[1010G]Economist阅读贴-maggie-jiang分贴

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回家了几天，今天开贴

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The Arab world

Waking from its sleep

A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab world; it will be complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out

Jul 23rd 2009 | From The Economist print edition

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The Arab world

Waking from its sleep

A quiet revolution has begun in the Arab world; it will be complete only when the last failed dictatorship is voted out

Jul 23rd 2009 | From The Economist print edition

Alamy

WHAT ails（G词）
the Arabs? The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) this week published the fifth in a series of hard-hitting强有力的
reports on the state of the Arab world. It makes depressing reading. The Arabs are a dynamic and inventive people whose long and proud history includes fabulous contributions to art, culture, science and, of course, religion. The score of modern Arab states, on the other hand, have been impressive mainly for their consistent record of failure.对比+转折，经典啊！

（排比句）They have, for a start, failed to make their people free: six Arab countries have an outright ban on political parties and the rest restrict them slyly狡猾的，奸诈的. They have failed to make their people rich: despite their oil, the UN reports that about two out of five people in the Arab world live on $2 or less a day.
They have failed to keep their people safe: the report argues that overpowerful internal security forces often turn the Arab state into a menace to its own people.
And they are about to fail their young people. The UNDP reckons the Arab world must create 50m new jobs by 2020 to accommodate a growing, youthful workforce—virtually impossible on present trends.

Arab governments are used to shrugging off criticism（对于批评不予理睬，shrug off：耸肩表示蔑视, 抖去, 摆脱）. They had to endure a lot of it when George Bush was president and America’s neoconservatives新保守主义，新保守派 blamed the rise of al-Qaeda on the lack of Arab democracy. Long practice has made Arab rulers expert at explaining their failings away. They point to their culture and say it is unsuited to Western forms of democracy. Or they point to their history, and say that in modern times they would have done much better had they not had to deal with the intrusions of
imperialists, Zionists and cold warriors. 帝国主义者，支持或拥护犹太人复国运动者 and 冷战分子

Some of this is undeniable.（部分赞同，balance的表现） A case can indeed be made that Islam complicates democracy. And, yes, oil, Israel and the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union meant that the Arab world was not left to find its own way after the colonial period ended. More recently the Arabs have been buffeted by the invasion of Iraq. Now they find themselves caught in the middle as America and Iran jostle
for争夺** regional dominance.

Strangely, your highness, they like voting

Still, （开始转折）as the decades roll by the excuses wear thin动词词组
逐渐消失（然而，时间流逝，借口逐渐消失？？不知道是不是转折，这里的as是表示什么意味呢？？）. Islam has not prevented democracy from taking root
生根in the Muslim countries of Asia. Even after its recent flawed election, Iran, a supposed theocracy, shows greater democratic vitality活力，生命力
than most Arab countries. As for outside intrusion, some of the more robust 精力充沛的Arab elections of recent years have been held by Palestinians, under Israeli occupation, and by Iraqis after America’s invasion. When they are given a chance to take part in genuine elections—as, lately, the Lebanese were—Arabs have no difficulty understanding what is at stake (=dangerous) and they turn out to vote in large numbers. By and large（大体上，基本上） it is their own leaders who have chosen to prevent, rig or disregard elections, for fear that if Arabs had a say most would vote to
throw the rascals out.

For this reason, you can bet that if the regimes政体，政权 have their way, Arabs will not get the chance. Arab rulers hold on to power through a cynical combination of coercion, intimidation and co-option高压政治，胁迫和共同选举
不知道co-option到底是什么意思？. From time to time（有时） they let hollow空的，虚假的 parties fight bogus伪造的 elections, which then return them to power.（老美用词真厉害。。。） Where genuine opposition exists it tends to be fatally split between Islamist movements on one hand and, on the other, secular parties that fear the Islamists more than they dislike the regimes themselves. Most of the small cosmetic
表面的reforms Arab leaders enacted when Mr Bush was pushing his “freedom agenda” on unwilling allies have since been rolled back击退. If anything, sad to say, the cause of democracy became tainted by association with a president most Arabs despised for invading Iraq.

The illusion of permanence

Can regimes that are failing their people so clearly really hold sway over some 350m people indefinitely? Hosni Mubarak has been Egypt’s president for 28 years; Muammar Qaddafi has run Libya since 1969. When Hafez Assad died after three decades as president of Syria, power passed smoothly to his son Bashar.
（社会政治类的例子，民主）After the failure of Mr Bush’s efforts to promote democracy, and the debacle in Iraq, Barack Obama has put “respect” rather than “freedom” at the centre of America’s discourse with the Muslim world. That may be wise: since the advent of Mr Obama, America’s standing has risen in Arab eyes, and Mr Bush’s zeal热心 for reforming other countries was counterproductive anyway. But this suggests that if the Arabs want democracy, they will have to grab it for themselves.

Some in the West are wary of 提防Arab elections, fearing that Islamists would exploit the chance to seize power on the principle of “one man, one vote, one time”. Yet Islamists seem to struggle to raise their support much above 20% of the electorate. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia suggest that democracy is the best way to draw the poison of extremism极端倾向，极端主义.
Repression only makes it more dangerous.

（民主的方面）Democracy is more than just elections. It is about education, tolerance and building independent institutions such as a judiciary and a free press. The hard question is how much ordinary Arabs want all this. There have been precious few Tehran-style（德黑兰风格的抗议？？） protests on the streets of Cairo. Most Arabs still seem unwilling to pay the price of change. Or perhaps, observing Iraq, they prefer stagnation 停滞to the chaos that change might bring. But regimes would be unwise to count on permanent passivity. As our special report in this issue argues, behind the political stagnation of the Arab world a great social upheaval is under way, with far-reaching consequences.

In almost every Arab country, fertility is in decline, more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface.
变革的作用The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive. At some point it will almost certainly collapse. The great unknown is when.

toywangUID: 2700880

加油哦

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

(⊙v⊙)嗯 3# toywang

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7018438.ece

From The Times

February 8, 2010

We might err, but science is self-correcting我们可能会错，但是科学史自我纠正的。

If claims about climate change need to be debunked, you can rely on scientists to do it. Scepticism is what we are all about我们所要具备的就是怀疑态度

John Krebs

·
98 Comments

Recommend? (32)

My non-scientist friends are beginning to ask me “What’s gone wrong with science?” Revelations about melting glaciers and potentially dodgy emails about global warming, the resurfacing of Andrew Wakefield and the MMR scare, and the sacking of the Government’s drugs adviser, have created the impression for some people that science is in a mess.

Of course science isn’t in a mess, nor has anything changed. But the stories underline two important features of scientists and science. First, scientists, just like every other trade — bus drivers, lawyers and bricklayers — are a mix. Most are pretty average, a few are geniuses, some are a bit thick理解能力差，愚钝的，笨的, and some dishonest.

Second, science itself is often misunderstood. Scientists tend to be portrayed as被描绘成 voices of authority who are able to reveal truths about arcane神秘的，不可思议的 problems, be it the nature of quarks 夸克or the molecular basis of ageing衰老的分子学基础. In fact, science is almost the opposite of this. In The Trouble With Physics, physicist Lee Smolin considers how to describe science and concludes that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feyman’s phrase says it best: “Science is the organised scepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.” 科学的定义-质疑精神

An Oxford colleague, one of the world’s top climate scientists, made the same point last week when he said to me: “It’s odd that people talk about ‘climate sceptics’ as though they are a special category. All of us in the climate science community are climate sceptics. It’s our job to question and challenge everything.” Any scientist will tell you that when you turn up at a conference the audience will do its best to tear your findings to pieces: no one takes anything for granted. 质疑精神的例子
“怀疑和挑战一切就是我们的工作”

This philosophy of science was formally instituted 350 years ago in London by the small band of men, including Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, who founded the Royal Society皇家学会, the world’s oldest national academy of science. Their motto, Nullius in verba (“Take nobody’s word for it”) embodies the Royal Society’s founding principle of basing conclusions on observation and experiment rather than the voice of authority.皇家学会的格言。。。质疑精神 Scientists don’t have all the answers, but they do have a way of finding out, and the fact that our lights come on, our computers compute and our mobile phones phone are among the myriad daily reminders that the scientific way works.

You might retort that science and scientists often don’t
live up to实践到，做到 this ideal. And you would be right. Scientists, like everyone else, have human frailties人类品德上的弱点and are susceptible to 对。。。敏感fashion and orthodoxy正统的. Nevertheless, over time, science is self-correcting because someone will have the courage to challenge the prevailing view and win the argument, provided he or she has sufficient evidence.

There is, of course, no excuse for scientists who over-egg过分夸大，过分修饰
or massage（原意是按摩。。。在这里？） their results, or who underplay the uncertainties无常，不确定 in their conclusions. The prevailing view in many areas of science will include significant uncertainties (as with climate change), so challenge is central to the progress of understanding. The claim that Himalayan喜马拉雅的
glaciers 冰河would melt in the next 30 years is an example of this self-correction. It was debunked from within the scientific community and not by outside commentators, it does not undermine the core conclusions about man-made global warming, and the mistake that the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made was to dismiss this challenge without studying the evidence.

Scepticism is fine but science is not a free-for-all可自由参加的比赛. Whether or not you accept the sceptics’ view should depend on careful weighing of the evidence. Dr Wakefield had no good evidence to support his claim of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Equally, the Department of Health’s claim that the “MMR vaccine is perfectly safe” is wrong. No vaccine is perfectly safe, but not vaccinating your children exposes them to a far bigger risk than the tiny risk associated with the vaccine. MMR事件

Given what I have said, it is not surprising that the interaction between science and government can be edgy. Ministers look to their expert advisers for clear-cut answers, a unanimous view, and preferably one that is politically convenient. Scientific advisers are prone to disappoint on all fronts. “I am sorry minister, but science is not clear-cut, what is more, different experts take a different view, and our best advice is to do X” (where X is not a vote winner). When I was asked to advise, in 1996, on whether or not to kill badgers 獾as a way of controlling bovine tuberculosis, I said that without a proper experiment it is not possible to tell whether or not the policy would work. To its credit, the Ministry of Agriculture set up what was perhaps the largest ecological experiment ever carried out in this country. The result showed that killing is not a cost-effective policy, and disappointed farmers. 作者做实验来验证某项猜测，得到了政府的支持，然后得出了结论。。。（不知X是代表什么。。）

Last year David Nutt, Chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, was sacked by the Home Secretary for being too outspoken about the Government’s rejection of his committee’s advice on the classification of cannabis大麻 and Ecstasy入迷，迷幻药. If ministers are going to reject expert advice, they should explain why. What they should definitely not do, as both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary did in this case, is to announce, before they have received the expert advice, that they have made up their mind.

Equally, independent experts should not be gagged抑制言论
压制言论自由by ministers, even if their views are inconvenient不合时宜的.
Science,
warts and all不掩盖的，据实的 比actually好。。, is still the best way of finding out, and is absolutely vital in informing government policy. That is why the Government must strongly reaffirm its commitment to freedom of expression for independent scientific advisers. At the same time, if scientists have a right to be heard, they have a responsibility to be scrupulously honest and not to claim more than is justified by the evidence.

Lord Krebs is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford





MMR是麻疹疫苗，1998年有论文指出MMR被爆会引起孤独症，然后这篇论文就被撤销了，理由是这篇论文导致英国的MMR接种率下降，麻疹的发病率上涨。。。
The MMR vaccine is an immunization shot against measles, mumps and rubella (also called German measles).


Claims about autism孤独症
Main article: MMR vaccine controversy
In the UK, the MMR vaccine was the subject of controversy after publication of a 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield et al. reporting a study of twelve children who had bowel symptoms along with autism or other disorders, including cases where onset was considered to be soon after administration of MMR vaccine.[27] During a 1998 press conference, Wakefield suggested that giving children the vaccines in three separate doses would be safer than a single injection. This suggestion was not supported by the paper, and several subsequent peer-reviewed studies have failed to show any association between the vaccine and autism.[28] Administering the vaccines in three separate doses does not reduce the chance of adverse effects, and it increases the opportunity for infection by the two diseases not immunized against first.[28][29] Health experts have criticized media reporting of the MMR-autism controversy for triggering a decline in vaccination rates.[30] Before publication of Wakefield's findings, the inoculation rate for MMR in the UK was 92%; after publication, the rate dropped to below 80%. In 1998, there were 56 measles cases in the UK; by 2008, there were 1348 cases, with 2 confirmed deaths.[31]
In 2004, after an investigation by The Sunday Times,[32] the interpretation section of the study, which identified a general association in time between the vaccine and autism, was formally retracted by ten of Wakefield's twelve coauthors.[33] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,[34] the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences,[35] the UK National Health Service[36] and the Cochrane Library review[12] have all concluded that there is no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
In 2007 Wakefield became the subject of a General Medical Council disciplinary hearing over allegations that his research had received funding related to litigation against MMR-vaccine manufacturers, and had concealed this fact from the editors of The Lancet.[37] It was later revealed that Wakefield received £435,643 [about $780,000] plus expenses for consulting work related to the lawsuit. This funding came from the UK legal aid fund, a fund intended to provide legal services to the poor.[32] In 2009 The Sunday Times reported that Wakefield had manipulated patient data and misreported results in his 1998 paper, creating the appearance of a link with autism.[38] In 2010, Wakefield was found by the GMC to have acted "irresponsibly",[39] and The Lancet fully retracted the original paper.[40]

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

贴错了呢。。。

lvruochenUID: 2792806

加油
问一个问题
be it the nature of quarks 夸克or the molecular basis of ageing衰老的分子学基础.
是这个意思吗？
前后什么意思

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

Technology in education在教育中应用新技术

This house believes the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

About this debate

Over the last several decades, large investments have been made to equip primary and secondary schools with computers and teacher training. Now it is time to examine whether there has been a sufficient return on this investment. Does technology really offer substantive advantages to students? Does technology accelerate or impede real progress in education? Similarly, does technology serve as a teaching crutch or does it offer the ability to promote sustainable change in the world’s classrooms? And if so, is the technology deployed today being used to best possible advantage? What conditions need to exist in schools for technology to have an impact?

Background reading

Tech.view

One clunky laptop per child

Great idea. Shame about the mediocre 普普通通的computer

Jan 4th 2008 | From The Economist online

IT WOULD be a stunt, but one perhaps worth performing, to write this column专栏 on the tiny, green and white, $200 XO（不知道在这是什么意思） computer from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that sits idle before your columnist专栏作家. Alas, he cannot.

This is not because the keys are too small for his adult hands (though they are), or because the processor’s处理器 slow speed makes the machine frustrating to use(though it does). Nor is it because the track pad sometimes goes screwy and the keys lack the normal pressed-key response that allows smooth typing. It isn’t even because moving the column from the word-processing application to the web-mail system is prohibitively抑制的，禁止的 difficult.

取而代之的是Instead（转折的超好的说，以后不用However了）, it is because the XO, which your columnist has explored since it arrived a few days before Christmas, has bugs that cause occasional crashes. A discreet message sometimes flashes when the system boots up启动, warning of some sort of data-check error. This, along with the host of other hiccups, necessitated使。。成为必要 the use of an ordinary, expensive computer for this column.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Nicholas Negroponte, a tech guru领袖头头 at the celebrated Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched the initiative in 2005, the vision was grandiose宏伟的，堂皇的, but the implementation seemed beguilingly欺骗的 simple. Computer-processing technology had become so widespread and inexpensive that DVD players and mobile phones had as much power as the PCs of just a few years ago. Just add a screen and keyboard, the thought went, and you’ll have a cheap, functional laptop.

Indeed, Mr Negroponte’s vision was brilliant. He planned to blanket the developing world with tens of millions of $100 laptops for kids. The low cost would come from a tripartite “perfect storm”. First, economies of scale: sales would be directly to governments, who could only buy quantities above 1m. Second, the machines would bypass迂回，走旁道 Intel’s processors and Microsoft’s software in favour of open-source stuff. Third, commodity parts would keep the price low.

Mr Negroponte sought funding from education ministries: “It’s an education project, not a technology project,” he was fond of saying. Faced with critics who argued he should concentrate on the classic development issues that keep people poor and sick rather than doling发放救济，施舍 out high-tech gear, Mr Negroponte would rightly reply that education through computers can help resolve all such problems.

Today that optimism seems Pollyannaish盲目乐观主义. Many governments (including Nigeria’s and Libya’s) cancelled their informal commitments to purchase the machines when they realised the devices were untried未经检查的（设备）, the price higher than envisaged and other cheap laptops available.

A few trials实验 in places like Haiti and Rwanda, together with orders from Peru and Uruguay collectively fell far short of离目标很远fell short of是指不够长没打中目标 even 1m machines. A clever holiday promotion in North America that offered two laptops—one for the buyer and one to donate to a child in a developing country—for $399 similarly fizzled发出嘶嘶声，失败的. Production lines at Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese manufacturer, were left idle.

All this is a shame, not least because Mr Negroponte’s idea was sound and the machines’ hardware, at least on paper, impressive. The initiative inspired several advances in laptop technology, in terms of features (flash memory instead of a spinning hard-drive), design (a laptop-to-tablet form and a waterproof keyboard) and price reductions. A pull-cord hand-generator for power is in the works. OLPC and their boosters deserve hearty congratulations for all of this. Unfortunately, OLPC’s problems, which can be distilled into four main areas, risk turning a wonderful idea into a plastic paperweight.

First, the implementation of the technologies is terrible. In their zeal to rewrite the rules of computing for first-time users, OLPC shipped machines with a cumbersome讨厌的，笨重的 operating system. For example, adding Flash to do something like watch a YouTube video requires users to go into a terminal line-code and type a long internet address to download the software: it seems impossible to cut-and-paste剪贴 the address. Major PC vendors spend millions in research and development to enhance a computer’s usability; OLPC tried to reinvent彻底改造，从新使用 the wheel and came up with an oval椭圆形.

Second, the go-to-market execution (as it’s called in the industry) was imperfect. There was a lack of documentation, support and methods to integrate the PCs into school curricula, teacher training, and the like. OLPC seemed to think that just by handing out laptops, everything would sort itself out. This columnist happens rather to like that gung-ho approach, yet also recognises that the consumer is not the nine-year-old user with infinite time on her hands, but a government bureaucrat who has to evaluate the machines relative to the other options.

That leads to the third problem. Since the project launched in 2005, commercial rivals have emerged: Intel’s “Classmate” at around $250; Acer’s laptop at $350; Everex PCs with Zonbu software at around $280; Asustek Computer’s Asus Eee at under $400; and an Indian competitor, Novatium Solutions, which created a basic "NetPC" for around $80. There are many more.

OLPC initially treated all these activities as threats rather than competitors. Lately, Intel has supported OLPC, though this week said it would leave its board, and Microsoft is trying to tweak Windows XP, an earlier operating system, to work on the XO. But all computer buyers will have to compare the XO to a lot of other products in the market—something that never seemed to have struck OLPC’s staffers as a possibility, but should have.

This leads to the final problem that has done the most to disappoint OLPC’s fans: the hubris傲慢, arrogance傲慢 and occasional self-righteousness自以为是的（同义的词真多，都有什么区别呢？） of OLPC workers. They treated all criticism as enemy fire to be deflected and quashed rather than considered and possibly taken on board. Overcoming this will be essential if the project is to succeed past its first release. Technology products improve based on user feedback反馈，反应. The OLPC staff will need to learn to listen to the candid无偏见的，公正的 criticism of outsiders for the second-generation of the laptop—or they do not deserve to build one.

Ultimately the OLPC initiative will be remembered less for what it produced than the products it spawned. The initiative is like running the four-minute mile: no one could do it, until someone actually did it. Then many people did.

Likewise, an inexpensive laptop seemed impossible until Mr Negroponte and the OLPC group placed a stake in the ground to build a $100 laptop—which in turn spurred the industry’s biggest players to create low-cost PCs. Mr Negroponte’s vision for a $100 laptop was not the right computer, only the right price. Like many pioneers, he laid a path for others to follow.

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

前文不是说科学会被误解吗？这是例子，说明这些难以理解的问题会被人认为是真理，而这些这是需要人们去质疑的，不一定是正确的。。。I guess...给你参考一下 7# lvruochen

lvruochenUID: 2792806

很有可能
那个When I was asked to advise, in 1996, on whether or not to kill badgers 獾as a way of controlling bovine tuberculosis, I said that without a proper experiment it is not possible to tell whether or not the policy would work. To its credit, the Ministry of Agriculture set up what was perhaps the largest ecological experiment ever carried out in this country. The result showed that killing is not a cost-effective policy, and disappointed farmers. 作者做实验来验证某项猜测，得到了政府的支持，然后得出了结论。。。（不知X是代表什么。。）

解决了告诉我一声
我也很好奇

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

Technology in education在教育中应用新技术

This house believes the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

About this debate

Over the last several decades, large investments have been made to equip primary and secondary schools with computers and teacher training. Now it is time to examine whether there has been a sufficient return on this investment. Does technology really offer substantive advantages to students? Does technology accelerate or impede real progress in education? Similarly, does technology serve as a teaching crutch or does it offer the ability to promote sustainable change in the world’s classrooms? And if so, is the technology deployed today being used to best possible advantage? What conditions need to exist in schools for technology to have an impact?

接上面的background...

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 15th 2007 | Mr Robert Cottrell

Welcome. Thank you. We have the opening arguments. Now is the time to argue back. I invite comments and questions from the floor.与会者所提的（问题）或所做的（发言）

Proposition: This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.继续引进新的技术和新的媒体不会提高教育质量，论点

The opening statements for and against the motion give some ground让步，给…一些空间
for agreement, and much ground for argument.

Both of our speakers, I deduce推论，推理, are persuadable that technology could in principle大体上
be a vital至关重要的
source of advancement in learning-if only it was to be implemented with enough brilliance and resources. But is even this true?提出观点 I would be pleased to hear from commenters who believe that education is primarily a matter of character building, and, as such, an activity best conducted among human beings, with the least possible mediation. Will any of our grandchildren look back on his or her schooldays, and credit his or her success in life to "a really good computer"?在开头先正面阐述一般事实，提出反问句，提出异议，例子补充

Is there an argument for keeping new technology out of the classroom, precisely because it is so ubiquitous everywhere else already? Can a child who is chatting online or video-gaming for six hours every day really benefit from spending even more time staring at a screen in the classroom?连续用例子来进行反问，反驳+表明自己的立场态度

How do we even measure-and how broadly should we measure-the educational impact of new technologies? No doubt, by putting iPods in the classroom, we can improve iPod skills. No doubt a newer generation of microprocessors can help the maths class calculate pi to even more decimal places.小数位 But what about social skills? Kindness? Common sense? Happiness? Physical fitness? Latin and Greek? Do those go into the metrics?举反例，经典。。。

All of this, moreover, assumes that resources are plentiful. But what about school districts with very limited budgets, or education ministries in poorer countries? Should they see technology as a way to cut the cost of delivering education? Or as an expensive add-on to basic teaching methods?可用于科技，教育，社会的issue当例子
We are in danger of encouraging them to take the first approach, only to discover that new technologies are all too often disastrously悲惨的 complicated and expensive to implement-as we find often enough in other areas of government and industry.

Finally, for now, let us remember that we are talking here about new technologies. Their application is, by definition, a matter of experiment.定义新科技。。。 Do we want to experiment with our children's education? Do you want someone experimenting on your children? Perhaps you do, and perhaps you should, since only by experimenting can we ever make progress. But if you prefer educational methods tried and tested over centuries, please say so. Likewise, if you feel it would be barmy to exclude from education technologies that are commonplace elsewhere in life, please say so too. These are both defensible-and assailable-positions.

Robert Cottrell Deputy Editor, Economist.com, The Economist Newspaper

科技联系教育，社会，人生未来，家庭教育的一点超好的文章，观点明确，主要是有气场，整篇的提出问题结构是典型的用于issue的结构，很纯正。

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

Innovation
This house believes that innovation works best when government does least.

About this debate

What is the right role for government in spurring刺激，鞭策 innovation? The outlines of this age-old古老的 debate will be familiar to many.被许多人所熟悉 One side argues that governments inevitably不可避免的 get it wrong误解，算错 when they get too involved in innovation: picking the wrong technology winners, say, or ploughing耕作 subsidies into politically popular projects rather than the most deserving ones. The other rebuts that given the grave global challenges we face today鉴于我们今天面临的严峻考验挑战—in the 1960s America thought it was the Soviet苏联的 race into space, today many countries worry about climate change and pandemic全国流行的恐吓 threats—governments need to do much more to support innovation.

Background reading

Private-sector space flight: Moon dreams

Climate-change politics: Cap-and-trade's last hurrah

Genetically modified food: Attack of the really quite likeable tomatoes

Business.view: Can America keep its innovative edge?

Private-sector space flight

Moon dreams

The Americans may still go to the moon before the Chinese

Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

AP Can you direct me to reception, please? direct to把精力灌注于。。。上

WHEN America’s space agency, NASA, announced its spending plans in February, some people worried that its cancellation of the Constellation星群，星座 moon programme had ended any hopes of Americans returning to the Earth’s rocky satellite. The next footprints on the lunar regolith月球的土被层 were therefore thought likely to be Chinese. Now, though, the private sector私营成分 is arguing that the new spending plan actually makes it more likely America will return to the moon.

The new plan encourages firms to compete to provide transport to low Earth orbit (LEO)近地轨道. The budget proposes $6 billion over five years to spur the development of commercial crew全体员工 and cargo 货物services to the international space station. This money will be spent on “man-rating” existing rockets, such as Boeing’s Atlas V, and on developing new spacecraft that could be launched on many different rockets. The point of all this activity is to create healthy private-sector competition for transport to the space station—and in doing so to drive down the cost of getting into space.

Eric Anderson, the boss of a space-travel company called Space Adventures, is optimistic about the changes. They will, he says, build “railroads into space”. Space Adventures has already sent seven people to the space station, using Russian rockets. It would certainly benefit from a new generation of cheap launchers发射者，运载火箭.

Another potential beneficiary—and advocate提倡者，鼓吹者 of private-sector transport—is Robert Bigelow, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded a hotel chain called Budget Suites of America. Mr Bigelow has so far spent $180m of his own money on space development—probably more than any other individual in history. He has been developing so-called expandable space habitats可扩大的太空生活环境，聚居地, a technology he bought from NASA a number of years ago.

These habitats, which are folded up for launch and then inflated in space, were designed as interplanetary行星间，太阳系内的 vehicles for a trip to Mars火星, but they are also likely to be useful general-purpose多方面的accommodation. The company already has two scaled-down按比例减小的 versions in orbit.

Mr Bigelow is preparing to build a space station that will offer cheap access to space to other governments—something he believes will generate a lot of interest. The current plan is to launch the first full-scale与原物大小一致的habitat (called Sundancer) in 2014. Further modules登月舱 will be added to this over the course of a year, and the result will be a space station with more usable volume than the existing international one. Mr Bigelow’s price is just under $23m per astronaut宇航员. That is about half what Russia charges for a trip to the international station, a price that is likely to go up after the
space shuttle航天飞机 retires later this year. He says he will be able to offer this price by bulk-buying大宗购买 launches on newly man-rated rockets. Since most of the cost of space travel is the launch, the price might come down even more if the private sector can lower the costs of getting into orbit.

The ultimate aim最终目的 of all his investment, Mr Bigelow says, is to get to the moon. LEO is merely his proving ground试验场. He says that if the technology does work in orbit, the habitats will be ideal for building bases on the moon. To go there, however, he will have to prove that the expandable habitat does indeed work, and also generate substantial returns on his investment in LEO, to provide the necessary cash.

If all goes well, the next target will be L1, the point 85% of the way to the moon where the gravitational pulls of moon and Earth balance. “It’s a terrific dumping off point,” he says. “We could transport a completed lunar base [to L1] and put it down on the lunar surface intact.”

There are others with lunar ambitions, too. Some 20 teams are competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, a purse of $30m that will be given to the first private mission which lands a robot on the moon, travels across the surface and sends pictures back to Earth. Space Adventures, meanwhile, is in discussions with almost a dozen potential clients about a circumlunar mission, costing $100m a head.

The original Apollo project最初的阿波罗登月计划 was mainly a race to prove the superiority优越感 of American capitalism over Soviet communism. Capitalism won—but at the cost of creating, in NASA, one of the largest bureaucracies官僚机构 in American history. If the United States is to return to the moon, it needs to do so in a way that is demonstrably确然 superior to the first trip—for example, being led by business rather than government. Engaging in another government-driven spending battle, this time with the Chinese, will do nothing more than show that America has missed the point.

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

Climate-change politics

Cap-and-trade's last hurrah限制和交易的最后的努力

The decline of a once wildly popular idea一个曾经一度广受欢迎的idea的没落

Mar 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Gaia盖亚，大地之母 lent an unhelpful hand

IN THE 1990s cap-and-trade—the idea of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions二氧化碳减排 by auctioning off拍卖掉 a set number of pollution permits污染许可证, which could then be traded in a market—was the darling of the green policy circuit. A similar approach to sulphur dioxide emissions二氧化物的排放, introduced under the 1990 Clean Air Act空气洁净法令, was credited with having helped solve acid-rain酸雨 problems quickly and cheaply. And its great advantage was that it hardly looked like a tax at all, though it would bring in a lot of money.

The cap-and-trade provision expected in the climate legislation that Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham have been working on, which may be unveiled被公诸于众 shortly, will be a poor shadow of that once alluring迷人的 idea. Cap-and-trade will not be the centrepiece中心装饰品
of the legislation (as it was of last year’s House climate bill, Waxman-Markey), but is instead likely to apply only to electrical utilities, at least for the time being. Transport fuels运输用燃料 will probably be approached with some sort of某种 tax or fee; industrial emissions will be tackled with regulation and possibly, later on, carbon trading. The hope will be to cobble修，拙劣的修补
together cuts in emissions similar in scope（活动）空间，范围 to those foreseen（foresee的过去分词
预见预知
）under the House bill国会法案, in which the vast majority of domestic cuts in emissions came from utilities.

This composite approach is necessary because the charms of economy-wide整体经济 cap-and-trade have faded褪色，衰弱 badly. The ability to raise money from industry is not so attractive in a downturn. Market mechanisms市场结构机制，市场法则 have lost their appeal as a result of the financial crisis. More generally, climate is not something the public seems to feel strongly about at the moment, in part because of that recession, in part perhaps because they have worries about the science (see article), in part, it appears, because the winter has been a snowy one.

The public is, though, quite keen on new initiatives on energy, which any Senate bill will shower with incentives and subsidies whether the energy in question be renewable, nuclear, pumped out抽空 from beneath在…之下 the seabed or still confined to research laboratories. So the bill will need to raise money, which is why cap-and-trade is likely to remain for the utilities, and revenues will be raised from transport fuels. A complex way of doing this, called a linked fee, would tie the revenues to the value of carbon in the utility market; a straightforward正直的，坦率的，简单的 carbon tax may actually have a better chance of passing.

Energy bills have in the past garnered bipartisan support得到了两党的共同支持, and this one also needs to. That is why Senator Graham matters. He could bring on board both Democrats and Republicans. Mr Graham’s contribution has been to focus the rhetoric花言巧语not just on near-term近期的jobs, but also on longer-term competitiveness. Every day America does not have climate legislation, he argues, is a day that China’s grip on the global green economy gets tighter.

He also thinks action on the issue would be good for his party. While short-term Republican interests call for opposition, the party’s long-term interests must include broadening加宽 its support. Among young people, for example, polling suggests that the environment, and the climate, matter a great deal.

Unfortunately for this argument, tactics matter, and young voters are unlikely to play a great role in the mid-term election. Other Republicans may think it better to wait before re-establishing the party’s green credentials证书，凭证
什么是绿色证书？. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, is happy to talk about climate as a problem, and talks about the desirability of some sort of carbon restriction—perhaps a tax, or some version of Maria Cantwell’s “cap-and-dividend” scheme. But she expresses no great urgency about the subject. And she has introduced one of two measures intended to curtail减少 the power the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now has to regulate carbon, on the ground that that is a matter for legislation sometime in the future.

The EPA’s new powers undoubtedly make the charms of legislation greater. Some industrial lobbies游说议员者 may decide that the bill will provide the certainty they need to decide about future investment, and get behind it. The White House has been supportive of late, inviting senators over to talk. But it remains an uphill struggle, and the use of reconciliation 和解，调和to pass health care could greatly increase the gradient of the hill, as Mr Graham has made abundantly clear.

结论很好用到issue里面，很精辟

If the bill does not pass, it will change environmental politics in America and beyond. The large, comparatively business-friendly environmental groups that have been proponents of trading schemes will lose ground, with organisations closer to the grassroots, and perhaps with a taste for civil disobedience, gaining power. Carbon-trading schemes elsewhere in the world have already been deprived of a vast new market—Waxman-Markey, now dead, would have seen a great many carbon credits bought in from overseas—and if America turned away from cap-and-trade altogether they would look even less transformative than they do today. And as market-based approaches lose relevance, what climate action continues may come to lean more heavily on the command-and-control techniques they were intended to replace.

这篇完全是讲政府在环境法案通过和环境保护中的role。。。例子很新，很好用也很典型。。。

maggie-jiangUID: 2666877

Business.view

Can America keep its innovative edge优势?

Yes—if it ignores the techno-nationalists

Jun 3rd 2008 | From The Economist online

WHEN trading in the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 stock index标准普尔 500 股票指数opened on June 2nd, Bear Stearns贝尔斯登 was not among the stocks that comprise it. To add insult to the injury伤害之余又侮辱 caused by its subprime次级的（应该是指次贷问题） peccadilloes, the crippled 105-year-old investment bank was ejected驱逐出 from the S&P 500 at the close of trading on May 30th following its takeover by JP Morgan.贝尔斯登公司(Bear Stearns Cos.)——全球500强企业之一,全球领先的金融服务公司,原美国华尔街第五大投资银行。2008年3月16日摩根大通以总价约2.36亿美元(每股2美元)收购贝尔斯登

It was replaced by Intuitive Surgical直觉外科手术公司, a firm that was founded in 1995 and now dominates the fast-growing global market for minimally invasive surgical techniques 微创外科技术that use robotics机器人技术 and other leading-edge尖端技术 technologies.

Intuitive Surgical Both intuitive and surgical

America has long been a global powerhouse极强牌强有力的队伍of innovation, breeding饲养 thousands of firms such as Intuitive Surgical that have forged new, world-beating technologies and services from ideas born in garages, laboratories and offices across the nation. Yet some observers fear that the country is now in danger of losing its lead in commercial innovation to India, China and other upstarts unless the federal government gets more heavily involved in sponsoring赞助 innovation.

With a presidential election looming, the cries of alarm are reaching a crescendo声音渐强. A report published in April by The Brookings Institution and the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, two think-tanks智囊团, warns that “without a robust, targeted, and explicit federal innovation push, US competitiveness will slip and economic growth will lag”.

The report's authors, Robert Atkinson and Howard Wial, urge the swift creation of a National Innovation Foundation that would use its $1 billion-$2 billion budget to, among other things, promote partnerships between universities and industry, and support regional industry “clusters” with federal grants联邦教育拨款.

Their concern that America will soon be overtaken in the innovation stakes is echoed in the blogosphere博客. Last week Bruce Nussbaum, who writes a blog on design and innovation issues, called on the American government to go beyond supporting higher-education research in areas such as maths and science. His taxpayer-financed “to-do list” includes funding research around innovation in the service sector and paying for the roll out of a national, high-speed broadband network.

On his blog, Mr Nussbaum called the presidential primaries “devoid of any serious discussion” of American competitiveness. Hillary Clinton has an “innovation agenda”, but this seems to be dedicated to reducing America's dependence on oil and to boosting funding for existing government-research bodies and science fellowships. Barack Obama and John McCain have both said they would make tax credits for research and development (R&D) permanent and, in Mr Obama's case, use regulation of the wireless spectrum to encourage broadband usage. But neither has shown much appetite for broader-based intervention.

So is America's next president guilty of neglecting an issue that is vital to the country's future prosperity? Not in this column's view. On the contrary, the candidates are right to turn a deaf ear to置若罔闻 techno-nationalists whose prescriptions are at best misguided and at worst positively harmful.

Indeed, the assumption that America is losing its innovative edge is open to question.下面是例证，支持观点 Messrs Atkinson and Wial cite statistics that show the country’s share of worldwide total domestic R&D spending fell from 46% in 1986 to 37% in 2003 as evidence that the nation’s leadership is under threat. And they bemoan哀叹 the shifting of American R&D overseas: in the last ten years, they claim, the percentage of US corporate R&D sites within America fell from 59% to 52%, while the number in China and India rose from 8% to 18%.

又是正面肯定Yet by many traditional measures, such as the number of patents registered and levels of venture-capital funding, America remains ahead of the global pack. And its research is still widely recognised as being top-notch拔尖的: the 2006 science Nobels all went to Americans. As for “offshoring” R&D, this reflects US firms' desire to tap into huge markets abroad and to understand the potential of ideas being developed there.

Techno-nationalists who focus on “domestic” R&D levels as an indicator of a nation's innovativeness overlook this important fact. They also fail to appreciate that R&D is not the only driver of successful innovation. In a book to be published later this year Amar Bhidé, a professor at Columbia University, argues that what matters in today's global economy is not where an idea comes from, but how fast a country's firms and consumers are willing to try it out.

And America is outstanding at what Mr Bhidé has dubbed “venturesome consumption”. Many popular American gizmos小发明, such as Apple's iPod and Dell's computers, are chock full of the latest technologies from overseas.

The good news for America is that creating a “venturesome冒险的” economy isn't easy, as it has more to do with a country’s culture than with central planning. That's one reason why efforts to jump start Europe’s innovation engine by, for instance, pouring billions of euros into industrial clusters have proven so disappointing (see The Economist's special report on innovation, published last year).

America would be well-advised有思虑的，细心的not to follow suit. It should also think twice before creating a federal innovation agency, which would do more harm than good by backing援助，支持 technologies that consumers might not want. And as for funding research into the services sector, leave that to firms like IBM and EDS—American companies that practically created the market and now dominate it.

The best thing a government can do is to ensure that the creative juices of its residents and its companies are allowed to flow as freely as possible. In America's case that means, for example, rethinking the stiff restrictions呆板的约束，拘谨的限制 placed on work visas工作签证 following the 2001 terrorist attacks, which have driven away foreign talent and probably stimulated the growth of those R&D centres abroad.

It also means overhauling大修，翻修the educational system from the bottom up, so that American schoolchildren have access to the best possible science and engineering education. Creating a better framework within which human ingenuity can flourish—rather than trying to pick winners from the centre—is the right way to ensure that the Intuitive Surgicals of the future are made in America.

由一个例证引出一个问题，提出疑问，提出观点，最后摆出解决方法
结构清楚，逻辑感很强

lvruochenUID: 2792806

这次抢在前面写了
过来学习一下