逆风的and adjust the position of their blades in anticipation.
文章开头指出传统涡轮机工作时其叶片容易被风损坏，进而引出了Dr.Mikkelsen和他同时在改进该方面的工作。

The basic technology, called lidar (short for light detection and ranging) has been around since the 1970s.表示某事物的出现 It is similar to radar in that it sends out electromagnetic waves电磁波 and then analyses those waves that bounce back, to determine what they bounced off. The difference is that radar depends on radio waves. These have long wavelengths and therefore bounce only off large things. Lidar uses light waves. Light has a much shorter wavelength and is readily reflected from small objects—one reason that human vision relies on it. Crucially, the light waves used in wind lidar are reflected by tiny, naturally occurring particles like water droplets, dust, pollen花粉 and salt crystals that drift along at the precise speed of the wind.

本段主要解释了为何用激光来探测而不是采用雷达所惯用的电磁波

Dr Mikkelsen and his colleagues worked out that they could use lidar to scan incoming wind and determine how it was behaving before it struck the turbine. To try this idea out, they first placed lidar devices at the base of 120-metre-tall wind turbines at Hovsore, the Danish test site for such devices. The lidars scanned the approaching winds with a laser that produced infra-red light红外线
with a wavelength of 1.55 microns微米. Reflected light was detected by a device so sensitive that it could pick up one returning photon 光子(the quantum-mechanical particles of which light is composed) out of every thousand billion fired by the laser. The device measured wind movement at 40, 60, 80, and 100 metres above the ground, and 100-200 metres in front of the turbine. The data it collected were then compared with wind measurements taken by cup anemometers风速计 (the sort that spin when struck by wind, to record its speed) in order to calibrate校准，测量 the lidar. That done, the computer which analyses the lidar data can be connected to the motors that adjust the pitch斜度 of the turbine blades, in order to maximise energy production and reduce damage.

在将Lidar置于涡轮机底部时的具体工作状态和效果。

The team found they were able to get accurate measurements at all heights around the turbine, but realised that installing the device on the ground was far from ideal. By shining the lasers into the air from below they were analysing a cone that had its point at the base of the turbine. This gave them an understanding of wind speeds, but little sense of how winds were changing as they closed the 200-metre distance to the turbine. To capture this important information, the laser-created cone of the lidar needed to be sent out from the centre of the turbine itself.

发现置于底部的不理想，考虑将lidar的位置移动至涡轮机中心

Placing a lidar in the centre of a turbine proved difficult, because of the centrifugal force generated by the turbine’s rotation. To help the lidar cop, the researchers replaced their classic lidar device, which used mirrors to direct the light, with a newly developed fibre-optic光导纤维 system. As Michael Harris of Natural Power, a British wind-energy company that is collaborating with Dr Mikkelsen, puts it, the centre of a turbine is like a tumble drier滚筒洗衣机. Because the light is travelling through cables, the new device is much less likely to go out of alignment.这里读了两遍依然不太理解

然后发现移到中间会受到离心力的影响，于是又通过光导纤维系统来解决这个问题。

Another problem that the team ran into with central-turbine installation was electrical interference from the generator. The detector in the lidar is extremely sensitive and is easily upset by spurious 伪造的，欺骗性的currents. The solution, the researchers realised, was to wrap the lidar in shielding material that conducts surplus electricity to earth.

问题接连不断地出现，来自发电机的电子干涉？解决方式是通过外包保护材料然后接地。

The result is a system than can improve electricity production by 5%. This may not sound much, but for a single 4-megawatt兆瓦 turbine it is worth around $38,000 a year. Further economic benefits come from lengthening the life of the blades and the generator itself.

Summary

Part one : new words
smart感到疼痛
turbine涡轮机

gale大风
tweaking稍微调整
upwind 逆风的
electromagnetic waves电磁波
pollen花粉
infra-red light红外线
micron微米
photon 光子
anemometer风速计
calibrate校准，测量
pitch斜度
fibre-optic光导纤维 spurious 伪造的，欺骗性的megawatt兆瓦

part two：好词好句

harness the strongest air currents 利用，驾驭强劲的气流
look set to似乎将

The basic technology, called lidar (short for light detection and ranging) has been around since the 1970s.表示某事物的出现

Be far from 与。。还相差很远
Another problem that the team ran into with
另一个有关。。的问题是。。

Part three:文章构思回顾
提出问题（解决问题的必要性）---近期Dr.Mikkelsen及其同事在这方面的改进---改进方法中上存在的问题及解决方案---整个改进方案将带来的作用

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1月30日

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试验版 of 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 the World Electronic Community, or WELCOM, the forum’s exclusive online network has only about 5,000 members.

以达沃斯论坛为例，指出online network所起到的form collaborative的作用

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. 在从句中使用虚拟语气，高手！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可用来替换each other 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.

列举facebook、topsy等网站，表现它们惊人的受欢迎程度

Although Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, there are a number of other globetrotting sites自助游，但在这里似乎不太翻译得通哈。。, 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（字符） messages called “tweets”. 可拿来作为对于twitter的介绍使用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.

进一步列举许多各具特点的网站

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，别名. Thanks to拿来替换表原因的连接词 easy-to-use interfaces人机界面 and fine-grained细致的
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 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.

Online communities 从被人们所冷落、误解到逐渐通过自身改变而为人们所接受，其中一个重要成就是bring humanity into a place that was once cold and technological

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

另一个重要成就则是成为大众传媒工具。

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 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.

人们依靠social network来进行联络，数据资料显示这种趋势将越来越强。

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比以往任何一个时期. 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 staring用得特别好 in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama to victory帮助。。获得胜利 in the presidential race.

Social network的发展引人注目，其作用也渗入人们生活的方方面面。

Delivery time

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

Social network承载了人们太多的期望，现在是时候做出一定的反映了。

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

In the business world there has also been much hype around something called “Enterprise 2.0”, a term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace. Fans claim that new social-networking offerings now being developed for the corporate world will create huge benefits for businesses. Among those being touted兜售 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.

粉丝们认为network将对商业起到巨大的好处。

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

但部分人开始怀疑network可能又是另一场网络经济泡沫的开始，且不少network business的运营模式已表现出问题

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使。不愉快，烦躁 that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information泄露公司机密.

公司管理层为了公司利益和员工工作效率，大多对network在工作时间的使用做了限制。

This special report will examine these issues in detail. It will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think, though not every site will prosper, and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. 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.

虽然不是每个网站都能成功，但毫无疑问的是未来将是一个基于network的全球交流日益密切的新时代。表现了作者对此的乐观态度。

本文中，对于network功能进行阐述的相关段落可用于传媒类issue。生动的例子包括了各种数据资料、facebook助奥巴马竞选成功、公司对于工作时间使用network的限制、名流在network上的活跃。。。

mintshUID: 2460474

6# mintsh
1月31日
           今天特意找了篇 culture 类的，好像比较短。有偷工减料之嫌哈。。

A jazz revival in Ethiopia 埃塞俄比亚

Swing along大摇大摆地走 again

An old tradition may be coming back

Jan 28th 2010 | ADDIS ABABA | From The Economist print edition

AFICIONADOS are hoping for a revival of the golden age of Ethiopian jazz, as players who emigrated westward a generation ago, especially to America, come home amid the global recession.

由于上一代前往国外的爵士乐手回到故乡，带来了爵士乐复兴的希望。

Tafari Assefa now plays his drums in a band at the bar of the Jupiter Hotel, one of the fancier newer establishments in Addis Ababa, the capital. Born in 1974, he studied music in Poland before emigrating to America. Life as a jazz man there was hard. “You had to beg for gig音乐会s,” he says. “Here, they call you.” He earned $70 a gig in America. Now, back home, he gets only $40. But the monthly rent, at $180, is several times less. He can get along. A cup of Ethiopian coffee, he notes, costs only 25 cents.

以其中一个为例，反映其背景和国内外生存状态

Ethiopia’s jazz tradition goes back to the 1920s, when Armenian orphan孤儿s from the massacres in Turkey were adopted by Ethiopia’s imperial court and formed a band called Arba Lijoch, meaning Forty Children. Other big bands followed suit跟着做，. “The Addis swing” caught on. By the dying days of Haile Selassie’s reign君主统治时期, in the early 1970s, musicians were fusing jazz and funk with躲避，避开more traditional Ethiopian tunes to create a distinctive Ethio-jazz.

回溯埃塞俄比亚的爵士乐历史及Ethio-jazz的诞生

After the grim Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam took over in 1974, Ethio-jazz soon died, along with much else. The communists were suspicious of free-form jazz自由风格的爵士. Many players and fans were killed or fled, mostly to America. Hotel bands were replaced with drab乏味的，单调的 synthesizer综合者s.

爵士乐经历一段黑暗时光

The doyen老资格，老前辈，首席 of Ethiopian jazz men is Mulatu Astatke, now 66, who used to divide his time between Britain, America and his home country, drawing inspiration from all three从。。得到灵感. When Duke Ellington visited Addis, Mr Astatke transposed some of the American bandleader’s numbers from the West’s eight-note八分音符 scale into Ethiopia’s five-note scale. The revivalists reckon that cross-fertilization有机结合 of this kind can now start up all over again.

从本地爵士乐在老前辈牵头实现本土和国外有机结合的基础上，复兴很有希望。

本文可以作为为文化类issue提供素材，以Ethiopian爵士乐发展的例子说明不同文化间相互学习带来的好处。

mintshUID: 2460474

2月1日

Architects, developer construct plan for overseas work

Local Authority

Sears Tower

Multi-Sport Events

Adrian Smith

By Blair Kamin, Tribune critic

January 26, 2010

With the recession halting major construction projects across the country, architects are struggling. Thousands have lost their jobs. Some firms have closed their doors原来关门真的是这么朴素的表达.

简要表述
需要将眼光投向海外的原因

Instead of waiting for an economic rebound, three Chicago architects have formed an unusual alliance with one of the city's largest developers to hunt for work in growing overseas markets like China. The developer, the Magellan Development Group, will invest at least $1 million in the architects' small firm, while the architects will contribute design skills and global experience managing large-scale work.

为了主动应对衰退，三位建筑师与麦哲伦公司开始合作

One of the architects, Tom Kerwin, jumped to跳槽？ the new firm from the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, one of the city's leading architectural offices. At Skidmore, Kerwin ran the firm's efforts on Chicago's unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The new firm is called Brininstool, Kerwin and Lynch.

"If we just stayed as we were, it could be another two years that we waited this thing out," said Brad Lynch, one of the architects. "We really want to be working on buildings."

Lynch and his longtime partner, David Brininstool, whose marquee用来公众活动的大帐篷
projects include the Racine Art Museum and private homes that have won awards from the Chicago chapter （地方分会）of the American Institute of Architects, have been hard hit by the economic downturn.

At the height of the real estate boom, their firm, then known as Brininstool + Lynch, moved up from small- and medium-size projects to downtown residential high-rises. Its annual billings营业额
swelled to暴增至
more than $4 million and the staff grew to 21, Lynch said. Now, the staff is down to eight, and billings have been cut to roughly $1.5 million.

Kerwin, 46, who worked at Skidmore for 23 years, characterized his parting with his old firm as "amicable," in contrast to former design partner Adrian Smith, who has publicly accused Skidmore of denying him proper credit for leading the design of the Burj Khalifa, the just-opened world's tallest building, in Dubai. Smith left in 2006 to start his own firm.

While Kerwin will not be delivering clients from his old firm to his new one, he does arrive with more than two decades of international experience and contacts. Among the biggest of his projects overseas: managing an under-construction, Skidmore--designed skyscraper in Nanjing, China, that is roughly as tall as Chicago's Willis Tower.

介绍三位建筑师的职业生涯和各自特点

With the Chicago high-rise market facing a glut of condominiums公寓, executives at Magellan liked the idea of exporting overseas their expertise in financing and construction.

"Our vision is to expand out Magellan," said James Loewenberg, the firm's co-chief executive.

麦哲伦公司对此事的态度

Atlanta-based consultant James Cramer, a former CEO of the American Institute of Architects who advises architects on business issues and who informally advised Kerwin on the move, called the partnership a good "counter recessionary strategy."反衰退策略

"There's a blurring of boundaries between architects, designers, developers and contractors," he said. "Just like we see public-private partnerships developing around the world, I think we're going to see more professionals collaborating to do some important things in the future."

业内专业人士对建筑师在海外寻找机会的态度

Nevertheless, the new firm will face heightened competition overseas from American firms, as well as grueling紧张的，使极度疲劳的 long-distance travel and, in some cases, corrupt local governments. The push for international work "is ripe with potential problems存在许多问题," Loewenberg said. "You've got to bring people with you who know what they're doing, so you don't get in trouble."

Underscoring the ties between Magellan and Brininstool, Kerwin and Lynch, the fledgling无经验的architectural firm will rent offices in the critically acclaimed, Magellan-backed Aqua skyscraper in the 200 block of North Columbus Drive. The developers also have offices in the mixed-use tower, which has space for apartments, condominiums and a hotel. Aqua was designed by Chicago architect Jeanne Gang.

The developers' $1 million investment will cover startup costs for the new firm, including computers and sophisticated video-conferencing equipment视频会议设备, and will represent a one-third stake in the firm, Lynch and Loewenberg said.

Despite the ties between the two firms, the architects insist that they will remain independent of Magellan and will be free to work with other clients. They said they are working with a Dutch developer on a large-scale, private Chicago housing development, though they declined to provide details about the project.

Lynch said the architects and Magellan would concentrate on getting new work in China, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines. The firms could also work together in the United States. If a university sought to build student housing and was searching for a developer, "we would bring Magellan into that equation," Lynch [email=said.%3c/p%3e%3cp%3ebkamin@tribune.com]said.[/email]

新公司的经营现状和存在的问题

本文中主要描述目前建筑师将重心转向海外业务的趋势，从原因——新公司所涉及的三方对此趋势的意见——新公司运行状况三个大方面展开。

此文中的现象可概括为
现实环境促使创新和改变的发生，这可以与issue中不少话题联系起来

mintshUID: 2460474

2月8日

        今天的文章粘到word里面有7页，今天看到第4页，明天接着看

A special report on the art market

Suspended animation

The art market has suffered from the recession, but globalisation should help it recover, say Fiammetta Rocco (interviewed here) and Sarah Thornton

Nov 26th 2009 | From The Economist print edition

Sothebys

THE longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, at Sotheby’s in London on September 15th 2008 (see picture). All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last hurrah万岁. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy.

在伦敦的艺术品拍卖会是一个世纪来艺术市场牛市的完美句号。

The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising vertiginously旋转地，令人眩晕地 since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries.

In the weeks and months that followed Mr Hirst’s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable, especially in New York, where the bail-out of the banks coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs and the financial demise of many art-buying investors. In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector—for Chinese contemporary art—they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world’s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them.

The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989, a move that started the most serious contraction in the market since the second world war. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more volatile. But Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, says: “I’m pretty confident we’re at the bottom.”

指出在金融风暴后，艺术品市场在走下坡路。

What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market, whereas in the early 1990s, when interest rates were high, there was no demand even though many collectors wanted to sell. Christie’s revenues in the first half of 2009 were still higher than in the first half of 2006. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.

The best that can be said about the market at the moment is that it is holding its breath. But this special report will argue that it will bounce back, and that the key to its recovery lies in globalisation. The supply of the best works of art will always be limited, but in the longer run demand is bound to rise as wealth is spreading ever more widely across the globe.

The World Wealth Report, published by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, charts the spending habits of the rich the world over. It includes art as one of a range of luxury items they like to buy. According to the report, in 2007 there were over 10m people with investible assets of $1m or more. Last year that number dropped to 8.6m and many rich people scaled back their “investments of passion”—yachts快艇, jets, cars, jewellery and so on. But the proportion of all luxury spending that went on art increased as investors looked for assets that would hold their value in the longer term.

指出此次遭受的打击与上次不同时因为现在好的作品依然有其市场且富人在艺术品上的投资会增加。

The regional spread of buyers also changed significantly as some parts of the world became relatively richer. During the boom the number of wealthy people in Russia, India, China and the Middle East rose rapidly. In 2003 Sotheby’s biggest buyers—those who purchased lots costing at least $500,000—came from 36 countries. By 2007 they were spread over 58 countries and their total number had tripled.

That upward trend is still continuing, and many of the new buyers take a particular interest in the art of their own place and time. Last year China overtook France as the world’s third-biggest art market after America and Britain (see chart 1), and some 25% by value of the 100,000-plus works of art sold by Christie’s went to buyers from Russia, Asia and the Middle East.

财富在世界范围内不同区域的分配使得拍卖方面对更多民族的买家，且买家有对来自自身地域的艺术品的特殊兴趣。

Auction records remain dominated by Impressionist and modern works (see table 2), but the biggest expansion in recent years has been in contemporary art. Prices of older works keep going up as more people have money to spend, but few such works become available because both collectors and museums tend to hold on to what they have. Old Master paintings, for example, have stuck at around 5% of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales for many years. By contrast, contemporary art, which in the early 1990s accounted for less than 10% of Sotheby’s revenues, grew to nearly 30% of greatly increased revenues by last year. Dealers and auction houses now sell more post-war and contemporary art than anything else. This report will concentrate on that part of the market, which accounts for about half the world’s art trade and most of the excitement.

Part of the extra demand has come from a large increase in the number of museums. Over the past 25 years more than 100 have been built, not only in America and Europe but also in the sheikhdoms a region under the rule of a sheikh of the Persian Gulf 波斯湾and the fast-growing cities in Asia; sometimes in partnership with Western institutions, such as the Guggenheim or the Louvre, sometimes on their own. Many of these institutions have made their mark 使自己出名by buying contemporary art.

Over the same period the number of wealthy private collectors has also increased many times over, and so has their diversity. The record price for one of Andy Warhol’s giant faces of Chairman Mao was $17.4m, paid by Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong property developer. It was the first major Warhol to go to the Far East. A month later the Qatar卡塔尔
royal family bought a Hirst pill cabinet, entitled “Lullaby Spring”, for £9.7m, the first major Hirst bound for the Middle East. Everyone wants an iconic work, which helps explain the global demand for artists such as Warhol, Jeff Koons and Mr Hirst—and the eye-watering这个不是太理解
prices such work can command.

说明了在拍卖行受欢迎的艺术品种类及其背后原因。

mintshUID: 2460474

很久没更新~~现在又回到准备AW的路上了~
2月25日

A debate about fashion in Qatar 卡塔尔

Cross about cross-dressing穿着异性的服装

Is it a wicked邪恶的，缺德的 Western habit that should be stopped?

Jan 28th 2010 | DOHA | From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

CROSS-DRESSING is on the rise among young Qataris. The local press says that more tradition-minded locals are upset by the growing number of young women affecting a masculine style of dress 喜欢。。风格的打扮, baggy宽松下垂的trousers, short hair and deep voices. These women, who call themselves boyat, which translates as both tomboy行为似男孩的顽皮姑娘
and transsexual (and is derived from the English word boy), are being seen in schools and on university campuses where some are said to harass their straiter-laced sisters.

提出着异性服装的现象在卡塔尔的青年女性人群中有上升趋势。

In an episode of a talk show on Qatari television, called Lakom al Karar (The Decision is Yours), a leading academic said that the “manly women” phenomenon was part of a “foreign trend” brought into Qatar and the Gulf by globalisation. Foreign teachers, the internet and satellite television have been blamed. So have foreign housemaids, for badly influencing children in their care.

卡塔尔的媒体将其归咎于外国对本地的影响和全球化。

The studio audience was divided over how to respond.在。。上形成不同的意见 Some called for the death penalty for cross-dressers, while others favoured medical treatment. A rehabilitation centre康复中心for Qatari boyat has been set up, but a local report says that as many as 70% of them refuse to give up their “abnormal behaviour”.

但观众对于应采取的措施反映不一

It is not just Qataris who are rattled激怒. A year ago the ministry of social affairs in the United Arab Emirates酋长 (UAE) launched a campaign against “masculine women”. The project, entitled “Excuse me, I’m a girl”, involved workshops研讨会，讲习班, lectures and television programmes, stressing the virtues of femininity and raising awareness of the presumed dangers of women looking like men. An emirates’ foundation is helping to fund a research project on “gender identity disorder among Emirati youth”.

不仅仅是卡塔尔，阿拉伯众多其他国家也受到cross-dressing的影响

One official describes the “deviant反常的，与deviation联系起来记忆
behaviour” of the boyat as a “menace” to society. But others sound less fazed受影响的，忧虑的. An American university lecturer in the region says the short hair and gym shoes worn by these young women would look perfectly normal on an American campus. That is just what unnerves使。。失去镇定 the traditionalists.

事实上，只有少数权利阶层对这个现象感到不满，大多数人对此的反应比较平静，外国学者认为cross-dressing使得保守人士感到不满。