1010G【fish】COMMENTS

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】7-2 【学习】

Death of advertising greatly exaggerated By: Contributed Content, Malaysia Published: May 13, 2010 As I read yet another article about the impending death（垂死） of advertising and how trust is the new social slayer（杀人者） of all things one-way, I couldn't help but wonder if any of these dissenting voices were going anywhere. Or if they were relevant to begin with. On one end, you have many people claiming advertising is dead, simply because the nature of social opinion has negated its impact. On the other, we know that despite how trust and peer advice is king, advertising still works. There is simply more to the hyperbole（夸张法） behind trust and influence than is superficially perceived. The argument against advertising is simple: trust versus spam. For all its purported（传说的） ability to reach a large volume of consumers it suffers from one fundamental flaw - it is disruptive（分裂性的）.  Simply put, you would not tolerate a stranger butting into(插手于) your conversation in a face-to-face situation, and that interruption is also deemed as being equally rude online. This inevitably leads pundits（专家） to the conclusion that content, for the most part, needs to be free. Any aversion to this belief is often met with（可以模仿使用） some rather heated exchanges, as was the case of Jaron Lanier, who received death threats after suggesting that authors deserved to be paid for their content. It has also been consistently demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source carry a much lower credibility rating than those from peers with no identifiable vested interest(特级权利). In short, I trust my friends or, at the very least, anyone who seems to be like me. If you're on the side of the client, then you're the enemy, and everything you say is questionable hype(天花乱坠的广告宣传). Hardly anyone will argue this point with you（可以模仿使用）, as forums, social networks and public relations practitioners will tell you that trust is the new brand and marketing holy grail（圣杯）. However, as we huff and puff about（上气不接下气；愤怒） how traditional advertising is the anti-hero of the social trust movement, online advertising, now a USD59 billion global industry, continues to disprove what the numbers are showing. Yes, we have seen and will continue to see a precipitous（陡峭的） drop in online newspaper ad revenue, but we seem to be distracted by the misfortunes of news sites to notice that advertising has and always will continue to work in other channels. Spending on advertising using digital media channels makes up more than 10% of overall worldwide advertising spending. And while the recent economic downturn（代替economice depression的用法） has somewhat dampened that growth, the advent of digital marketers saw the rapid migration from traditional media to new media, potentially at the expense of（在损失某物的情况下） the former. Digital marketers will continue to grow smarter as well, employing targeted advertising based on an individual's specific profiles and habits, allowing future marketers to charge a premium on potentially high-yield campaigns. As much as we'd like to think the web has changed the way we perceive value, there is the undeniable truth that all of the content you're enjoying online is monetized（该用法非常好） in some way, whether you would want to acknowledge it or not. Advertising helps keep quality content alive on your favorite website and, while its machinations（诡计） may not be immediately transparent to you, the few who click on banner ads and participate in online quizzes and contests help in some way to provide administrators the ability to float their operations. Speak to any blogger about advertising revenue if you need further convincing. As much as we'd like to slam（猛关上） advertising as being irrelevant and intrusive, it significantly helps to keep the internet alive, for no real content creation can survive on the warm approvals of fans alone. People say that the problem isn't so much about advertising and its importance to a website's survival, but how it reaches them. However, as marketers move towards targeted advertising, we will continue to see placements which are more relevant to your needs, and when they become relevant, they stop becoming noise. We may see an age when advertising finds its place among reputation management as the prevailing form of consumer engagement and, as they continue to figure out how to become more effective in a less annoying manner, it will soon become hard to tell PR from sell. We should all hope that by that time, we will be smart enough to know the difference.

azure9UID: 2789030

May 17, 2010, 5:07 pm
Time to Review Workplace Reviews?
By TARA PARRER-POPE

After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies — they have identified some surprising ones.
The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.
A number of studies have documented the health toll of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours.
Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!”
Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.
“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me.
Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”
Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job.
“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.”
Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker.
“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”
Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ”
Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss.
“If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.”
And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.
Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor.
The association notes that one of the hazards of such a relationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions.
But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress.
“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

azure9UID: 2789030

A New Clue to Explain Existence
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: May 17, 2010

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.
In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.
Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.
“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk at Fermilab a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”
The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review.
It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.
The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.
Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”
The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.
Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”
Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”
Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the results are confirmed by other experiments.
Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”

creativeUID: 2193617

COMMENT 8-1May 17, 2010, 5:07 pm
Time to Review Workplace Reviews?
ByTARA PARRER-POPE

After years of studying theill effects of workplace stress [note the position of ''the''],psychologists are turning their attention to its[means ''workplace stress'' rather than ''ill effects'', so not''their''] causes. {So many nouns inthis sentence, hehe} Along withthe usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies[a funny word] — they [psychologists] have identified somesurprising ones.

The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction inthe United States appears to be at an all-time low. TheConference Board [a non-profit global business organizationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_Board]reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied withtheir jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings,based on a survey of 5,000 households [same as''families'' but looks more professional], show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about jobsecurity. Employees are unhappy about the designof their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality oftheir managers [a tiny grammar hint: noting the positionof plural parts in these ''… of …'' structures].

A number of studies have documented the health toll[the extent of loss, damage, suffering, etc.] of workplacestress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher riskfor heart problems and depression, among other things. Thismonth, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressureshad double the risk for a heart attack.And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found thatthose who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percenthigher risk for heart disease than thosewho put in 7 hours [see how the author abbreviated].

Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at theAnderson School of Management at the University of California, LosAngeles, says [why not said? I don'tunderstand.] too many people work in a “toxic”environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throwsa spotlight on one of the culprits: “Get Rid of the PerformanceReview!”

Annual reviews not only create [Why isnot it ''Not only do annual reviews create''?] a high level ofstress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bossesand subordinates — less effective attheir jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on theworker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. Hesays he has heard from countless workers who say their work lifewas [lives were?] ruined by an unfairreview [unfair reviews?].

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in theair because of performance reviews,” he told[see it is not ''tells'' here!] me.

Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply beabolished. Robert I. Sutton, a StanfordUniversity management professor, says they can be valuable ifproperly executed. But he added, “Inthe typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it atall.” [I am totally lost in the mixingtenses. Maybe, a present tense is preferred if there is no exactquotation, otherwise past tense is. Anyway, high school grammar is sofar away from me that I can remember few.]

Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of goodperformance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. Herefused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to copewith the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually [nocomma here] he lost his job.

“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health,too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since hestarted his own business. “When you’re always fearingfor your job, it’s not a good situation.”

Gary Namie, director of the WorkplaceBullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullieshave been known to use performance reviews to underminea worker.

“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a verybiased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, theauthor of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It shouldbe replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the workand who can become coaches.”

Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of LucixCorporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performancereviews after witnessing [testify, attest]the emotional havoc [great confusion anddisorder, wide and general destruction] they created forworkers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with whothey are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’renot effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effectiveas a person.’ ”

Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructiveleadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in thepsychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’teliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better whenthey have a good relationship with their boss.
“If I’mconsulting in an organization and there are morale[metal] problems, the first thing I wouldlook at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair,an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One ofthe findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who havemore support from supervisors tend to do better in stressfulsituations.”

And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In oneBritish study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisorshad consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.

Although there is little [negative adj.,means, actually, nothing] an individual can do about such aboss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips,including finding a mentor within the company to discuss strategiesfor dealing with a problem supervisor.

The association notes that one of the hazards of such arelationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work orwaging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says,workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions.

But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless inthe face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among themost common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose newbook “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) arguesthat good bosses are essential to workplace success, saidskyrocketing [a big word] health carecosts should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress.

“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s yourimmediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming outshows that if you want to be an effective organization or aneffective boss, you’ve got to strike [apowerful word] a balance between humanity and performance.”

[Oh my! I am so lucky to have a kindsupervisor.]

azure9UID: 2789030

May 17, 2010, 5:07 pm
Time to Review Workplace Reviews?
By TARA PARRER-POPE

After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies — they have identified some surprising ones.

The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security(?). Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.

A number of studies have documented the health toll of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours.

toll: value measured by what must be given or done or undergone to obtain something

Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical[臨床的] psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!”

culprit: someone who perpetrates wrongdoing

Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less
effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.

subordinate: Lower in rank or importance
                   Subject or submissive to authority or the control of another
                   Inferior in rank or status

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me.
Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”
Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job.
“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.”
Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker.

cope: Come to terms or deal successfully with
undermine: Destroy property or hinder normal operations

“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”
Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ”

biased: Favoring one person or side over another
ongoing: Currently happening
havoc: Violent and needless disturbance

Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss.

destructive: Causing destruction or much damage
eliminate: Terminate or take out
               Kill in large numbers

“If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.”

morale: The spirit of a group that makes the members want the group to succeed

And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.
Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor.

The association notes that one of the hazards of such a relationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions.
But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing[飛漲，升騰，焰火] health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress.
“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

immediate:Very close or connected in space or time

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】8-1【学习】

May 17, 2010, 5:07 pm Time to Review Workplace Reviews? By TARA PARRER-POPE After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies(恐吓) — they have identified some surprising ones. The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers. A number of studies have documented the health toll（损耗） of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are(be) at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours. Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits(罪犯): “Get Rid of the Performance Review（出勤情况）!” Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review. “There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me. Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.” Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job. “It played hell（痛苦的情况） with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.” Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker. “I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.” Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ” Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss. “If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.” And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday. Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor. The association notes that one of the hazards（冒风险） of such a relationship is self-defeating（不利于自己的） behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions. But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing（猛增，好词！） health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress. “Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.” 小c的这篇文章让我想起自己的老板，让我想起那些个可怜的员工，真是谢谢小c，似乎教会了我如何去缓解压力，或是什么是我该选择的！

azure9UID: 2789030

A New Clue to Explain Existence
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: May 17, 2010

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology[宇宙哲學]: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.

portend: Indicate by signs

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

annihilate: Kill in large numbers
lethal: Of an instrument of certain death

Sifting data from collisions of protons[質子] and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle[粒子] accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons[中間子]囧, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

sift:Check and sort carefully
      Distinguish and separate out

“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk at Fermilab a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”

dominance: Superior development of one side of the body
inexplicable:  Incapable of being explained or accounted for

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review.
It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.

dissident: Characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards
               Disagreeing, especially with a majority.
prevail: Be larger in number, quantity, or importance
           Be valid, applicable, or true;
           Continue to exist
           
The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds.(==//) They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.
Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”

oscillate:Move or swing from side to side regularly

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.
Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”
Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”
Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the results are confirmed by other experiments.
Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”

preponderance:Superiority in power or influence
                      A superiority in numbers or amount
                      Exceeding in heaviness; having greater weight

azure9UID: 2789030

Death of advertising greatly exaggerated
By: Contributed Content, Malaysia
Published: May 13, 2010

As I read yet another article about the impending death of advertising and how trust is the new social slayer of all things one-way, I couldn't help but wonder if any of these dissenting voices were going anywhere. Or if they were relevant to begin with.

impend:Be imminent or about to happen; "Changes are impending".

On one end, you have many people claiming advertising is dead, simply because the nature of social opinion has negated its impact. On the other, we know that despite how trust and peer advice is king, advertising still works. There is simply more to the hyperbole behind trust and influence than is superficially perceived.

negate: Be in contradiction with
            Deny the truth of
            Prove negative; show to be false   
hyperbole:Extravagant exaggeration

The argument against advertising is simple: trust versus spam.
For all its purported ability to reach a large volume of consumers it suffers from one fundamental flaw - it is disruptive.

disruptive:Characterized by unrest or disorder or insubordination;

Simply put, you would not tolerate a stranger butting into your conversation in a face-to-face situation, and that interruption is also deemed as being equally rude online.
This inevitably leads pundits to the conclusion that content, for the most part, needs to be free.
Any aversion to this belief is often met with some rather heated exchanges, as was the case of Jaron Lanier, who received death threats after suggesting that authors deserved to be paid for their content. It has also been consistently demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source carry a much lower credibility rating than those from peers with no identifiable vested interest. In short, I trust my friends or, at the very least, anyone who seems to be like me.

aversion: A feeling of intense dislike
              The act of turning yourself (or your gaze) away

If you're on the side of the client, then you're the enemy, and everything you say is questionable hype. Hardly anyone will argue this point with you, as forums, social networks and public relations practitioners will tell you that trust is the new brand and marketing holy grail.
However, as we huff and puff about how traditional advertising is the anti-hero of the social trust movement, online advertising, now a USD59 billion global industry, continues to disprove what the numbers are showing.

Yes, we have seen and will continue to see a precipitous drop in online newspaper ad revenue, but we seem to be distracted by the misfortunes of news sites to notice that advertising has and always will continue to work in other channels.
Spending on advertising using digital media channels makes up more than 10% of overall worldwide advertising spending. And while the recent economic downturn has somewhat dampened that growth, the advent of digital marketers saw the rapid migration from traditional media to new media, potentially at the expense of the former.

dampen: Smother or suppress
             Deaden (a sound or noise),
             Lessen in force or effect
advent: Arrival that has been awaited (especially of something momentous
            
Digital marketers will continue to grow smarter as well, employing targeted advertising based on an individual's specific profiles and habits, allowing future marketers to charge a premium on potentially high-yield campaigns.
As much as we'd like to think the web has changed the way we perceive value, there is the undeniable truth that all of the content you're enjoying online is monetized in some way, whether you would want to acknowledge it or not.(可以直接用的句子)
Advertising helps keep quality content alive on your favorite website and, while its machinations may not be immediately transparent to you, the few who click on banner ads and participate in online quizzes and contests help in some way to provide administrators the ability to float their operations.

premium:Payment for insurance
machination:Covert and involved plotting to achieve your ends.

Speak to any blogger about advertising revenue if you need further convincing. As much as we'd like to slam advertising as being irrelevant and intrusive, it significantly helps to keep the internet alive, for no real content creation can survive on the warm approvals of fans alone.
People say that the problem isn't so much about advertising and its importance to a website's survival, but how it reaches them.
However, as marketers move towards targeted advertising, we will continue to see placements which are more relevant to your needs, and when they become relevant, they stop becoming noise.

We may see an age when advertising finds its place among reputation management as the prevailing form of consumer engagement and, as they continue to figure out how to become more effective in a less annoying manner, it will soon become hard to tell PR from sell.
We should all hope that by that time, we will be smart enough to know the difference

很好的文章，說明了很多問題~

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】8-2【学习】

A New Clue to Explain Existence By DENNIS OVERBYE Published: May 17, 2010 Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology（宇宙学）: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends（预兆） fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence. In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts（规律） of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated（消灭） each other in a blaze（在一片光亮中） of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why. Sifting（筛选） data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter. “This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk at Fermilab a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable（神秘的）.” The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review. It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team. The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds. They oscillate（摆动） back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance（数量上的优势） of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons. Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.” The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation（可以模仿使用）, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for（渴望） almost as long. Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at（轻轻地拨动，翻找） with the Large Hadron Collider.”  Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”  Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the results are confirmed by other experiments. Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”(比喻的手法说明该研究的重要性)

azure9UID: 2789030

81# 谦行天下
不要謝我哦，謝文章作者咯~

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【COMMENT】8-1

May 17, 2010, 5:07 pm Time to Review Workplace Reviews? By TARA PARRER-POPE After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies（办公室老大） — they have identified some surprising ones. The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers. A number of studies have documented the health toll（记录，用document的哇） of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours. Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits（throw a sportlight on sth / throw a light on sth）: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!” Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review. “There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me. Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.” Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job. “It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.” Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker(损害worker). “I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone（易于出错的， prone表示趋向，error-prone趋向出错的，abuse-prone趋向滥用的） and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.” Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ” Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss. “If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.” And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday. Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor（指导者，良师益友） within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor. The association notes that one of the hazards of such a relationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions（控制自己的emotion，没记错的话好像有一篇argu就是写这个的，注意manage这个词用的很广，I manage to arrive on time. ）. But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress. “Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence(pile用得好) coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【COMMENT】8-2

A New Clue to Explain Existence By DENNIS OVERBYE Published: May 17, 2010 Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel（揭开，拆散） one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends（预兆） fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider（碰撞机） outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence. portend：预兆 His silent portends trouble. In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze（燃烧，发光） of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why. Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter. “This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk at Fermilab a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.” The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review. It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident（意见不同的人） and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail（超过） over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins(纺纱) of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic（亚原子） particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter（一事物超过另一事物）, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of（可以取代 says by） Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team. prevail：超过，战胜，克服 Law offer us the best hope of overcoming the differences that prevail the world. The new effect hinges on（转移，依赖于） the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds（物质反应还可以人格化哈！）. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance（多数的，占优势） of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay（退化） to muons. Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.” The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning（渴望） for almost as long. yearn： 渴望 It's all I know, all I yearn, all that I live for. 这就是我所知道的，我所渴望的，我所为之生存的 Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at（戳动） with the Large Hadron Collider.” poke at：戳动，反复拨动 poke at with foot or toe 用脚尖轻轻走路 Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.” Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath（屏息等待） until the results are confirmed by other experiments. Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God（我不敢说这个宣布相当于找到了真理，但至少揭开了真理的面纱）.”

azure9UID: 2789030

Thailand's crisis
Red dawn
Thailand’s army marches in to crush the months-long protest in Bangkok
May 19th 2010 | BANGKOK | From The Economist online

FOR six days, clouds of black smoke hung over Bangkok’s jagged skyline, marking out flashpoints in a prolonged political drama. At dawn on May 19th, the show reached its bloody climax. Combat troops supported by armoured vehicles pushed into the red shirts’ protest camp. A few thousand stragglers had held out there, defiant to the end. But a group of their leaders, once captured, went quietly, drawing howls of disapproval from their diehard supporters. Other protest leaders may have slipped away. The black smoke grew thicker and more noxious as angry protesters set fire to tyre-and-bamboo barricades and the ritzy shopping area where they had bedded down for several weeks.

The assault on the fortified camp was methodical and met only scattered resistance from gunmen holed up inside. Security forces kept overwhelming force on their side. It was not, mercifully, the replay of the Tiananmen Square massacre that some had predicted, though some 40 people have died in violent clashes since last week. Most of the protesters were herded away to evacuation points.

On the outskirts of the camp however, riots flared along a major road that had seen the worst of the recent fighting. Arson attacks spread to new areas, and gun battles erupted beneath the blackened underside of a fly-over. Nearby a port slum has begun staging its own red-shirt rally.

Keeping a lid on unruly crowds and stopping the red shirts from regrouping may be the army’s next test. But that is only a start for the country. Bridging the deep social and economic divisions in Thai society, and crafting a new political balance will be a long-term challenge for whatever sort of government emerges from this disaster.

The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, has failed to make any headway towards reconciliation. He had already created a terrific obstacle to peace on April 10th, when he hastily sent in troops to clear another protest site; 25 people died but the red shirts remained. But Mr Abhisit may deserve credit for offering a plausible compromise to the red shirts. That the leaders of their United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) failed to grasp this olive branch is tragic. They must bear some responsibility for the lives lost, as do the soldiers who marched into downtown Bangkok.

As recently as May 18th an eleventh-hour ceasefire had appeared close. But the mistrust on both sides proved impossible to bridge, and the talks failed. In retrospect, a negotiated end to the stand-off may have been doomed since May 13th, when a sniper picked off Khattiya Sawasdipol, a rogue army general who had sided with the red shirts and taunted his commanders.

Widespread fighting broke out while General Khattiya lay in a coma, days before his death. Army units trying to block off the sprawling protest site came under attack by a mob tossing rocks, firecrackers and petrol bombs. Shadowy black-clad militia joined the melee alongside the red shirts, though only fleetingly. Soldiers opened fire without much restraint, even at paramedics trying to bring out the wounded. Road junctions were declared as “live-fire zones”. The mayhem spread to other parts of the city. The military cordon appeared to be breaking as red shirts defied orders to stay away. Something had to give. In the end it was not a political deal between the warring factions but instead overwhelming force that won the day.

As the bullets flew, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister and billionaire telecoms tycoon who encouraged the red shirts after he lost power in 2006 to a military coup, tweeted his sorrow to his followers. From his exile, Mr Thaksin denied, once again, that he was giving orders to the red-shirts leaders and urged everyone to embrace peace. There is little doubt, however, that Mr Thaksin held sway over the splintered, squabbling leadership of the UDD. The two-month protest would not have been possible without his deep pockets and political network. Though the red-shirt cause outgrew him, his stubbornness seems to have undone the peace talks.

The aftermath of the May 19th crackdown will likely see continued unrest, both around Bangkok’s slums and in Thailand’s north and north-east. The north-east accounts for around one-third of parliamentary seats. Since 2001, the region has overwhelmingly voted for Mr Thaksin and his allies. The red shirts had sought to force a new election in the belief that voters would turf out Mr Abhisit, the darling of Bangkok’s privileged classes.

Protesters there were quick to stage arson attacks in retaliation for their rout in Bangkok. The government put the city under a curfew on May 19th, its first since 1992.
As Thailand stumbles into the next phase of its crisis, many will be asking how it came to this. If politics is the art of the compromise, Thais had appeared to be experts. Various political factions, both elected and unelected, cobbled together governments that oversaw steady economic growth even as they squabbled and scrapped for the spoils. That pragmatic formula no longer works, not when political crises have polarised opinions within families, workplaces and communities, and hollowed out the centre

azure9UID: 2789030

(有題ISSUE剛好在說這個問題哦，值得看一下~)
Global universities
An old idea refashioned
How to create a higher-education supermarket
May 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THE word “globalisation” usually conjures up images of globe-spanning companies and distance-destroying technologies. The Rupert Murdochs and Lloyd Blankfeins of this world are generally seen as its champions. Its enablers are the laws of comparative advantage and economies of scale.

In “The Great Brain Race” Ben Wildavsky points to another mighty agent of globalisation: universities. These were some of the world’s first “global” institutions. In the Middle Ages great universities such as Paris and Bologna attracted “wandering scholars” from across Europe. In the 19th century Germany’s research universities attracted scholars from across the world. In the early 20th century philanthropists such as Cecil Rhodes and William Harkness established scholarships to foster deeper links between countries. By the 1960s globe-trotting professors were so commonplace that they had become the butt of jokes. (What is the difference between God and professor so and so? God is everywhere. Professor so and so is everywhere but here.)

Academic globalisation has gone into overdrive in the modern university. Some of this is along familiar lines—academics collaborating with ever more foreign colleagues and sabbatical-seekers contriving to spend ever more time abroad. But Mr Wildavsky demonstrates that globalisation is now much more complicated than just cross-border collaboration spiced up with junkets.

Universities are obsessed by the global marketplace for students and professors. They are trying to attract as many students from abroad as possible (not least because foreign students usually pay full fees). Nearly 3m students now spend some time studying in foreign countries, a number that has risen steeply in recent years. Universities are also setting up overseas. New York University has opened a branch in Abu Dhabi. Six American universities have created a higher-education supermarket in Qatar. Almost every university worth its name has formed an alliance with a leading Chinese institution.

But globalisation is going deeper than just the competition for talent: a growing number of countries are trying to create an elite group of “global universities” that are capable of competing with the best American institutions. China and India are focusing resources on a small group. The French and German governments are doing battle with academic egalitarians in an attempt to create European Ivy Leagues. Behind all this is the idea that world-class universities can make a disproportionate contribution to economic growth.

This is a fascinating story. But Mr Wildavsky, a former education reporter who now works for both the Kauffman Foundation and the Brookings Institution, is too earnest a writer to make the best of it. He wastes too much ink summarising research papers and quoting “experts” uttering banalities. And he fails to point out the humour of sabbatical man jet-setting hither and thither to discuss such staples of modern academic life as poverty and inequality. Mr Wildavsky should spend less time with his fellow think-tankers (who are mesmerised by the idea of a global knowledge economy) and more talking to students, who experience the disadvantages as well as the advantages of the new cult of globalisation at first hand.

polosongruiUID: 2595436

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm
What Is a Philosopher?
By Simon Critchley
There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia(millennium的复数千年期) of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing（很好很强大的比喻）. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off（kick off 踢开，开始） by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?
As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative（挑衅的，引起讨论的） definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression（离题，枝节话）.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.
Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently（专心地） at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty（机智的） Thracian（色雷斯人） servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest（玩笑） suffices（足够） for all those who engage in philosophy.”
What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt（笑柄，烟蒂） of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh(捧腹大笑、使人哈哈大笑的东西). The philosopher’s clumsiness(笨拙) in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.
But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists（讽刺家）. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently（by accident; without intending to） presses his basic philosophical claim.
But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction（区分） between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger（讼棍,司法黄牛,卑劣律师）.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted（分配，拨出） for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler（盗用公款者）. The pettifogger, the jury（陪审团；(竞赛或展览的)评判委员会）, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them.
The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity（困惑，茫然）, fascination（魅力，娇媚） and curiosity.
By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor（对话者，谈话者）, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive（骗人的，造成假象的，靠不住的）. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.
Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment（意见，观点；感情，情绪）. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute（敬礼，致意；赞扬，颂扬） each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess（坦白，供认；承认） that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.
Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage（抵押，抵押借款） brokers and hedge（n.树篱；障碍物 vt.用篱笆围 vi.避免直接回答） fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked（使弯曲） things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd（机灵的，敏锐的，精明的） and a shyster（奸诈的人，讼棍）.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of（借助，由于） his or her otherworldliness（超脱尘世）, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.
Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells（居住） within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.
This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety（不尊敬；不虔诚） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.
A couple of generations later, during the uprisings（起义，暴动） against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin（违犯戒律，犯过失） twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality（道德败坏；伤风败俗的行为） and atheism（无神论，不信神）, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎，渎神） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation（谴责；告发） of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks.
Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed（着迷） with maintaining the status quo（现状）, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent（雄辩的，口才流利的；明白显示出的）, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”
Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer（口吃，结结巴巴地说 n.结巴，口吃） isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully（可怕地；糟透地） uncanny（不可思议的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous（巨大的，可怕的） or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.
泰勒斯(米利都的) [Thales of Miletus]
希腊哲学家。其著作已失传，当时的资料也已不在。泰勒斯是西方哲学创始人这一说法主要源于亚里士多德。亚里士多德在著作中提及，泰勒斯首先提出了水为万物本质的宇宙论。泰勒斯的重要贡献基于他试图通过对自然现象的简化来解释自然，并从自然界本身去寻求原因，而不是在具有人形的诸神中去寻求原因。
阿里斯托芬 [Aristophanes]
(450?～388?BC)希腊剧作家，雅典人。公元前427年以喜剧剧作家开始其戏剧写作生涯，一生大约写了40部剧本，只有11部流传下来，其中包括《云》(公元前423)、《黄蜂》(公元前422)、《鸟》(公元前414)、《地母节妇女》(公元前411) 和《蛙》(公元前405)。大部分是“旧喜剧”的典型代表，“旧喜剧”是指喜剧演出法的一个阶段，在这个阶段里，合唱队、摹拟表演、滑稽模仿在演出中占有较重分量。他的讽刺、机智和无情的主题呈现方式使他成为古希腊最伟大的喜剧作家。
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks(born June 28, 1926) is a Jewish-American actor, writer director, and theatrical producer best known as a creator of broad film farces and parodies. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, Brooks served in the US Army during World War II as an engineer. He started out in show business as a stand-up comic before becoming a comedy writer for television, working on Your Show of Shows. In 1961, with Carl Reiner, he created the persona of the 2000 Year Old Man, a collection of ad libbed comedy routines made into a series of comedy records. With Buck Henry, he created the successful TV series Get Smart. In 1975, Brooks created When Things Were Rotten, a well-received Robin Hood parody that lasted only 13 episodes; nearly 20 years later, Brooks mounted another Robin Hood parody with Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
维特根斯坦 [Wittgenstein, Ludwig (Josef Johann)]
(1889.4.26,维也纳～1951.4.29,英格兰 剑桥郡 剑桥)哲学, 人物小传奥地利裔英籍哲学家，20世纪哲学界的主要人物之一。奥地利大钢铁制造商之子，在柏林和曼彻斯特学机械工程。B.罗素的著作使他对数学产生了更多的兴趣。后赴剑桥随罗素学习(1912～1913)。他曾创造出两个具有原创性及影响性的哲学思想体系，即其逻辑理论与稍晚的语言哲学。第一次世界大战期间在奥地利军队中服役。在战俘营中完成他的伟大著作《逻辑哲学论》，该书的中心问题是：语言是如何可能成其为语言的?而他所获得的答案是：一个描述事物的句子(命题)一定是“实在的一幅图像”。他对维也纳学派和逻辑实证主义深具影响。其后，放弃了大笔财富，另觅其他职业。由于发现自己能在哲学中进行有创造性的工作，于1929年回到剑桥。由于他的演讲和学生所作笔记广为流传，他逐渐对整个英语世界的哲学思想产生有力影响。死后出版的《哲学研究》(1953)一书，其观点与《逻辑哲学论》有很大不同，认为无穷无尽的各种语言用法背后，并未隐藏着统一的本质。其第二个哲学体系突出的特点是较注重于揭示概念怎样与行为和反应相联系，怎样同人们生活当中对概念的表达相联系。
亚里士多德 [Aristotle]
(384BC,斯塔伊拉～322BC,哈尔斯基)哲学, 人物小传希腊哲学家和科学家。其父曾是马其顿国王亚历山大大帝祖父的御医，他是柏拉图的学生，后来在柏拉图学园任教20年。约公元前342年返回马其顿担任亚历山大的老师，公元前335年到雅典开办自己的吕刻昂学校。他与柏拉图哲学最大的不同点是：不需要假设一个超然而单独存在的理念领域，能知觉事物的世界就是真实的世界。著作丰富，现存的作品包括：《工具篇》、《论灵魂》、《物理学》、《形而上学》、《尼可马亥伦理学》、《欧德摩斯伦理学》、《动物志》、《政治学》、《修辞学》和《诗学》等，其他在自然历史和科学方面的作品也很多(大部分在公元前1世纪时首度刊印)。他把哲学论题划分为伦理、物理和逻辑三方面。对他而言，逻辑是研究每一论题所必需的。亚里士多德还提出四因：形式因、质料因、动力因和目的因，并主张一个永恒不动的原动力(神)是物理的必要元素。在伦理学方面，他主张对人类(或任何东西)有益的是达成他们的目的或功用，也就是所谓的目的论。亚里士多德和柏拉图被公认是西方哲学的创建者，而他对后来的西方科学和哲学有巨大的影响。


斯宾诺莎 [Spinoza, Benedict de]
希伯来语教名为Baruch Spinoza。(1632.11.24,阿姆斯特丹～1677.2.21,海牙)哲学, 人物小传荷兰犹太人哲学家，17世纪唯理论的主要代表人物。其父母为逃避葡萄牙的天主教迫害而来到荷兰。早期对新科学和哲学思想的兴趣使他在1656年被逐出犹太教，其后靠磨镜片和抛光工作来谋生。他的哲学代表了对笛卡儿哲学的发展和否定，其大多数震撼性的学说中很多都是对笛卡儿主义哲学难题的解决。他在笛卡儿形而上学中发现了3个不足之处：上帝的超然存在、身心二元论、归属于上帝和人类的自由意志。斯宾诺莎认为那些学说使世界变得难于理解，因为这不可能解释上帝和世界、心灵和身体的关系以及说明由自由意志引起的事件。在他的巨著《伦理学》(1677)中，他试着用极易理解和充分确定的方式来建构能解决这些问题的形而上学一元论体系。海德堡大学请他出任哲学教授，但他拒绝了，以追求自身独立。其他主要著作有《神学政治论》(1670)和未完成的《政治论》。
休姆 [Hume, David]1
(1711.5.7,苏格兰 爱丁堡～1776.8.25,爱丁堡)哲学, 人物小传苏格兰哲学家、历史学家和经济学家。首部著作《人性论》(1739～1740)，是他表述全面的哲学体系的一次尝试，但最初反应冷淡。《道德和政治论文集》(1741～1742)则受到欢迎，并极大地影响了他的朋友A.斯密的经济思想。《政论集》(1752)出版后，接着又出版了巨著《英格兰史》(5卷，1754～1762)。他把哲学设想为对人性进行归纳的经验科学，以I.牛顿的科学方法为模型，以J.洛克的经验主义为蓝本，尝试描述求知的心理状态。他归结出：形而上学是不可能的，经验以外没有其他知识。并归结出：人是感情动物，而非理性动物。进而质疑物质概念及因果必然性以及归纳法的客观有效性。他的影响广泛。I.康德认为自己构思批判哲学就是出于对休姆的直接反应，而休姆在导致A.孔德走向实证主义方面也起到了重要的作用。在英国，休姆的正面影响见于J.边沁，他因休姆的《人性论》而转向功利主义，而受休姆影响更大的则是J.S.穆勒。
罗素 [Russell, Bertrand (Arthur William), 3rd Earl Russell]2
(1872.5.18,英格兰 蒙茅斯 特雷勒克～1970.2.2,威尔士 梅里昂尼斯)数学, 人物小传, 哲学英国逻辑学家和哲学家，最著名的是他在数理逻辑方面的成就和关于各种社会和政治问题，尤其是和平主义和核裁军的主张。罗素出生于贵族家庭，是罗素伯爵的孙子，伯爵两度担任19世纪时的英国首相。他在剑桥大学研究数学和哲学，在那儿受到唯心主义哲学家J.M.E.麦克塔格特的影响，但他很快抛弃了唯心主义，转向柏拉图式的极端现实主义。在早期论文《关于指示》(1905)中，他阐明了像“法兰西的现任国王”这种没有关系项的短语是如何在逻辑上用作一般陈述而不是专有名称，从而解决了语言原理上的一个著名的难题。罗素后来认为这个名为“描述理论”的发现是他对哲学最重要的贡献之一。在《数学原理》(1903)和划时代的另一本《数学原理》(3卷，1910～1913)中，后者为他和A.N.怀特海合作而成，他试着证明整个数学起源于逻辑。在第一次世界大战中持和平主义态度，因而丧失了在剑桥大学的讲师职位，后来入狱(1939年在纳粹侵略面前他愿意放弃和平主义)。罗素最详尽的形而上学学说，逻辑原子论，强烈影响了逻辑实证主义派。他的晚期哲学著作有《心的分析》(1921)、《物的分析》(1927)和《人类的知识：其范围和界限》(1948)。《西方哲学史》(1945)是为普通读者而写，成为一部畅销书，很多年来都是他的主要收入来源。在他许多关于政治和社会话题的书籍中，有《自由之路》(1918)、《布尔什维克的实践和理论》(1920)——是对苏联共产主义的严厉批评、《论教育》(1926)和《婚姻和道德》(1929)。由于他在晚期著作中支持某些有争议的观点，1940年他在接受纽约城市大学的教师职位时受到阻碍。第二次世界大战后成为核裁军运动的领导者，是关于核武器和世界安全的国际帕格沃什会议以及核裁军运动的第一任主席。1961年89岁的时候，因为煽动国内反抗而第二次入狱。他在1950年获得诺贝尔文学奖。