读economist 【dies in flames】by winning1030

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A special report on entrepreneurship

Global heroes

Mar 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Despite the downturn（（经济）衰退）, entrepreneurs are enjoying a renaissance the world over, says Adrian Wooldridge (interviewed here)

Illustration by Nick Dewar

IN DECEMBER last year, three weeks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and in the midst of the worst global recession since the 1930s, 1,700 bright-eyed Indians gathered in a hotel in Bangalore for a conference on entrepreneurship. They mobbed(成群围住) business heroes such as Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant, and Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, another software giant. They also engaged in a frenzy of（在极度的兴奋中）networking. The conference was so popular that the organisers had to erect（建立）a huge tent to take the overflow（容纳不下的人或事物）. The aspiring entrepreneurs did not just want to strike it rich; they wanted to play their part in forging a new India. Speaker after speaker praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.

Back in 1942 Joseph Schumpeter gave warning that the bureaucratisation of capitalism was killing the spirit of entrepreneurship. Instead of risking the turmoil（混乱，骚动） of “creative destruction”, Keynesian economists, working hand in glove with（与。。。狼狈为奸） big business and big government, claimed to be able to provide orderly prosperity. But perspectives have changed in the intervening decades, and Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs are once again roaming the globe.

Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, governments of almost every ideological stripe have embraced entrepreneurship. The European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank have also become evangelists（福音传道者）. Indeed, the trend is now so well established that it has become the object of satire. Listen to me, says the leading character in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”

This special report will argue that the entrepreneurial idea has
gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right, championed by powerful pressure groups, reinforced by a growing infrastructure of universities and venture capitalists

（风险投资家）and embodied by wildly popular business heroes such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and India’s software kings. The report will also contend （声称）that entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation.

The world’s greatest producer of entrepreneurs continues to be America. The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. High-flyers（抱负极高的人，有野心的人）from around the world still flock（群集） to America’s universities and clamour（喧哗; 吵闹.） to work for Google and Microsoft. And many of them then return home and spread the gospel.

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拍拍，鼓励下哈

winning1030UID: 2538401

2# irvine666
谢谢斑斑捧场~贵在坚持啊~~偶还要补上前几天落下的economist

winning1030UID: 2538401

3# yyx017
看了你的分析，也觉得很用心呢~

winning1030UID: 2538401

第二篇

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Divorce and childrenDragons’ den
Mar 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition
JULIE LYNN EVANS, a well-known British psychotherapist, deals with troubled children with remarkable devotion and insight. As the recession puts added strain(压力) on many marriages, her account of the mental stresses and strains that parental break-up inflicts on children could not be more timely.
Many of the children Ms Evans sees do not want to talk at all, regarding grown-ups as untrustworthy or irrelevant. She starts by getting them to depict their lives in spray-painted graffiti(涂鸦) on giant sheets of paper, or by making models from sand or clay（黏土）. The outcome can be terribly sad: one depressed mother appears as a sagging （sag 下垂，凹陷）black balloon; a dissolute（放荡的） absent father is scrunched up(揉皱)into a clay ball and hurled (hurl 用力扔（某物）; around the garden. It is hard not to agree with Ms Evans, that children from broken homes are almost always more distressed than their parents realise. The children she sees are clingy(粘住的,紧贴的), rude, destructive(想要破坏的，会造成破坏的) or attention-seeking, and much else besides. Being ignored compounds 【加重，（因进一步伤害）使（坏事）更坏】the problem.     
Her remedies（remedy 补救办法，治疗法） are simple: rules and diversions. Self-discipline, unfashionably, is vital. Keep anguished 【（肉体或精神）极度痛苦的】and angry phone calls until after bedtime; children hate overhearing （无意中听到，偷听到）them. Don’t burden them with details about legal fights or sexual infidelity（不忠，不贞）. Avoid arguing in front of them and above all do not demonise（使妖魔化） the other side, however badly you think your ex-spouse（前配偶） has behaved. Children have a right to two parents. Poisoning their mind against one of them is “stealing” part of a child’s “natural physical, emotional and spiritual inheritance（继承）”, she argues. Some contact with even the most awful, addicted or inadequate parent is usually better than none at all: it helps the children make sense of what has happened. Very few parents, Ms Evans notes, have absolutely nothing to add to the lives of their children.
The other big lesson is that broken homes can be patched up【解决（争吵、麻烦等）】 from the outside. Grandparents, neighbours and others can offer children windows of happiness in an otherwise bleak （阴郁的，无望的）week, with security, fun, companionship or a phone number (usually treasured but rarely used, in the author’s experience) to call if things become unbearable. Such helping hands should be non-judgmental. The last thing a stricken ex-spouse needs to hear is that they are drinking too much or cooking too little.
Inflict sth on sb    使（某人）遭受（打击﹑ 惩罚等）
Burden sb with sth

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Face value
Reading between the lines
Mar 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition
As glossy magazines struggle, Ann Moore of Time Inc wants technology to be the solution, not the problem

Bloomberg
THERE are few things that unnerve （使失去镇定）Ann Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc, America’s largest magazine company, as much as young Americans’ “shock” when they hear that her firm will have to start charging them. “Real reporting takes time and money and effort,” she says. “Somebody does have to pay for the Baghdad bureau（局、办事处）.” A recession is a difficult time to convince readers that they need to start paying for information, however, particularly because Time Inc, a division( 部门)of Time Warner, a media giant, has long made its articles available free online. But a new model is needed, and Ms Moore is trying all sorts of things in her effort to find one. On March 18th her company launched Mine, for example, a new concept that allows readers to go online and select articles from eight titles, for delivery in print or online as a free, personalised magazine. If this proves popular, the company may start charging for it. This nifty （聪明的）scheme highlights(使显著,使突出;强调) Time Inc’s eagerness to attract readers to its magazines—but its ambivalence about adding a price tag.
As the boss of a company which oversees 120 magazine titles including Time, People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune, Ms Moore faces the difficult task of keeping magazines relevant as household budgets shrink(退缩，收缩), the appeal of free content online grows, and advertisers reduce their spending. At some of her magazines, such as Time, advertising revenues are down by around 30% compared with this time last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Ms Moore has had to tear up her company’s five-year plan and draft a new two-year one instead, focusing on two things: internal reorganisation and innovation.

After laying off around 600 people, Ms Moore has restructured the firm into three units—news, entertainment and lifestyle—grouping together magazines with similar material, advertisers and audiences. The aim is to maintain editorial quality while increasing efficiency, because titles can share writers and articles and pool resources for functions, such as subscription services（订购服务）. Ms Moore has also turned her attention to training, launching “Time Inc University”, a series of seminars （研讨会）led by Time executives on topics such as branding and teamwork, in February. Ms Moore will teach one of these seminars herself.
At the same time, Ms Moore is building her magazines’ brands and taking them in new directions. Under her, some titles have moved beyond the printed word and into popular culture. People co-hosts（共同主办） the Screen Actors Guild Awards Gala, for example, and Essence sponsors an annual concert of African-American music. Late last year the company announced an elaborate scheme called “Maghound”—an online subscription service that lets readers pick several magazines to receive each month in the post, and gives them the chance to switch titles whenever they like. Ms Moore sees promise in using the internet to make readers loyal to print magazines. “The industry needs to use technology to our advantage,” she says.
Ms Moore has seen the magazine industry evolve, and weather technological shifts, for over three decades. She graduated from Harvard Business School in 1978 with 13 job offers, including one from Time Inc. She accepted it, even though it paid the least, because she had grown up reading Time and dreamt of working at Sports Illustrated. She started as a financial analyst and rose to become associate publisher of Sports Illustrated, but it soon became clear to her that the magazine, a very male title at a company dominated by men, would not make her publisher in a hurry. So she moved to People in 1991, and helped make it one of the most profitable magazines in the world.
It was at People that Ms Moore was spotted （发觉）by Richard Parsons, who later became chief executive of Time Warner and chose Ms Moore as chief executive of Time Inc in 2002. According to Mr Parsons, who is now chairman of Citigroup, Ms Moore was “bright, charming, energetic, fun and gutsy（勇敢的）” and had the skills to “transform Time Inc from a magazine company to a publishing company” that made its output available online as well as in print. But Mr Parsons, who has watched her career closely, admits that she is now operating in troubled waters（混乱的状态）, as she tries to cope with a recession in addition to the rise of the internet.
Ever the optimist
Ms Moore is a self-described “magazine optimist” who thinks that holding a glossy magazine beats looking at a screen. Magazines may indeed be better placed than newspapers to cope with the recession and readers’ shift towards the web. But given the woes（悲哀、不幸 ）of America’s newspapers, many of which have gone bust （破产）or shifted to scaled-down, web-only operations, that is not saying much. And despite her love of print, Ms Moore is not afraid of technology. In February Time ran a cover story entitled “How to Save Your Newspaper” which crystallised（使（思想﹑ 计划等）具体化）a growing belief within the industry that providing articles to readers free online is not sustainable, and that a switch to paid access will be necessary. Ms Moore thinks her firm can lead the way in this shift from freebies to fees. This month Time Inc said it was considering the introduction of a hybrid（ 混合的）(or “freemium”) scheme, making some People and Time articles available free, but charging for premium（高级的） content. But this approach has been tried before, notably by the New York Times, which later abandoned it.
Another possibility is that readers may be prepared to subscribe （赞助）to content on portable devices such as Amazon’s Kindle e-reader or advanced “smart” phones. Ms Moore says it might make sense for her company to subsidise （资助）such devices if readers agree to sign up for enough material—an approach that would make particular sense for Time Inc, with its wide range of titles. Ms Moore is already talking to makers of e-readers about working together. The music industry, she notes, missed out{错过(机会) }because it was afraid to embrace technology. She is determined not to let the same thing happen in magazine publishing.

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Religion, medicine and death
But not yet, Lord
Mar 19th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
Religious people seem curiously reluctant to meet their maker（上帝）

HOW do a person’s religious beliefs influence his attitude to terminal illness? The answer is surprising. You might expect the religious to accept death as God’s will and, while not hurrying towards it, not to seek to prolong their lives using heroic and often traumatic（创伤的）medical procedures. Atheists（无神论者）, by contrast, have nothing to look forward to after death, so they might be expected to cling to life.
In fact, it is the other way round—at least according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Andrea Phelps and her colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Religious people seem to use their faith to cope with the pain and degradation（降低） that “aggressive” medical treatment entails（使承担）, even though such treatment rarely makes much odds.（没有多大区别）
Dr Phelps and her team followed the last months of 345 cancer patients. The participants were not asked directly how religious they were but, rather, about how they used any religious belief they had to cope with difficult situations by, for example, “seeking God’s love and care”.（注意插入语用法） The score from this questionnaire was compared with their requests for such things as the use of mechanical ventilation（机械通气） to keep them alive and resuscitation （复苏）to bring them back from the dead.
The correlation was strong. More than 11% of those with the highest scores underwent mechanical ventilation; less than 4% of those with the lowest did so. For resuscitation the figures were 7% and 2%.
Explaining the unpleasantness and futility（无用） of the procedures does not seem to make much difference, either. Holly Prigerson, one of Dr Phelps’s co-authors, was involved in another study at Dana-Farber which was published earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This showed that when doctors had frank conversations about the end of life with terminally ill cancer patients, the patients typically chose not to request very intensive medical interventions.
According to Dr Prigerson, though, such end-of-life chats had little impact on “religious copers”, most of whom still wanted doctors to make every effort to keep them alive. Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of Christianity’s most revered figures, famously asked God to help him achieve “chastity and continence, but not yet”. When it comes to meeting their maker, many religious people seem to have a similar attitude.

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第四篇

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Biofools
Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Farming biofuels produces nitrous oxide. This is bad for climate change

MANY people consider the wider use of biofuels a promising way of reducing the amount of surplus(过剩的，多余的) carbon dioxide (CO2) being pumped into the air by the world’s mechanised transport. The theory is that plants such as sugar cane（甘蔗）, maize（玉米） (corn, to Americans), oilseed rape（油菜） and wheat take up CO2 during their growth, so burning fuels made from them should have no net effect on the amount of that gas in the atmosphere. Biofuels, therefore, should not contribute to global warming.

Theory, though, does not always translate into practice, and just as governments have committed themselves to the greater use of biofuels (see table), questions are being raised about how green this form of energy really is. The latest come from a report produced by a team of scientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world.
The ICSU report concludes that, so far, the production of biofuels has aggravated rather than ameliorated global warming. In particular, it supports some controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Dr Crutzen concluded that most analyses had underestimated the importance to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O) by a factor of between three and five. The amount of this gas released by farming biofuel crops such as maize and rape probably negates（消除，使无效） by itself any advantage offered by reduced emissions of CO2.
Although N2O is not common in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it hangs around （逗留）longer. The upshot（结果） is that, over the course of a century, its ability to warm the planet is almost 300 times that of an equivalent mass of CO2. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who was involved in writing the ICSU report, said that although the methods used by Dr Crutzen could be criticised, his fundamental conclusions were correct.

N2O is made by bacteria that live in soil and water and, these days, their raw material is often the nitrogen-rich fertiliser that modern farming requires. Since the 1960s the amount of fertiliser used by farmers has increased sixfold(6倍的), and not all of that extra nitrogen ends up in their crops. Maize, in particular, is described by experts in the field as a “nitrogen-leaky（漏的）” plant because it has shallow roots and takes up nitrogen for only a few months of the year. This would make maize (which is one of the main sources of biofuel) a particularly bad contributor to global N2O emissions.
But it is not just biofuels that are to blame. The ICSU report suggests N2O emissions in general are probably more important than had been realised. Previous studies, including those by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-appointed body of experts, may have miscalculated their significance—and according to Adrian Williams of Cranfield University, in Britain, even the IPCC’s approach suggests that the global-warming potential of most of Britain’s annual crops is dominated by N2O emissions.
The broader issue, therefore, is the extent to which humanity has hijacked the “nitrogen cycle”, as the passage of that gas into and out of the atmosphere is known, for its own use. Alan Townsend, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of those trying to calculate the extent of this change. What seems certain is that the nitrogen cycle is changing faster and more profoundly than the carbon cycle, which has attracted much more attention.
This week Dr Townsend, and others involved in something called the International Nitrogen Initiative, are meeting in Paris to try to organise an international assessment of what is going on. This would do for nitrogen what the IPCC has done for carbon. To some, worries about nitrogen will doubtless seem to be no more than the latest environmental bandwagon（引人注目）. But the case of biofuels shows that without proper consideration of all greenhouse gases, not just CO2, it is too easy to rush headlong into expensive methods of mitigation that actually make things worse.

hustly0415UID: 2407456

怎么参加这个活动啊。。。
我也想参加~~~

winning1030UID: 2538401

13# hustly0415
自己去economist上读自己感兴趣的文章嘛，自己收集好词好句~

winning1030UID: 2538401

Can I serve you now?
Jan 29th 2009
From The Economist print edition
American attitudes to stem-cell therapies are changing fast

Illustration by Stephen Jeffrey
FOR the past eight years, America’s government has declined to fund new research into one of the world’s most promising medical technologies: the use of human embryonic stem cells to repair or replace damaged tissue in the diseased and injured. Embryonic stem cells are special for two reasons, one scientific and one ethical. The scientific reason is that they are able to turn into any of the body’s myriad cell types, which is why they might be used in this way. The ethical reason is that, at the moment, harvesting them usually involves killing human embryos. The embryos in question have no future anyway (they are usually “spares” from in vitro fertilisation procedures). But it was this destruction of potential human life that disturbed George Bush and his supporters.
Barack Obama has promised to reverse（推翻） the ban. When that happens, American academics will no longer have to watch enviously from the sidelines as their colleagues in Australia, Britain, China, the Czech Republic, Israel, Singapore and South Korea push ahead. But though the legislative wheels have yet to start turning, the mood has already shifted.
One sign of this shift came on January 23rd when the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted permission for the first clinical trial of a therapy based on human embryonic stem cells to Geron, a firm based in Menlo Park, California. Geron was able to ask for permission, and the FDA was able to grant it, because the ban does not apply to privately financed research. America, it seems, is back in the stem-cell business.
Off we go
Geron’s trial is of a treatment for paralysis caused by damage to the spinal cord（脊髓）. Between eight and ten patients with severe spinal-cord injuries will be recruited （招募）to test this treatment for safety. At the same time both the researchers and the patients will be looking for signs of improvement in the condition. If the trial is successful, larger ones will follow.
The trick that Geron’s researchers have learned is how to turn embryonic stem cells into cells called oligodendrocytes（少突细胞）. These, in turn, generate a structure called the myelin（髓磷脂）sheath（鞘）, which insulates nerves against leakage of the electrical signals that carry their messages around. Geron plans to inject its oligodendrocytes into the damaged spines of patients between one and two weeks after their injury.
Tests in rats, using human cells, have shown that oligodendrocytes injected this way can indeed help repair myelin sheaths and restore the ability of nerve cells to carry signals. The hope is that the same will happen in people. The nerve cells themselves will not be replaced, so even in principle such treatment could not help everyone with a spinal injury. Many observers do, however, see this research as a step along the road to reconnecting the brains and limbs of those with severed spinal cords, by growing new nerve cells to bridge the gap. All new medical procedures need to be tested for safety, of course. With stem cells, the main risk is not the sort of chemical toxicity （毒性）associated with a drug; rather it is of an unusual type of tumour called a teratoma（畸胎瘤）. Teratomas are more or less normal bodily structures—eyes or teeth, for example—that are growing in the wrong place. They are a special risk with stem cells precisely because such cells can turn into any other sort. If the wrong genetic switch is flicked, the wrong sort of tissue（组织） results.
Another risk, though, is immune rejection. Introducing stem cells into a body is a bit like transplanting an organ: the recipient’s immune system might throw a wobbly and try to destroy the intruder. Geron’s patients will therefore have to spend two months taking anti-rejection drugs. Other people, though, think they may be able to get round this difficulty. The International Stem Cell Corporation (ISCo), in Oceanside, California, for one, reckons（认为） it can do so and, at the same time, deal with the ethical issue of embryo destruction.
ISCo has found a way of producing embryonic-like stem cells from unfertilised eggs. The egg is chemically stimulated to create a group of cells that form a non-viable (and unfertilised) “embryo”. This, explains Kenneth Aldrich, the firm’s boss, is something that could not be implanted into a woman’s womb and produce a child. Nonetheless, the cells it contains have the same characteristics as stem cells.
下面例证！！
Besides any ethical advantages this procedure may have, it could also have medical ones. Because lines of stem cells created in this way have only one parent, they are immunologically simpler than normal embryonic cells—in other words they have a smaller variety of the proteins that trigger rejection. That lack of variety, says Dr Aldrich, means it might be feasible to create a bank of stem-cell lines that could be matched to every immune type in the human population, rather as a blood bank （血库）carries blood of all the different groups (A, B, O and so on). Replacement stem cells might then be ordered off the shelf.
Nor are spinal-cord injuries the only condition lined up for treatment. Both ISCo and Advanced Cell Technology, of Los Angeles, are trying to create stem cells that could stop—and possibly reverse—a process called macular degeneration黄斑部变性, which leads to blindness. ISCo says it hopes to start human trials later this year. Using embryonic stem cells in this way is regarded as a particularly promising route because a similar form of treatment that employs stem cells recovered from still-born children is already known to work.
Try, try, try again
The true potential of this approach is unknowable. It might yet prove too difficult to use as widely as its supporters hope. Stem-cell therapy has been suggested as a way of dealing with arthritis, angina咽峡炎 and Parkinson’s disease, as well as spinal-cord injury and blindness—a range of conditions that makes it look like a panacea（万灵丹）. That risks disappointment and overreaction if things go wrong. But the only way to find out is to try.
Michael West, the founder of Geron and now head of BioTime, another biotechnology company, says the existing legislation has affected privately financed research as well as the public sort. Investors have been frightened off by the political debate. Once it is gone, the full brunt正面的冲击,主要的压力of America’s innovative know-how, academic and private, could transform the subject, as other countries may soon find out.