谦行天下 comment 记

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】2-2 学习
Business software
Office politics
Microsoft bids to keep its grip on corporate computing against Google's challenge
May 13th 2010 | SAN FRANCISCO | From The Economist online

ANYONE attending the launch on May 12th of the latest version of Microsoft’s Office software suite could have been forgiven for thinking they had walked into a meeting about meteorology（这个词俺老记不住） rather than technology. All the talk was of clouds—vast data centres that provide cheap and plentiful computing capacity accessible via the internet—and how companies can take advantage of them to boost productivity. In a significant move, Microsoft announced new, web-based versions of popular applications such as Word and Excel as part of the “Office 2010” release, and unveiled changes designed to make it easier for workers to collaborate using its software.

These initiatives come at a critical time in the evolution of corporate computing. After dominating the office desktop for so long, Microsoft now faces a growing challenge from a variety of companies that are betting they can leverage（改变；杠杆） the cloud to erode its share of the market

Chief（这词用得好） among the pretenders to the throne is Google, which is aggressively seeking to persuade companies to ditch Office and other Microsoft products in favour of its own web-based offerings, called Google Apps. The competition between these twobehemoths（？） is likely to become even more intense as companies loosen their IT purse strings as the economic outlook improves. Google offers some of its web applications free, but these versions lack some of the more sophisticated functions that large companies often need, so it sells them a high-end version of Google Apps for $50 per user per year.

The battle with Google Apps is one that Microsoft cannot afford to lose

For Microsoft, this is a battle that it cannot afford to lose. Office is a big money-spinner for the company and many corporate users are locked into longer-term contracts that guarantee a steady stream of revenue from the software. Small wonder, then, that Stephen Elop, the head of Microsoft’s business division, has described the launch of Office 2010 as “an epic release”.

Among other things, the new, web-based version of Office will make it much easier for workers to use documents and spreadsheets on a host of different devices, including smart phones. Microsoft has also tweaked its software to make it easier for people to, say（这是另一种举例的方式么？）, embed videos in PowerPoint presentations and to integrate data from their social networks into online calendars and e-mail services. And the company plans to offer a free, stripped down version of its web apps that will compete directly with Google’s mass-market offering.

Microsoft says GM and Starbucks have chosen its web offerings after rejecting Google's

Mr Elop points out that Microsoft already has 40m paying customers using online services from the company, whereas Google can only boast a fraction of that number. He also claims that firms such as General Motors and Starbucks have decided to embrace Microsoft’s web offerings after weighing them up against Google’s. “The fact that Microsoft has to point to people who considered Google and decided not to go with us is evidence of how far we have come in the business arena,” sniffs one senior Google executive.

There is little doubt that Google, which claims it has over 2m users of its productivity apps, looms large（赫然耸立） in the rearview mirror（后视镜） of Microsoft’s business division. This week the company even cheekily（厚颜无耻的） proposed to firms using Office 2007, the previous release of Microsoft’s business software, that they bolt on Google Apps to get much of the web-based functionality they need, instead of upgrading to Office 2010. Google has also been tweaking its own cloud services（？） to make them run faster and to give users even more of a desktop-like experience.

Yet while Google has been able to sign up some large clients such as Genentech and Motorola, it still gets the lion’s share of its business from small and medium-sized companies. The internet giant argues that this will eventually change as more companies rebel against multiple-year contracts and embrace the flexibility that web-based apps offer. Perhaps, but there are also a host of other companies, including IBM and relatively unknown outfits（全套装备） like Zoho that also have their sights set on this market too. And Microsoft is clearly gearing up（换挡高速） for a fight. Get ready for a truly epic battle in the cloud.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】3-1 【学习】

The Supreme Court
Cracking the Kagan code
Barack Obama knows Elena Kagan well. To most other Americans, she is a mystery
May 13th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition

SIXTEEN years ago a young scholar complained that the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices had taken on “an air of vacuity and farce（真空的空气和闹剧？）”. Senators failed to ask hard questions. Nominees（提名人，什么是提名人？） refused to give substantive answers. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dodged（躲闪） every query as either “too specific” (meaning, roughly（大致）, anything that might have some bearing on a case that might some day come before the court) or “too general” (roughly, anything else worthy of mention). Let’s bring back the kind of grilling to which Judge Robert Bork was subjected in 1987, wrote Elena Kagan. She must bekicking（踢） herself.

Barack Obama nominated(提名) Ms Kagan to the Supreme Court on May 10th. Havingexcoriated（苛责） Justice Ginsburg for refusing to give straight answers, she will lookhypocritical（虚伪） if she does the same. Yet Ms Kagan must have noticed that Judge Bork, whomade no secret of his views（坦诚）, was not confirmed, whereas the clam-like（？？） Justice Ginsburg was, by 96 votes to three.

The nominee’s career has been marked by frenzied（疯狂的） networking and few publicly expressed opinions. She is a pal（朋友） of nearly every Democrat who counts. She met Mr Obama when he was a humble law lecturer, and is now his solicitor-general（副检察长）. She worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, and also briefly for then-Senator（当时的参议员） Joe Biden. She clerked for（为……工作） Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal hero. Larry Summers, who was then the boss of Harvard, made her dean of its law school. He is now Mr Obama’s top economic adviser. All these bigwigs（头面人物） think Ms Kagan (sb) is hot stuff. Conservative academics find her pleasant, too.

此段有不少夸人好的词啊！

But for those below Olympus, she is a mystery. She has never been a judge, so she has no paper trail of rulings. Given her talents, she has written relatively little, and that little has been cautious and analytical rather than bold and prescriptive（惯例的）. “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade,” says Tom Goldstein, a legal blogger who nonetheless supports her.

Her weakest spot is that when she led Harvard Law School, she barred military recruiters from campus in protest at the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers. This infuriates（激怒sb） middle America. Even people who think the ban on gays in uniform is unjust are affronted（侮辱） that the nation’s top law school should actively discourage its students from serving their country.

Ms Kagan protests that she was only enforcing a long-standing anti-discrimination policy, that the recruiting ban was not absolute and that she loves the military really. But to many, her excuses will sound rather lawyerly. And though she described the gay ban as “a moral injustice of the first order”, she backed down when the university’s federal funding was threatened.

Republicans are already roasting her for this episode. They are also carping about her New Yorkiness—she did not learn to drive a car until her late 20s—and her supposed isolation from the lives of ordinary Americans. John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, grouched（发牢骚） that she has “spent her entire professional career in Harvard Square, Hyde Park [the posh Chicago neighbourhood where Mr Obama also lived] and the DC Beltway.”

On more substantial matters, however, Republicans have little to shoot at. Sooner or later, the court will hear a challenge to Mr Obama’s health reform. The constitution empowers Congress to “regulate commerce...among the several states”. Many conservatives think it a stretch to say this means the federal government can force people to buy health insurance, especially when some state governments object. Mr Obama would hardly pick a Supreme Court justice who deemed his greatest domestic accomplishment unconstitutional, but outsiders can only guess how Ms Kagan would interpret the commerce clause more generally. Since many of the powers the federal government has assumed since the 1930s rest on an expansive definition of interstate commerce, this matters.

这段我看得有点稀里糊涂的

On social issues, Ms Kagan is clearly liberal, but how liberal? She once wrote that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” but it was clear from the context that she was describing the current Supreme Court’s views, not necessarily her own. She once advised Bill Clinton to accept a ban on late-term abortions as part of a compromise. Pro-choicers were outraged when this surfaced. But pro-lifers say the ban had such a broad exception for the mother’s health that it would not have criminalised any abortions at all had it been enacted, which it wasn’t.

Liberals have doubts about her, too. Some accept Mr Obama’s word that she is one of them. Others recall that the last nominee about whom so little was known turned out to be roughly the opposite of what the president who nominated him promised. Granted, George Bush senior did not know David Souter personally, whereas Mr Obama knows Ms Kagan very well. But some liberals are still disgruntled.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor, calls the nomination “a terrible act of betrayal”, because Ms Kagan is insufficiently protective of free speech (she supports restrictions on obscenity) and takes too expansive a view of executive power. During her confirmation as solicitor-general, she agreed with a Republican inquisitor that America is at war with terrorists, and she appeared to agree that an al-Qaeda financier captured in, say, the Philippines, can be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant. This suggests she would be sympathetic to Mr Obama’s claim of almost Bush-like powers over terrorist suspects. Once she has a job for life on the court, she may reveal what she really thinks.

——————————————————————————————————
【COMMENT】4-1 【学习】
Women on company boards
La vie en rose
French companies get serious about putting women in the boardroom
May 6th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition

MOST French bosses have little time for a new law, now going through parliament（议会）, which would compel listed companies to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. Xavier Fontanet, chief executive of Essilor, an eyewear（眼镜） firm, has quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying, “One may not command without having obeyed（？推测是对女性进aboard的反对意见吧？）.” His point is that few women have had the 30 years or so of experience climbing the corporate ladder that a good director requires.

Nonetheless, the government is determined to make France the second country with a compulsory quota（强制配额） for women in the boardroom. (Norway was the first.) At the start of the year women occupied just 11% of the total of around 580 board seats at France’s biggest 40 firms. Now bosses will have to find as many as 170 new female directors in six years, according to OFG Research. “We are looking for women to fill every seat vacated by a man,” says Diane Segalen, vice-chairman of CTPartners, a headhunting（？？猎头公司？） firm in Paris.

In private, chief executives say they will look for female board members of a particular type: those who will look decorative and not rock the boat. One boss asked a headhunter for photographs of candidates and said he would treat looks as his first criterion, ahead of industry experience. A board member of a multinational company who opposes the 40% quota said that bosses could simply appoint their wives or—more subtly—their girlfriends.

我的感想：我滴个汗呐，怎么会这样，是女性的无能的么？

Some recent appointments have certainly raised eyebrows（不满）. In March Dassault Aviation（飞行）, a manufacturer of fighter planes and corporate jets, said it would nominate Nicole Dassault, the 79-year-old wife of Serge Dassault, its controlling shareholder, to its board. Mrs Dassault has little hands-on business experience. LVMH has nominated Bernadette Chirac, the 76-year-old wife of the former French president. Mrs Chirac’s qualifications, explained the company, were that she was female and that as first lady she supported fashion and regularly attended catwalk shows.

Companies with no family controlling shareholder, to be sure, will be expected to propose more qualified candidates. But finding them is not always easy. Sanofi-Aventis, a pharmaceuticals firm（药物）, was disappointed when Catherine Bréchignac, the head of the national science research agency, withdrew her candidacy. Some firms are tackling the shortage of senior women with direct experience of their industry by looking far outside. Vivendi, a telecoms and media group, for instance, found Aliza Jabès, the glamorous founder of NUXE, a beauty-products firm, having used her in an ad campaign for its corporate mobile-phone products.

So far, says Pierre-Yves Gomez of EMLYON Business School, appointments such as Mrs Chirac’s confirm that the first reaction of French chief executives is to find women who will not challenge them. Because companies must find a lot of them in a short time, some women will gather（占有） many board seats. One female director, indeed, has had seven offers since January. A perverse effect（不合情理的） of the quota, therefore, says Mr Gomez, may be to reduce rather than increase board diversity.

我想知道为啥不给点时间慢慢找femal board。

Rose@MayUID: 2797727

加油加油~

谦行天下UID: 2797557

4-2

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy By ROBBIE BROWN Published: May 14, 2010 From the New York Time ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious immigration case, surrendered to（屈服） a Georgia sheriff（治安官） on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing. Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation（驱逐出境） next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her（以重型罪指控） for providing a false address to the police. The case has become a flash point（亮点） in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between（突出了……之间的裂痕） the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted（起诉）. “I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.” Civil rights groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine traffic violation. Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated state law, misled the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education. Ms. Colotl was pulled over（让司机靠边） March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters from graduation, for “impeding（妨碍） the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant. On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await deportation to Mexico. But after protests by Latino groups, demonstrations at the Georgia Capitol（国会大厦） by her sorority（大学的女生联谊会） sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted a one-year deferral on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for an extension next year. Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal. She and her lawyer declined to discuss the immigration status of her parents. In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants. One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate（强制执行） that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students. Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics（拉美裔） make up 11 percent of the population, census figures show. Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees were arrested in the county was traffic offenses. “This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited and very probably illegal.” “We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said. Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally. The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance is registered, and that she also provided her current address. No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration. “Ironically, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining the law（她破坏法律）,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy
By ROBBIE BROWN
Published: May 14, 2010 From the New York Time

ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious immigration case, surrendered to（屈服） a Georgia sheriff（治安官） on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing.

Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation（驱逐出境） next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her（以重型罪指控） for providing a false address to the police.

The case has become a flash point（亮点） in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between（突出了……之间的裂痕） the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted（起诉）.

“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”

Civil rights groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine traffic violation.

Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated state law, misled the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education.

Ms. Colotl was pulled over（让司机靠边） March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters from graduation, for “impeding（妨碍） the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant.

On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await deportation to Mexico.

But after protests by Latino groups, demonstrations at the Georgia Capitol（国会大厦） by her sorority（大学的女生联谊会） sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted a one-year deferral on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for an extension next year.

Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal.

She and her lawyer declined to discuss the immigration status of her parents.

In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants.

One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate（强制执行） that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students.

Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics（拉美裔） make up 11 percent of the population, census figures show.

Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees were arrested in the county was traffic offenses.

“This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited and very probably illegal.”

“We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said.

Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally.

The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance is registered, and that she also provided her current address.

No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration.

“Ironically, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining the law（她破坏法律）,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

谦行天下UID: 2797557

5-1

Rewarding American bosses
Nay on pay（Ney (also nay, nye, nai), a wind instrument）
America’s shareholders find a voice to condemn undeserved compensation（谴责不应有的赔偿）
May 13th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition

IT IS too soon to call it a trend, but the fact that America’s normally passive shareholders have voted against executive pay packages（薪酬福利） at two big companies within a week suggests that something is going on. The 54% of votes cast against the remuneration（薪水） of Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s chief executive, at the phonemaker’s annual meeting on May 3rd, marked the first time that American shareholders had ever rejected a boss’s pay. Four days later they did it again, voting against the wages of Ray Irani, boss of Occidental Petroleum.

Such expressions of discontent are unprecedented in America, not least because until recently no one bothered to ask shareholders to approve executive pay. Last year was the first time a significant number of American firms gave shareholders a “say on pay”, although the votes are usually not binding, and many of the firms that have adopted them were forced to do so as a condition of a government bail-out（以优先权给股东分红）. This year around 300 big companies are giving shareholders a vote. If certain proposals in the financial-reform bill now before Congress become law, say on pay will become the norm for American public companies, as it already is in Britain.

In 2003 Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive at the time of GlaxoSmithKline, became the first boss to lose a shareholder vote under the say-on-pay rules adopted in Britain a year earlier. The first two Americans to suffer the indignity of defeat made obvious targets. The $52.2m that Occidental paid Mr Irani for his services in 2009 not only made him the highest-paid boss at America’s 200 biggest firms; it also made him one of the most overpaid, once the performance of his firm’s shares is taken into account. Graef Crystal, a veteran analyst of undeserved executive pay, had singled out Mr Irani’s package for criticism on the grounds that the payment was in cash and that Mr Irani’s performance targets had been lowered.

As for Mr Jha, Motorola’s board seems to have ignored the shot fired across its bow（？鞠躬之后的怒火？） by shareholders last year, when over one-third of them opposed his pay package. The board’s decision to give him a stake（股份） of up to 3% in the company he will run if Motorola is split in two, or a guaranteed payment if the planned break-up does not happen by June 2011, seems to have provoked the No vote.

One test of the significance of the two reversals will be how the boards of Motorola and Occidental respond. So far they have only issued boilerplate（样板文件） comments, promising to engage with shareholders “to get a better understanding of any specific concerns they may have” (Motorola) and to use their input to “re-evaluate the company’s compensation philosophy, objectives and policies” (Occidental).

Another test will be how widespread shareholder activism on pay becomes. Saying no to the greediest outliers（贪婪的门外汉） may have little impact on remuneration at the average firm. “I’d have liked to see more No votes at other companies,” says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, which conducts research on corporate governance. She had expected pay at firms bailed out by the government to come under close scrutiny（彻底的审查） from shareholders, but so far that particular dog has failed to bark（？形象的比喻？没有对股东彻底的审查吧?）.

In Britain, No votes have remained a rarity since shareholders snubbed（冷落） Mr Garnier. Indeed, it was not until last year that another pay package got a majority of No votes—that of Royal Dutch Shell’s senior executives. However, activists argue that the right to vote on pay has led to far more consultation of shareholders by boards seeking to ensure that pay packages will not be controversial.

led to far more consultation of……seeking to

Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School argues that shareholder rights in general are less strong in America than Britain, “so there may be less pressure on boards to react to signals sent by shareholders.” It is much harder for American shareholders, for example, to force out recalcitrant directors. So much will depend on two other reforms currently under consideration in Congress. The first would require would-be directors to win a majority of votes cast to secure seats on a board. At present at many American firms, directors can be elected despite overwhelming opposition if no other candidates win more votes—something that is quite common because it is hard to get onto the ballot in the first place. For that reason, the second reform would make it easier for shareholders to nominate candidates.

Thus empowered, shareholders should be able to sling off the board members of compensation committees who ignore their advice on pay. In particular, they would be likely to target the chair of the compensation committee—people such as Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and senator who holds the position at Occidental, and Samuel Scott, a former boss of Corn Products International, at Motorola—who are arguably more to blame for excessive pay packages than the bosses who receive them.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

6-1

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)千年的意思） 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. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes（注脚） to Plato（柏拉图）. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative（挑衅的） definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression（离题）.” 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 at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian 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 for（足以） all those who engage in philosophy.”

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon（健忘的滑稽的人）, the butt of（受到……的嘲讽） countless jokes from Aristophanes（古希腊诗人）’ “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. 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. 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 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 between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence（非常必要，实质精华）. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted 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. The pettifogger, the jury, 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）, fascination and curiosity.
By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, 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（欺骗性的）. 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（可以学习使用）, 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（基于情感的观点看法）. 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） each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess 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 brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted（弯曲和发育不良）” and they are compelled “to do crook（弯曲）ed things.” The pettifogger（讼棍;骗人的律师） is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, 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 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（无信仰） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to（不得不） 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 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 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 and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎神明） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness（来世） 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 with（迷恋） maintaining the status quo, 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（有口才的）, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer 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 uncanny（难以理解的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous（丑恶的） 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.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

7-1

May 17, 2010, 6:15 pm
Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
By Stanley Fish

The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash（撞击） between two bad paradigms(样式，模范).

The first paradigm is embedded in and configure（使成形）s the bill’s targeted program, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic（反霸权主义） curriculum” and “a pedagogy（教育学） based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed（受压迫的）.”

Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst（？？？） when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny（承担他们的暴政） have been internalized（使内在化） by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical（完全的，彻底的） effort to liberate yourself from them.

That effort is education, properly reconceived（重述） not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling（分解）, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates（与……隔绝） them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.”

To say that this view of education is political is to understate（少说） the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherent（支持者）s as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy（正统观点） labors to occlude（堵塞） so that they can join the effort to topple（打到） it. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site)（在作文时如有引用也应如此） pledge（保证）s to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.”

If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se（本质上）(好词！) — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse（？？） or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra（颂歌） in the world of educational theory.)

It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately（故意地） to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction.

This is one case, however, where the remedy（治疗法） is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandate（授权）s the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial（权威的） tone, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred.

This would be a great surprise to those communitarian（共产主义） theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie（典型美国式的；好！）, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence（法学）.

But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection（耶稣复活）), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate（询问） it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious（极坏的） purposes must be banished from public education.

The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric（修辞学）. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize history and social studies.”

Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing（改变宗教信仰）; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding（看台） state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.

azure9UID: 2789030

所以你以後都打算在這裡做COMMENTS？

谦行天下UID: 2797557

7-2

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.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

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(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！

谦行天下UID: 2797557

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 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)

谦行天下UID: 2797557

9-2

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（凭幻想做出） images of globe-spanning（全球生成的） companies and distance-destroying technologies. The Rupert Murdochs and Lloyd Blankfeins of this world are generally seen as its champions. Its enabler（推动者）s 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（从整个欧洲）. 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（奔走） 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（过度） in the modern university. Some of this is along familiar lines—academics collaborating with ever more foreign colleagues and sabbatical（休假）-seekers contriving（设法做到） to spend ever more time abroad. But Mr Wildavsky demonstrates that globalisation is now much more complicated than just cross-border（边界） collaboration spiced up with junkets（野餐）.

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（并不仅仅是因为） 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（平等主义） in an attempt to create European Ivy Leagues. Behind all this is the idea that world-class universities can make a disproportionate（不相称的） 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（讲） banalities（陈腐的东西）. And he fails to point out the humour of sabbatical man jet-setting hither and thither（到处）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（迷人的美丽） 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（迷信） of globalisation at first hand.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

9-1

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

FOR six days, clouds of black smoke hung over Bangkok’s jagged skyline, marking out（划出界限） flashpoints in a prolonged political drama. At dawn on May 19th, the show reached its bloody climax（达到高潮）. 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（顽固的） 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（求解？？） barricades and the ritzy（豪华的） shopping area where they had bedded down（铺床睡） for several weeks.

The assault on the fortified（加强的） camp was methodical and met only scattered resistance from gunmen holed up inside. Security forces kept overwhelming（巨大的） 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 outskirt（外边）s of the camp however, riot（骚乱）s flare（突发）d 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（贫民窟） has begun staging（分段运输） its own red-shirt rally（集会）.

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（和解的进展）. 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（花言巧语） compromise to the red shirts. That the leaders of their United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship（独裁） (UDD) failed to grasp this olive branch（橄榄枝） 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（回顾）, a negotiated end to the stand-off（疏远） may have been doomed（命中注定的） since May 13th, when a sniper（阻击兵） picked off（瞄准射死） Khattiya Sawasdipol, a rogue（不诚实，不道德） army general who had sided with the red shirts and taunted his commanders.

Widespread fighting broke out while General Khattiya lay in a coma（昏迷）, days before his death. Army units trying to block off the sprawling protest site came under attack by a mob（群众） tossing（投射） rocks, firecrackers（鞭炮） and petrol bombs. Shadowy black-clad（穿黑衣服的） militia（民兵） joined the melee（混战） alongside the red shirts, though only fleetingly（飞驰的）. Soldiers opened fire without much restraint, even at paramedics（伞兵军医） trying to bring out the wounded. Road junctions were declared as “live-fire zones”. The mayhem（大混乱） spread to other parts of the city. The military cordon（大封锁） 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（企业报道） who encouraged the red shirts after he lost power in 2006 to a military coup, tweeted his sorrow to his followers. From his exile（放逐）, 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（统治） 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（后果） of the May 19th crackdown（镇压） will likely see continued unrest（动乱）, both around Bangkok’s slums and in Thailand’s north and north-east. The north-east accounts for around one-third of parliamentary（议会的） 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（赶走） Mr Abhisit, the darling of Bangkok’s privileged classes.

Protesters there were quick to stage arson attacks in retaliation（报复） for their rout（打败对方） in Bangkok. The government put the city under a curfew（戒严） on May 19th, its first since 1992.
As Thailand stumbles into（无意中卷入） 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（监视） steady economic growth even as they squabbled and scrapped for the spoils. That pragmatic formula（务实性的准则） no longer works, not when political crises have polarised opinions within families, workplaces and communities, and hollowed out the centre

谦行天下UID: 2797557

10-1
Financial reform
Almost there
The Senate votes for financial reform, but some important issues remain unresolved
May 21st 2010 | NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist online

FINANCIAL reform is coming to America. On May 20th, after more than three weeks of often rancorous（怀恶意的） debate, the Senate approved the biggest overhaul（大检查） of the financial system since the Great Depression, by 59 votes to 39. Its bill must now be reconciled with（与……和解） one passed by the House of Representatives in December. The result will be Barack Obama’s second big legislative victory of the year, after the passage of health-care reform in March.

Tim Geithner, Mr Obama’s treasury secretary, praised Chris Dodd and Harry Reid, the Democratic senators who steered the 1,500-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act to a successful vote, for their “tremendous(极棒的) leadership”. The administration has reason to be pleased, since the bill largely mirrors the reform blueprint（新颖的用法！） it had been pushing.
steer..... to a successful vote

As with most bills, this one has its share of pork and irrelevant provisions（粮）, including one requiring buyers of Congolese（刚果） minerals to prove that the money they hand over is not being used to fund militant（激进的） groups. But there is much meat at its heart. The bill would beef up（？？？） the system for monitoring systemic risks. It would empower the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to wind down failing financial giants, imposing losses on creditors（强加给债主损失） as well as shareholders. It would create an independent consumer financial-protection bureau. And it would toughen up（使强壮） oversight（疏忽） of derivatives（派生物）, requiring most contracts to be channelled through clearing houses and traded on exchanges or exchange-like platforms.

//此段讲新上台的政策使房子交易市场正规化

Could this bill have prevented the crisis? Not by itself. Some of the most important reforms are outside its purview（超出范围）. Toughened-up capital（资金） and liquidity（资产流动性） standards for banks will be hammered out by（被解决） regulators from around the world in Basel. The Obama administration’s proposed tax on big banks will likely be advanced in different legislation. One glaring（耀眼的） omission from the Senate and House bills is a plan to deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant, accident-prone mortgage agencies now under government conservatorship（公共福利的监督官）.

//此段讲这个bill起作用的方式是通过其他的一些方式来进行的。

The most important component aimed at preventing another crisis is “resolution authority”, under which any big financial company, not just a bank, can be seized and wound down in an orderly way. Lack of such authority led to the shambolic（混乱的） failure of Lehman Brothers and the controversial bail-out of AIG. To win Republican support, however, Mr Dodd made the process so harsh for unsecured creditors that they might flee if they sense panic building—forcing the authorities, again, to use ad-hoc（特别） measures. Left unanswered is how bail-outs will be paid for. The House version of the bill requires banks to chip in to a $150 billion up-front fund. The Senate bill envisages （设想）the costs being recoup（重获）ed afterwards, another concession to Republicans.

//此段讲对大经济公司的严厉打击

The new consumer-protection bureau should help to close the gap between well-regulated banks and poorly regulated mortgage brokers and finance companies, which led the race to the bottom in loan-underwriting（借款保险业） standards. But many firms, most significantly small banks, are exempted（赦免） from its authority. And the industry gripe（抱怨）s that there is remarkably little independent oversight of the bureau, should it run amok with（横行于） new regulations that stifle（使窒息） legitimate products. The Senate bill puts the bureau inside the Federal Reserve, though it gives the Fed little say in its direction; in the House version, the bureau stands alone.

//bureau一些作用独立于系统之外

Surprisingly, given the depth of congressional（国会） animosity（憎恨） towards it, the Fed emerges as a big winner. It keeps all its existing bank-supervision powers (except for consumer protection) and gets new ones over systemically important non-banks. In a crucial victory, the Fed and the White House fought off a provision that would have allowed intrusive congressional audits of the central bank’s most delicate monetary-policy decisions. However, such a provision remains in the House version of the bill.

//新bill上台以后，Fed会从国会那获得更大的经济掌控权

As for Wall Street（华尔街） itself, the outcome is worse than initially expected but better than it might have been—though uncertainties remain. Bankers had hoped that the bill emerging from the Senate-usually the more measured of the two chambers-would be more bank-friendly than the House version. But a flurry（骤雨） of draconian（严厉的） amendments was offered in recent weeks amid a surge in anti-bank sentiment（见解） (fuelled by fraud charges against Goldman Sachs) and political populism（平民主义） in the run-up to congressional primaries. Among those approved was one requiring the Fed to regulate debit-card fees, another setting minimum mortgage-underwriting standards (and banning no-documentation “liar loans”) and a third requiring credit ratings of asset-backed securities to be assigned by a board within the Securities and Exchange Commission. But a proposal to cap banks’ maximum size was defeated, as was one that would have placed restrictions on credit-card interest rates.

//尽管新bill的上台更有利于bank，但是一场修订案的出台，使形式发生变化。

But some of banks’ biggest worries remain unresolved. They are resigned to（托付给） accept some form of the “Volcker rule”, which would restrict their proprietary trading and investment in hedge funds and private equity. A particularly tough version of the rule was rejected just before the Senate vote, but its authors hold out hope that it can be inserted during the weaving-together of the House and Senate bills. The Volcker rule and other looming（隐约出现的） restrictions could collectively cut large banks’ profits by as much as 15-20% (not counting returned capital from shed businesses), reckon analysts at Morgan Stanley.

//同时Volcker rull和其他的限制政策会使银行的利益减少15%以上。

Wall Street’s biggest concern is a provision banning deposit-takers from trading credit-default（违约） swaps, interest-rate swaps and the like. Introduced by the head of the Senate Agriculture Committee some weeks ago, it was expected that this would fall by the wayside during debate. But it proved stubbornly persistent, making it into the bill as passed. Ostensibly（表面上） aimed at raising a firewall between run-of-the-mill（普通的；好词！） retail banking（小额银行业务） and “casino” activities, such a prohibition would hinder risk management as well as speculation, banks argue.

//华尔街最大的忧虑是……。（专业词汇不是很理解啊！）

All eyes will now be on the “conference” process that will likely be used to iron（熨平） out differences between（好短语！） the two bills over the next week or two. This will provide one last lobbying opportunity to Wall Street, which has already spent hundreds of millions trying to influence lawmakers, to the president’s chagrin. Banks will focus much of their effort on reversing the swap-dealing ban (which is also opposed by their regulators). Where the two chambers differ, the Senate prevails as a rule—though Barney Frank, the architect of the House bill, has said he will fight to preserve some of his provisions. Once Mr Obama signs the law, many of its vaguer provisions will have to be fleshed out（充实，有血有肉） by financial regulators, a process that could take many months. There are plenty of ambiguities to be tackled, for instance the bills’ loose definition of “swap” and “major swap participant”.

//两家议案的不同会在两周之内达到一个定论。

After the Senate bill was passed, Mr Obama pledged to “ensure that we arrive at a final product that…secures financial stability while preserving the strengths and crucial functions of a financial industry that is central to our prosperity and ability to compete in a global economy.” That remains to be seen. If the history of financial legislation is a guide—just think Sarbanes-Oxley—the new law will have more than a few unintended consequences. For now, though, the White House can revel in（得益于） a political triumph that a year ago seemed to many to be beyond reach.
//奥巴马表示议案通过以后的作用，但是作者对此持观望的看法。

谦行天下UID: 2797557

11-1

Obama Mandates（上级对下级的命令） Rules to Raise Fuel Standards
By PETER BAKER
Published: May 21, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered the government on Friday to develop tougher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, advancing the fight against climate change without waiting for Congress.

Mr. Obama announced the creation of a national policy that will result in less greenhouse gas pollution from medium- and heavy-duty trucks for the first time, and will further reduce exhaust from cars and light-duty trucks beyond the requirements he had already put in place.

“Today’s announcement is an essential part of our energy strategy, but it’s not a substitute for other necessary steps,” Mr. Obama said in a Rose Garden ceremony on Friday, flank（位于~的侧面）ed by auto and truck manufacturers. He repeated his hope that Congress would pass an energy bill by the end of the year. “In the meantime,” he added, “I’m going to take every sensible, responsible action that I can take using my authority as president.”
Mr. Obama said that reducing fuel use would save money for businesses and consumers, and he linked his new policy to the enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “The disaster in the gulf only underscore（强调）s that, even as we pursue domestic reduction to reduce our reliance on imported oil, our long-term security depends on the development of alternative sources of fuel and new transportation technologies,” he said.

The executive memorandum（正式的记录） the president signed on Friday orders the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department to develop new fuel and emissions standards more strict than those formalized（formalize standards） last month, but the memorandum did not propose specific fuel-economy figures.

Under last month’s rules, new cars must get at least 35.5 miles to a gallon of fuel, on average, by 2016, in combined city and highway driving. The president’s new plan would order further improvements in fuel efficiency for cars and light trucks made in 2017 and beyond, and in medium and heavy trucks made in 2014 through 2018.

In addition, Mr. Obama’s directive orders more federal support for the development of new vehicles like advanced electric cars, and it instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce emissions of other kinds of pollutants by motor vehicles, besides greenhouse gases.

Environmentalists hailed(向~致敬) the move. “President Obama’s oil savings proposal will reduce our dependence on oil,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization. “More efficient cars and trucks will help to protect families’ budgets as well as America’s shores.”

Medium and heavy trucks represent only 4 percent of all vehicles on American highways, but they consume more than 20 percent of the fuel used in road transportation, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization. Improving the average fuel economy of these trucks by 3.7 miles to the gallon would, by 2030, reduce American oil consumption by 11 billion gallons a year, the group said.

Mr. Obama said existing technology could improve the fuel economy of tractor-trailers（拖拉机-拖车）, as an example, by 25 percent. Over all, he said that within 20 years he wants the nation’s vehicles to be using half the fuel and produce half the pollution they do today.

Building cleaner vehicles costs money, but may ultimately save consumers more through lower gasoline bills. The policy already enacted will add about $1,000 to the cost of an average new car by 2016, but save about $3,000 in fuel over the life of the vehicle, according to government officials.
enact policy

Mr. Obama was joined on Friday by environmental leaders and representatives of major truck manufacturers who supported the new policy. Among them were the chief executives of Volvo, Daimler Trucks North America, Cummins and Navistar, the head of the American Trucking Association and a garbage-truck driver in his uniform.
be joined by被……赞同

Manufacturers want a single national standard set over the long term because that is easier to comply with（服从） than the patchwork of state and national regulations that had been imposed in the past.

Before the president’s initial policy a year ago, car and light-truck makers were facing fuel-efficiency standards being developed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in response to Congressional legislation; separate greenhouse-gas standards being developed by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act; and the possibility of separate standards enacted in California and 13 other states.

“The federal government is looking 15 years down the road and uniting all the diverse stakeholders to work towards the same national goal,” Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said in a statement. Noting the collaboration over the set of rules enacted last month, he added, “This approach achieved success once before, so we are optimistic that we can do it again.”

Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, a nonprofit group, said the new policy would promote the use of clean diesel（柴油） technology. “Diesel engines offer an unmatched combination of energy efficiency, work capability, reliability and now near-zero-emissions environmental performance,” he said.