★☆★Economist系列精读★☆★

gdreamer9UID：2542678

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tm/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14027269
How to toughen up softwood
A hard act to followJul 14th 2009
From Economist.com
Making softwoods more durable could cut demand for unsustainably logged tropical hardwoods
© 2008 Kebony ASA
ONE of the reasons tropical forests are being cut down so rapidly is demand for the hardwoods, such as teak, that grow there. Hardwoods, as their name suggests, tend to be denser and more durable than softwoods. But their unsustainable logging destroys not only forests but also local creatures and the future prospects of the people who lived there.提出问题

It would be better to use softwood, which grows in cooler climes in sustainably managed forests. Softwoods are fast-growing coniferous species that account for 80% of the world’s timber. But the stuff is not durable enough  to be used outdoors without being treated with toxic preservatives to protect it against fungi and insect pests. These chemicals eventually wash out into streams and rivers, and the wood must be retreated. Moreover, at the end of its life, wood that has been treated with preservatives in this way needs to be disposed of carefully. 分析问题的原因

(SE 1)One way out of this problem would be an environmentally friendly way of making softwood harder and more durable—something that a Norwegian company called Kebony has now achieved. It opened its first factory in January.

Kebony stops wood from rotting by placing in a vat containing a substance called furfuryl alcohol, which is made from the waste left over when sugarcane is processed. The vat is then pressurised, 挤压？forcing the liquid into the wood. Next the wood is dried and heated to 110ºC. The heat transforms the liquid into a resin, which makes the cell walls of the wood thicker and stronger.

The approach is similar to that of a firm based in the Netherlands called Titan Wood. Timber swells when it is damp and shrinks when it is dry because it contains groups of atoms called hydroxyl groups, which absorb and release water. Titan Wood has developed a technique for converting hydroxyl groups into acetyl groups (a different combination of atoms) by first drying the wood in a kiln and then treating it with a chemical called acetic anhydride. The result is a wood that retains its shape in the presence of water, and is no longer recognised as wood by grubs that would otherwise attack it. It is thus extremely durable.

The products made by both companies are completely recyclable, environmentally friendly and create woods that are actually harder than most tropical hardwoods. Treated Canadian maple, for example, is harder than tropical merbau and jatoba. The strengthened softwoods can be used in everything from window frames to spas to garden furniture. Treated maple is also being adopted for decking on yachts. The cost is similar to that of teak, but the maple is more durable and easier to keep clean.

Obviously treating wood makes it more expensive. (SE2)But because it does not need to receive further treatments—a shed made from treated wood would not need regular applications of creosote, for example—it should prove economical over its lifetime. Kebony reckons that its pine cladding, for example, would cost a third less than conventionally treated pine cladding over the course of 40 years. Saving money, then, need not be at the expense of helping to save the planet.

感觉是小阅读一篇

gjwUID：2512308

'Behind Chinese walls'
学习笔记
1.Rio Tinto 力拓（澳洲矿业公司）
2.detention（detain v.）: a holding in custody
3.spat: a brief petty quarrel or angry out burst （口角）
4.barrage：a vigorous or rapid out
5.pouring or projection of many things at once（枪炮齐发，弹幕；这里是指连续不断的攻击性言论）
6.outspeak:  to declare openly or boldly (坦率直言)
7.hard-line approach now seems to have backfired.(强硬的谈判方式现在似乎显得与当初的设想事与愿违)
8.hard-line:  强硬路线
9.backfired:  to have the reverse of the desired or expected effect(事与愿违的)
10.heft： importance (很好的替换词)

GenevUID：2543794

China's recovery

A fine balancing act

Jul 16th 2009 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition

Is China's economic stimulus too much of a good thing?

Reuters

CHINESE growth was already the envy of the world. Now recession-stricken countries will be turning an even brighter green. On Thursday July 16th new figures showed China’s GDP growth quickened to 7.9% in the year to the second quarter. That is healthy enough by anyone’s standards but the headline number conceals a more astonishing rebound. Goldman Sachs estimates that GDP grew at an annualised rate of 16.5% in the second quarter compared with the previous three months. Over the same period, America’s economy probably contracted again. China’s economic stimulus has clearly been hugely effective. So effective, indeed, that some economists are now worrying it may be working rather too well.

Green: Having a sickly or unhealthy pallor indicative of nausea or jealousy, for example.脸色难看的：脸色呈病态或不健康的苍白色，可能由恶心或妒忌引起

In the year to June fixed investment surged by 35%, car sales rose by 48%, and purchases of homes by more than 80%. After falling last year, home prices are now rising briskly in some big cities, and share prices have soared by 80% from their November low. Domestic spending has been spurred partly by the government’s stimulus package, but probably even more important was the scrapping of restrictions on bank lending late last year. In June new lending was more than four times larger than a year earlier.

One reason why the economy has rebounded so quickly is that much of the slowdown was self-inflicted, rather than the result of America’s economic collapse. In 2007 concerns about overheating prompted the government to curb the flow of credit for construction and home buying. This caused China’s economy to slow sharply even before the global financial crisis. Then, last November, the government turned the credit tap back on full.

That has given a big boost to domestic spending but raised concerns that the flood of liquidity will push up inflation, fuel bubbles in shares and housing, and store up bad loans. The M2 measure of money surged by 29% in the year to June. In fact the risk of high inflation in the near future appears low: Chinese consumer prices fell by 1.7% in the year to June, and spare capacity at home and abroad is holding down prices. But asset prices could be a bigger danger. According to one estimate, 20% of new lending went into the stockmarket in the first five months of this year.

It is probably too soon to use the word “bubble”. The stockmarket is still at only half its 2007 peak and, although house prices have risen sharply this year in Shanghai and Shenzhen, the nationwide average is barely higher than it was a year ago. But the pace of bank lending is unsustainable, and America’s recent experience suggests that it is better to prevent bubbles forming than to mop up the mess afterwards. Several officials at the central bank People’s Bank of China (PBOC) have said lending should be curbed.

At the moment, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is signalling that he wants monetary policy kept fairly loose. Exports remain weak and the government fears premature tightening could derail the recovery. It is also keen to create jobs and maintain social stability in the months before the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule in October.

Still, the central bank has begun to tug gently at the reins. It has nudged up money-market interest rates and warned banks that it intends to increase its scrutiny of new bank loans. The China Banking Regulatory Commission has warned banks to stick to rules on mortgages for second homes, which require a down-payment of at least 40% of a property’s value.

The recent rebound in house sales is, in fact, exactly what the government is aiming for, since it is using property as a way to spur private consumption. Higher house sales encourage more spending on furniture and consumer appliances. Construction also creates lots of jobs; indeed, it employs almost as many workers as the export sector. Since October the government has encouraged people to buy houses by cutting the minimum mortgage down-payment on their main home 30% to 20% and by reducing stamp duty and other taxes on property from transactions. Stronger sales are now feeding through into new house building: housing starts rose by 12% in the year to June, the first growth in 12 months.

Given the importance of property to domestic demand, the government is highly unlikely to want to clamp down hard on the housing market. Despite the recent lending boom, Chinese banks’ mortgage lending is still very conservative compared with that in America—at the peak of America’s housing bubble it was easy to get a mortgage for 100% or more of the value of a home. Nevertheless, the lesson of America’s financial crisis for China’s government is plain: overly loose lending should never be ignored.

gjwUID：2512308

''A fine balancing act''
学习笔记～
annualize:  to calculate or adjust to reflect a rate based on a full year(按年计算的)
derail:   to cause to run off the rails（脱轨）
            to obstruct the progress of (阻碍)
nudge:  用肘轻推来提醒；引申为接近.
           【经】上调:It has nudged up money-market interest rates.
stamp duty:  印花税

gdreamer9UID：2542678

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14030161Nice but trickyJul 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition


EVEN before its publication, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” had prompted a heated debate online, mostly among people who had not read the book but were merely familiar with its title. Critics lambasted it for suggesting that everything ought to be free; and they attacked its author, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired (and a former journalist on this newspaper), for daring to charge money for a book advancing this position. Both criticisms are unfair. The book is in fact available free in some electronic formats, and this handily illustrates Its argument, which is not that everything should be free, but that more things now can be, thanks to the new business models being opened up by the tumbling prices of computer power, storage and networking.
Advertising ArchivesWhat a giveaway
It sounds like a big idea. But unlike “The Long Tail”, Mr Anderson’s previous book, “Free” lacks an elegant underlying explanation for why some of these new models work and others do not. “The Long Tail” provided an illuminating perspective on the success of internet companies such as Amazon, eBay, Google and Netflix. These very different firms, it turned out, were all exploiting the internet’s capacity to open up niche markets that their bricks-and-mortar rivals,??强劲的敌人？ limited by a lack of physical shelf space, could not. But where “The Long Tail” revealed something unexpected and informative, “Free” often feels as though it is stating the obvious.

Mr Anderson divides the idea of Free (it is capitalised throughout) into four sub-categories: cross-subsidies (give away the razor, sell the blade); advertising-supported services (from radio and television to websites); freemium (a small subset of users pay for a premium version of something, supporting a free version for the majority); and non-monetary markets (in which participants motivated by non-financial considerations develop things like open-source software and Wikipedia).

Much of this, at least in the first two categories, is old hat,？旧的形式？ as Mr Anderson, um, freely admits. Many of his examples, such as the free cookbooks given away to promote sales of Jell-O, are historical. “Free is not new,” he argues, “but it is changing.” What is different now, Mr Anderson argues, is that Free can be far more widely applied in the digital era. “While last century’s Free was a powerful marketing method, this century’s Free is an entirely new economic model,” he claims.

（三分之二转折，还真是！^_^GOLDEN STANDARD）啊 But he never quite stands this up. Indeed, he concludes the book with a confession that Free “has to be matched with Paid”. Beyond the old-fashioned cross-subsidies and free samples, some companies seem to have found new ways to make Free work, but there are not many of them, and the sustainability of others is unclear. And many of the success stories are just applying old ideas in a new field: Google can support its free e-mail service, Gmail, using profits from its online-advertising business, for example. What is new here is e-mail, not cross-subsidies or advertising. The “freemium” approach used by dotcoms such as Flickr and Skype, which is now being adopted by some newspapers online, does offer an attractive new model, but will not work for everyone.

Free is “both a familiar concept and a deeply mysterious one,” Mr Anderson says at the outset. His book advances some interesting ideas about the economics of abundance, but it ultimately leaves the mystery unsolved. The idea of Free is so broad, and encompasses so many different things, that generalisations are difficult. Mr Anderson finishes his book with a list of 50 business models built around Free, presumably so that the reader can find the model that is most likely to apply in his own field. That such a long and varied list is required merely underlines how difficult it is—appropriately enough, for a book that sets off with Jell-O—to nail down such a slippery concept.

GenevUID：2543794

Human spaceflight

Over the moon

Jul 20th 2009
From The Economist print edition

On the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, America wonders whether to go back

AFP

NASA has never really recovered its direction since the triumph of the Apollo project. The zenith of that project was 40 years ago today on July 20th 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11’s lunar module onto the Sea of Tranquillity, and promptly fluffed his lines. The cancellation of Apollo three years later started the slide, and the space shuttles that were supposed to fill the gap failed to become the workaday vehicles that had been promised. The agency’s probes have visited all of the solar system’s planets and it has done a lot of important science. But its manned space programme has never got back the pizzazz of 1969.

Five years ago George Bush outlined a plan to return Americans to the moon in 2020, with an option on going to Mars later. Now that plan is the subject of a rather un-American bout of introspection and self-examination. At the behest of Barack Obama’s newly empowered Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), NASA, America’s space agency, is submitting to an independent review of its human-spaceflight plans in order to determine their future.

This year has been a particularly difficult one for NASA. It started with the incoming administration asking some hard questions, such as how much money could be saved by cancelling various bits of the spacecraft that the agency plans to use to replace its fleet of ageing shuttles—which, among other things, provide America’s only direct link with the International Space Station. The shuttles are due to retire next year, and there is already consternation about the gap between that retirement and the arrival of their successor.
The starting point for the review is a simple one: money. Mr Obama’s administration, like every other new government, wishes to impose its own spending plans, and human spaceflight has never been high on its list of priorities. The existing plan for human spaceflight sets NASA on a path that will lead it to consume what one insider estimates to be around $100 billion before the programme is complete. It seems entirely prudent, therefore, for the administration to examine whether this is money well spent.

NASA faces substantial challenges. For example, as currently designed, its plans for a system of rockets to replace the shuttle (known collectively as Ares, the Greek name for Mars) do not fit within the funds that are available, and have been criticised for showing too little innovation and even less progress. NASA’s role, some argue, should be the whizzier business of novel plasma-drives and nanotech-based heat shielding—not “Apollo on steroids” as some people have derisively described Ares. Nor is there any sense of how the proposed moon base that would eventually be built, supposedly as a stepping stone to Mars, can be supported financially.

The difficulty, as ever, is to make the agency properly serve the public that pays for it. Few are suggesting that NASA be eliminated, but such questions reflect the struggle for purpose that it has had since the end of Apollo. Its mission is not human exploration for its own sake, nor off-planet colonisation, yet human spaceflight consumes a large chunk of the budget.
At the moment a shift in priorities that would lead to a direct Mars mission seems unlikely. Even if astronauts return to the moon, though, the means of getting them there must still be decided. One alternative to Ares, proposed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is to use modified versions of their existing Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets both to go to the moon and to resupply the space station, but at lower cost. And if Ares is cancelled another winner may be SpaceX, a small Californian firm that is building a series of rockets called Falcon. These will be able to fly cargo to the International Space Station—and, if all goes well in the future, people.

SpaceX differs from Lockheed and Boeing in that Falcon is a speculative venture rather than having been commissioned (as Delta and Atlas were) by the government. Many see this sort of true private enterprise, rather than the taxpayer-assisted sort, as the way forward in space. And if that is the case, the eternally difficult question of what NASA is for will soon have to be asked again.

sarah2014UID：2671021

NASA’s role, some argue, should be the whizzier business of novel plasma-drives and nanotech-based heat shielding—not “Apollo on steroids” as some people have derisively described Ares. 这里不懂？？？

布拉格的薰衣草UID：2628014

惊叹~~
支持支持~~

sarah2014UID：2671021

Buttonwood1 Y! f& O* U, n* |* y; m1 Y2 v
Not so fast
! C0 m: o1 `6 m& _8 gJun 18th 20093 m. {; v2 [7 W9 C7 x7 u
From The Economist print edition
) D- l0 b) ~9 D& `$ D' RAppetite for risk may have returned, but the crisis is not over
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& [9 q. {; }9 r" j1 O/ Z* x3 iLOW interest rates are intended to ease the burden on debtors, discourage saving, encourage spending and thereby revive the economy. But they also have a distorting effect on asset markets. By reducing the cost of speculation, they encourage bubbles./ C. J9 g  n) i/ X3 n* `
So although it is good news that some indicators (such as the cost of bank borrowing) have improved, risk appetites also need monitoring closely. The “search for yield” which marked the boom of 2005, 2006 and early 2007 seems to have started again. Retail investors, disappointed with measly returns on savings accounts, are piling into corporate-bond funds. One British manager is reportedly raking in £1 billion (.6 billion) a month.( T: J, N/ ~1 _
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Those investors will have to hope that the managers choose their bonds wisely. Standard & Poor’s, a credit-rating agency, reports that more companies have defaulted in 2009 than in the whole of last year, and expects the default rate, 7.29% in May, to hit 14.3% by next year. The agency’s “weakest link” category contains 290 firms, with nearly 0 billion of debt, that are deemed to be at risk of failure.4 e3 s* ?: h3 p3 d$ i
The banks are also rediscovering their willingness to take risks. In a review of the investment-banking sector on June 15th, JPMorgan said that rival banks, eager to rebuild market share, are offering to do deals at “irresponsible prices”. 0 p& ^- ?* |0 C( |% c/ z$ O
The silver lining to this cloud is that large companies have been able to take advantage of investor enthusiasm to raise money in both the bond and equity markets. J. Sainsbury, a British supermarket group, launched a £445m rights issue on June 17th to fund expansion plans. The very idea would have been unimaginable three months ago.* F- @6 Z/ [: [/ M. `; K/ ]0 m4 L
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All this is encouraging the feeling that the worst of the crisis is over. Equity markets enjoyed an almost uninterrupted rebound between March and mid-June; according to Société Générale, the MSCI World index rose in 13 out of the 14 weeks to June 12th, the best sequence since December 1999. This, in turn, was linked to the feeling that the worst of the recession was seen in the first quarter, and that the global economy could be rebounding by the second half of this year.
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There is a kind of positive feedback loop here, in which confidence about the economy boosts the stockmarket and a rising market helps restore economic sentiment (indeed, share prices are included in leading indicators). As strategists at Citigroup remark, the world seems to have moved from worrying about the Great Depression to talking about the Great Escape.6 l+ U% M! i+ ^9 v) l
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But how real is this shift? Not all the recent economic data have been positive. The June Empire State survey of manufacturing activity in New York showed a retreat. German export figures for April showed a 4.8% month-on-month fall. The latest figures for American and euro-zone industrial production showed similar dips. American raw domestic steel production is down 47% year on year; railway traffic in May was almost a quarter below its level of a year earlier. Bankers say that chief executives seem a lot less confident about the existence of “green shoots” than markets are.3 w7 ]' P# y( K+ W4 S+ i9 v6 C+ U
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The danger is that policymakers have done more to revive the financial markets than they have to shore up the real economy. Tim Lee of pi Economics thinks the authorities are simply inflating another bubble. The carry trade (borrowing in low-yielding currencies to invest in higher-yielding ones) has returned, as shown by the strength of the Australian dollar.
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This bubble may start to deflate. Investors are already rediscovering their appetite for government bonds: the yield on ten-year Treasuries had drifted back from a peak of 3.93% on June 10th to 3.67% a week later. Investors may be starting to realise that, even if the biggest falls in output have passed, the outlook for 2010 is still likely to be sluggish., ?; ^* l" U6 V3 J1 M
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After all, the problems that existed at the start of this crisis have not gone away. Delinquencies on American mortgage loans are still rising: the seasonally adjusted rate in the first quarter was higher across all categories. European banks may still need to write down another 3 billion of assets this year and next, according to the European Central Bank. Worst of all, Capital Economics says American consumer debt is more than 130% of disposable income, double its level in the 1980s. Reducing this ratio will require widespread defaults, rapid inflation or a prolonged period of higher savings rates. None of those would be particularly good news for the markets. The crisis took a long time to build up. It will not disappear as a result of one good quarter.



Q：
Tim Lee of pi Economics  什么意思啊？

GenevUID：2543794

54# sarah2014

http://www.pieconomics.com/about.asp

pi, the symbol p, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers, nor even as a root or as the solution of an algebraic equation with rational coefficients. Its expression as a decimal never terminates and never starts recurring.

pi Economics stands for professional investment economics. Financial market cycles never precisely recur and their relationship to economic variables is not linear or constant. But the course of the markets is ultimately determined by economic forces. The challenge for investors is to understand those forces and how they interact with each other and with the financial markets.

GenevUID：2543794

Race in America

Trouble brewing

Aug 1st 2009 | NEW YORK
From Economist.com

Barack Obama's beer-barrel diplomacy aims to defuse a race row

Reuters

AND now the world knows what beer he drinks. On Thursday July 30th, Barack Obama, clasping a Bud Light, met James Crowley, a white police sergeant apparently partial to a Blue Moon and Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor who glugged on a Sam Adams Light. The three, along with Joe Biden, the vice-president and Buckler man, met to chat about an incident that has become known as Gatesgate. After the past week, Mr Obama probably found his cold beer unusually welcome.

偏爱的：对某物或某人偏爱的：partial to detective novels.

The saga sounds daft but threatened to spiral into a controversy about race in a country that has just elected its first black president. Sergeant Crowley arrested Mr Gates on July 16th outside his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mr Gates had locked himself out and then broke back in. A neighbour, suspicions aroused, called the police. The rest of the details are far from clear. It seems that Mr Gates lost his temper with Sergeant Crowley and was detained briefly before all charges were dropped. Mr Obama was pulled into the row when he said, during a press conference, that the police had acted “stupidly”.

That utterance hinted at a racial antagonism that Mr Obama sought to put to rest with this week's “Beer Summit”. Mr Obama knew he had a problem on his hands. He is no angry black man but the dispute sparked a flurry of furious responses. Those who already disliked Mr Obama leapt to Mr Crowley’s defence, while those who like the president rushed to argue in favour of Mr Gates.

If the racial element of the incident were not enough class played a role too. Mr Obama appeared to be defending Mr Gates, a friend and fellow Harvard man, against a working-class cop. Mr Obama’s critics lambasted him for rushing to conclusions. He apologised for his ill-chosen word and, with his “suds diplomacy”, sought to prove that a dose of simple goodwill can bring people together.

Defusing the row is important for Mr Obama. His approval ratings are coming down to earthly levels and his opponents sniffed blood. In one new poll, those “strongly” disapproving of his performance now slightly outnumber those who “strongly” approve. Mr Obama retains support from the middle ground. But those conservatives who were once merely sceptical about Mr Obama are now indignant that he is pushing a big-government programme. A big overhaul of healthcare has made many voters fear for the quality of their own care and wary of higher taxes.

Mr Obama had already stoked the race debate by nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Ms Sotomayor is a decent judge who performed well in her Senate hearings, but she makes an inviting target for Mr Obama’s opponents. She has referred to the special judicial abilities of a “wise Latina”, and made a controversial ruling in a case where the the authorities in New Haven, Connecticut denied promotion to white firemen because no blacks had scored high enough in an exam to warrant advancement.

Try as he might to stand as a unifying figure, Mr Obama has not met with unqualified success. Gatesgate has seen inflammatory comments that are usually confined to the uglier corners of the internet aired on prime-time television. Lou Dobbs, the once-respectable TV commentator, has mused on air whether there could be something to conspiracy theories that Mr Obama is not a natural-born American citizen (and hence ineligible to be president). Fox News’s Glenn Beck, a regular host at the conservative TV station, called Mr Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people”. Another conservative, Michelle Malkin, took to the Today Show, a normally dull morning chat programme, to call him a “racial opportunist”.

Mr Obama thinks that showing a bit of respect can get people to budge from hardened positions. The photos of the Beer Summit seemed to show four men sharing a good time. But the angry public reactions to the whole sordid affair show that easy times with an ice-cold beer will be few and far between for the president in the coming months.

GenevUID：2543794

The origin of malaria

The source of malaria

Aug 4th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

Human malaria started in chimpanzees

FLPA

AGUE, tertian fever, quartan fever, paludism. Malaria has been known about since ancient times and has gone under many names. Today, it kills over a million people a year, most of them young children. Where it originally came from, though, has been a matter of scientific debate for half a century.

In 1958 Frank Livingstone, a noted anthropologist, suggested that Plasmodium falciparum (which is by far the deadliest of the several parasites that cause human malaria) had jumped into Homo sapiens from chimpanzees. He speculated that the rise of agriculture had led to human encroachment on wild forests, giving the chimp version of the bug, P. reichenowi, the chance to find a new host. A rival camp, however, argued that P. falciparum was a variant of P. gallinaceum, a parasite found in chickens.

A paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences shows that Livingstone got it right. Stephen Rich of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Nathan Wolfe of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative in San Francisco, and their colleagues used genetic evidence to confirm that P. falciparum is, indeed, an offshoot of P. reichenowi. And a recent one at that, as it may have hopped from chimp to human a mere 10,000 years ago—about the time, as Livingstone argued, that human hunter-gatherers were settling down on the farm.

To reach their conclusion, Dr Rich and Dr Wolfe studied the DNA sequences of malarial parasites collected from nearly 100 wild or formerly wild chimpanzees born in central and west Africa. They identified eight distinct versions of P. reichenowi (only one had been known before) and found that the DNA of P. falciparum sat nicely in the middle of all this genetic variation. Moreover, it seems to have made the jump from chimps to people only once. All P. falciparum parasites alive today appear to derive from an individual example of P. reichenowi.
All this is, of course, ancient history, but it is history with a point. Understanding how parasites leap species barriers is crucial to understanding how new infectious diseases start in humans—and an example of a recent leap was also published this week. Nature Medicine carried a report by Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen and his colleagues of a new human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) detected in a Cameroonian woman. Unlike the widespread HIV-1 M strain, and the much rarer N and O strains, which jumped to people from chimpanzees, the newly described P strain originated in gorillas.

Dr Wolfe believes this sort of thing happens all the time. He calls it viral chatter. Only occasionally, as with the M strain of HIV-1, does the chatter lead to a serious epidemic. Monitoring the chatter, however, may nip such an epidemic in the bud. The Global Viral Forecasting Initiative is therefore involved in setting up a monitoring system in viral “hot spots”, such as central Africa and South-East Asia, to catch such transfections early.
Dr Rich, meanwhile, observes that because P. reichenowi, the closest relative of P. falciparum, is “of greatly diminished pathogenicity” in its chimpanzee hosts (in other words, it causes them few adverse symptoms), it may provide a basis for development of new vaccines that are naturally attenuated. And a malaria vaccine would be a good thing indeed.

GenevUID：2543794

Leszek KolakowskiJul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish-born Oxford philosopher, died on July 17th, aged 81HIS life was learning—about history, about his times, about himself. Like some other erstwhile true believers, he became one of most cogent critics of his former faith. Having spent his youthful years as an ardent communist and atheist, Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great minds of the modern era, turned into Marxism’s most perceptive opponent, and one with a profound respect for religion.

His intellectual life started in the misery of Nazi-occupied Poland—he had to study in secret, mostly alone—and finished in one of the nicest places imaginable: Oxford’s All Souls College. In a university tailor-made for gifted misfits, Mr Kolakowski was happy: he was left alone to read, write, and, less often, talk. All Souls provided a glorious academic retreat: the only obligation is to dine there regularly. His distinctive hat, craggy features, idiosyncratic English and perspex walking stick established him as a landmark even in a city studded with oddities and treasures.

“Philosopher” was his usual label, but not a wholly accurate one: historian of ideas would be better. Mr Kolakowski showed little interest in the Oxford tradition of analytical philosophy; like his great Oxonian philosophical contemporary, Isaiah Berlin, he formulated no grand scheme of ideas. His forte was to explain the development, attractiveness and shortcomings of political ideas and systems, particularly the communism invented by Karl Marx and practised across the Soviet empire.

His magnum opus was the three-volume “Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution”, published in the 1970s. It calmly and expertly demolished the pillars of Marxist thought: the labour theory of value, the idea of class struggle, historical materialism and the like. He also pointed out, again without unnecessary polemics, the practical shortcomings of communist systems. Stalinism was not an aberration, he argued, but the inevitable consequence of pursuing a communist utopia. For that, powerful left-wing voices such as the historian E.P. Thompson berated him as a traitor to the noble socialist ideals that he once espoused.
Against the devilBoth his experience and beliefs made such criticism seem patronising. Mr Kolakowski had lived under two kinds of totalitarianism, Nazism and communism; his ideas had been censored even in the supposedly more liberal communist Poland of the late 1950s and 1960s. What finally drove him, and his Jewish wife Tamara, to emigrate was the communist-inspired anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. Few if any of his leftist critics had such experiences. In a spirited rejoinder to Thompson, Mr Kolakowski wrote: "The only medicine communism has invented—the centralised, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule—is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure; it is less efficient economically and it makes the bureaucratic character of social relations an absolute principle."
His opponents in that argument seem to have landed on the dustheap of history. But Mr Kolakowski’s distaste for communism did not make him an evangelist for free-market liberalism: he was too inquisitive, sceptical and irreverent to support any particular doctrine strongly. He was particularly critical of those who relied solely on science for answers to the big questions about life. He criticised too the emptiness of secular materialism. Increasingly, he became convinced that religion, in some form or other, was a necessary part of human existence. He was no churchgoer, but asked what his next target would be after communism, he replied, only half-jokingly, “the devil”.

For those involved in the struggle against communism, on both sides of the iron curtain, he became a guru, ranking along with Czeslaw Milosz, the émigré Polish poet whose book “The Captive Mind”, published in 1953, unpicked the mind-mangling effects of communist thought.
In those early days, of course, Mr Kolakowski was still a loyal, if critical, party member. Some of his fans preferred to forget that. They also overlooked his youthful tirades against Poland’s Catholic church. As a zealous party member when the remnants of wartime anti-communism were still strong, he used to carry a pistol for fear of assassination. Remembering his father’s murder during the Nazi occupation, the young Kolakowski accepted communism as an alternative both to Nazi militarism and to the failures of Poland’s pre-war system of semi-authoritarian capitalism. Indeed his country’s post-war communist rulers saw the brainy, determined youngster as a prize prospect and rewarded him with a trip to Moscow in 1950 to experience the delights of Soviet rule.

That backfired. He wrote later of the “material and spiritual desolation” he saw there, though it took two decades for his faith in Poland’s socialist system to erode entirely. In the late 1960s, he made his way to America but found the radical campus leftism “pathetic and disgusting”; no place to bring up his daughter, he felt. He visited America regularly, though, and it was in his Jefferson lecture, the highest honour the federal government gives for intellectual achievement, that he coined his best-known aphorism: “We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

GenevUID：2543794

Global warming and the permafrost

Thaw point

Jul 30th 2009 | TOOLIK LAKE, ALASKA
From The Economist print edition

Tundra is among the least-studied types of terrain on Earth. That is about to change

The beautiful and the dammed

THE Arctic tundra is one of the world’s most extensive ecosystems, and the frozen soil known as permafrost, which underlies it, can be hundreds of metres deep. But as the world warms up in response to the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being poured into the atmosphere each year, so does the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, bacteria start chewing up the organic matter it contains. This releases yet more carbon dioxide, as well as methane, another greenhouse gas, which has 25 times the warming potential of CO2. Edward Schuur of the University of Florida in Gainesville, a doyen of the field, estimates that the world’s permafrost contains twice as much carbon as its atmosphere. If even a fraction of that were released as CO2 and methane, it would be bad news.

Nor is that all. Thawing permafrost also leaks nitrates and phosphates into the tundra, allowing novel plant species to get a foothold in what was, to start with, a fairly spartan habitat. It distorts the Earth’s surface, too, creating a landscape of domes and pits known as thermokarst because of its resemblance to the karstic terrain of limestone-rich parts of the world. This changes the tundra’s ecology. It also plays havoc with human structures, such as buildings, roads and pipelines, that sit on top of it. For all of these reasons, then, more research is needed into this icy realm. And that is the object of a project with the unsnappy name of Spatial and Temporal Influences of Thermokarst Failures on Surface Processes in Arctic Landscapes, which was kicked off by a group of scientists who gathered in late June at the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska.

Karsting the first stone

The project, which is led by Breck Bowden of the University of Vermont in Burlington, involves 17 research groups from America and Canada. To start with, they will use a combination of aerial photography, field measurements, and ground- and satellite-based sensors to compile a map of all the thermokarstic areas of Alaska. This will provide a reference point from which changes can be measured.

The team will then try to work out how the development of features such as “retrogressive thaw slumps” and “active-layer detachments” (different ways in which thawing permafrost can cause a hillside to slip) are associated with the local climate, geology and vegetation. They will look, too, at the amount of ice in the ground, and the temperature and the moisture of the soil. All these data will be fed into computer models which, the researchers hope, will allow them to develop an automated way of predicting where and when new features will form, and to monitor them when they appear.

Dr Bowden and his colleagues also hope to understand the impact of thermokarst activity on the structure of the soil, and its nutrient content. They will concentrate on a few sites that can be studied intensively and which are affected by different types of activity. They will measure the amount of carbon, phosphate and nitrate in the soil, together with the rate of plant growth and microbial decomposition. That will let them work out just how “leaky” thawing permafrost is and thus how big its contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere might be, should the worst come to the worst.

It will also help them forecast changes in the tundra’s vegetation. The softening of the soil and the consequent release of nutrients is likely to encourage the growth of shrubs on land that is now dominated by grass, moss and lichens. The researchers will monitor the growth of this vegetation around newly formed thermokarst features and use experimental field plots to test how conditions mimicking such features affect which species will thrive.

Last, the project will try to work out how thawing permafrost will affect the numerous streams, rivers and lakes of the Arctic. Together, these amount to the biggest acreage of water on “dry” land. As water moves through affected areas, it picks up both nutrients and sediment that would otherwise be held in the permafrost’s icy grasp. These, paradoxically, have opposite effects on the growth of algae. The phosphates and nitrates stimulate it whereas the extra sediment suppresses it by trapping nutrients in the beds of such bodies of water.

Muddy waters

It is not only natural habitats and future generations that are threatened by the thawing of the permafrost. People in the here and now are affected, as well. Sediments from a huge thermokarstic area have, for example, dammed the Selawik River in north-western Alaska, interfering with fish and threatening the livelihood of nearby villages. Elsewhere in the state, a combination of melting sea ice and thawing permafrost has exacerbated the erosion of several coastal villages, which will have to be relocated at a considerable cost.

Whether anything short of reversing climate change can be done about all this is a moot question. But at least when the project reports, in five years’ time, the size of the threat will be clearer. The news it brings may not be welcome. But it is surely better than living in ignorance about one of the world’s most important habitats.

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gdreamer9UID：2542678

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