1010G【fish】COMMENTS

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【13-1】 Don’t sweat it Development and public-health initiatives will matter much more to malaria than the climate will May 19th 2010 | From The Economist online ONE of the obvious problems with predicting the future effects of climate change is that they haven’t happened. This makes climate studies highly dependent on models, which invariably and unavoidably make simplifying assumptions（前面的副词值得学习）. This means that using their results to say anything of practical import needs care and caveats（警告）, both of which can often be in short supply, or stripped out（剥离，剥除） to make a point（立论，表明一种看法）. However, it is now ever more possible for studies of climate change to look at the past, not the future. The 20th century saw a fair amount of warming, and it is sometimes possible to compare what this warming did and didn’t do with what future warming might or might not do. This is what a paper published in Nature this week does in an attempt to re-examine, and perhaps close down（此处表示结束这个话题？）, long-running debates about malaria and climate change. Both the malaria parasite and the mosquitoes which spread it respond to（取代result from） temperature and moisture. Understanding those responses（对应前面的respond to） makes it possible to model what changes in climate might mean to the incidence（发生率） of the disease. Such models have suggested that in a warmer world the area subject to endemic（风土性的，地方性的） malaria would increase, perhaps quite a lot, though some places would see a reduction due to increased aridity（干旱，乏味）. The caveats here include noting that the climate models can make no great claims to accuracy at the regional level and that such an approach does almost nothing to deal with changes in land use, wealth and public health programmes. subject to 使服从于，使经历，使经受 These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. 这些是根据数据和统计资料显示出来的危机指标。 You should subject yourself to my command.你必须服从我。 We were subjected to very close questioning.我们经受了非常严厉的拷问。 Determinism, is the theory that the world, or the nature is everywhere subject to casual law. 宿命论是指世界或自然界处处受到因果关系理论的约束。 One of the main thrusts（推力） of the new Nature paper, which is an offshoot（分支，分流） of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust to produce an accurate worldwide atlas（地图集） of where cases of malaria actually take place, is to see how much of what happened to the spread of malaria in the 20th century can be explained by（此处用被动，因为前面一直在说malaria） what happened to the climate. The answer, according to Peter Gething of Oxford University and his colleagues there and in Florida, is not much. They conclude that claims that a warming climate has led to more widespread disease and death due to malaria are largely at odds with（与。。不和，与。。不符） the evidence, which shows the areas effected shrinking（减少）, and the size of the effect shrinking too. Increases in the spread and severity of the disease burden foreseen over the next 40 years by the biological models are far smaller than the decreases in comparable measures seen over the past century. thrust：推力，强加于 we can't thrust our thought on others.我们不能把自己的想法强加于他人。 He thrusts his way through the crowd.他冲过人群。 The second tack of their argument is to compare the sort of effect seen in biology-based models of where malaria might spread with both models of and data on the effects direct intervention against the disease can have. Again the effects due to climate are small, even negligible（可用在argu里）, compared with the effects that interventions have achieved already and might achieve in decades to come. The marginal areas where climate might enlarge the area at risk are also, the article argues, the areas where the greatest declines in transmission have recently been seen thanks to increased intervention. tack：大头针，改变方向 The ship tacked against the wind. 船只逆风而行。 come down to brass tacks 说话单刀直入 on the right tack 方向正确 If you can't persuade him, try a new tack. 如果你不能说服他，尝试新办法吧 The conclusion is clear. People who are thinking about what to do about malaria should bear in mind(keep in mind) that the biological basis of its distribution may change in a warmer world. Those thinking about the overall danger that climate change represents should not spend their time worrying about its impact on malaria. Caveats that count Is there a wider conclusion to draw about computer models such as those that underlay frightening statements about malaria in a climate-changed world? Perhaps; but like the models themselves, it comes with caveats. Scientists tend to model what can be modelled, and natural scientists, in particular, tend to prefer models that incorporate at least some aspects of the underlying processes which they are interested in, rather than working purely on empirical correlations(经验关系). This means that if you search the scientific literature for approaches to the future, you will tend to find answers based on natural processes. If other knowledge suggests that natural processes aren’t the most important aspect of the problem at hand, then it’s a good idea to look at the models with that provision in the forefront of your mind（首先想到的）. The other vital lesson is that the caveats matter. Pretty much every paper presenting a biology-based model of malaria’s dependence on climate contains a warning that changes in economy, technology and society matter too, and aren’t in the model. To transmit the model’s results without important caveats is reckless（鲁莽的）（句型好好套）. The recklessness may, at times, be deliberate. In the reporting of climate change, as in the reporting of pretty much everything else, bad news gets a better airing than good（这啥意思？）. There is no doubt that some environmental advocates are willing to exploit that dynamic to the full. Paul Reiter, a researcher into medical entomology at the Institut Pasteur, has spent the past decade pushing back against exaggerated claims about（收回，把。。往后推：push back） the effects of climate on malaria. But he and others have not done so in vain. push back：延迟，往后推 The company has asked me to push back the time my departure from L.A branch until the the IBN negotiations has finished. ...延迟我离开洛杉矶分公司的日期。。。 Look at what the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say about malaria. The 1995 report made much of the effects of climate on the basis of biological models, and exaggerated some of the risk through factual error. One does not need sophisticated insights into modelling or epistemology（认识论） to realise that a climate-enabled spread of malarial mosquitoes to altitudes above 2,500 metres would have little impact, in itself, on Nairobi or Harare: pace the IPCC, both cities sit only about 1,500 metres above sea level. Even in that report, though, there were caveats. The subsequent 2001 report strengthened them and softened the conclusion（减轻。。结论：很好的用法）. In its 2007 report the IPCC pulled back from what it had said in 2001. In its next report, currently slated to appear in 2014, it will doubtless take the new Oxford work on board. If one is going to be optimistic about the future of malaria, one might also, with caution, be optimistic about the future of assessments of climate change. Things can, over time, get better, especially when the record of what has happened to date gets taken seriously. They will do so quicker if people accept both the usefulness and limits of models of the future, as well as the appeal of models of the past.

azure9UID: 2789030

Synthetic biology
And man made life
Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor (see article). Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff.

Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth.

Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops (see article), greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

On the face of it, then, artificial life looks like a wonderful thing. Yet that is not how many will view the announcement. For them, a better word than “creation” is “tampering”. Have scientists got too big for their boots? Will their hubris bring Nemesis in due course? What horrors will come creeping out of the flask on the laboratory bench?

Such questions are not misplaced—and should give pause even to those, including this newspaper, who normally embrace advances in science with enthusiasm. The new biological science does have the potential to do great harm, as well as good. “Predator” and “disease” are just as much part of the biological vocabulary as “nurturing” and “growth”. But for good or ill it is here. Creating life is no longer the prerogative of gods.

Children of a lesser god
It will be a while, yet, before lifeforms are routinely designed on a laptop. But this will come. The past decade, since the completion of the Human Genome Project, has seen two related developments that make it almost inevitable. One is an extraordinary rise in the speed, and fall in the cost, of analysing the DNA sequences that encode the natural “software” of life. What once took years and cost millions now takes days and costs thousands. Databases are filling up with the genomes of everything from the tiniest virus to the tallest tree.

These genomes are the raw material for synthetic biology. First, they will provide an understanding of how biology works right down to the atomic level. That can then be modelled in human-designed software so that synthetic biologists will be able to assemble new constellations of genes with a reasonable presumption that they will work in a predictable way. Second, the genome databases are a warehouse that can be raided for whatever part a synthetic biologist requires.

The other development is faster and cheaper DNA synthesis. This has lagged a few years behind DNA analysis, but seems to be heading in the same direction. That means it will soon be possible for almost anybody to make DNA to order, and dabble in synthetic biology.

That is good, up to a point. Innovation works best when it is a game that anyone can play. The more ideas there are, the better the chance some will prosper. Unfortunately and inevitably, some of those ideas will be malicious. And the problem with malicious biological inventions—unlike, say, guns and explosives—is that once released, they can breed by themselves.

Biology really is different
The Home Brew computing club launched Steve Jobs and Apple, but similar ventures produced a thousand computer viruses. What if a home-brew synthetic-biology club were accidentally to launch a real virus or bacterium? What if a terrorist were to do the same deliberately?

The risk of accidentally creating something bad is probably low. Most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead. It doesn’t fight back. Living hosts do. Creating something bad deliberately, whether the creator is a teenage hacker, a terrorist or a rogue state, is a different matter. No one now knows how easy it would be to turbo-charge an existing human pathogen, or take one that infects another type of animal and assist its passage over the species barrier. We will soon find out, though.
It is hard to know how to address this threat. The reflex, to restrict and ban, has worked (albeit far from perfectly) for more traditional sorts of biological weapons. Those, though, have been in the hands of states. The ubiquity of computer viruses shows what can happen when technology gets distributed.

Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach: openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to oppose the villains is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly. If pathogens can be designed by laptop, vaccines can be, too. And, just as “open source” software lets white-hat computer nerds work against the black-hats, so open-source biology would encourage white-hat geneticists.

Regulation—and, especially, vigilance—will still be needed. Keeping an eye out for novel diseases is sensible even when such diseases are natural. Monitoring needs to be redoubled and co-ordinated. Then, whether natural or artificial, the full weight of synthetic biology can be brought to bear on the problem. Encourage the good to outwit the bad and, with luck, you keep Nemesis at bay.

azure9UID: 2789030

Germany vs. Europe
Published: May 26, 2010

Germany’s commitment to the European Union has been central to its postwar rehabilitation and its economic success. For years, Germany played the role in Europe that America so frequently plays globally — the locomotive whose dynamism and demand helps turn around recessions before they deepen into depressions.
Now, at the worst possible moment, Germany is turning to nationalist illusions. Europe’s past economic successes are now viewed as German successes. Europe’s current deep problems are everyone else’s except Germany’s. That is neither realistic nor sustainable. But German politicians and commentators are callously and self-destructively feeding these ideas.
Earlier this year, when Germany was still refusing to participate in a bailout, the country’s largest newspaper by circulation, Bild, suggested Greece should sell the Acropolis to pay off its bond market creditors. (It estimated the monument could bring in $140 billion.) A senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suggested auctioning off some of Greece’s Aegean islands. Meanwhile, a Bild poll showed a majority of Germans in favor of expelling Greece from the euro.
After a rough stretch following reunification, Germany took the tough decisions necessary to restore its competitiveness and revive growth. As a result, it is doing far better than the rest of Europe, with a low fiscal deficit and strong export surpluses. But its export-dependent economy would sputter if European consumers — its main customers — could no longer afford to buy its goods. German banks lent billions to Greece and other troubled European countries. If things don’t turn around quickly, those loans may have to be written down.
Germany also has contributed less than its fair share to the global stimulus, preferring to free ride on American and Chinese stimulus spending. And the euro’s underlying problem — the lack of an enforceable common fiscal policy, which allowed Greece and the others to rack up deficits they could not afford — is the responsibility of all the euro’s creators, Germany prominent among them.
Germans have not been eager to hear those less-flattering parts of the story, and their leaders haven’t been eager to tell them. For months, Mrs. Merkel resisted all appeals — by other European leaders and Washington — to, well, be a European leader. When Germany finally agreed to contribute to a bailout fund — under threat of a Continentwide crash — Europe’s economic problems were far worse, and Germany and others had to ante up a lot more cash.
Europe’s most-troubled economies today — Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy — bear plenty of responsibility for this mess. They spent lavishly during the bubble. They failed to reform their rigid and inefficient labor markets and to contain their increasingly uncompetitive wage costs. The rest of Europe, including Germany, should have demanded adjustments earlier, but didn’t.
With devaluation not an option for euro members, Europe’s high-deficit countries have been forced into steep tax increases and deep spending cuts to bring their soaring deficits under control and calm the bond markets. Necessary as they are, these cuts also run a very high risk of plunging the Continent into deep recession this year unless Germany offsets them with aggressive stimulus of its own. We hope Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will remind German officials of that on his visit to Berlin on Thursday.
Instead of committing to more spending, Germany is now preparing a multiyear program of deep spending cuts. Given its troubled history, we can understand its fear of deficit spending and inflation. But right now more German austerity will likely cripple Europe’s nascent recovery and Germany’s own prosperity. That is another hard truth that Mrs. Merkel needs to tell her party and her country.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

13-2

Dicing(将。。切成丁，赌输) with data Google and especially Facebook should change the way they look after people’s personal information May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition IN THE space of a week two of the best-known internet companies have found themselves in a pickle over privacy(显得有点乱，困难重重). Facebook faces criticism for making more information about its users available by default. Meanwhile Google has been castigated（严正，修订） by a bevy（群） of privacy regulators for inadvertently collecting data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in people’s homes as part of a project to capture images of streets around the world. castigate：严整，申诉 He was castigated for his carelessness when doing his homework. 他因为做作业时马马虎虎而遭到批评。 Although the two cases are distinct, they have revived fears that online privacy is being trampled（践踏） underfoot（在脚下） as internet behemoths（网络爬虫？） race to grab as much data as possible. And they have provoked calls for tougher action by regulators and governments to prevent web firms from abusing the mountains of personal data they now hold. Danah Boyd, a social-networking expert, has even argued that Facebook, with its hordes（一大群） of members around the world, is now so embedded in people’s lives（与人们生活息息相关） that it should be regulated as a utility. The firms have fought back. Facebook claims that most of its users are comfortable with the changes it has introduced, including one that lets it share detailed customer data with some external sites. It has blamed the furore（勃然大怒） on media hysteria（竭斯底里）; only a few privacy activists have publicly committed “Facebook suicide” by closing their accounts (see article). As for Google, it has apologised for its “mistake” and says that leaders of its Street View project knew nothing about the software that allowed its roving （徘徊，流动的）vehicles to capture snippets（小片，片段，不知道天高地厚的年轻人） of e-mails. Friends or foes? At its most extreme, the attack on Facebook and Google makes little sense. Treating them as utilities seems excessive, for two reasons. They are not essential services that enjoy a local or national monopoly; people who feel their privacy is being violated are free to hop to other web services（hop好生动的哇） (remember AltaVista and MySpace?), though many sites deliberately make it hard for them to take their data with them. A second reason to tread carefully is that strict regulation could stifle（扼杀，窒息） the rapid innovation in business models that has thrived（繁荣，兴旺） on the internet. Instead, officials should concentrate on enforcing existing privacy rules—something they seem reassuringly keen to do. Canada’s privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has given warning that her organisation may take action against Facebook for violating a deal reached last year requiring the network to seek users’ permission before sharing their data.                           However, even if, like this newspaper, you both distrust government intervention and believe the world has gained from the sharing of information on the web, there are plainly real grounds for concern. For instance, Google claims it discovered that its software had been accidentally recording private information for several years only after privacy officials in Germany demanded that it come clean about（坦白交代） the data being collected. That is a stunning（极好的，震耳欲聋的） admission from a technology giant（技术大牛，哈~）—and privacy watchdogs（联邦隐私委员会） are right to investigate that. Facebook’s problem is more fundamental. True, the social network has some of the most extensive privacy controls on the web, but these have now become so complex—and are tweaked（拧，焦急） so often—that even privacy experts find them bamboozling（欺骗，使迷惑）. The company also has a powerful incentive to push people into revealing more information. Facebook generates most of its revenue from targeted advertisements based on users’ demography（人口统计学） and interests, so the more data users share publicly the more money it can mint from ads. It may well be betting（打赌） that users are now so hooked（挂钩，迷住） that they are unlikely to revolt（反抗） against a gradual loosening of privacy safeguards（好生动的撒）. The worst thing is Facebook’s underlying prejudice against privacy. Sign up and it assumes you want to share as much data as possible; if not, you have to change the settings, which can be a fiddly（要求高精度的，精确的） business. The presumption should be exactly the opposite: the default should be tight privacy controls, which users may then loosen if they choose. If Facebook fails to simplify and improve its privacy policy, it will justly risk the wrath（愤怒） of regulators—and many more Facebook suicides.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

14-1 徐小平老師推薦

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Many Faiths, One Truth By TENZIN GYATSO Published: May 24, 2010 WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior(差的，次级的). Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today. Related Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence（virus，毒性，毒力）. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets（建造清真寺） and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith（adhere to：还可以这样用的哦）. Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures（为啥cultures放在这里呢？不应该放一个形容词吗？）, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries. Granted（在issue中挺好用的）, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions. （先抑后扬的写法） An early eye-opener for me（大开眼界） was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely（不合时宜的，过早的） death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions. A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves（大块烤过的食物） and fishes, his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering. I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us. Take Judaism, for instance. I first visited a synagogue（犹太集会） in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too — as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in the welfare of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings（杰出人物，ISSUE48可以用哦） like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known Baba Amte, who founded a leper（麻风病患者） colony not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned（回避）. When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony. Compassion is equally important in Islam — and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith（paint：多生动的一个词）. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading（恳求） that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion. Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam（伊斯兰的阿訇） in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines（铭记，珍藏） compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran（可兰经）. Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides（分歧） at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one. Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole（事关全民族、全人类）. 真是精辟~如果我能写一半就好了~

谦行天下UID: 2797557

11-2 【学习】

‘Lost’ Fans Suffer From Blabbermouths Online By JENNA WORTHAM Published: May 21, 2010 Erin Farley has her plans for Sunday all laid out[carried out]. Two hours before the last episode of “Lost” is broadcast three time zones away, she will shut down her home Internet connection. TweetDeck? Off. Facebook? Off. Her cellphone? Stashed[hide] out of reach. “I’ll turn off the whole Internet just to avoid having anything spoiled,” said Ms. Farley, a 31-year-old freelance[a writer or artist who sells services to different employers without a long-term contract with any of them] writer in Portland, Ore. “I don’t want to ruin the surprise.” The Internet in general, and social media like Twitter in particular, can be a minefield[full of dangerous] for those who are trying to keep themselves in the dark about an event or show so they can enjoy it later. When the Olympics and Grammy Awards are time-delayed, for example, armchair critics chattering about the wins and losses online can destroy the suspense in an instant. But the problem is especially acute for fans of “Lost.” The show’s time-bending storyline and layers of mysteries can mean that a single indiscreet[lacking discretion; injudicious] tweet[weak sound of a bird] might ruin a whole episode for someone who has yet to see it. At the same time, some fans can’t resist the urge to share, and the jaw-dropping plot twists in the run-up to the finale Sunday night on ABC have given them plenty to post about. DVR users and people who don’t live on the East Coast, where “Lost” is shown first, are especially at risk for online spoilers. Overseas fans may have to wait days for a local broadcast — several years in Internet time. This is one reason that the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, said this week that it had arranged to have broadcasters in several European countries and Israel show the “Lost” finale early Monday morning, at the same time it will be seen on the West Coast in the United States. The move will save Kelvin Downey, a 23-year-old bartender[an employee who mixes and serves alcoholic drinks at a bar] in Ireland, from having to spend four days dodging mentions of the finale online or being tempted to download an illegal copy of it — though it will mean tuning in at the very un-prime-time[prime-time:the hours between 7 and 11 p.m. when the largest tv audience is available] hour of 5 a.m. on Monday to watch. “We were getting worried that it’d be ruined for us,” Mr. Downey said. “But now that we can watch the simulcast[a broadcast that is carried simultaneously by radio and television ], we won’t have to avoid Twitter, or the Internet in general, at all this time.” Given that “Lost” has stretched on for 121 episodes over six seasons, each more enigmatic than the last, its die-hard fans feel they have a lot at stake. “If you’ve invested that much time watching the arc of the show, you don’t want to have it blown,” said Christopher Frankonis, 40, who works at a bookstore in Portland. “You want the payoff to be as pure as possible. You just have to log off and wait your turn.” The tension between the oversharers and those who just don’t want to know has at times pitted friend against friend. “If I post about ‘Lost,’ I try to keep it cryptic[having a secret or hidden meaning],” said Kristina Lucarelli, 23, who lives in Manhattan and was watching the show this week with friends and about 150 other fans at an East Village bar called Professor Thom’s. But two weeks ago, after watching in disbelief as (spoiler alert) two of the show’s main characters met a watery demise[the time when something ends], Ms. Lucarelli quickly posted about it. “I was so shocked,” she said. “I couldn’t help myself.” “She completely ruined it for me,” interjected Whitney Jefferson, 25. “I was waiting to watch it with my boyfriend and she tweeted about it and then commented on Facebook.” Analysts say Twitter is typically a benefit to time-delayed television. “The East Coast builds the West Coast’s awareness,” said Mark Ghuneim, chief executive of Wiredset, a digital advertising agency based in New York that creates and tracks social media marketing campaigns. “People see others talking about it and they tune in.” But with shows as rich and complex as “Lost,” Mr. Ghuneim said, “the Web has turned into one big spoiler.” During each broadcast of “Lost” this season, an average of 27,000 posts about it flowed through Twitter, according to Wiredset. That topped even the mighty “American Idol,” which averages 25,000 posts an episode. By comparison, there were about 310,000 posts about the Super Bowl during the game. ABC executives say social media reinforces the appeal of watching a prime-time show like “Lost” as it is broadcast, even in an era of Hulu and TiVo where most programming can be delivered on demand. “People still like to come together to watch something and talk about it, regardless of the platform,” said Michael Benson, executive vice president of marketing for the ABC Entertainment Group. Not everyone can deflect “Lost” spoilers. Ryan and Jennifer Ozawa live in Hawaii, where the lush forests form the backdrop for many of the show’s scenes, and where they record “The Transmission,” a popular podcast about the show. The Ozawas say that for them, there is no safe zone, online or off. “We saw Michelle Rodriguez dressed as a cop months before it was revealed to be her back story,” Mr. Ozawa said. The pair differ sharply in their opinions on prebroadcast “Lost” knowledge. “I love seeing the reactions start streaming in around 3 p.m. Hawaii time,” Mr. Ozawa said. “But that is the point at which my wife turns everything completely off.” Mr. Ozawa said he had an “uncontrollable obsessive hunger” when it comes to knowing more about “Lost,” so much so that he watched part of the filming of the final episode. “But that’s all I’ll say, because as much as anyone, I know ‘Lost’ is all about the reveal,” he said.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

12-1 [learned by glass hour]

Brazil's booming economy
Flying too high for safety
A burst of Chinese-level growth cannot be sustained. But it hints at Brazil’s new-found strength, and is perfectly timed for the presidential election
May 20th 2010 | SÃO PAULO | From The Economist print edition

NEW skyscrapers are going up along Avenida Faria Lima in the business district of São Paulo. Sales of computers and cars are booming, while a glut of passengers has clogged[stopped up; clogged up] the main airports. Brazil created 962,000 new formal-sector[a particular aspect of life or activity] jobs between January and April—the highest figure for these months since records began in 1992. Everything indicates that over the past six months the economy has grown at an annualised pace of over 10%. Even allowing for an expected slackening, many analysts forecast that growth in 2010 will be 7%—the highest rate since 1986.

The problem is that while it may be growing at Chinese speeds, Brazil is not China. Because it still saves and invests too little, most economists think it is restricted to a speed limit of 5% at the most, if it is not to crash. The growth spurt is partly the result of the stimulus measures taken by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government when the world financial crisis briefly tipped the country into recession late in 2008. The trouble, say critics, is that much of the extra government spending is turning out to be permanent—and so the economy is starting to resemble a Toyota with the accelerator stuck to the floor[????].
The strain is showing. Businesses are chasing after scarce skilled labour. Inflation for the 12 months to April reached 5.3%, above the Central Bank’s target of 4.5%. Imports are set to top exports this year, for the first time since 2000, and the current-account deficit should widen to 3% of GDP.

The authorities are starting to worry. Last month the Central Bank raised its benchmark Selic interest rate by 0.75%, the first rise in nearly two years. Many economists in São Paulo believe that this one will be followed by others, taking the rate from its low of 8.75% to 13% by next year.

The government’s critics say that lax fiscal policy is making the Central Bank’s task harder, increasing the risk of the boom ending in a sharp slowdown next year. When he became president in 2003, Lula stuck to the sound fiscal policies he inherited from his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Thanks to faster growth and higher tax revenues, between 2003 and 2008 Lula’s government managed to keep public debt in check even while expanding spending. By treating the recession as “a licence to spend”, the government is now undermining the credibility it piled up, says Raul Velloso, a public-finance specialist in Brasilia.

Officials share those concerns—up to a point. The government has withdrawn nearly all of the tax breaks it enacted to boost demand during the recession. On May 13th ministers declared that they would shave 10 billion reais ($5.4 billion) from the running costs of the federal government this year. That followed a similar announcement of another 21 billion reais of cuts in March. But this hardly amounts to slamming on the brakes. The cuts are to the generous (and notional) budget approved by Congress. Even if implemented in full, they will merely slow the rate of increase in government spending, keeping it constant or slightly lower as a share of GDP, concedes Nelson Barbosa, a senior finance official.

The government is still injecting money into the economy in two controversial ways. First, the National Development Bank (BNDES), whose loans cost about half the Selic rate, has expanded its lending by almost half. It has been able to do this because the treasury granted it two long-term credits totalling 180 billion reais. Those credits, for which the BNDES has offered IOUs, have led to accusations of creative accounting. While adding to the government’s gross debt, they have not driven up the more closely watched figure for public debt, net of assets: at 42.7% of GDP, this is back to its level of mid-2008, and is much lower than the debt burdens of European countries.



Second, the government has jacked up[improved]its payroll[a list of employees and their salaries] spending. The number of federal civil servants has increased fairly modestly since 2003 (by around 10%). But they have been treated generously: the total federal wage bill more than doubled in nominal terms between 2003 and 2009, while inflation was less than 50%. Lula has pushed up the minimum wage much faster than inflation too. That has helped to make the income distribution less skewed[having an oblique or slanting direction or position], and boosted consumer demand. But it has a knock-on effect[indirect] on pension benefits[retire].

Mr Barbosa insists that faster growth will allow the government to squeeze payroll and pension spending[a situation in which increased costs cannot be passed on to the customer] gently over the coming years. The BNDES helped sustain investment when the financial markets seized up. The latest bout of financial turmoil has seen the real depreciate by 5% or so this month. But Brazil’s stockpile of international reserves means it is well-placed to withstand market panics. Mr Barbosa says that the critics should look at the long-term trend, under which real interest rates (ie, after inflation) have fallen from up to 20% in 2003 to between 5% and 10%. Once the new monetary[related to money] squeeze is over they will fall further, he says.



Certainly many Europeans would love to have Brazil’s problems. Its economy has acquired underlying strength. Companies are scurrying to satisfy the demand for consumer goods of a rapidly expanding lower-middle class, while China continues to suck in Brazil’s exports of raw materials. Productivity is rising. Costs per unit of labour are increasing at only about half the rate of real wages, reckons José Roberto Mendonça de Barros, a consultant and former finance official.

But commodity prices are starting to weaken. Faster growth would be more assured if the government made room for lower interest rates and installed better infrastructure[the stock of basic facilities and capital equipment needed for the functioning of a country or area]. The next president, elected in October, will have to tackle this. The economy’s red-hot start to the election year has increased the chance that it will be Lula’s candidate, Dilma Rousseff, who gets the chance to try.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

12-2[learn by glass hour]

EDITORIAL
Jobs and the Class of 2010
Published: May 21, 2010

Commencement[an academic exercise in which diplomas are conferred] is supposed to be filled with hope, but for the class of 2010, these are grim times. Over the past year, the unemployment rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.1 percent. For the roughly half of high school graduates under 25 and not in college, the average is 22.8 percent.

Worse, a deep labor recession, like this one, may be more than a temporary hardship. It could signal a long-term decline in living standards — downward mobility.
downward mobility:【社会学】(由于职业或婚姻等变化而引起的)社会地位的下降;(个人、社会组织、阶层等的)下向流动 [参较 vertical mobility, upward mobility, horizontal mobility]

Where you start out in your career has a big impact on where you end up. When jobs are scarce, more college grads start out in lower-level jobs with lower starting salaries.

Academic research suggests that for many of these graduates, that correlates to overall lower levels of career attainment and lower lifetime earnings.

Tough times for college grads mean even tougher times for high school graduates, because fewer jobs mean more competition from college-educated workers. In the past year, 59.5 percent of young high school grads on average had a job, compared with 70.2 percent in 2007.

The pat answer is that college students should consider graduate school as a way to delay a job search until things turn around, and that more high school students should go to college to improve their prospects.

For many undergraduates, especially those with large student debts, graduate school would be prohibitively[to a prohibitive degree] expensive. And while more than half of this year’s high school grads are expected to be enrolled in college in the fall, most will have to work to help pay the bills. For them, college is not a retreat from a bad job market; a bad market is an obstacle to a college degree.

Washington has not been helping enough. The 2009 stimulus package — thanks to President Obama, Congressional Democrats and a few Republican senators — has supported some 2.5 million jobs, helping to avert a much deeper recession. The economy is still missing more than 10 million jobs, and unless more is done to spur employment, the impact on many new graduates and other workers will be harsh.
the impact on...will be harsh

In his budget this year, Mr. Obama called for $266 billion in spending for jobs and stimulus. So far, Congress has passed only a $15 billion tax credit for hiring in 2010 and a few short-term extensions of unemployment benefits. On Thursday, Democratic Congressional leaders called for $80 billion to extend federal benefits and subsidies for the unemployed through 2010 and to provide more aid to states. More emergency spending is crucial to support consumer demand and, by extension, hiring. The Democratic proposal also calls for relatively modest sums for summer youth jobs, small-business lending and state infrastructure bonds.

The measures should be passed quickly. But recent debates suggests that the Republicans — in their role as nouveau deficit hawks — are likely to oppose more job-related spending unless it is paid for. The deficit needs to be addressed when the economy recovers. Right now, tax increases or spending cuts would only reduce economic activity, weakening the boost the measures are supposed to provide.

The White House and Democratic lawmakers need to make that case forcefully. Lawmakers owe it to their constituents — and explaining the need for more job spending should not be that hard. Far too many Americans know how bad the situation is out there.

In the longer term, Congress will also need to do more to foster jobs and industries of the future, like green technology. Several taxes could be enacted to help finance longer-term efforts, including the bank tax proposed by President Obama. Congress and the administration should also consider a financial transactions tax, both to curb speculation and to raise revenue to rebuild the economy that was damaged, in large part, by the banks’ recklessness[the trait of giving little thought to danger].

Without a bigger vision, more money and political courage, the future for those just entering the job market and those already there looks bleak for years to come.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

14-2

Op-Ed Columnist Two Theories of Change By DAVID BROOKS Published: May 24, 2010 These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition（迷信） and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth. Their great model was Descartes（笛卡尔）. He aimed to begin human understanding anew. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past and build from the ground up（从开头，彻底的）, erecting（建立） one logical certainty upon another. What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution. But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits. They put more emphasis on our sentiments（感情，情感）. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism（部落文化）, which mar（玷污） rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that. These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated（明确表达） most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.” As Levin shows, Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again. Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them. Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees（受托者） for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have. Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working. If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch（白手起家）. Burke also supported the American Revolution, but saw it in a different light than Paine（pay attention to the word "light"）. He believed the British Parliament had recklessly trampled(践踏) upon the ancient liberties the colonists had come to enjoy. The Americans were seeking to preserve what they had. We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention（争论的焦点） between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one. Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists（辩论家） of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics. The children（offspring） of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

13-1【by 谦行天下】
Don’t sweat it
Development and public-health initiatives will matter much more to malaria【疟疾】 than the climate will
May 19th 2010 | From The Economist online

ONE of the obvious problems with predicting the future effects of climate change is that they haven’t happened. This makes climate studies highly dependent on models, which invariably and unavoidably make simplifying assumptions. This means that using their results to say anything of practical import needs care and caveats【a warning against certain acts】, both of which can often be in short supply, or stripped out to make a point.

However, it is now ever more possible for studies of climate change to look at the past, not the future. The 20th century saw a fair amount of warming, and it is sometimes possible to compare what this warming did and didn’t do with what future warming might or might not do. This is what a paper published in Nature this week does in an attempt to re-examine, and perhaps close down, long-running debates about malaria and climate change.

Both the malaria parasite and the mosquitoes which spread it respond to temperature and moisture. Understanding those responses makes it possible to model what changes in climate might mean to the incidence of the disease. Such models have suggested that in a warmer world the area subject to endemic malaria would increase, perhaps quite a lot, though some places would see a reduction due to increased aridity[a deficiency of moisture ]. The caveats here include noting that the climate models can make no great claims to accuracy at the regional level and that such an approach does almost nothing to deal with changes in land use, wealth and public health programmes.

One of the main thrusts[the act of applying force to propel something] of the new Nature paper, which is an offshoot[a natural consequence of development] of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust to produce an accurate worldwide atlas of where cases of malaria actually take place, is to see how much of what happened to the spread of malaria in the 20th century can be explained by what happened to the climate. The answer, according to Peter Gething of Oxford University and his colleagues there and in Florida, is not much. They conclude that claims that a warming climate has led to more widespread disease and death due to malaria are largely at odds with the evidence, which shows the areas effected shrinking, and the size of the effect shrinking too. Increases in the spread and severity of the disease burden foreseen over the next 40 years by the biological models are far smaller than the decreases in comparable measures seen over the past century.
claims that ...are largely at odds with the evidence

The second tack [ the act of changing tack] of their argument is to compare the sort of effect seen in biology-based models of where malaria might spread with both models of and data on the effects direct intervention against the disease can have. Again the effects due to climate are small, even negligible, compared with the effects that interventions have achieved already and might achieve in decades to come. The marginal areas where climate might enlarge the area at risk are also, the article argues, the areas where the greatest declines in transmission have recently been seen thanks to increased intervention

The conclusion is clear. People who are thinking about what to do about malaria should bear in mind that the biological basis of its distribution may change in a warmer world. Those thinking about the overall danger that climate change represents should not spend their time worrying about its impact on malaria.
//There are very well sentences in this paragraph.

Caveats that count
Is there a wider conclusion to draw about computer models such as those that underlay frightening statements about malaria in a climate-changed world? Perhaps; but like the models themselves, it comes with caveats.

Scientists tend to model what can be modelled, and natural scientists, in particular, tend to prefer models that incorporate at least some aspects of the underlying processes which they are interested in, rather than working purely on empirical[based on experiences] correlations. This means that if you search the scientific literature for approaches to the future, you will tend to find answers based on natural processes. If other knowledge suggests that natural processes aren’t the most important aspect of the problem at hand, then it’s a good idea to look at the models with that provision in the forefront of your mind.

The other vital lesson is that the caveats matter. Pretty much every paper presenting a biology-based model of malaria’s dependence on climate contains a warning that changes in economy, technology and society matter too, and aren’t in the model. To transmit the model’s results without important caveats is reckless.
'To transmit the model’s results without important caveats is reckless.'

The recklessness may, at times, be deliberate. In the reporting of climate change, as in the reporting of pretty much everything else, bad news gets a better airing than good. There is no doubt that some environmental advocates are willing to exploit that dynamic to the full. Paul Reiter, a researcher into medical entomology at the Institut Pasteur, has spent the past decade pushing back against exaggerated claims about the effects of climate on malaria. But he and others have not done so in vain.
recklessness :
the trait of giving little thought to danger

ddeliberate:discuss the pros and cons of an issue

Look at what the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say about malaria. The 1995 report made much of the effects of climate on the basis of biological models, and exaggerated some of the risk through factual error. One does not need sophisticated insights into modelling or epistemology to realise that a climate-enabled spread of malarial mosquitoes to altitudes above 2,500 metres would have little impact, in itself, on Nairobi or Harare: pace the IPCC, both cities sit only about 1,500 metres above sea level.

Even in that report, though, there were caveats. The subsequent 2001 report strengthened them and softened the conclusion. In its 2007 report the IPCC pulled back from what it had said in 2001. In its next report, currently slated to appear in 2014, it will doubtless take the new Oxford work on board. If one is going to be optimistic about the future of malaria, one might also, with caution, be optimistic about the future of assessments of climate change. Things can, over time, get better, especially when the record of what has happened to date gets taken seriously. They will do so quicker if people accept both the usefulness and limits of models of the future, as well as the appeal of models of the past.

azure9UID: 2789030

EDITORIAL
While China Stands By
Published: May 27, 2010

There is only one country with any chance of getting through to North Korea. That is China, the North’s major supplier of aid, food and oil. As tensions on the Korean Peninsula continue to spiral — frighteningly — upward, China is refusing to get involved.
China has only one concern: avoiding any crisis that might unleash huge refugee flows. If it believes that the status quo is conducive to stability, it is mistaken.
Relations between the Koreas have threatened to explode since last week when the South accused the North of torpedoing a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. It offered compelling forensic evidence of the North’s role in the March attack, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.
What makes this so especially dangerous is that North Korea’s erratic leader, Kim Jong-il, is in a power struggle to ensure that his youngest son succeeds him. (American intelligence officials suspect Mr. Kim may have ordered the attack to prove his willingness to take on South Korea and its Western allies.)
North Korea often blusters, but it has gone much further this time. Over the last few days, it has cut almost all ties and agreements with the South and threatened war if Seoul proceeds with threatened sanctions. On Thursday, it severed a naval hot line that was supposed to prevent clashes in disputed waters.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried hard this week to convince Chinese leaders of North Korea’s culpability — and of the need for Beijing to press the North to accept responsibility. There is no doubt about the North’s involvement. An international team investigated the incident, and South Korea has produced a torpedo propeller with North Korean markings.
China needs to stop covering for its client and join in a United Nations Security Council statement that condemns the North’s behavior. Privately, Beijing should make clear to North Korea that any future acts of aggression will result in a cut off of aid. The United States, South Korea and Japan, which have taken a strong stand against the North, also must leave some room for Pyongyang to back down.
The two Koreas — which have never formally ended their war — need to finally set a demarcation line in the West Sea where the Cheonan was attacked and sank. China could do real good if it worked with the United States to bring the two Koreas to the negotiating table.

azure9UID: 2789030

Oxford Tradition Comes to This: ‘Death’ (Expound)
By SARAH LYALL
Published: May 27, 2010

OXFORD, England — The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.
“An exercise in showmanship to avoid answering the question,” is the way the historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on “innocence” in 1964, a tour de force effort that began with the opening chords of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and then brought in, among other things, the flawed heroes of Stendhal and the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp in the William Golding novel “Free Fall.”
No longer will other allusion-deploying Oxford youths have the chance to demonstrate the acrobatic flexibility of their intellect in quite the same way. All Souls, part of Oxford University, recently decided, with some regret, to scrap the one-word exam.
It has been offered annually since 1932 (and sporadically before that) as part of a grueling, multiday affair that, in one form or another, has been administered since 1878 and has been called the hardest exam in the world. The unveiling of the word was once an event of such excitement that even non-applicants reportedly gathered outside the college each year, waiting for news to waft out. Applicants themselves discovered the word by flipping over a single sheet of paper and seeing it printed there, all alone, like a tiny incendiary device.
But that was then. “For a number of years, the one-word essay question had not proved to be a very valuable way of providing insight into the merits of the candidates,” said Sir John Vickers, the warden, or head, of the college.
In a university full of quirky individual colleges with their own singular traditions, All Souls still stands out for the intellectual riches it offers and the awe it inspires. Founded in 1438 and not open to undergraduates, it currently has 76 fellows drawn from the upper echelons of academia and public life, most admitted on the strength of their achievements and scholarly credentials.
Previous fellows include Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Christopher Wren, William Gladstone and T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia). Hilaire Belloc and John Buchan are said to have failed to get in. In recent years, fellows have included a Nobel Prize winner, several cabinet members, a retired senior law lord and a lord chancellor.
In addition, two young scholars are chosen each year from among Oxford students who graduated recently with the highest possible academic results. Called examination fellows, they get perks including room and board, 14,783 pounds (about $21,000) a year for a seven-year term and the chance to engage in erudite discussions over languorous meals with the other fellows.
But first they have to take the exam. It consists of 12 hours of essays over two days. Half are on the applicants’ academic specialties, the other half on general subjects, with questions like: “Do the innocent have nothing to fear?” “Isn’t global warming preferable to global cooling?” “How many people should there be?” and the surprisingly relevant, because this is Britain: “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”
Those are daunting enough. But it is the one-word-question essay (known simply as “Essay”) that candidates still remember decades later. Past words, chosen by the fellows, included “style,” “censorship,” “charity,” “reproduction,” “novelty,” “chaos” and “mercy.”
It was not a test for everyone.
“Many candidates, including some of the best, seemed at a loss when confronted with this exercise,” said Mr. Briggs, a longtime teacher of modern history at Oxford.
Others found it exhilarating. “Brilliant fun,” a past applicant named Matthew Edward Harris wrote in The Daily Telegraph recently, recalling his 2007 essay, on “harmony.”
He had resolved, he said, that “No matter what word I was given, I would structure my answer using Hegel’s dialectic.” And then, like a chef rummaging through the recesses of his refrigerator for unlikely soup ingredients, he added a discussion of Kant’s categorical imperative and an analysis of the creative tensions among the vocalists in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (he didn’t get in).
The writer Harry Mount, an Oxford graduate and the author of “Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life,” didn’t get in, either. His essay, in 1994, was on “miracles.”
What was in it?
“Crying Madonnas in Ireland, that sort of thing,” Mr. Mount said. “And the battle between faith and cynicism. I was a cynic and didn’t believe in miracles, and perhaps that was bad. I had just read about Karl Popper and his theory of falsification, so I threw in a bit about that.”
Justin Walters, the founder and chief executive of Investis, an online corporate communication service company, said that writing his essay, on “corruption,” was not half as bad as the oral exam several weeks later, conducted by a long row of fellows peering across a table.
“ ‘Mr. Walters, you made some very interesting distinctions in your essay. Are you prepared to defend it?’ ” he remembered one of the fellows asking. Unfortunately, he had only a vague recollection of what he had written. “You’re the teacher — you figure it out,” he recalled thinking. (He must have done something right: he got in.)
Sir John, the current college warden, has worked as the Bank of England’s chief economist and been president of the Royal Economic Society, among other jobs. He draws a self-protective veil over the memory of his own essay, in 1979, on “conversion.”
“I do shudder at the thought of what I must have written,” he said.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

15-1

Synthetic biology And man made life Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition TO CREATE life is the prerogative（特权的） of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings（恳求） of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark（神圣火光）, a vital essence.（精华液） It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled（阐明） the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor (see article). Pedants may quibble（讥讽，嘲弄） that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order. That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation（爆炸声） of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth. Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering（领进，引进） in has been dubbed（复制的，译制的）, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops (see article), greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels（奇迹） could be designed and grown? On the face of it, then, artificial life looks like a wonderful thing. Yet that is not how many will view the announcement. For them, a better word than “creation” is “tampering”. Have scientists got too big for their boots? Will their hubris（狂妄自大的） bring Nemesis in due course? What horrors will come creeping out（偷偷溜出） of the flask（烧瓶） on the laboratory bench? Such questions are not misplaced—and should give pause even to those, including this newspaper, who normally embrace advances in science with enthusiasm. The new biological science does have the potential to do great harm, as well as good. “Predator” and “disease” are just as much part of the biological vocabulary as “nurturing” and “growth”. But for good or ill it is here. Creating life is no longer the prerogative of gods. Children of a lesser god It will be a while, yet, before lifeforms are routinely designed on a laptop. But this will come. The past decade, since the completion of the Human Genome Project, has seen two related developments that make it almost inevitable. One is an extraordinary rise in the speed, and fall in the cost, of analysing the DNA sequences that encode the natural “software” of life. What once took years and cost millions now takes days and costs thousands. Databases are filling up with the genomes of everything from the tiniest virus to the tallest tree. These genomes are the raw material for synthetic biology. First, they will provide an understanding of how biology works right down to the atomic level. That can then be modelled in human-designed software so that synthetic biologists will be able to assemble new constellations of genes with a reasonable presumption that they will work in a predictable way. Second, the genome databases are a warehouse that can be raided（袭击） for whatever part a synthetic biologist requires. The other development is faster and cheaper DNA synthesis. This has lagged（落后于） a few years behind DNA analysis, but seems to be heading in the same direction. That means it will soon be possible for almost anybody to make DNA to order, and dabble（玩水，泼溅） in synthetic biology. That is good, up to a point（从一点上说）. Innovation works best when it is a game that anyone can play. The more ideas there are, the better the chance some will prosper（pay attention to prosper）. Unfortunately and inevitably, some of those ideas will be malicious(恶毒的). And the problem with malicious biological inventions—unlike, say, guns and explosives—is that once released, they can breed by themselves. Biology really is different The Home Brew computing club launched Steve Jobs and Apple, but similar ventures produced a thousand computer viruses. What if a home-brew（自制的，自己酿制的） synthetic-biology club were accidentally to launch a real virus or bacterium? What if a terrorist were to do the same deliberately? The risk of accidentally creating something bad is probably low. Most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead. It doesn’t fight back. Living hosts do. Creating something bad deliberately, whether the creator is a teenage hacker, a terrorist or a rogue state（流氓国家）, is a different matter. No one now knows how easy it would be to turbo-charge（涡轮增压） an existing human pathogen（病原体）, or take one that infects another type of animal and assist its passage over the species barrier. We will soon find out, though. It is hard to know how to address this threat. The reflex, to restrict and ban, has worked (albeit far from perfectly) for more traditional sorts of biological weapons. Those, though, have been in the hands of states. The ubiquity（普遍存在的） of computer viruses shows what can happen when technology gets distributed. Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach: openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to oppose the villains（恶棍） is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly. If pathogens can be designed by laptop, vaccines can be, too. And, just as “open source” software lets white-hat（好人） computer nerds work against the black-hats（为非作歹，干坏事的）, so open-source biology would encourage white-hat geneticists. Regulation—and, especially, vigilance（警觉）—will still be needed. Keeping an eye out for novel diseases is sensible even when such diseases are natural. Monitoring needs to be redoubled and co-ordinated. Then, whether natural or artificial, the full weight of synthetic biology can be brought to bear on the problem. Encourage the good to outwit the bad（取其精华，弃其糟粕） and, with luck, you keep Nemesis at bay（keep Nemesis far away from you）.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

15-2

Germany vs. Europe Published: May 26, 2010 Germany’s commitment to the European Union has been central to its postwar rehabilitation(战后重建) and its economic success. For years, Germany played the role in Europe that America so frequently plays globally — the locomotive（机车，火车头） whose dynamism and demand helps turn around recessions before they deepen into depressions. Now, at the worst possible moment, Germany is turning to nationalist illusions（走进民族主义的疑惑？？）. Europe’s past economic successes are now viewed as German successes. Europe’s current deep problems are everyone else’s except Germany’s. That is neither realistic nor sustainable. But German politicians and commentators are callously（冷酷无情的） and self-destructively feeding these ideas（support such ideas）. Earlier this year, when Germany was still refusing to participate in a bailout（跳伞，急救的）, the country’s largest newspaper by circulation, Bild, suggested Greece should sell the Acropolis to pay off its bond market creditors. (It estimated the monument could bring in $140 billion.) A senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suggested auctioning off some of Greece’s Aegean islands. Meanwhile, a Bild poll showed a majority of Germans in favor of expelling Greece from the euro. After a rough stretch following reunification, Germany took the tough decisions necessary to restore its competitiveness and revive growth. As a result, it is doing far better than the rest of Europe, with a low fiscal deficit and strong export surpluses（贸易顺差）. But its export-dependent economy would sputter（气急败坏的，喷出的） if European consumers — its main customers — could no longer afford to buy its goods. German banks lent billions to Greece and other troubled European countries. If things don’t turn around quickly, those loans may have to be written down（变为坏账）. Germany also has contributed less than its fair share to the global stimulus, preferring to free ride on American and Chinese stimulus spending. And the euro’s underlying problem — the lack of an enforceable common fiscal policy, which allowed Greece and the others to rack up（击倒，获胜） deficits they could not afford — is the responsibility of all the euro’s creators, Germany prominent among them. Germans have not been eager to hear those less-flattering parts of the story, and their leaders haven’t been eager to tell them. For months, Mrs. Merkel resisted all appeals — by other European leaders and Washington — to, well, be a European leader. When Germany finally agreed to contribute to a bailout fund — under threat of a Continentwide crash — Europe’s economic problems were far worse, and Germany and others had to ante up（下赌注，付清） a lot more cash. Europe’s most-troubled economies today — Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy — bear plenty of responsibility for this mess. They spent lavishly（浪费的，丰富的） during the bubble. They failed to reform their rigid and inefficient labor markets and to contain their increasingly uncompetitive wage costs. The rest of Europe, including Germany, should have demanded adjustments earlier, but didn’t. With devaluation not an option for euro members（伴随状语）, Europe’s high-deficit countries have been forced into steep tax increases and deep spending cuts to bring their soaring deficits under control and calm the bond markets. Necessary as they are, these cuts also run a very high risk of plunging the Continent into deep recession this year unless Germany offsets them with aggressive stimulus of its own. We hope Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will remind German officials of that on his visit to Berlin on Thursday. Instead of committing to more spending, Germany is now preparing a multiyear program of deep spending cuts. Given its troubled history, we can understand its fear of deficit spending and inflation. But right now more German austerity（紧缩） will likely cripple（残废的，匍匐的） Europe’s nascent（初期的，发生中的） recovery（就是说Europe的恢复步履艰难） and Germany’s own prosperity. That is another hard truth that Mrs. Merkel needs to tell her party and her country.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

13-2【learn by谦行天下】
Dicing[赌] with data
Google and especially Facebook should change the way they look after people’s personal information
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN THE space of a week two of the best-known internet companies have found themselves in a pickle [混乱] over privacy. Facebook faces criticism for making more information about its users available by default. Meanwhile Google has been castigated by a bevy【一群】 of privacy regulators for inadvertently collecting data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in people’s homes as part of a project to capture images of streets around the world.
IMMIGRATION has Europe in a pickle.
移民问题让欧洲陷入到一种困境。

Although the two cases are distinct, they have revived fears that online privacy is being trampled underfoot as internet behemoths race to grab as much data as possible. And they have provoked calls for tougher action by regulators and governments to prevent web firms from abusing the mountains of personal data they now hold. Danah Boyd, a social-networking expert, has even argued that Facebook, with its hordes of members around the world, is now so embedded in people’s lives that it should be regulated as a utility.

The firms have fought back. Facebook claims that most of its users are comfortable with the changes it has introduced, including one that lets it share detailed customer data with some external sites. It has blamed the furore[a sudden outburst (as of protest)] on media hysteria[state of violent mental agitation]; only a few privacy activists have publicly committed “Facebook suicide” by closing their accounts (see article). As for Google, it has apologised for its “mistake” and says that leaders of its Street View project knew nothing about the software that allowed its roving vehicles to capture snippets of e-mails.
snippets :a small piece of anything (especially a piece that has been snipped off)
roving :(of groups of people) tending to travel and change settlements frequently

Friends or foes[friends or enemies]?
At its most extreme, the attack on Facebook and Google makes little sense. Treating them as utilities seems excessive, for two reasons. They are not essential services that enjoy a local or national monopoly; people who feel their privacy is being violated are free to hop to other web services (remember AltaVista and MySpace?), though many sites deliberately make it hard for them to take their data with them. A second reason to tread carefully is that strict regulation could stifle the rapid innovation in business models that has thrived on the internet. Instead, officials should concentrate on enforcing existing privacy rules—something they seem reassuringly keen to do. Canada’s privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, has given warning that her organisation may take action against Facebook for violating a deal reached last year requiring the network to seek users’ permission before sharing their data.
hop :move quickly from one place to another
deliberately:with intention; in an intentional manner

However, even if, like this newspaper, you both distrust government intervention and believe the world has gained from the sharing of information on the web, there are plainly real grounds for concern. For instance, Google claims it discovered that its software had been accidentally recording private information for several years only after privacy officials in Germany demanded that it come clean about the data being collected. That is a stunning admission from a technology giant—and privacy watchdogs are right to investigate that.
stunning:commanding attention

Facebook’s problem is more fundamental. True, the social network has some of the most extensive privacy controls on the web, but these have now become so complex—and are tweaked so often—that even privacy experts find them bamboozling. The company also has a powerful incentive to push people into revealing more information. Facebook generates most of its revenue from targeted advertisements based on users’ demography and interests, so the more data users share publicly the more money it can mint from ads. It may well be betting that users are now so hooked that they are unlikely to revolt against[厌恶] a gradual loosening of privacy safeguards.
bamboozling:conceal one's true motives from especially by elaborately feigning good intentions so as to gain an end

The worst thing is Facebook’s underlying prejudice against privacy. Sign up and it assumes you want to share as much data as possible; if not, you have to change the settings, which can be a fiddly business. The presumption should be exactly the opposite: the default should be tight privacy controls, which users may then loosen if they choose. If Facebook fails to simplify and improve its privacy policy, it will justly risk the wrath of regulators—and many more Facebook suicides.
fiddly ：需要手巧的，高于精度的
risk the wrath of ：激怒