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谦行天下UID: 2797557

26-1

What the new iPhone probably won't include (but should)
Jun 6th 2010, 21:44 by T.S. | LONDON

AS THE futurologist Paul Saffo likes to observe, most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success. The basic technology is often worked out, but without someone to champion【拥护】 it, it spreads only slowly. Then, eventually, a big company takes the technology in question and builds it into its products, thus endorsing【背书】 the idea and giving it scale. Suddenly, it takes off. It seems to be an overnight success, but it has actually taken much longer than that to reach the mainstream.
futurologist ：未来学家科技预测者[亦作futurist]



Over the years Apple has blessed several technologies in this way and brought them to a mass audience: the graphical user interface with the Mac, the digital music player with the iPod, mobile internet-browsing and multi-touch screens with the iPhone, tablet computers with the iPad. In each case there were previous examples of the technology, but Apple showed how it should be done, and it then took off. There's another such technology that has been around for several years and is ready for lift-off【腾空飞起】; it just needs the endorsement of a big company like Apple to make it happen. The technology in question is "near-field communication" (NFC) chips, which can be used to make contactless payments, among other things.

If you use a contactless card as your office pass or public-transport ticket (prominent examples are Octopus in Hong Kong and Oyster in London) then you'll already be familiar with the basic idea: you hold the card near a reader (I keep my Oyster card inside my wallet) and the ticker barrier opens. There are also contactless credit cards in several markets (though not very many retailers accept them yet), and contactless key fobs, using the same technology, which let you pay for petrol with a swipe. This technology has been slowly spreading for years.

What an NFC chip does, however, is enable a mobile phone to emulate one of these contactless cards. The phone is then able to replace a wallet-full of such cards, and accompanying software on the phone lets you check the balance on your rail pass, for example. This is in fact commonplace in Japan, where thousands of people routinely use their mobile phones as their railway tickets, and renew their tickets right on their phones, using the phone's mobile-internet connection. For a while this was easily the biggest mobile-commerce application on Earth.

All the nuts and bolts【基本要素】 have been worked out, in other words. But the technology is still stuck in the starting blocks. The banks were pushing contactless credit cards quite hard in some parts of the world a couple of years ago, but the financial crisis has understandably distracted them. Handset-makers such as Nokia have also produced handsets with NFC support, but if only one or two phones in the line-up support NFC, that's not enough phones to encourage retailers, railway companies and so on to adopt the technology.

If Apple announced that every iPhone would henceforth【从此以后】 support NFC, however, then the picture would change overnight. There would be a flood of apps to support the emulation of various contactless cards. Within a few months there would be a critical mass of tech-savvy users willing to adopt the technology, giving retailers, banks and other companies the confidence to pile in. And iPhones are quite expensive handsets【手机】, with relatively price-insensitive buyers, so nobody would really notice the small added cost of an NFC chip.

Understandably, given that it makes perfect sense, there have been persistent rumours that Apple might be thinking of putting NFC chips into the next iPhone, which is due to be announced on June 7th. Tellingly, the company has filed a couple of NFC-related patents. But the next-generation iPhones that have escaped into the wild in recent weeks, and have then been taken apart, do not seem to include the technology. Moreover, Apple has approved an iPhone case, made by DeviceFidelity, that includes an NFC chip connected via the dock connector, and which then talks to an app on the phone. I doubt Apple would do that if it were about to announce direct support for the technology itself; but perhaps it's a bluff【断臂】 to divert attention from plans to do just that. On balance, though, I don't expect the new fourth-generation iPhone HD, or whatever it is called, to include NFC. But perhaps the fifth-generation one will?

谦行天下UID: 2797557

26-2

Using Light and Genes to Probe the Brain
Optogenetics【光遗传学】 emerges as a potent tool to study the brain's inner workings
By Gary Stix   

In 1979 Francis Crick, famed co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, published an article in Scientific American that set out a wish list of techniques needed to fundamentally improve understanding of the way the brain processes information. High on his wish list was a method of gaining control over specific classes of neurons while, he wrote, “leaving the others more or less unaltered.”

Over the past few years Crick’s vision for targeting neurons has begun to materialize thanks to a sophisticated combination of fiber optics【纤维光学】 and genetic engineering. The advent of what is known as optogenetics has even captured popular attention because of its ability to alter animal behavior—one research group demonstrated how light piped into a mouse’s brain can drive it to turn endlessly in circles. Such feats have inspired much public comment, including a joke made by comedian Jay Leno in 2006 about the prospect for an optogenetically controlled fly pestering George W. Bush.
The advent of ：(重要人物或事件)…的出现(或到来)

pester：annoy persistently


Controlling a subordinate or a spouse with a souped-up laser pointer may be essential for science-fiction dystopia and late-night humor, but in reality optogenetics has emerged as the most important new technology for providing insight into the numbingly complex circuitry of the mammalian brain. It has already furnished clues as to how neural miswriting underlies neurological and mental disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia.
souped-up：加强了马力的—— soup：n汤；马力；v加速马力
dystopia：糟透的社会
A seminal event that sparked widespread neuroscience interest came in 2005, when Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University and at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt demonstrated how a virus could be used to deliver a light-sensitive gene called channelrhodopsin-2 into specific sets of mammalian neurons. Once equipped with the gene (taken from pond algae), the neurons fired when exposed to light pulses. A box on Crick’s list could be checked off: this experiment and ones that were soon to follow showed how it would be possible to trigger or extinguish selected neurons, and not their neighbors, in just a few milliseconds, the speed at which they normally fire. Hundreds of laboratories worldwide have since adopted Deisseroth’s technique.

A 38-year-old psychiatrist by training who still sees patients once a week, Deisseroth entered the field of bioengineering because of his frustration over the inadequate tools available to research and treat mental illness and neurodegenerative disorders. “I have conducted many brain-stimulation treatments in psychiatry that suffered greatly from a lack of precision. You can stimulate certain cells that you want to target, but you also stimulate all of the wrong cells as well,” he says. Instead of just observing the effects from a drug or an implanted electrode, optogenetics brings researchers closer to the fundamental causes of a behavior.
psychiatrist：精神病学家，精神病医生

Since 2005 Deisseroth’s laboratory—at times in collaboration with leading neuroscience groups—has assembled a powerful tool kit based on channelrhodopsin-2 and other so-called opsins. By adjusting the opening or closing of channels in cell membranes, opsins can switch neurons on or turn them off. Molecular legerdemain can also manipulate just a subset of one type of neuron or control a circuit between groups of selected neurons in, say, the limbic system and others in the cortex. Deisseroth has also refined methods for delivering the opsin genes, typically by inserting into a virus both opsin genes and DNA to turn on those genes.

To activate the opsins, Deisseroth’s lab has attached laser diodes to tiny fiber-optic cables that reach the brain’s innermost structures. Along with the optical fibers, electrodes are implanted that record when neurons fire. “In the past year what’s happened is that these techniques have gone from being something interesting and useful in limited applications to something generalizable to any cell or question in biology,” Deisseroth says.

Most compelling, however, are experiments that have demonstrated te relevance of optogenetics to both basic science and medicine. At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago last October, Michael Häusser of University College London reported on an optogenetics experiment that showed how 100 neurons could trigger a memory stored in a much larger ensemble of about 100,000 neurons, suggesting how the technique may be used to understand memory formation.

Last spring Deisseroth’s group published an optogenetics study that helped to elucidate the workings of deep-brain stimulation, which uses electrodes implanted deep in the brain to alleviate the abnormal movements of Parkinson’s disease. The experiment called into question the leading theory of how the technology works—activation of an area called the subthalamic【邱下脑】 nucleus. Instead the electrodes appear to exert their effects on nerve fibers that reach the subthalamic nucleus from the motor cortex and perhaps other areas. The finding has already led to a better understanding of how to deploy【配置】 deep-brain electrodes. Given its fine-tuned specificity, optoelectronics might eventually replace deep-brain stimulation.

Although optogenetic control of human behavior may be years away, Deisseroth comments that the longer-range implications of the technology must be considered: “I’m not writing ethics papers, but I think about these issues every day, what it might mean to gain understanding and control over what is a desire, what is a need, what is hope.”

谦行天下UID: 2797557

27-1

BanyanAsia's alarming cities
How Asian cities are built will determine the prospects for global carbon emissions. Oh dear
Jul 1st 2010

IF YOU are the sort to worry at night about man-induced climate change, then book a stay at any of the new high-rise hotels going up on the edge of China’s big cities—start looking for them around the third ring road. When you stagger red-eyed out of bed to peer into the murky dawn, you will see rank upon serried rank of raw “superblock” developments, a mile apart, marching into the distance. You think of the emissions involved in their carbon-hungry construction, the traffic jams on the arteries tying them into the expanding city, and the new coal-fired power stations being built to light them up. And you wonder how Asia can change its habits—energy consumption grew by 70% in the ten years to 2008—before it is too late for all of us.

Yet the world’s hopes of putting carbon emissions on a manageable path depend upon on how developing Asia urbanises in the coming decades. The scale is staggering. According to the Asian Development Bank, 44m people join city populations each year. Every day sees the construction of 20,000 new dwellings and 250km (160 miles) of new roads.
In theory, urban living can be greener than other ways of life: people need to travel shorter distances, for instance. The practice is not so simple. Most poor people coming to the city aspire to higher standards of living and consumption. Ill-planned public transport reinforces car use. Most striking, putting up and using buildings accounts for a big part of developing Asia’s carbon emissions—perhaps 30% in the case of China, where nearly half the world’s new floor space is built each year. What’s more, the buildings do not age well. Many thrown up in the 1990s are already being pulled down and replaced.
Governments acknowledge the challenge. Green codes in China mandate energy-saving standards for heating, cooling and lighting new buildings. The aim is to cut new buildings’ energy use by 65%. But many new buildings are designed first and greened later—a cheaper but less effective approach.
As for the superblocks that exemplify China’s urbanisation, a dozen new ones are built every day. Yet their conceptual design is flawed, however many low-energy light bulbs they boast. They get built after the city government lays out a system of arterial roads. State utility companies put down power, water and sewage mains. Developers bid for the rights to build blocks with specified numbers of housing units, schools, offices, shops, green space and so on. The developer throws up the block and plugs it into the centralised utilities grid. Presto, people move in.
Yet such hyper-development has unwelcome consequences. Not least, as Harrison Fraker, an architect at the University of California at Berkeley, argues, superblocks in effect become gated communities of privilege.
The social consequences of such isolation (for those inside and out) may take time to make themselves felt: for almost all of China’s history, neighbourhood streets and alleys have enriched urban life. The environmental impact, however, is already apparent. Gated blocks with a single entrance force not just residents to abandon cycling or walking for the motor car whenever they need to go anywhere. Outsiders, too, face a vast, fenced obstacle in the way of where they want to go. Congestion, pollution and traffic accidents rise. Time to build a fourth ring road.
Mr Fraker and his team devised a different approach for Tianjin in north China, by thinking of the development as a whole system in which high-density neighbourhoods would generate nearly all their energy and water needs. First, “greenways” were marked out that gave pedestrians and cyclists a way to get to the nearest mass-transit station without being run down or choked. Meanwhile, good use of sunlight, shading and ventilation would cut heating and cooling loads. Photovoltaic panels and windmills would provide four-fifths of electricity needs. The rest, as well as gas for cooking and hot water, would come from biogas generated from sewage, waste food and plant clippings. Rainwater would flush lavatories. Storm-water run-off would be collected for irrigation, including for allotments and the trees that reduced the “heat-island” effect. Something of China’s traditional urban scale would be echoed by community blocks within the greater scheme, accommodating 100-300 families.
Yet in China the idea appears to have run into the sands because of the radical approach it requires. Developers are ill-versed in thinking about energy, water and sewage as a seamless whole. Utilities think like central planners. Government agencies struggle to operate beyond their traditional remits. What is more, the costs are up to a fifth higher for such developments, though they more than pay for themselves in the long run.

In the short run, dim prospects
Enlightened developers say that their kind should be putting up greener buildings without waiting for Asian governments to set the tone. Christine Loh of Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong think-tank, argues that large amounts of energy can be saved with little effort, dramatically improving efficiency. In the newish hotel by the Kunming ring road in which this column is being written, the bulbs that provide the light are not only electricity-guzzling incandescent ones, but dim and frosted at that.
But Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’s outgoing senior climate-change official, argues that limits to what can be done are set by the perverse economic incentives that apply in most parts of Asia. Developers, a big part of the solution, will struggle to make a profitable fist of turning green when energy and the costs of pollution are grossly mispriced, favouring old-fashioned utilities. Putting an end to these subsidies would do wonders for bringing about a better night’s sleep, and a crisper, more pleasing view in the morning.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

8-1【学习】
Forget it!
Jul 16th 2010, 10:52
by The Economist online
A study involving children's car seats suggests that consumers might be better at filtering out bad information than previously thought

IF YOU were told that a particularly delicious-looking ice-cream cone contained dangerous chemicals, then told soon after that it was safe to eat after all, would you still choose it for dessert? So far, studies by behavioural economists have suggested that people have a hard time unlearning反学习 what they have previously been told, even after being ordered to do so. In mock trials, for example, jurors陪审员 are frequently unable to disregard evidence they are later told is inadmissible不许可的. But Uri Simonsohn, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, has a forthcoming即将来临的 paper in the Journal of Marketing suggesting that some consumers, at least, are indeed capable of letting go of wrong information.
Mr Simonsohn started by having to dismiss wrong information himself. In early 2007, shortly after he and his wife had bought a car seat for their first child, Consumer Reports magazine published a ranking of car seats according to safety. Unfortunately, the magazine had messed up混乱 its usually thorough testing procedure, with cars being crashed at much higher speeds than advertised. (At a 35-mph side-impact crash, the structure of the car seat can make a difference; at 70 mph, the infant’s safety depends much more on the structure of the car.) Two weeks later, Consumer Reports issued a retraction撤回: several car seat brands (including the Simonsohns') were safer than the original rankings suggested.
Mr Simonsohn tracked online auctions of car seats after both the initial rankings and the retractions, to see how prices were affected. The car seats falsely charged with poor performance saw their prices drop, then rebound quickly. By contrast, one seat, which failed both Consumer Reports's original and revised tests, continued to sell more cheaply after the retraction was issued. The car-seat buyers were apparently able to disregard the flawed rankings and pay attention to the correct information. "I was shocked," he says. "Because if there's one product where I would expect people to be overly emotional, it would be child safety."
There are some caveats警告. It helps, Mr Simonsohn admits, that both the original rankings and the retraction were widely publicised宣扬: child-safety issues attract headlines. That the retraction was made swiftly很快的 may also have focussed consumers’ attention: a time lapse流逝 of months or more might have affected sales more profoundly. Furthermore, parents who buy car seats online may pay more attention to safety rankings than do their peers at a store.
But the results have led Mr Simonsohn to rethink the earlier tests of seemingly wrongheaded坚持错误的 consumers. Perhaps the mock jurors refused to give up previous information not out of stubbornness or ignorance but because the experimenters failed to give them sufficient reason to change their minds. Car-seat buyers, in contrast, were willing to accept new information and discard old data because they trusted Consumer Reports—especially when the magazine was confessing a misstep.
This would have implications暗示 for more than just behavioural economics. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children for fear of autism自我中心主义 are also concerned about child safety, but have discounted不重视 the strong evidence that no link exists. The problem, Mr Simonsohn suggests, might lie not with the new information but with the source: few health agencies inspire as much trust as Consumer Reports.

There are several good expression for Argument writing involved in this argument.
At the very first place, the author give us an opinion, then with the supportive of an experiment of a report, the former viewed was turned wrong. When an oposite atitude was established, the author tries to elucidate the former wrong phenomenon.

It is an ordinary structure in GRE reading material.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

The function of Critcs
A history and critique of the last 200 years of cultural criticism, form Addison and Steele to Barthes and Derrida, by Britain’s most stylish时髦的 critic.
This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois中产阶级的 society as a central feature of a “public sphere公共领域” in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the benign rule of reason. The disintegration瓦解 of this fragile culture brought on a crisis in criticism, whose history since the 18th century has been fraught with充满 ambivalence and anxiety.

Eagleton’s account embraces Addison and Steele, Johnson and the 19-century reviewers, such critics as Arnold and Stephen, the heyday of Scrutiny and New Criticism, and finally the proliferation of avant-garde前卫的 literary theories such as deconstructionism结构主义.

The Function of Criticism is nothing less than a history and critique of the “critical institution” itself. Eagleton’s judgements on individual critics are sharp and illuminating, which his general argument raises crucial questions about the relations between language, literature and politics.

“Eagleton is second to none首屈一指 among cultural critics writing in the English language today.” — Guardian

“Eagleton is a combative好战的, fiercely articulate发音清楚的 and witty诙谐的 Marxist literary critic.” — The Nation
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow, University of Manchester. His other publications include Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Walter Benjamin (1981), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Ideology(1991), The Crisis of Contemporary Culture (1993), Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1997).

谦行天下UID: 2797557

Function of Critism
Matthew Arnold at one point in his career was much admired and popular poet. Later in his life, however, his attention turned with force to criticism of both literary works and forms and the social fabric of society.

Criticism, according to Matthew Arnold in his essay, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, functions as an endeavor that is not reliant upon any creative art form; rather criticism is inherently valuable in itself, whether its value springs from bringing joy to the writer of it or whether that value springs from making sure that the best ideas reach society. Arnold at time seems to be echoing回应 the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s views of poetry by exclaiming大声说出 that the very highest function of humakind is exercising运用 its creative power.

Arnold links criticism with creative power throughout the essay and concludes with a thought that connects to the earlier one above when he asserts that that writing criticism may actually produce in its practitioner开业者 a sense of ecstatic狂喜的 creative joy just like the someone engaging in what we normally think of creative writing feels. Arnold is equating the emotional state of writing criticism with the emotional state of creative writing in order to undermine渐渐破坏 the typical censure of criticism that it serves no purpose, that it’s just someone criticizing something that he can’t even do as well.
The personal function of criticism is just one of the many that Arnold carefully delineates描绘. He leaps from the personal to the universal in his argument that criticism serves a function by propagating传播 the best ideas so that they trickle down向下滴流 to the masses.传播给大众 Great writing, according to Arnold, springs out涌出 of an epoch世纪 of great ideas and these epochs are manifested when the great ideas reach the masses. The only way to ensure this process takes place is for the critic to disinterestedly公正的 recognize greatness in writing and impart this greatness to the common man, so that he will be stirred by new ideas. In other words, the reason that periods of great creativity and periods of dormant静止的 creativity seems to come in spurts喷射 can be traced just as much to the critic who recognizes the greatness and brings it to the public’s attention rather than just to solely to the creator of the great work. Examples of this concept can be seen even in recent times when lackluster无光泽的 movie and music periods have been kickstarted重新启动 by exciting new talent brought to the attention of the masses by critical success. Rather than merely laying out画线 a blueprint for criticism, Arnold attempts to prove that criticism in and of itself has several vital functions and should be regarded as art form that is as high and significant as any creative art form.

This passage tells us that there is an opinion exist that is criticism should be regarded as art form as creative art form.