经济学人中英对照23
英语学习_（6-10）《经济学人》中英对照_必备
英语学习_（6-10）《经济学⼈》中英对照_必备弃我去者，昨⽇之⽇不可留乱我⼼者，今⽇之⽇多烦忧TEXT 6Travelling with baggage背着⾏囊去旅⾏Feb 16th 2006From The Economist print edition（1）FEW modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir ★Wilfred Thesiger[1], who died in 2003. Despising the “drab uniformity of the modern world”, Sir Wilfred ★slogged across [2] Africa and Asia, especially Arabia, on animals and on foot, immersing himself in tribal societies. He delighted in killing—lions in Sudan in the years before the second world war, Germans and Italians during it. He disliked “soft”living and “★intrusive[3]”women and revered murderous savages, to whom he gave guns. He thought educating the working classes a waste of good servants. He kicked his dog. His journeys were more notable as feats of ★masochistic[4] endurance than as exploration. Yet his first two books, “Arabian Sands”, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, and “The Marsh Arabs”, about southern Iraq, have a ★terse[5] brilliance about them. As records of ancient cultures on the ★cusp[6] of ★oblivion[7], they are unrivalled.现代游记作家鲜有⼈能⽐2003年去世的威福瑞?塞西格爵⼠更令⼈敬畏。
2021年《经济学人》杂志原版英文(整理完整版)
Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(6-7)欧阳光明（2021.03.07）Hard to digestA wealth of genetic information is to be found in the human gutBACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this week's Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria, just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers.What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identify—the bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. So the researchers guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered withpublished databases of genes whose functions are already known.This comparison helped Dr Gill identify for the first time the probable enzymatic processes by which bacteria help humans to digest the complex carbohydrates in plants. The bacteria also contain a plentiful supply of genes involved in the synthesis of chemicals essential to human life—including two B vitamins and certain essential amino acids—although the team merely showed that these metabolic pathways exist rather than proving that they are used. Nevertheless, the pathways they found leave humans looking more like ruminants: animals such as goats and sheep that use bacteria to break down otherwise indigestible matter in the plants they eat.The broader conclusion Dr Gill draws is that people are superorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of human and microbial attributes. The notion of a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in other fields have come to view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. This, suggest some, will be crucial to the success of personalised medicine, as different people will have different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial flora. Accordingly, the next step, says Dr Gill, is to see how microbial populations vary between people of different ages, backgrounds and diets.Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora asthey pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one.Zapping the bluesThe rebirth of electric-shock treatmentELECTRICITY has long been used to treat medical disorders. As early as the second century AD, Galen, a Greek physician, recommended the use of electric eels for treating headaches and facial pain. In the 1930s Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, two Italian psychiatrists, used electroconvulsive therapy to treat schizophrenia. These days, such rigorous techniques are practised less widely. But researchers are still investigating how a gentler electric therapy appears to treat depression.Vagus-nerve stimulation, to give it its proper name, was originally developed to treat severe epilepsy. It requires a pacemaker-like device to be implanted in a patient's chest and wires from it threaded up to the vagus nerve on the left side of his neck. In the normal course of events, this provides an electrical pulse to the vagus nerve for 30 seconds every five minutes.This treatment does not always work, but in some cases where it failed (the number of epileptic seizures experienced by a patient remaining the same), that patient nevertheless reported feeling much better after receiving the implant. This secondary effect led to trials for treating depression and, in 2005, America's Food and DrugAdministration approved the therapy for depression that fails to respond to all conventional treatments, including drugs and psychotherapy.Not only does the treatment work, but its effects appear to be long lasting. A study led by Charles Conway of Saint Louis University in Missouri, and presented to a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, has found that 70% of patients who are better after one year stay better after two years as well.The technique builds on a procedure called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted deep into the white matter of patients' brains and used to “reboot” f aulty neural circuitry. Such an operation is a big undertaking, requiring a full day of surgery and carrying a risk of the patient suffering a stroke. Only a small number of people have been treated this way. In contrast, the device that stimulates the vagus nerve can be implanted in 45 minutes without a stay in hospital.The trouble is that vagus-nerve stimulation can take a long time to produce its full beneficial effect. According to Dr Conway, scans taken using a technique called positron-emission tomography show significant changes in brain activity starting three months after treatment begins. The changes are similar to the improvements seen in patients who undergo other forms of antidepression treatment. The brain continues to change over the following 21 months. Dr Conway says that patients should be told that the antidepressant effects could be slow in coming.However, Richard Selway of King's College Hospital, London,found that his patients' moods improved just weeks after the implant. Although brain scans are useful in determining the longevity of the treatment, Mr Selway notes that visible changes in the brain do not necessarily correlate perfectly with changes in mood.Nobody knows why stimulating the vagus nerve improves the mood of depressed patients, but Mr Selway has a theory. He believes that the electrical stimulation causes a region in the brain stem called the locus caeruleus (Latin, ironically, for “blue place”) to flood the brain with norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter implicated in alertness, concentration and motivation—that is, the mood states missing in depressed patients. Whatever the mechanism, for the depressed a therapy that is relatively safe and long lasting is rare cause for cheer.The shape of things to comeHow tomorrow's nuclear power stations will differ from today's THE agency in charge of promoting nuclear power in America describes a new generation of reactors that will be “highly economical” with “enhanced safety”, that “minimise wastes” and will prove “proliferation resistant”. No doubt they will bake a mean apple pie, too.Unfortunately, in the world of nuclear energy, fine words are not enough. America got away lightly with its nuclear accident. When the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania overheated in 1979 very little radiation leaked, and there were no injuries. Europe was not so lucky. The accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 killed dozens immediatelyand has affected (sometimes fatally) the health of tens of thousands at the least. Even discounting the association of nuclear power with nuclear weaponry, people have good reason to be suspicious of claims that reactors are safe.Yet political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy security. Already, some 441 commercial reactors operate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet's electricity, according to America's Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to extend their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?Clearly, modern designs need to be less accident prone. The most important feature of a safe design is that it “fails safe”. For a re actor, this means that if its control systems stop working it shuts down automatically, safely dissipates the heat produced by the reactions in its core, and stops both the fuel and the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactions from escaping by keeping them within some sort of containment vessel. Reactors that follow such rules are called “passive”. Most modern designs are passive to some extent and some newer onesare truly so. However, some of the genuinely passive reactors are also likely to be more expensive to run.Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A large atom (usually uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones, releasing energy and neutrons. The neutrons then trigger further break-ups. And so on. If this “chain reaction” can be controlled, the energy released can be used to boil water, produce steam and drive a turbine that generates electricity. If it runs away, the result is a meltdown and an accident (or, in extreme circumstances, a nuclear explosion—though circumstances are never that extreme in a reactor because the fuel is less fissile than the material in a bomb). In many new designs the neutrons, and thus the chain reaction, are kept under control by passing them through water to slow them down. (Slow neutrons trigger more break ups than fast ones.) This water is exposed to a pressure of about 150 atmospheres—a pressure that means it remains liquid even at high temperatures. When nuclear reactions warm the water, its density drops, and the neutrons passing through it are no longer slowed enough to trigger further reactions. That negative feedback stabilises the reaction rate.Can business be cool?Why a growing number of firms are taking global warming seriously RUPERT MURDOCH is no green activist. But in Pebble Beach later this summer, the annual gathering of executivesof Mr Murdoch's News Corporation—which last year led to a dramatic shift in the mediaconglomerate's attitude tothe internet—will be addressed by several leading environmentalists, including a vice-president turned climatechangemovie star. Last month BSkyB, a British satellite-television company chaired by Mr Murdoch and run by hisson, James, declared itself “carbon-neutral”, having taken various steps to cut or offset its discharges of carboninto the atmosphere.The army of corporate greens is growing fast. Late last year HSBC became the first big bank to announce that itwas carbon-neutral, joining other financial institutions, including Swiss Re, a reinsurer, and Goldman Sachs, aninvestment bank, in waging war on climate-warming gases (of which carbon dioxide is the main culprit). Last yearGeneral Electric (GE), an industrial powerhouse, launched its “Ecomagination” strategy, aiming to cut its output ofgreenhouse gases and to invest heavily in clean (ie, carbon-free) technologies. In October Wal-Mart announced aseries of environmental schemes, including doubling the fuel-efficiency of its fleet of vehicles within a decade.Tesco and Sainsbury, two of Britain's biggest retailers, are competing fiercely to be the greenest. And on June 7thsome leading British bosses lobbied Tony Blair for a more ambitious policy on climate change, even if that involvesharsher regulation.The greening of business is by no means universal, however. Money from Exxon Mobil, Ford and General Motorshelped pay for television advertisements aired recently in America by the CompetitiveEnterprise Institute, with thedaft slogan “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life”. Besides, environmentalist critics say, some firmsare eng aged in superficial “greenwash” to boost the image of essentially climate-hurting businesses. Take BP, themost prominent corporate advocate of action on climate change, with its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign, highprofileinvestments in green energy, andev en a “carbon calculator” on its website that helps consumers measuretheir personal “carbon footprint”, or overall emissions of carbon. Yet, critics complain, BP's recent record profits arelargely thanks to sales of huge amounts of carbon-packed oil and gas.On the other hand, some free-market thinkers see the support of firms for regulation of carbon as the latestattempt at “regulatory capture”, by those who stand to profit from new rules. Max Schulz of the ManhattanInstitute, a conservative think tank, not es darkly that “Enron was into pushing the idea of climate change, becauseit was good for its business”.Others argue that climate change has no more place in corporate boardrooms than do discussions of other partisanpolitical issues, such as Darfur or gay marriage. That criticism, at least, is surely wrong. Most of the corporateconverts say they are acting not out of some vague sense of social responsibility, or even personal angst, butbecause climate change creates real business risks and opportunities—from regulatory compliance to insuringclients on flood plains. And although theseconcerns vary hugely from one company to the next, few firms can besure of remaining unaffected.Testing timesResearchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws mayincrease the number of experiments neededIN AN ideal world, people would not perform experiments on animals. For the people, they are expensive. For theanimals, they are stressful and often painful.That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection fromthe toxicity of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission isforging ahead with proposals that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the EuropeanUnion, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25years.Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of theseto be examined right away, and plans to spend between €4 billion-8 billion ($5 billion-10 billion) doing so. Thenumber of animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m a yearto about 5m, unless they are saved by some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment,roughly 10% of European animal tests are forgeneral toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs andvaccines, and the remaining 10% a variety of uses such as diagnosing diseases.Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and lastweekend the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to reviewprogress.A good place to start finding alternatives for toxicity tests is the liver—the organ responsible for breaking toxicchemicals down into safer molecules that can then be excreted. Two firms, one large and one small, told themeeting how they were using human liver cells removed incidentally during surgery to test various substances forlong-term toxic effects.PrimeCyte, the small firm, grows its cells in cultures over a few weeks and doses them regularly with the substanceunder investigation. The characteristics of the cells are carefully monitored, to look for changes in theirmicroanatomy.Pfizer, the big firm, also doses its cultures regularly, but rather than studying individual cells in detail, it counts cellnumbers. If the number of cells in a culture changes after a sample is added, that suggests the chemical inquestion is bad for the liver.In principle, these techniques could be applied to any chemical. In practice, drugs (and, in the case of PrimeCyte,food supplements) are top of the list. But that might change if the commission has its way: those 140,000screenings look like a lucrative market, although nobody knowswhether the new tests will be ready for use by2009, when the commission proposes that testing should start.Other tissues, too, can be tested independently of animals. Epithelix, a small firm in Geneva, has developed anartificial version of the liningof the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix's researchers, the firm'scultured cells have similar microanatomy to those found in natural lung linings, and respond in the same way tovarious chemical messengers. Dr Huang says that they could be used in long-term toxicity tests of airbornechemicals and could also help identify treatments for lung diseases.The immune system can be mimicked and tested, too. ProBioGen, a company based in Berlin, is developing anartificial human lymph node which, it reckons, could have prevented the near-disastrous consequences of a drugtrial held in Britain three months ago, in which (despite the drug having passed animal tests) six men sufferedmultiple organ failure and nearly died. The drug the men were given made their immune systems hyperactive.Such a response would, the firm's scientists reckon, have been identified by their lymph node, which is made fromcells that provoke the immune system into a response. ProBioGen's lymph node could thus work better than animaltesting.Another way of cutting the number of animal experiments would be tochange the way that vaccines are tested, according to CoenraadHendriksen of the Netherlands Vaccine Institute. At themoment, allbatches of vaccine are subject to the same battery of tests. DrHendriksen argues that this is over-rigorous. When new vaccine culturesare made, belt-and-braces tests obviously need to be applied. But if abatch of vaccine is derived from an existing culture, he suggests that itneed be tested only to make sure it is identical to the batch from which itis derived. That would require fewer test animals.All this suggests that though there is still some way to go before drugs,vaccines and other substances can be tested routinely on cells ratherthan live animals, useful progress is being made. What is harder to see ishow the use of animals might be banished from fundamental research.Anger managementTo one emotion, men are more sensitive than womenMEN are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by athousand women's magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia,confirms that men are, indeed, less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important and suggestiveexception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study has just been published in Current Biology, looked at the way aperson's sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agreeon what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear,joy,sadness or surprise seems to be recognised universally—which suggests that the expressions involved areinnate, rather than learned.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants in their study photographs of these emotional expressions inmixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, andmeasured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies,that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was morequickly identified on a male face than a female one.Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eightphotographs as when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts of expression,which took more time to find when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in thebrain is attuned to picking out angry expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, thishighly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men pickedout the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women were usually quicker than men to recognizeevery other sort of facial expression.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly hasa survival advantage—and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than inwomen, the abilityto spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable.As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to getkilled by it. Most murders involve men killing other men—even today the context of homicide is usually aspontaneous dispute over status or sex.The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allowthe sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, thisstudy also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you wantattention, get angry.The shareholders' revoltA turning point in relations between company owners and bosses?SOMETHING strange has been happening this year at company annual meetings in America:shareholders have been voting decisively against the recommendations of managers. Until now, mostshareholders have, like so many sheep, routinely voted in accordance with the advice of the people theyemploy to run the company. This year managers have already been defeated at some 32 companies,including household names such as Boeing, ExxonMobil and General Motors.This shareholders' revolt has focused entirely on one issue: the method by which members of the boardof directors are elected. Shareholder resolutions on other subjects have mostly been defeated, asusual.The successful resolutions called for directors to be elected by majority voting, instead of by thetraditional method of “plurality”—which in practice meant that only votes cast in favour were counted,and that a single vote for a candidate would be enough to get him elected.Several companies, led by Pfizer, a drug giant, saw defeat looming and pre-emptively adopted a formalmajority-voting policy that was weaker than in the shareholder resolution. This required any director whofailed to secure a majority of votes to tender his resignation to the board, which would then be free todecide whether or not to accept it. Under the shareholder resolution, any candidate failing to secure amajority of the votes cast simply would not be elected. Intriguingly, the shareholder resolution wasdefeated at four-fifths of the firms that adopted a Pfizer-style majority voting rule, whereas it succeedednearly nine times out of ten at firms retaining the plurality rule.Unfortunately for shareholders, their victories may prove illusory, as the successful resolutions were all“precatory”—meaning that they merely advised management on the course of action preferred byshareholders, but did not force managers to do anything. Several resolutions that tried to imposemajority voting on firms by changing their bylaws failed this year.Even so, wise managers should voluntarily adopt majority voting, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &Katz, a Wall Street law firm that has generally helped managers resist increases in shareholder powerbutnow expects majority voting eventually to “become universal”. It advises that, at the very least,managers should adopt the Pfizer model, if only to avoid becoming the subject of even greater scrutinyfrom corporate-governance activists. Some firms might choose to go further, as Dell and Intel have donethis year, and adopt bylaws requiring majority voting.Shareholders may have been radicalised by the success last year of a lobbying effort by managersagainst a proposal from regulators to make it easier for shareholders to put up candidates in boardelections. It remains to be seen if they will be back for more in 2007. Certainly, some of the activistshareholders behind this year's resolutions have big plans. Where new voting rules are in place, they plancampaigns to vote out the chairman of the compensation committee at any firm that they think overpaysthe boss. If the 2006 annual meeting was unpleasant for managers, next year's could be far worse.Intangible opportunitiesCompanies are borrowing against their copyrights, trademarks and patentsNOT long ago, the value of companies resided mostly in things you could see and touch. Today it liesincreasingly in intangible assets such as the McDonald's name, the patent for Viagra and the rights toSpiderman. Baruch Lev, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, puts theimplied value of intangibles on Americancompanies' balance sheets at about $6 trillion, or two-thirds ofthe total. Much of this consists of intellectual property, the collective name for copyrights, trademarksand patents. Increasingly, companies and their clever bankers are using these assets to raise cash.The method of choice is securitisation, the issuing of bonds based on the various revenues thrown off byintellectual property. Late last month Dunkin' Brands, owner of Dunkin' Donuts, a snack-bar chain, raised$1.7 billion by selling bonds backed by, among other things, the royalties it will receive from itsfranchisees. The three private-equity firms that acquired Dunkin' Brands a few months ago have used thecash to repay the money they borrowed to buy the chain. This is the biggest intellectual-propertysecuritisation by far, says Jordan Yarett of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a law firm that hasworked on many such deals.Securitisations of intellectual property can be based on revenues from copyrights, trademarks (such aslogos) or patents. The best-known copyright deal was the issue in 1997 of $55m-worth of “Bowie Bonds”supported by the future sales of music by David Bowie, a British rock star. Bonds based on the films ofDreamWorks, Marvel comic books and the stories of John Steinbeck have also been sold. As well asDunkin' Brands, several restaurant chains and fashion firms have issued bonds backed by logos andbrands.Intellectual-property deals belong to a class known as operating-asset securitisations. These differ fromstandard securitisations of future revenues, such as bonds backed by the payments on a 30-yearmortgage or a car loan, in that the borrower has to make his asset work. If investors are to recoup theirmoney, the assets being securitised must be “actively exploited”, says Mr Yarett: DreamWorks mustcontinue to churn out box-office hits.The market for such securitisations is still small. Jay Eisbruck, of Moody's, a rating agency, reckons thataround $10 billion-worth of bonds are outs tanding. But there is “big potential,” he says, pointing out thatlicensing patented technology generates $100 billion a year and involves thousands of companies.Raising money this way can make sense not only for clever private-equity firms, but also for companieswith low (or no) credit ratings that cannot easily tap the capital markets or with few tangible assets ascollateral for bank loans. Some universities have joined in, too. Yale built a new medical complex withsome of the roughly $100m it raised securitising patent royalties from Zerit, an anti-HIV drug.It may be harder for investors to decide whether such deals are worth their while. They are, after all,highly complex and riskier than standard securitisations. The most obvious risk is that the investorscannot be sure that the assets will yield what borrowers promise: technology moves on, fashions changeand the demand for sugary snacks may collapse. Valuing intellectual property—an exercise based。
经济学人中英对照Brave new words
Central banks各国央行Brave new words大胆新言论Rich-world central banks explore more doveish strategies发达国家央行探索更加温和的政策FOR four years rich-world central banks have done their best to rejuvenate economies with conventional and unconventional monetary policy. Now, with short-term interest rates still stuck near zero and their balance-sheets stuffed with government bonds, the central banks of America, Britain and Japan are experimenting with a shift in approach: coupling monetary action with commitments designed to alter the public’s expectati ons of interest rates, inflation and the economy. The sense of change is reinforced by the prospect of new leaders at the Japanese and British central banks, and the increasing prominence of several doves at America’s.4年来，发达国家央行为经济复苏想尽了一切办法，常规和非常规货币政策你方唱罢我登场。
时至今日，短期利率依然近乎于零，资产负债表上依然满是政府债券。
《经济学人》英中对照翻译版(考研英语必备)
来源于/wordpress/（The Economist《经济学人》中文版）和/（《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版）11月10, 2008[2008.11.08] 美国大选：无限期望America's election：Great expectationsNO ONE should doubt the magnitude of what Barack Obama achieved this week. When the president-elect was born, in 1961, many states, and not just in the South, had laws on their books that enforced segregation, banned mixed-race unions like that of his parents and restricted voting rights. This week America can claim more credibly that any other western country to have at last become politically colour-blind. Other milestones along the road to civil rights have been passed amid bitterness and bloodshed. This one was marked by joy, white as well as black (see article).相信无人质疑奥巴马于本周取胜的重要意义。
这位新总统出生于1961年，那时美国很多州的法律都要求强化种族分离、禁止像奥巴马父母那样的跨族通婚、限制选举权利；这些不仅限于南部地区，而出现在全国范围内。
经济学人中英文
考研英语外刊《经济学家》读译参考之五十六：新意－中国日益关注创新Something new新意(陈继龙编译)Aug 3rd 2006 | BEIJINGFrom The Economist print editionAFTER years of prospering as the world's workshop, China now wants to be its laboratory as well. “Innovation”has become a national buzzword[1], and Chinese leaders have been tossing it into their speeches since the beginning of the year, when President Hu Jintao started an ambitious campaign to drive China's economy further up the value chain. (1)True, new campaigns and catchphrases[2] are declared by the government and the Communist Party in China all the time, and mostly end up fizzling out[3] in puddles[4] of rhetoric. But there are signs that the government i_______①to back its innovation campaign with more than just words.中国作为“世界工场”，多年来发展蒸蒸日上，但现在它也希望成为“世界实验室”。
“创新”已经成为举国上下一个时髦词儿。
今年年初，胡锦涛主席启动了一项雄心勃勃的规划，旨在推动中国经济进一步与价值链接轨。
重点总结的经济学人-中英文版)
Finance and EconomicsOffshore private banking离岸私人银行业Bourne to survive伯恩的幸存Aug 6th 2009From The Economist print editionDespite the woes of UBS, Swiss private banking remains in reasonable shape尽管瑞银处境不佳，瑞士的私人银行业仍保有相当规模Illustration by S. KambayashiA FTER visiting his bank in Zurich, Jason Bourne, an amnesic assassin, wonders: “Who has a safety-deposit box full of money and six passports and a gun?” In the popular imagination as well as Hollywood films the answer is clear: customers of Swiss banks do.当失忆的杀手詹森•伯恩(Jason Bourne)从其位于苏黎世的银行走出后，自问到：”什么样的人会有一个装满了钱、6本护照还有一把枪的银行保险箱？”在大众的想像与好莱坞的电影中，这个答案是明确的：瑞士银行的客户就是这样的人。
If this reputation for skulduggery is right, Switzerland, home to about one-quarter of the world’s offshore money, is in big trouble. After nearly going bust, UBS, its biggest bank, is now being pistol-whipped by America’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which wants it to hand over the names of tens of thousands of alleged tax dodgers. A preliminary settlement between the two was agreed on July 31st, although its details have yet to be made public. In March Switzerland agreed to comply with an OECD tax code that will oblige it to reveal information on clients that other governments say they need to enforce their laws. Where will crooks, despots and war criminals go now? And what will Swiss private banks do when they leave?如果这种隐秘而无原则的名声不是空穴来风的话，瑞士，这个坐拥世界四分之一离岸资金的国家将会有大麻烦。
经济学人》杂志原版英文(The_Economist整理版4-5)
Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(4-5)Hot to trotA new service hopes to do for texting what Skype did for voice callsTALK is cheap—particularly since the appearance of voice-over-internet services such as Skype. Such services, which make possible very cheap (or even free) calls by routing part or all of each call over the internet, have forced traditional telecoms firms to cut their prices. And now the same thing could be about to happen to mobilephone text messages, following the launch this week of Hotxt, a British start-up.Users download the Hotxt software to their handsets, just as they would a game or a ringtone. They choose a user name, and can then exchange as many messages as they like with other Hotxt users for £1 ($1.75) per week. The messages are sent as data packets across the internet, rather than being routed through operators' textmessaging infrastructure. As a result, users pay only a tiny data-transport charge, typically of a penny or so per message. Since text messages typically cost 10p, this is a big saving—particularly for the cost-conscious teenagers at whom the service is aimed.Most teenagers in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, pay for their mobile phones on a “pre-paid” basis, rather than having a monthly contract with a regular bill. Pre-paid tariffs are far more expensive: bundles of free texts and other special deals, which can reduce the cost of text messaging, are generally not available. For a teenager who sends seven messages a day, Hotxt can cut the cost of texting by 75%, saving £210 per year, says Doug Richard, the firm's co-founder. For really intensive text-messagers, the savings could be even bigger: Josh Dhaliwal of mobileYouth, a market-research firm, says that some teenagers—chiefly boys aged 15-16 and girls aged 14-15—are “supertexters” who send as many as 50 messages per day.While this sounds like good news for users, it could prove painful for mobile operators. Text-messaging accounts for around 20% of a typical operator's revenues. With margins on text messages in excess of 90%, texting also accounts for nearly half of an operator's profits. Mr Richard is confident that there is no legal way that operators can block his service; they could raisedata-transport costs, but that would undermine their own efforts to push new services. Hotxt plans to launch in other countries soon.“The challenge is getting that initial momentum,” says Mr Dhaliwal. Hotxt needs to persuade people to sign up, so that they will persuade their friends to sign up, and so on. Unlike Skype, Hotxt is not free, so users may be less inclined to give it a try. But as Skype has also shown, once a disruptive, low-cost communications service starts to spread, it can quickly become very big indeed. And that in turn can lead to lower prices, not just for its users, but for everyone.A discerning viewA new way of processing X-rays gives much clearer imagesX-RAYS are the mysterious phenomenon for which Wilhelm Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel prize in physics, in 1901. Since then, they have shed their mystery and found widespread use in medicine and industry, where they are used to revealthe inner properties of solid bodies.Some properties, however, are more easily discerned than others. Conventional Xray imaging relies on the fact that different materials absorb the radiation to different degrees. In a medical context, for example, bones absorb X-rays readily, and so show up white on an X-radiograph, which is a photographic negative. But Xrays are less good at discriminating between different forms of soft tissue, such as muscles, tendons, fat and blood vessels. That, however, could soon change. For Franz Pfeiffer of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and his colleagues report, in the April edition of Nature Physics, that they have manipulated standard X-ray imaging techniques to show many more details of the inner body.The trick needed to discern this fine detail, according to Dr Pfeiffer, is a simple one. The researchers took advantage not only of how tissues absorb X-rays but also of how much they slow their passage. This slowing can be seen as changes in the phase of the radiation that emerges—in other words of the relative positions of the peaks and troughs of the waves of which X-rays are composed.Subtle changes in phase are easily picked up, so doctors can detect even small variations in the composition of the tissue under investigation, such as might be caused by the early stages of breast cancer. Indeed, this trick—known as phase-contrast imaging—is already used routinely in optical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Until now, however, no one had thought to use it for medical X-radiography.To perform their trick, the researchers used a series of three devices called transmission gratings. They placed one between thesource of the X-rays and the body under examination, and two between the body and the X-ray detector that forms the image. The first grating gathers information on the phases of the X-rays passing through it. The second and third work together to produce the detailed phase-contrasted image. The approach generates two separate images—the classic X-ray image and the phase-contrasted image—which can then be combined to produce a high-resolution picture.The researchers tested their technique on a Cardinal tetra, a tiny iridescent fish commonly found in fish tanks and aquariums. The conventional X-ray image showed the bones and the gut of the fish, while the phase-contrasted image showed details of the fins, the ear and the eye.Dr Pfeiffer's technique would thus appear to offer a way to get much greater detail for the same amount of radiation exposure. Moreover, since it uses standard hospital equipment, it should be easy to introduce into medical practice. X-rays may no l onger be the stuff of Nobel prizes, but their usefulness may just have increased significantly.Here be dragonsWith luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological petPAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.GeneDupe's business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe's team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”.Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on.Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe's scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal's genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe's enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe's scientists can add a little evolution to their products.Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon, a horse for the unicorn and, most taxingly, the spliced genomes of a lion and an eagle for the gryphon). The virtual genomes of these real animals are then tweaked by random electronic mutations. When they have matured, the virtual adults most closely resembling the targets are picked and cross-bred, while the others are culled.Using this rapid evolutionary process, GeneDupe's scientists have arrived at genomes for a range of mythological creatures—in a computer, at least. The next stage, on which they are just embarking, is to do it for real.This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you.Tales of the unexpectedWhy a drug trial went so badly wrongIN ANY sort of test, not least a drugs trial, one should expect the unexpected. Even so, on March 13th, six volunteers taking part in a small clinical trial of a treatment known as TGN1412 got far more than they bargained for. All ended up seriously ill, with multiple organ failure, soon after being injected with the drug at a special testing unit at Northwick Park Hospital in London, run by a company called Parexel. One man remains ill in hospital.Small, preliminary trials of this sort are intended to find out whether a drug is toxic. Nevertheless, the mishap was so seri ous that Britain's Medic ines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), a government body, swiftly launched a full inquiry.On April 5th it announced its preliminary findings. These were that the trial was run correctly, doses of the drug were given as they were supposed to have been, and there was no contamination during manufacturing. In other words, it seems that despite extensive tests on animals and human-cell cultures, and despite the fact that the doses in the human trial were only a five-hundredth of those given to the animals, TGN1412 is toxic in people in a way that simply had not shown up.This is a difficult result for the drug business because it raises questions about the right way of testing medicines of this kind. TGN1412 is unusual in that it is an antibody. Most drugs are what are known as “small molecules”. Antibodies are big, powerful proteins that are the workhorses of the immune system. A mere 20 of them have been approved for human therapy, or are in latestage clinical trails, in America and Europe, but hundreds are in pre-clinical development, and will soon need to be tried out on people.Most antibody drugs are designed to work in one of three ways: by recruiting parts of the immune system to kill cancer cells; by delivering a small-molecule drug or a radioactive atom specifically to a cancer; or by blocking unwanted immune responses. In that sense, TGN1412 was unusual because it worked in a fourth way. It is what is called a “superagonistic” antibody, designed to increase the numbers of a type of immune cell known as regulatory T-cells.Reduced numbers, or impaired function, of regulatory T-cells has been implicated in a number of illnesses, such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Boosting the pool of these antibodies seemed like a good treatment strategy. Unfortunately, that strategy fell disastrously to pieces and it will take a little longer to find out why.The result highlights concerns raised in a paper just published by the Academy of Medical Sciences, a group of experts based in London. It says there are special risks associated with novel antibody therapies. For example, their chemical specificity means that they might not bind to their targets in humans as they do in other species.Accidence and substanceTwo possible explanations for the bulk of realityTHE unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% of the total mass. The rest, however, must exist. Without it, galaxies would not survive and the universe would not be gently expanding, as witnessed by astronomers. What exactly constitutes this dark matter and dark energy remains mysterious, but physicists have recently uncovered some more clues, about the former, at least.One possible explanation for dark matter is a group of subatomic particles called neutrinos. These objects are so difficult to catch that a screen made of lead a light-year thick would stop only half the neutrinos beamed at it from getting through. Yet neutrinos are thought to be the most abundant particles in the universe. Some ten thousand trillion trillion—most of them produced by nuclear reactions in the sun—reach Earth every second. All but a handful pass straight through the planet as if it wasn't there.According to the Standard Model, the most successful description of particle physics to date, neutrinos come in three varieties, called “flavours”. These are known as electron neutrinos, tau neutrinos and muon neutrinos. Again, according to the Standard Model, they are point-like, electrically neutral and massless. But in recent years, this view has been challenged, as physicists realised that neutrinos might have mass.The first strong evidence came in 1998, when researchers at an experiment called SuperKamiokande, based at Kamioka, in Japan, showed that muon neutrinos produced by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere had gone missing by the time they should have reached an underground detector. SuperKamiokande's operators suspect that the missing muon neutrinos had changed flavour, becoming electron neutrinos or—more likely—tau neutrinos. Theory suggests that this process, called oscillation, can happen only if neutrinos have mass.Since then, there have been other reports of oscillation. Results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada suggest that electron neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions in the sun change into either muon or tau neutrinos on their journey to Earth. Two other Japanese experiments, one conducted at Kamioka and one involving the KEK partic le-accelerator laboratory in Tsukuba, near Tokyo, also hint at oscillation.Last week, researchers working on the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, confirmed these results. Over the coming months and years, they hope to produce the most accurate measurements yet. The researchers created a beam of muon neutrinos by firing an intense stream of protons into a block of carbon. On the other side of the target sat a particle detector that monitored the number of muon neutrinos leaving the Fermilab site. The neutrinos then traveled 750km (450 miles) through the Earth to a detector in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota.Myths and migrationDo immigrants really hurt American workers' wages?EVERY now and again America, a nation largely made up of immigrants and their descendants, is gripped by a furious political row over whether and how it should stem the flood of people wanting to enter the country. It is in the midst of just such a quarrel now. Congress is contemplating the erection of a wall along stretches of the Mexican border and a crackdown on illegal workers, as well as softer policies such as a guest-worker programme for illegal immigrants. Some of the arguments are plain silly. Immigration's defenders claim that foreigners come to do jobs that Americans won't—as if cities with few immigrants had no gardeners. Its opponents say that immigrants steal American jobs—succumbing to the fallacy that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around.One common argument, though not silly, is often overstated: that immigration pushes down American workers' wages, especially among high-school dropouts. It isn't hard to see why this might be. Over the past 25 years American incomes have become less equally distributed, typical wages have grown surprisingly slowly for such a healthy economy and the real wages of the least skilled have actually fallen. It is plausible that immigration is at least partly to blame, especially because recent arrivals have disproportionately poor skills. In the 2000 census immigrants made up 13% of America's pool of workers, but 28% of those without a high-school education and over half of those with eight years' schooling or less.In fact, the relationship between immigration and wages is not clear-cut, even in theory. That is because wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers. Once capital has fully adjusted, the final impact on overall wages should be a wash, as long as the immigrants have not changed the productivity of the workforce as a whole.However, even if wages do not change on average, immigration can still shift the relative pay of workers of different types. A large inflow of low-skilled people could push down the relative wages of low-skilled natives, assuming that they compete for the same jobs. On the other hand, if the immigrants had complementary skills, natives would be relatively better off. To gauge the full effect of immigration on wages, therefore, you need to know how quickly capital adjusts and how far the newcomers are substitutes for local workers.Roaming holidayThe EU hopes to slash the price of cross-border mobile calls“TODAY it is only when using your mobile phone abroad that you realise there are still borders in Europe,” lamented Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for telecoms and media regulation, as she announced plans to slash the cost of mobile roaming last month. It is a laudable aim: European consumers typically pay €1.25 ($1.50) per minute to call home from another European country, and €1 per minute to receive calls from home while abroad. With roaming margins above 90%, European mobile operators make profits of around €10 billion a year from the trade, the commission estimates.Ms Reding's plan, unveiled on March 28th and up for discussion until May 12th, is to impose a “home pricing” scheme. Even while roaming, callers would be charged whatever they would normally pay to use their phones in their home countries; charges for incoming calls while roaming would be abolished. That may sound good. But, as the industry is understandably at pains to point out, it could have some curious knock-on effects.In particular, consumers could sign up with operators in foreign countries to take advantage of lower prices. Everyone would take out subscriptions to the cheapest supplier and bring them back home, says John Tysoe of the Mobile World, a consultancy. “You'd end up with a complete muddle. An operator might have a network, bu t no customers, because they've all migrated.”Another problem with Ms Reding's plan, he says, is that operators would compensate for the loss of roaming fees— thought to account for around 3% of their revenues and 5% of profits—by raising prices elsewhere. This would have the perverse effect of lowering prices for international business travellers, a big chunk of roaming traffic, while raising prices for most consumers.The commission's proposals are “economically incoherent”, says Richard Feasey of Vodafo ne, which operates mobile networks in many European countries. Imposing price caps on roaming is legally questionable, he says, and Vodafone has, in any case, been steadily reducing its roaming charges. (European regulators prevented it from doing so for three years on antitrust grounds after its takeover of Mannesmann in 2000.) Orange, another multinational operator, says it is planning to make price cuts,too. “Of course, now everybody's got price cuts,” says Stefano Nicoletti of Ovum, a consultancy.But perhaps Ms Reding's unspoken plan is to use the threat of regulation as a way to prompt action. Operators are right that her proposals make no sense, but they are charging too much all the same. So expect them to lobby hard against the proposals over the next couple of years, while quietly cutting their prices—an outcome that would, of course, allow both sides to claim victory.Devices and their desiresEngineers and chemists get togetherTHERE used to be a world of difference between treating a patient with a device—such as a fake hip or a pacemaker—and using biology and biochemistry. Different ailments required wholly different treatments, often with little in common. But that is changing as medical advances—such as those being trumpeted at the biotechnology industry's annual gathering this week in Chicago—foster combinations of surgical implants and other hardware with support from medicines. Drug-releasing stents were one of the first fruits of this trend, which increasingly requires vastly different sorts of health-care firms to mesh their research efforts.That will be a challenge. While pharmaceutical and biotech firms are always in search of the next big thing, devicemakers prefer gradual progress. Instead of hanging out with breathless entrepreneurs near America's east and west coasts, where most drug and biotechnology firms are based, many of the device-makers huddle in midwestern cities such as Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Kalamazoo. And unlike Big Pharma, which uses marketing blitzes to tell ailing consumers about its new drugs, medical-device sales teams act more as instructors, showing doctors how to install their latest creations.Several companies, however, are now trying to bring these two business cultures together. Earlier this year, for example, Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian firm, bought American Medical Instruments (AMI). Angiotech's managers reckon their company has devised a good way to apply drug coatings to all sorts of medical paraphernalia, from sutures and syringes to catheters, in order to reduce the shock to the body. AMI makes just the sorts of medical supplies to which Angiotech hopes to apply its techniques.One of America's biggest makers of medical devices, Medtronic, has been doing joint research with Genzyme, a biotechnology company that is also keen on broader approaches to health care. Genzyme says that it was looking for better ways to treat ailments, such as coronary and kidney disease, and realised that it needed to understand better how electro-mechanical devices and information technology work. But combining its efforts with those of Medtronic “on a cultural level is very hard”, the company says. Biotechnology firms are used to much more risky projects and far longer development cycles.Another difference is that device-makers know that if a problem emerges with their hardware, the engineers will tinker around and try to resolve the glitch. Biotech and pharmaceutical firms have no such option. If a difficulty emerges after years of developing and testing a new pill, as with Merck's Vioxx, there may be little they can do about it. “You can't futz with a molecule”, says Debbie Wang, a health-care industry analyst.Strangely, says Ms Wang, some of the most promising engineering outfits were once divisions of pharmaceutical andhealth-care companies, which got rid of them precisely because they did not appear to offer the rapid growth that managers saw in prescription drugs. Guidant, a maker of various cardiovascular devices, was spun off by Eli Lilly in 1994 and a decade later became the prize in a bidding war between Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, which Boston won earlier this year.Pfizer sold Howmedica, which makes joint replacements and prosthetics, to Kalamazoo-based Stryker in 1998. Anotherjoint-replacement maker, Zimmer, was spun off from Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2001. Now both those companies are looking for ways to add “anti-interactive coatings”—ie, drugs—to their business. One of the most troublesome complications in joint replacement is infection.The big drug companies might be tempted to reacquire the firms that they let go. But, given the potential for cultural and strategic clashes, it may make more sense for a few big and broad medical-device makers, such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific and St Jude Medical, to continue consolidating their own industry while co-operating, along the lines of the Medtronic-Genzyme venture, with biotech and pharmaceutical firms as they see fit. There would still be irritation; but probably less risk of wholesale rejection.Eat less, live moreHow to live longer—maybeDIETING, according to an old joke, may not actually make you live longer, but it sure feels that way. Nevertheless, evidence has been accumulating since the 1930s that calorie restriction—reducing an animal's energy intake below its energy expenditure—extends lifespan and delays the onset of age-related diseases in rats, dogs, fish and monkeys. Such results have inspired thousands of people to put up with constant hunger in the hope of living longer, healthier lives. They have also led to a search for drugs that mimic the effects of calorie restriction without the pain of going on an actual diet.Amid the hype, it is easy to forget that no one has until now shown that calorie restriction works in humans. That omission, however, changed this month, with the publication of the initial results of the first systematic investigation into the matter. This study, known as CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy), was sponsored by America's National Institutes of Health. It took 48 men and women aged between 25 and 50 and assigned them randomly to either a control group or a calorie-restriction regime. Those in the second group were required to cut their calorie intake for six months to 75% of that needed to maintain their weight.The CALERIE study is a landmark in the history of the field, because its subjects were either of normal weight or only slightly overweight. Previous projects have used individuals who were clinically obese, thus confusing the unquestionable benefits to health of reducing obesity with the possible advantages of calorie restriction to the otherwise healthy.At a molecular level, CALERIE suggests these advantages are real. For example, those on restricted diets had lower insulin resistance (high resistance is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes) and lower levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (high levels are a risk factor for heart disease). They showed drops in body temperature and blood-insulin levels—both phenomena that have been seen in long-lived, calorie-restricted animals. They also suffered less oxidative damage to their DNA.Eric Ravussin, of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who is one of the study's authors, says that such results provide support for the theory that calorie restriction produces a metabolic adaptation over and above that which would be expected from weight loss alone. (He also points out that it will be a long time before such work reveals whether calorie restriction actually extends life.) Nevertheless, such metabolic adaptation could be the reason why calorie restriction is associated with longer lifespans in other animals—and that is certainly the hope of those who, for the past 15 years, have been searching for ways of triggering that metabolic adaptation by means other than semi-starvation.The search for a drug that will stave off old age is itself as old as the hills—as is the wishful thinking of the suckers who finance such efforts. Those who hope to find it by mimicking the effect of calorie restriction are not, however, complete snake-oil salesmen, for there is known to be a family of enzymes called sirtuins, which act both as sensors of nutrient availability and as regulators of metabolic rate. These might provide the necessary biochemical link between starving and living longer.Universal service?Proponents of “software as a service” say it will wipe out traditional softwareSOMETHING momentous is happening in the software business. Bill Gates of Mi crosoft calls it “the next sea change”. Analysts call it a “tectonic shift” in the industry. Trade publications hail it as “the next big thing”. It is software-as-a-service (SaaS)—the delivery of software as an internet-based service via a web browser, rather than as a product that must be purchased, installed and maintained. The appeal is obvious: SaaS is quicker, easier and cheaper to deploy than traditional software, which means technology budgets can be focused on providing competitive advantage, rather than maintenance.This has prompted an outbreak of iconoclasm. “Traditional software is dead,” says Jason Maynard, an analyst at Credit Suisse. Just as most firms do not own generators, but buy electricity from the grid, so in future they will buy software on the hoof, he says. “It's the end of software as we know it. All software is becoming a service,” declares Marc Benioff of , thebest-known proponent of the idea. But while SaaS is growing fast, it still represents only a tiny fraction of the overall software industry—a mere $3.35 billion last year, estimates Mr Maynard. Most observers expect it to be worth around $12 billion by 2010—but even that is equal only to Microsoft's quarterly sales today. There is no denying that SaaS is coming. But there is much debate, even among its advocates, about how quickly it will grow, and how widely it will be adopted.At the moment, small and medium-sized businesses are the most enthusiastic adopters of SaaS, since it is cheaper and simpler than maintaining rooms of server computers and employing staff to keep them running. Unlike the market for desktop software,。
一篇《经济人学》翻译
【翻译】有一群人最受其害。
在过去的半个世纪，发达国家教育程度不高的男性，在处理劳动力市场和家庭领域中的巨大变化时困难重重。
随着技术和贸易的发展使得有勇无谋之人的价值不断下滑，教育程度不高的男性努力在职场寻找自己应该扮演的角色。
另一方面，女性习得了高超的技艺之后，则在诸如医疗和教育等发展行业如鱼得水。
随着教育变得越来越重要，男孩在学校的表现常常不如女生。
在制造业，失去工作的男性也常常再难入职。
失业的男性会发现很难吸引长期配偶。
结果就是，对教育程度较低的男性来说，没有工作，没有家庭，没有未来，简直是雪上加霜。
左派和右派各抒己见。
但是他们的解释并不矛盾：造成这一现状，经济和社会变革均有责任，而两者也会彼此加强。
而且，现状有可能会恶化。
技术将会给更多产业带来变革，会造福社会，但是也会让那些无法学习提高的工人成为多余。
经合组织智库预测，在几乎所有的发达国家中，单亲家庭的绝对数量会继续增加。
没有父亲陪伴成长的男孩更有可能无法建立长久的关系，这会形成男性社会功能障碍的恶性循环。
能采取什么措施呢？部分解决问题的关键在于文化态度的改变。
在过去的一代人中，中产阶级男性认识到他们需要帮忙照顾孩子，并改变自己的行为。
工人阶层的男性需要跟上变化。
女性已经知道她们也能在不失去自身特质的前提下，成为医生和物理学家。
男性需要理解，传统的体力劳动不会再回来，他们也能在不失去自身男性特质的情况下成为护士或发型师。
【词汇短语】1. cope with 处理2. labor market 劳动力市场3. devalue [diː'væljuː] vt. 使贬值4*.brawn [brɔːn] n. 发达的肌肉5. surge [sɜːdʒ] vi. 激增6. sector ['sektə] n. 部门7. superior [suː'pɪərɪə; sjuː-] adj. 出众的8. permanent ['pɜːm(ə)nənt] adj. 永久的9. prospect ['prɒspekt] n. 前途10. contradictory [kɒntrə'dɪkt(ə)rɪ] adj. 矛盾的11. reinforce [riːɪn'fɔːs] vt. 加强•12. render ['rendə] vt. 致使13. redundant [rɪ'dʌnd(ə)nt] adj. 多余的14. think-tank 智囊团15. household ['haʊshəʊld] n. 家庭•16*.dysfunction [dɪs'fʌŋ(k)ʃ(ə)n] n. 功能紊乱17. child care 儿童保育18. catch up ['kætʃʌp] 赶上•19. surgeon ['sɜːdʒ(ə)n] n. 外科医生20. femininity [,femɪ'nɪnɪtɪ] n. 女子本性21. manual job 体力工作22. hairdresser ['heədresə] n. 美发师23. masculinity [,mæskjʊ'lɪnɪtɪ] n. 男子气（注：标*的为超纲词）【点评】段I分析了发达国家教育程度较低男性面临的不利局面。
经济学人最新中英对照
The Economist 《经济学人》常用词汇总结，太珍贵了！！1、绝对优势（Absolute advantage）如果一个国家用一单位资源生产的某种产品比另一个国家多，那么，这个国家在这种产品的生产上与另一国相比就具有绝对优势。
2、逆向选择（Adverse choice）在此状况下，保险公司发现它们的客户中有太大的一部分来自高风险群体。
3、选择成本（Alternative cost）如果以最好的另一种方式使用的某种资源，它所能生产的价值就是选择成本，也可以称之为机会成本。
4、需求的弧弹性（Arc elasticity of demand）如果P1和Q1分别是价格和需求量的初始值，P2 和Q2 为第二组值，那么，弧弹性就等于-（Q1-Q2）（P1＋P2）/（P1-P2）（Q1＋Q2）5、非对称的信息（Asymmetric information）在某些市场中，每个参与者拥有的信息并不相同。
例如，在旧车市场上，有关旧车质量的信息，卖者通常要比潜在的买者知道得多。
6、平均成本（Average cost）平均成本是总成本除以产量。
也称为平均总成本。
7、平均固定成本( Average fixed cost）平均固定成本是总固定成本除以产量。
8、平均产品（Average product）平均产品是总产量除以投入品的数量。
9、平均可变成本（Average variable cost）平均可变成本是总可变成本除以产量。
10、投资的β(Beta）β度量的是与投资相联的不可分散的风险。
对于一种股票而言，它表示所有现行股票的收益发生变化时，一种股票的收益会如何敏感地变化。
11、债券收益(Bond yield）债券收益是债券所获得的利率。
12、收支平衡图（Break－even chart）收支平衡图表示一种产品所出售的总数量改变时总收益和总成本是如何变化的。
收支平衡点是为避免损失而必须卖出的最小数量。
13、预算线(Budget line）预算线表示消费者所能购买的商品X和商品Y的数量的全部组合。
经济学人中英文版
三一文库（）〔经济学人中英文版〕*篇一：2014完整版《经济学人》英文原版经济学人完整整理版DigestOfThe.Economist.2006(8-9)ThemismeasureofwomanMenandwomenthinkdifferently.ButnotthatdifferentlyINTHE1970stherewasafadforgivingdollstobabyboysandfi re-enginestobabygirls.Theideawasthatdifferencesinbe haviourbetweenthesexesweresolelytheresultofupbringi ng:cultureturnedwomenintoironers,knittersandchatter boxes,andmenintohammerers,drillersandsilenttypes.Sw itchingtoyswouldputanendtosexualsorting.Today,itisc learwhyitdidnot.Whenboysandgirlsareborn,theyarealre adydifferent,andtheyfavourdifferenttoysfromthebegin ning.Thatboysandgirls—andmenandwomen—areprogrammedbyevolutiontobehavedifferentlyfromonea notherisnowwidelyaccepted.Surely,noonetodaywouldthi nkofdoingwhatJohnMoney,ofJohnsHopkinsUniversity,did in1967:amputatingthegenitaliaofaboywhohadsufferedabotchedc ircumcision,andadvisingtheparentstobringhimupasagir l.Theexperimentdidntwork,andtheconsequencesweretrag ic.Butwhichofthedifferencesbetweenthesexesare “biological”,inthesensethattheyhavebeenhonedbyevo lution,andwhichare“cultural”or“environmental”andmightmoreeasilybealteredbychangedcircumstances,i sstillfiercelydebated.Thesensitivityofthequestionwasshownlastyearbyafuror rrySummers,thenHarvardspresident,causedastormwhenhesuggestedthatinnateabil itycouldbeanimportantreasonwhythereweresofewwomenin thetoppositionsinmathematics,engineeringandthephysi calsciences.Evenasapropositionfordiscussion,thisisunacceptablet osome.Butbiologicalexplanationsofhumanbehaviourarem akingacomebackasthegenerationofacademicsthatfearedt hemasacovertwayofjustifyingeugenics,orofthwartingMa rxistutopianism,isretiring.Thesuccessofneo-Darwinis mhasprovidedanintellectualunderpinningfordiscussion aboutwhysomedifferencesbetweenthesexesmightbeinnate .Andnewscanningtechniqueshaveenabledresearcherstoex aminethebrainsinteriorwhileitisworking,showingthatm aleandfemalebrainsdo,atonelevel,operatedifferently. Theresults,however,donotalwayssupportpastclichésaboutwhatthedifferencesinquestionactuallyare.Differencesinbehaviourbetweenthesexesmust,insomeway ,bereflectionsofsystematicdifferencesbetweenthebrai nsofmalesandfemales.Suchdifferencescertainlyexist,b utdrawinginferencesfromthemisnotaseasyasitmayappear.Forastart,mensbrainsareabout9%largerthanthoseofwome n.Thatusedtobecitedasevidenceofmenssupposedlygreate rintelligence.Actually,thedifferenceislargely(andprobablycompletely)explainedbythefactthatmenarebigger thanwomen.Inrecentyears,moredetailedexaminationhasr efinedthepicture.Femalebrainshaveahigherpercentageo fgreymatter(themanifestation,enbloc,ofthecentralbod iesofnervecells),andthusalowerpercentageofwhitematt er(themanifestationofthelong,thinfilamentsthatconne ctnervecellstogether),thanmalebrains.That,plusthefa ctthatinsomeregionsofthefemalebrain,nervecellsarepa ckedmoredenselythaninmen,meansthatthenumberofnervec ellsinmaleandfemalebrainsmaybesimilar.Oddly,though,themainconnectionbetweenthetwohemisphe resofthebrain,whichisknownasthecorpuscallosumandism adeofwhitematter,isproportionatelysmallerinmenthanw omen.Thismayexplainwhymenuseonlyonesideofthebrainto processsomeproblemsforwhichwomenemploybothsides.Thesedifferencesinstructureandwiringdonotappeartoha veanyinfluenceonintelligenceasmeasuredbyIQtests.Itd oes,however,seemthatthesexescarryoutthesetestsindif ferentways.Inoneexample,wheremenandwomenperformequa llywellinatestthatasksthemtoworkoutwhethernonsensewordsrhyme,brainscanningshowsthatwomenuseareasonboth therightandtheleftsidesofthebraintoaccomplishthetas k.Men,bycontrast,useonlyareasontheleftside.Thereisa lsoacorrelationbetweenmathematicalreasoningandtempo ral-lobeactivityinmen—butnoneinwomen.Moregenerally,menseemtorelymoreonthe irgreymatterfortheirIQ,whereaswomenrelymoreontheirw hitematter.AmericanexceptionalismTheworldsbiggestinsurancemarketistoosplinteredKANSASCITY,Missouri,isknownmoreforitshistoricalrole asacattletownthanasafinancialhub.Butitistothismidwe sterncity,Americas26thlargest,thatregulatorsandinsu ranceexecutivesfromaroundtheglobeheadwhentheywantto makesenseoftheworldslargest—andoneofitsweirdest—insurancemarkets.ForitisinKansasCitythattheNationalAssociationofInsu ranceCommissioners(NAIC)ishoused.Itoverseesamarketaccountingforone-thirdofpremiumswrittenworldwide.OutsideKansasCity,themarketbecomesaregulatoryfree-for -all.EachofAmericas50states,plustheDistrictofColomb ia,governsitsinsuranceindustryinitsownway.Inanincreasinglyglobalinsurancemarket,Americasstate -basedsystemiscomingunderstrongpressuretoreform.Ins urancehaschangeddramaticallysincetheNAICwassetupin1 871,withgrowingsophisticationinunderwritingandriskm anagement.PremiumsinAmericahaveballoonedto$1.1trill ionandmarketpowerisincreasinglyconcentratedinthehan dsofbigplayers(someofthemforeign-owned)thatarepushi ngforanoverhaulofthestate-basedsystem.“ItsanextremelyexpensiveandByzantineprocess,”saysBobHartwig,aneconomistwiththeInsuranceInformati onInstitute,aresearchgroup.Thoughafiercelypoliticalissue,congressionalsupportf orsimplifyingthesystemisgainingground.BothhousesofC ongressarelookingatproposalstochangethestate-baseds ystem.Biginsurersfavouraversionthatwouldimplementan optionalfederalcharterallowingthemtobypassthestate-bystateregulatoryprocessiftheychoose.Asimilarsystemalreadyexistsforbanks.Proponentsofthechangesseemoreefficiency,anabilityto rolloutproductsmorequicklynationallyand,ultimately, betterofferingsforconsumersasaresult.Yetsomeconsume rgroupsfavourstate-basedregulation.Theybelieveitkee pspremiumslowerthantheyotherwisewouldbe.Premiumsasa percentageofgrossoutputarelowerinAmericathaninsever alothercountries.Thepoliticalheadwindsarestrong:insurancecommissione rsareelectedofficialsinsomestates(California,forins tance)andappointedbythegovernorinothers.Theindustry isalsosplit:mostofthecountrys4,500insurersaresmall, andmanyofthemhaveclosetieswithstate-basedregulators ,whosesurvivaltheysupport.Buteventheseforcesmayeven tuallybeovercome.ElsewhereintheindustryinAmerica,thereareothercallsf orreform.Inabackdoorformofprotectionism,Americanreinsurancefirmshavelongbenefitedfromaregulationthatrequiresforeignreinsurerswritingcross-borderbusine ssintoAmericatopostmorecollateralthantheydo.“IfyouoperateoutsidethebordersoftheUS,theydonttrus tyouoneinch,”lamentsJulianJames,headofinternationalbusinessatLlo ydsofLondon,whichwrites38%ofitsbusinessinAmerica.Thecollateralrequirementwasestablishedbecauseofworr iesaboutregulatorystandardsabroad,andthefinancialst rengthofglobalreinsurers.Todayregulatorystandardsha vebeentightenedinmanyforeignmarkets.AmajorityofAmer icasreinsurancecovernowcomesfromfirmsbasedabroad,in cludingmanythathavesetupoffshoreinBermuda(fortaxrea sons)primarilytoserveAmerica.ToohottohandleDellsbatteryrecallrevealsthetechnologyindustrysvuln erabilitiesTHEREisthenailtest,inwhichateamofengineersdrivesala rgemetalnailthroughabatterycelltoseeifitexplodes.In anothertrial,laboratorytechniciansbakethebatteriesinanoventosimulatetheeffectsofadigitaldeviceleftinac losedcaronaswelteringday—tocheckthereactionofthechemicalsinside.Onproduction runs,randombatchesofbatteriesaretestedfortemperatur e,efficiency,energydensityandoutput.Buttherigorousprocessesthatgointomakingsophisticate d,rechargeablebatteries—theheartofbillionsofelectronicgadgetsaroundtheworld —werenotenough.OnAugust14thDell,acomputercompany,sai ditwouldreplace4.1mlithium-ionbatteriesmadebySony,a consumer-electronicsfirm,inlaptopcomputerssoldbetwe en2004andlastmonth.Ahandfulofcustomershadreportedth ebatteriesoverheating,catchingfireandevenexploding —includingonecelebratedcaseataconferencethisyearinJa pan,whichwascapturedonfilmandpassedaroundtheinterne t.Thecosttothetwocompaniesisexpectedtobebetween$200 mand$400m.Insomeways,Dellisavictimofitssuccess.Thecompanywasapioneerinturningthepersonalcomputerintoacommodity,w hichmeantsqueezingsupplierstothelastpenny,usingecon omiesofscalebyplacinghugeorders,andrunningefficient supplychainswithlittleroomforerror.Itallcreatedavol atileenvironmentinwhichmistakescanhavegraveeffects.Sincelithium-ionbatterieswereintroducedin1991,their capacitytooverheatandburstintoflamehasbeenwellknown .Indeed,in2004Americabannedthemascargoonpassengerpl anes,asafirehazard.Butthelatestproblemsseemtohavear isenbecauseofthemanufacturingprocess,whichdemandspe rfection.“Ifthereisevenanano-sizedparticleofdust,asmallmeta lshardorwatercondensationthatgetsintothebatterycell ,itcanoverheatandexplode,”saysSaraBradfordofFrostSullivan,aconsultancy.Asthee nergyneedsofdeviceshavegrownrapidly,sohavethedemand sonbatteries.Thecomputingindustryscultureisalsopartlytoblame.Fir mshavelongtriedtoshipproductsasfastastheypossiblyca n,andtheymayhavesetlessstorebyquality.Theyusedtomockthetelecomsindustrysethosof“five-nines”—99.999% reliability—becauseitmeantlongproductcycles.Butnowtheyaregradua llyacceptingitasabenchmark.ThatispartlywhyMicrosoft hastakensolongtoperfectitsnewoperatingsystem,Window sVista.Comparedwithotherproductcrises,fromcontaminatedCoca -Colain1999toFirestonesfaultytyresin2000,Dellcanbecomplimentedforquicklytakingchargeofahotsituation.T hefirmsaystherewereonlysixincidentsoflaptopsoverhea tinginAmericasinceDecember2005—buttheinternetcreatedaconflagration.KeepingthefaithMixingreligionanddevelopmentraisessoul-searchingque stionsWORLDBankprojectsareusuallyfreeofwordslike “faith”and“soul.”Mostofitsmissionsspeakthejargonofdevelopment:povert yreduction,aggregategrowthandstructuraladjustments.Butasmallunitwithinthebankhasbeencurryingfavourwith religiousgroups,workingtoeasetheirsuspicionsanduset heirinfluencetofurtherthebanksgoals.Inmanydevelopin gcountries,suchgroupshavethebestaccesstothepeopleth ebankistryingtohelp.Theprogrammehasexistedforeighty ears,butthisbrainchildofthebankspreviouspresident,J amesWolfensohn,hasspentthepastyearlargelyinlimboash issuccessor,PaulWolfowitz,decidesitsfuture.Now,some religiousleadersinthedevelopingworldareworriedthatt heprogresstheyhavemadewiththebankmaystall.Thatprogresshasnotalwaysbeeneasy.Theprogramme,named theDevelopmentDialogueonValuesandEthics,facedcontro versyfromthestart.Justasreligiousgroupshavestruggle dtoworkwiththebank,manypeopleontheinsidedoubtedifth ebankshouldbedelvingintothedivine.Criticsarguedthat religioncouldbedivisiveandpolitical.Somesaidreligio nclasheswiththeseculargoalsofmodernisation.Althoughthebankdoesnotlenddirectlytoreligiousgroups ,itworkswiththemtoprovidehealth,educationalandother benefits,andreceivesdirectinputfromthoseonthegroundinpoorcountries.KatherineMarshall,directorofthebank sfaithunit,arguesthatsuchgroupsareinanidealposition toeducatepeople,moveresourcesandkeepaneyeoncorrupti on.Theyareorganiseddistributionsystemsinotherwisech aoticplaces.Theprogrammehashadsuccessgettingevangel icalgroupstofightmalariainMozambique,improvemicrocreditandwaterdistr ibutioninIndia,andeducatepeopleaboutAIDSinAfrica.“Westartedfromverydifferentviewpoints.TheWorldBank islookingatthesurvivalofacountry,welookatthesurviva lofapatient,”saysLeonardoPalombi,oftheCommunityofSantEgidio,anIt alianchurchgroupthatworksinAfrica.Althoughtheworkcontinues,thoseinvolvedinMrWolfensoh nsformerpetprojectnowfretoveritsfuture.Someexpectth efaithunittobetransferredtoanindependentorganisatio nalsosetupbyMrWolfensohn,theWorldFaithsDevelopmentD ialogue,whichwillstillmaintainalinkwiththebank.Reli giousgroupsarehopingtheirvoiceswillstillbeheard.“Ifwearegoingtomakeprogress,faithinstitutionsneedtobeinvolved.Webelievereligionhastheabilitytobringst ability.Itwillbeimportantforthebanktofollowthrough,”saysAgnesAbuom,oftheWorldCouncilofChurchesforAfrica,basedinKenya.Likereligiousgroups,largeinstitutionssuchasthebankc anresistchange.Economistsanddevelopmentexpertsaresometimesslowtobelieveinnewideas.Onepositiveby-prod uctoftheinitiativeisthatreligiousgroupsoncewaryofth ebanksintentionsarelesssuspicious.Ultimately,aslong asbotheconomistsandevangelistsaimtohelpthepoorattai nabetterlifeonearth,differencesinopinionaboutthelif ehereafterdonotmattermuch.StandanddeliverForthefirsttimesincetheepidemicbegan,moneytofightAI DSisinplentifulsupply.ItisnowtimetoconvertwordsintoactionKEVINDECOCK,theWorldHealthOrganisationsAIDSsupremo, isnotamantomincehiswords.HereckonsthatheandhiscolleaguesintheglobalAIDSestablishmenthavebetweenfiveand sevenyearstomakearealdentintheproblem.Iftheyfail,th eworldsattentionspanwillbeexhausted,charitabledonor sandgovernmentswillturntoothermattersandAIDSwillberelegatedinthepublicconsciousnesstobeingyetanotheri ntractableproblemofthepoorworldaboutwhichlittleorno thingcanbedone.Fornow,though,themoneyisflowing.About$8.9billionise xpectedtobeavailablethisyear.And,regardlessofDrDeCo ckslong-termworries,thatsumshouldriseoverthenextfew years.Notsurprisingly,alotofpeopleareeagertospendit.Manyofthosepeople—some24,000ofthem—havebeenmeetinginTorontoatthe16thInternationalAIDSC onference.AnAIDSconferenceisunlikeanyotherscientifi cmeeting.Inpart,itisajamboreeinwhichpeopletrytoout-doeachotherindisplaysofculturalinclusiveness:themus icofsixcontinentsresonatesaroundtheconventioncentre .Inpart,itisalightningconductorthatallowsAIDSactivi ststomaketheirdiscontentknowntotheworldinaseriesofs emi-officialprotests.Itisalsowhatotherscientificmeetingsare,aforumforthepresentationofpap erswithtitlessuchas “DifferinglymphocytecytokineresponsesinHIVandLeish maniaco-infection”.Butmostly,itisagiantcouncilofwa r.Andatthisone,thegeneralsaretryingtoimposeacomplet echangeofmilitarystrategy.WhenAIDSwasdiscovered,therewasnotreatment.Existinga nti-viraldrugsweretriedbutatbesttheydelayedtheinevi table,andatworsttheyfailedcompletely.Prevention,then,wasn otmerelybetterthancure,itwastheonlythingtotalkabout .Condomsweredistributed.Posterswerepostedexhortingt headvantagesofsafesex.Televisionadvertswererunthats howedtheconsequencesofcarelessness.Tenyearsago,though,anewclassofdrugsknownasproteasei nhibitorswasdeveloped.Incombinationwithsomeoftheold erdrugs,theyproducedwhatisnowknownashighlyactiveanti-retroviraltherapyorHAART.Inmostcases,HAARTcanprol onglifeindefinitely.Thatcompletelychangedthepicture.OncetheAIDSactivist shadtreatedthemselves,theybegantolobbyforthepoorwor ldtobetreated,too.And,withmuchfoot-dragging,thatisn owhappening.About1.6mpeopleinlow-andmiddle-incomeco untries,1moftheminsub-SaharanAfrica,arenowreceiving anti-AIDSdrugsroutinely.Theintention,announcedatlas tyearsG8meetinginScotland,isthatthedrugsshouldbeava ilableby2010toallwhowouldbenefitfromthem.However,thoseondrugsremaininfectedandrequiretreatme ntindefinitely.Tostoptheepidemicrequiresare-emphasi sofprevention,anditisthatwhichtheorganisershavebeen tryingtodo.Man,deconstructedTheDNAthatmayhavedriventheevolutionofthehumanbrainONEofthebenefitsofknowingthecompletegeneticsequence sofhumansandotheranimalsisthatitbecomespossibletocomparetheseblueprints.Youcanthenworkoutwhatseparates manfrombeast—geneticallyspeaking,atleast.Thehumanbrainsetsmanapart.About2myearsagoitbegantog rowinsize,andtodayitisaboutthreetimeslargerthanthat ofchimpanzees,mansclosestrelative.Humanintelligence andbehaviouralcomplexityhavefaroutstrippedthoseofit ssimiancousins,sothehumanbrainseemstohavegotmorecom plex,aswellasbigger.Yetnostudyhaspinpointedthegenet icchangesthatcausethesedifferencesbetweenmanandchim p.Nowagroupofscientistsbelievetheyhavelocatedsomeinte restingstretchesofDNAthatmayhavebeencrucialintheevo lutionofthehumanbrain.AteamledbyDavidHaussleroftheH owardHughesMedicalInstituteinCalifornia,comparedthe humangenomewiththatofmammalsincludingotherprimates. TheyreportedtheresultsinNature.Theresearcherslookedatthenon-humangenomesfirst,seek ingregionsthathadnotchangedmuchthroughoutevolutiona ryhistory.Regionsthatareuntouchedbynormalrandomchangestypicallyareimportantones,andthusareconservedbye volution.Nexttheresearchersfoundtheequivalentregion sinthehumangenometoseeifanywereverydifferentbetween humansandchimps.Suchasuddenchangeisahallmarkofafunc tionalevolutionaryshift.Theyfound49regionstheydubbed “humanacceleratedregions”(HARs)thathaveshownarapid,recentevolution.Mostofthe seregionsarenotgenesascommonlyunderstood.Thisisbeca usetheycodeforsomethingotherthantheproteinsthataree xpressedinhumancellsandthatregulatebiologicalproces ses.AnumberoftheHARsareportionsofDNAthatareresponsi bleforturninggenesonandoff.Intriguingly,themostrapidlychangingregionwasHAR1,wh ichhasaccumulated18geneticchangeswhenonlyonewouldbe expectedtooccurbychance.ItcodesforabitofRNA(amolecu lethatusuallyactsasatemplatefortranslatingDNAintopr otein)that,itisspeculated,hassomedirectfunctioninne uronaldevelopment.HAR1isexpressedbeforebirthinthedevelopingneocortex—theouterlayerofthebrainthatseemstobeinvolvedinhighe rfunctionssuchaslanguage,consciousthoughtandsensory perception.HAR1isexpressedincellsthatarethoughttoha veavitalroleindirectingmigratingnervecellsinthedeve lopingbrain.Thishappensatsevento19weeksofgestation, acrucialtimewhenmanyofthenervecellsareestablishingt heirfunctions.Withoutmoreresearch,thefunctionofHAR1remainsmerespe culation.Butanintriguingfacetofthisworkisthat,until now,mostresearchershadfocusedtheirhuntfordifference sontheprotein-codingstretchesofthegenome.Thatsuchad iscoveryhasbeenmadeinwhatwasregardedasthelessintere stingpartsofthehumangenomeisapresageofwhereexciting genomicfindsmaylieinthefuture.KeepingitrealHowtomakedigitalphotographymoretrustworthyPHOTOGRAPHYoftenblursthedistinctionbetweenartandrea lity.Moderntechnologyhasmadethatblurringeasier.Inth edigitaldarkroomphotographerscanmanipulateimagesandthreatentheintegrityofendeavoursthatrelyonthem.Seve raljournalistshavebeenfiredforsuchactivityinrecentmont hs,includingonefromReutersforfakingpicturesinLebano n.Earlierthisyear,theinvestigationintoHwangWoo-suks howedtheSouthKoreanscientisthadchangedimagespurport ingtoshowcloning.Inanefforttoreelinphotography,camera-makers aremakingitmoreobviouswhenimageshavebeenaltered.Onewayofdoingthisistouseimage-authenticationsystems torevealifsomeonehastamperedwithapicture.Theseusecomputerprogramstogenerateacodefromtheverydatathatc omprisetheimage.Asthepictureiscaptured,thecodeisatt achedtoit.Whentheimageisviewed,softwaredeterminesth ecodefortheimageandcomparesitwiththeattachedcode.If theimagehasbeenaltered,thecodeswillnotmatch,reveali ngthedoctoring.Anotherwayfavouredbymanufacturersistotakeapieceofda tafromtheimageandassignitasecretcode.Oncetheimagefi leistransferredtoacomputer,itisgiventhesamecode,whi chwillchangeifitisedited.Thecodeswillmatchiftheimag eisauthenticbutwillbeinconsistentiftamperingoccurre d.ThealgorithmistheweaponofchoiceforHanyFarid,acomput erscientistatDartmouthCollegeinNewHampshire.Digital imageshavenaturalstatisticalpatternsintheintensitya ndtextureoftheirpixels.Thesepatternschangewhenthepi ctureismanipulated.DrFaridsalgorithmsdetectthesecha nges,andcantellifpixelshavebeenduplicatedorremoved. Theyalsotrytodetectifnoise—theoverexposedpixelswithintheimagethatcreateagrainy effect—waspresentatthetimethephotographwastakenorhasbeenad dedlater.However,forgershavebecomeadeptatprintingandrescanni ngimages,thuscreatinganeworiginal.Insuchcases,analy singhowthree-dimensionalelementsinteractiskey.Longshadowsatmiddayareagiveaway.Eventhetinyreflectionsin thecentreofapersonspupiltellyouaboutthesurroundingl ightsource.SoDrFaridanalysesshadowsandlightingtosee ifsubjectsandsurroundingsareconsistent.Foritspart,Adobe,themakerofPhotoshopsoftware,hasimp roveditsabilitytorecordthechangesmadetoanimagebylog ginghowandwheneachtoolorfilterwasused.Photoshopwast heprogramusedbythejournalistfiredbyReuters;hishandiworkleftapatterninthesmokehehadaddedthatwasspo ttedbybloggers.Thusfartheinternethasprovenaneffecti vecheckondigitalforgery.Althoughitallowspotentially fakeimagestobedisseminatedwidely,italsocastsmanymor ecriticaleyesuponthem.Sometimesthebestscrutinyissim plymorepeoplelooking.CollateraldamageWhythewarinIraqissurprisinglybadnewsforAmericasdefe ncefirmsWHENBoeingannouncedonAugust18ththatitplannedtoshutdownproductionoftheC-17,ahugemilitarycargoplane,then ewssentashiverthroughtheAmericandefenceindustry.Asi twindsdownitsproductionlineatLongBeach,California,o verthenexttwoyears,Boeingwillsoonbegintonotifysuppl iersthattheirserviceswillnolongerbeneeded.Ithadtoca llahalt,becauseordersfromAmericasDefenceDepartmenth addriedupandatrickleofexportdealscouldnottaketheirp lace.Thecompanywouldnotsupportthecostofrunningthepr oductionlinefortheC-17(onceoneofitsbiggest-sellinga ircraft)ontheoff-chancethatthePentagonmightchangeit smindandplacefurtherorders.Thewiderworryforthedefenceindustryisthatthiscouldbe thefirstofmanybigprogrammestobeshutdown.Abigpartoft heproblemisthatAmericaisatwar.Theneedtofindanextra$ 100billionayeartopayforoperationsinIraqmeansthereis pressuretomakecutsinthedefencebudget,whichhasbeenpr ovisionallysetat$441billionforthefiscalyearbeginnin ginOctober.Americandefencebudgetsinvolveacomplicate ddancestartingwithwhatthePentagonwants,whattheWhite Housethinksitshouldgetand,finally,whatCongressallow sittogetawaywith.Althoughthearmedforcesextraspendin。
英语学习《经济学人》中英对照
从太空采集太阳能Solar power from space,Beam it down 从太空采集太阳能,传送电力到地球吧Harvesting solar power in space, for use on Earth, comes a step closer to reality将太空收获的太阳电能在地球上利用，这种理想又向现实迈出了一大步。
THE idea of collecting solar energy in space and beaming it to Earth has been around for at least 70 years. In "Reason", a short story by Isaac Asimov that was published in 1941, a space station transmits energy collected from the sun to various planets using microwave beams.从太空中收集太阳能并将其传送到地球的想法已经存在了至少70年。
艾萨克·阿西莫夫(Isaac Asimov )在1941年出版的短篇小说Reason中曾设想利用微波束将空间站收集到的太阳能传送到各类行星上。
The advantage of intercepting sunlight in space, instead of letting it find its own way through the atmosphere, is that so much gets absorbed by the air. By converting it to the right frequency first (one of the so-called windows in the atmosphere, in which little energy is absorbed) a space-based collector could, enthusiasts claim, yield on average five times as much power as one located on the ground.从太空直接截获太阳光而不任由它们穿过大气层的优点是大部分光能量不会被大气吸收。
经济学人中英双语对照精读笔记合集汇总
经济学⼈中英双语对照精读笔记合集汇总1、经济学⼈中英双语对照精读笔记TE20210529，Leaders | Two states or one? 两个国家还是⼀个？TE20210605，Leaders | Geopolitics and business 地缘政治和商业TE20210612，Leaders | Bunged up 绿⾊能源的发展瓶颈TE20210619，Leaders | Broadbandits ⽹络盗匪TE20210626，Asia | Unlawfully wed ⼩⼩新娘TE20210703，Leaders | The long goodbye 漫长的告别TE20210710，Leaders | Fault lines in the world economy 世界经济断层线TE20210717，Leaders | Rule of lawlessness 南⾮法治之战TE20210724，Leaders | No safe place ⽆处容⾝TE20210724，China | Surfing: Mother ocean 乘风破浪的姐姐，浪尖上的新风尚TE20210731，Leaders | Dashed hopes 破灭的希望，新兴国家的出路在何⽅？TE20210814，Leaders | Last Chance 美国还能拯救阿富汗？TE20210821，Leaders | Biden’s debacle 拜登⼤溃败TE20210904，Asia | Prostitution in Indonesia: Perverse outcomes 印度尼西亚卖淫问题：反常的结果TE20210911，Leaders | Why nations that fail women fail 为什么辜负⼥性的国家会失败？TE20211016，Leaders | The energy shock 能源冲击TE20211023，Leaders | Instant economics 即时经济2、其它外刊中英双语对照精读笔记内部揭秘：《经济学⼈》图表原来是⽤这些⼯具制作的出乎意料，权威杂志《⾃然》报道祝融号⽕星探测器的最新情况太阳报世界独家爆料：以权谋私、出轨⼥助理！英国卫⽣⼤⾂汉考克与⼥下属办公室热吻摸臀《柳叶⼑》最新研究论⽂：新冠病毒让⼈变笨！The Year Flu Disappeared 流感消失的那⼀年美国亏⽋那些冒着⽣命危险帮助过他们的阿富汗⼈解密美国情报局对情报质量是如何定义的？俄罗斯总理不为⼈知的⼀⾯，竟然出了⼀道初中数学题。
经济学人中英对照
Immigration law移民法Our town我们的城镇A small city passes a controversial immigration ordinance內布拉斯加小镇通过了一项有争议的移民法令SOME of the earliest settlers of Nebraska were Germans. During the first world war the state forbade any teaching in their native language. But that was long ago. These days, just outside the tidy little city of Fremont, a new batch of residents is trying to settle in. The Regency II trailer park houses immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Many of the trailers are just flimsy boxes. Others are painted brightly, or sport day lilies on a small lawn. One house has an American flag beside it. And on June 21st the Regency displayed a white sign at its entrance with the message: “V ote No”.内布拉斯加州最早的定居者中有一些是德国人。
在第一次世界大战期间，该州曾禁止德裔居民用母语教学。
但这是很久以前的事了。
这些天来，就在整洁的弗里蒙特小镇外围，一批新的居民正试着安顿新家。
Regency II拖车场的居民都是移民，多数来自墨西哥。
经济学人_精品文章中英对照
1.Whopper to go至尊汉堡，打包带走Will Burger King be gobbled up by private equity?汉堡王是否会被私人股本吞并？Sep 2nd 2010 | NEW YORKSHARES in Burger King (BK) soared on September 1st on reports that the fast-food company was talking to several private-equity firms interested in buying it. How much beef was behind these stories was unclear. But lately the company famous for the slogan “Have It Your Way” has certainly not been having it its own way. There may be arguments about whether BK or McDonald’s serves the best fries, but there is no doubt which is more popular with stockmarket investors: the maker of the Big Mac has supersized its lead in the past two years.有报道披露，快餐企业汉堡王（BK）正在与数个有收购意向的私人股本接洽，9月1日，汉堡王的股值随之飙升。
这些报道究竟有多少真材实料不得而知。
汉堡王的著名口号是“我选我味”，但如今显然它身不由己，心中五味杂陈。
汉堡王和麦当劳哪家薯条最好吃，食客们一直争论不休，但股票投资人更喜欢哪家股票，却一目了然：过去两年里，巨无霸麦当劳一直在扩大自己的优势。
The_Economist整理版(《经济学人》原版英文,有4000词汇即可,练习阅读绝好资料)
Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(2-3)Moving marketsShifts in trading patterns are making technology ever more importantAN INVESTOR presses a button, sending 1,000 small “buy” orders to a stock exchange. The exchange's computer system instantly kicks in, but a split second later, 99% of the orders are cancelled. Having found the best price, the investor makes his trade discreetly, leaving no visible trace on the market—all in less time than it takes to blink. His stealth strategy remains intact.Events like this happen many times a day, as floods of orders from active hedge funds and “algorithmic” traders—who use automated programs to buy and sell—rush through the information-technology systems of the world's exchanges. The average transaction size on leading stock exchanges has fallen from about 2,000 shares in the mid-1990s to fewer than 400 today, although total trading volume has soared. But exchanges' systems have to cope with more than just a growing onslaught of “buy” and “sell” messages. Customers want to trade in more complicated ways, combining different types of assets on different exchanges at once. Then, as always, there is regulation. All this is pushing technology further to the fore.Recent embarrassments at the Tokyo Stock Exchange have illustrated what can happen when systems fail to keep up with the times. In just the past few months, the importance of technology has been plain in mergers (those of the New York Stock Exchange and Archipelago, and NASDAQ and INET); collaborations (the decision by the New York Board of Trade to use the Chicago Board of Trade's trading platform); and the creation of off-exchange trading networks (including one unveiled recently by Citigroup).Technology is hardly a new element in financial markets: the advent of electronic trading in the 1980s (first in Europe, later in America) helped to globalise financial markets and drove up trading volumes. But having slowed after the dotcom bubble it is now demanding ever more of exchanges' and intermediaries' attention. Investors can now deal more easily with exchanges or each other, bypassing traditional routes. As customers' demands and bargaining power have increased, so the exchanges have had to ramp up their own systems. “Technology created the monster that has to be ad dressed by more technology,” says Leslie Sutphen of Calyon Financial, a big futures broker.Aite Group, a research firm, reckons that in America alone the securities and investment industry spent $26.4 billion last year on IT (see chart), and may spend $30 billion in 2008. Sell-side firms spend most: J.P. Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley each splashed out more than $2 billion in 2004, while asset-management firms such as State Street Global Advisors, Barclays Global Investors and Fidelity Investments spent between $250m and $350m apiece. With brokerage fees for trades whittled down, many have concluded that better technology is one way to cut trading costs and keep customers.Testing all enginesGlobal growth is looking less lopsided than for many yearsLARR Y SUMMERS, a Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, once said that “the world economy is flying on one engine” to describe its excessive reliance on American demand. Now growth seems to be becoming more even at last: Europe and Japan are revving up, as are most emerging economies. As a result, if (or when) the American engine stalls, the global aeroplane will not necessarily crash.For the time being, America's monetary policymakers think that their economy is still running pretty well. This week, as Alan Greenspan handed over the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve to Ben Bernanke, the Fed marked the end of Mr Greenspan's18-year reign by raising interest rates for the 14th consecutive meeting, to 4.5%. The central bankers also gave Mr Bernanke more flexibi lity by softening their policy statement: they said that further tightening “may be needed”rather than “is likely to be needed”, as before.Most analysts expect the Fed to raise rates once or twice more, although the economy slowed sharply in late 2005. Real GDP growth fell to an annual rate of only 1.1% in the fourth quarter, the lowest for three years. Economists were quick to ascribe this disappointing number to special factors, such as Hurricane Katrina and a steep fall in car sales—the consequence of generous incentives that had encouraged buyers to bring purchases forward to the third quarter. The consensus has it that growth will bounce back to an annual rate of over 4% in the first quarter and stay strong thereafter.This sounds too optimistic. A rebound is indeed likely in this quarter, but the rest of the year could prove disappointing, as a weakening housing market starts to weigh on consumer spending. In December sales of existing homes fell markedly and the stock of unsold homes surged. Economists at Goldman Sachs calculate that, after adjusting for seasonal patterns, the median home price has fallen by almost 4% since October. Experience from Britain and Australia shows that even a soft landing for house prices can cause an acute slowdown in consumer spending.American consumers have been the main engine not just of their own economy but of the whole world's. If that engine fails, will the global economy nose-dive? A few years ago, the answer would probably have been yes. But the global economy may now be less vulnerable. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Jim O'Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, argued convincingly that a slowdown in America need not lead to a significant global loss of power.Start with Japan, where industrial output jumped by an annual rate of 11% in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs has raised its GDP growth forecast for that quarter (the official number is due on February 17th) to an annualized 4.2%. That would pushyear-on-year growth to 3.9%, well ahead of America's 3.1%. The bank predicts average GDP growth in Japan this year of 2.7%. It thinks strong demand within Asia will partly offset an American slowdown.Japan's labour market is also strengthening. In December the ratio of vacancies to job applicants rose to its highest since 1992 (see chart 1). It is easier to find a job now than at any time since the bubble burst in the early 1990s. Stronger hiring by firms is also pushing up wages after years of decline. Workers are enjoying the biggest rise in bonuses for over a d ecade.Pass the parcelOnline shoppers give parcels firms a new lease of lifeTHINGS must be going well in the parcels business. At $2.5m for a 30-second TV commercial during last weekend's Super Bowl, an ad from FedEx was the one many Americans found the most entertaining. It showed a caveman trying to use a pterodactyl for an express delivery, only to watch it be gobbled up on take-off by a tyrannosaur. What did the world do before FedEx, the ad inquired? It might have asked what on earth FedEx did before the arrival of online retailers, which would themselves be sunk without today's fast and efficient delivery firms.Consumers and companies continue to flock in droves to the internet to buy and sell things. FedEx reported its busiest period ever last December, when it handled almost 9m packages in a single day. Online retailers also set new records in America. Excluding travel, some $82 billion was spent last year buying things over the internet, 24% more than in 2004, according to comScore Networks, which tracks consumer behaviour. Online sales of clothing, computer software, toys, and home and garden products were all up by more than 30%. And most of this stuff was either posted or delivered by parcel companies.The boom is global, especially now that more companies are outsourcing production. It is becoming increasingly common for products to be delivered direct from factory to consumer. In one evening just before Christmas, a record 225,000 international express packages were handled by UPS at a giant new air-cargo hub, opened by the American logistics firm at Cologne airport in Germany. “The internet has had a profound effect on our business,” says David Abney, UPS's international president. UPS now handles more than 14m packages worldwide every day.It is striking that postal firms—once seen as obsolete because of the emergence of the internet—are now finding salvation from it. People are paying more bills online and sending more e-mails instead of letters, but most post offices are making up for that thanks to e-commerce. After four years of profits, the United States Postal Service has cleared its $11 billion of debt.Firms such as Amazon and eBay have even helped make Britain's Royal Mail profitable. It needs to be: on January 1st, the Royal Mail lost its 350-year-old monopoly on carrying letters. It will face growing competition from rivals, such as Germany's Deutsche Post, which has expanded vigorously after partial privatisation and now owns DHL, another big international delivery company.Both post offices and express-delivery firms have developed a range of services to help ecommerce and eBay's traders—who listed a colossal 1.9 billion items for sale last year. Among the most popular services are tracking numbers, which allow people to follow the progress of their deliveries on the internet.A question of standardsMore suggestions of bad behaviour by tobacco companies. MaybeANOTHER round has just been fought in the battle between tobacco companies and those who regard them as spawn of the devil. In a paper just published in the Lancet, with the provocative title “Secret science: tobacco industry research on smoking behaviour and cigarette toxicity”, David Hammond, of Waterloo University in Canada and Neil Collishaw and Cynthia Callard, two members of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, a lobby group, criticise the behaviour of British American Tobacco (BAT). They say the firm considered manipulating some of its products in order to make them low-tar in the eyes of officialdom while they actually delivered high tar and nicotine levels to smokers.It was and is no secret, as BAT points out, that people smoke low-tar cigarettes differently from high-tar ones. The reason is that they want a decent dose of the nicotine which tobacco smoke contains. They therefore pull a larger volume of air through the cigarette when they draw on a low-tar rather than a high-tar variety. The extra volume makes up for the lower concentration of the drug.But a burning cigarette is a complex thing, and that extra volume has some unexpected consequences. In particular, a bigger draw is generally a faster draw. That pulls a higher proportion of the air inhaled through the burning tobacco, rather than through the paper sides of the cigarette. This, in turn, means more smoke per unit volume, and thus more tar and nicotine. The nature of the nicotine may change, too, with more of it being in a form that is easy for the body to absorb.According to Dr Hammond and his colleagues, a series of studies conducted by BAT's researchers between 1972 and 1994 quantified much of this. The standardised way of analysing cigarette smoke, as laid down by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), which regulates everything from computer code to greenhouse gases, uses a machine to make 35-millilitre puffs, drawn for two seconds once a minute. The firm's researchers, by contrast, found that real smokers draw 50-70ml per puff, and do so twice a minute. Dr Hammonds's conclusion is drawn from the huge body of documents disgorged by the tobacco industry as part of various legal settlements that have taken place in the past few years, mainly as a result of disputes with the authorities in the United States.Dr Hammond suggests, however, the firm went beyond merely investigating how people smoked. A series of internal documents from the late 1970s and early 1980s shows that BAT at least thought about applying this knowledge to cigarette design.A research report from 1979 puts it thus: “There are three major design featur es which can be used either individually or in combination to manipulate delivery levels; filtration, paper permeability, and filter-tip ventilation.” A conference paper from 1983 says, “The challenge would be to reduce the mainstream nicotine determined by standard smoking-machine measurement while increasing the amount that would actually be absorbed by the smoker”. Another conference paper, from 1984, says: “We should strive to achieve this effect without appearing to have a cigarette that cheats the league table. Ideally it should appear to be no different from a normal cigarette...It should also be capable of delivering up to 100% more than its machine delivery.”Thanks to the banksCollege students learn more about market ratesA GOOD education may be priceless, but in America it is far from cheap—and it is not getting any cheaper. On February 1st Congress narrowly passed the Deficit Reduction Act, which aims to slim America's bulging budget deficit by, among other things, lopping $12.7 billion off the federal student-loan programme. Interest rates on student loans will rise while subsidies fall.Family incomes, grant aid and federal loans have all failed to keep pace with the growth in the cost of tuition. “The funding gap between what students can afford and what higher education costs has got wider and wider,” says Claire Mezzanotte of Fitch, a ratings agency. Lenders are rushing to bridge the gap with “private” student loans—loans that are free of government subsidies and guarantees.Virtually non-existent ten years ago, private student loans in the 2004-05 school year amounted to $13.8 billion—a compound annual growth rate of almost 30%—and they are expected to double in the next three years. According to the College Board, an association of schools and colleges, private student loans now make up nearly 22% of the volume of federal student loans, up from a mere 5% in 1994-95.The growth shows little sign of slowing. Education costs continue to climb while pressure on Congress to pare down the budget deficit means federal aid will, at best, stay at current levels. Meanwhile, the number of students attending colleges and tradeschools is expected to soar as the children of post-war baby-boomers continue matriculating.Private student loans are popular with lenders because they are profitable. Lenders charge market rates for the loans (the rates on federal student loans are capped) before adding up-front fees, which can themselves be around 6-7% of the loan. Sallie Mae, a student-loan company and by far the biggest dispenser of private student loans, disclosed in its most recent report that the average spread on its private student lending was 4.75%, more than three times the 1.31% it made on its federally backed loans.All of this is good news when lenders are hungry for new areas of growth in the face of a cooling mortgage market. Private student loans, says Matthew Snowling of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, an investment bank, are probably “the fastest-growing segment of consumer finance—and by far the most profitable one—at a time when finding asset growth is challenging.” Last December J.P. Morgan, which already had a sizeable education-finance unit, snapped up Collegiate Funding Services, a Virginia-based provider of federal and private student loans. Companies from Bank of America to GMAC, the financing arm of General Motors, have jumped in. Other consumer-finance companies, such as Capital One, are whispered to be eyeing the market.In the beginning...How life on Earth got going is still mysterious, but not for want of ideasNEVER make forecasts, especially about the future. Samuel Goldwyn's wise advice is well illustrated by a pair of scientific papers published in 1953. Both were thought by their authors to be milestones on the path to the secret of life, but only one has so far amounted to much, and it was not the one that caught the public imagination at the time.James Watson and Francis Crick, who wrote “A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid”, have become as famous as rock stars for asking how life works and thereby starting a line of inquiry that led to the Human Genome Project. Stanley Miller, by contrast, though lauded by his peers, languishes in obscurity as far as the wider world is concerned. Yet when it appeared, “Production of amino acids under possible primitive Earth conditions” was expected to begin a scientific process that would solve a problem in some ways more profound than how life works at the moment—namely how it got going in the first place on the surface of a sterile rock 150m km from a small, unregarded yellow star.Dr Miller was the first to address this question experimentally. Inspired by one of Charles Darwin's ideas, that the ingredients of life might have formed by chemical reactions in a “warm, little pond”, he mixed the gases then thought to have formed the atmosphere of the primitive Earth— methane, ammonia and hydrogen—in a flask half-full of boiling water, and passed electric sparks, mimicking lightning, through them for several days to see what would happen. What happened, as the name of the paper suggests, was amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The origin of life then seemed within grasp. But it has eluded researchers ever since. They are still looking, though, and this week several of them met at the Royal Society, in London, to review progress.The origin question is really three sub-questions. One is, where did the raw materials for life come from? That is what Dr Miller was asking. The second is, how did those raw materials spontaneously assemble themselves into the first object to which the term “alive” might reasonably be applied? The third is, how, having once come into existence, did it survive conditions in the early solar system?The first question was addressed by Patrick Thaddeus, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, and Max Bernstein, who works at the Ames laboratory, in California, part of America's space agency, NASA. As Dr Bernstein succinctly put it, the chemical raw materials for life, in the form of simple compounds that could then be assembled into more complex biomolecules, could come from above, below or beyond.Full to burstingRising levels of carbon dioxide will dump even more water into the oceansTHE lungs of the planet, namely green-leafed plants that breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, also put water vapour into the atmosphere. Just as people lose water through breathing (think of the misted mirror used to check for vital signs), so, too, do plants. The question is, what effect will rising concentrations of carbon dioxide have on this? The answer, published in this week's Nature by Nicola Gedney of Britain's Meteorological Office and her colleagues, would appear to be, less water in the atmosphere and more in the oceans.Measurements of the volume of water that rivers return to the oceans show that, around the world, rivers have become fuller over the past century. In theory, there are many reasons why this could be so, but some have already been discounted. Research has established, for example, that it is not, overall, raining—or snowing, hailing or sleeting—any more than it used to. But there are other possibilities. One concerns changes in land use, such as deforestation and urbanisation. The soil in rural areas soaks up the rain and trees breathe it back into the atmosphere, whereas the concrete in urban areas transfers rainwater into drains and hence into rivers. Another possibility is “solar dimming”, in which aerosol particles create a hazy atmosphere that holds less water. And then there is the direct effect of carbon dioxide on plant transpiration.Dr Gedney used a statistical technique called “optimal fingerprinting” or “detection and attribution” to identify which of these four factors matter. Her team carried out five simulations of river flow in the 20th century. In the first of these they allowed all four explanations to vary: rainfall, haze, atmospheric carbon dioxide and land use. They then held one of them constant in each of the next four simulations. By comparing the outcome of each of these with the first simulation, the team gained a sense of its part in the overall picture. So, for example, they inferred the role of land use by deducting the simulation in which it was fixed from the simulation in which it varied.As with any statistical analysis, the results are only as good as the model, the experimental design and the data. Dr Gedney and her colleagues acknowledge that their model does not fully take into account the use of water to irrigate crops—particularly important in Asia and Europe—nor the question of urban growth. They argue, however, that these aspects, taken together, would remove water from rivers, which makes their conclusion all the more striking. And it is this: fuller rivers cannot be explained by more rainfall or haze or changes in land use, but they can be explained by higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.The mechanism is straightforward. A plant breathes through small holes, called stomata, found in its leaves. Plants take in carbon dioxide, and when the atmosphere is relatively rich in this gas, less effort is needed. The stomata stay closed for longer, and less water is lost to the atmosphere. This means that the plant doesn't need to draw as much moisture from the soil. The unused water flows into rivers.The great tech buy-out boomWill the enthusiasm of private-equity firms for investing in technology and telecoms end in tears, again?PRIME COMPUTERS, Rhythm NetConnections and XO Communications—all names to drain the blood from the face of a private-equity investor. Or so it was until recently, when investing in technology and telecoms suddenly became all the rage for private-equity companies. These investment firms—labelled “locusts” by unfriendly Europeans—generally make their money by buying big controlling stakes in companies, improving their efficiency, and then selling them on.In the late 1980s, Prime Computers became private equity's first great “tech wreck”, humiliating investors who thought they understood the technology business and could nurture the firm back to health away from the shorttermist pressures of the public stockmarket. After Prime failed, private-equity firms spent the best part of a decade focusing solely on the old economy. Only in the late 1990s, when the new economy was all the rage, did they pluck up the courage to return to tech and telecoms—a decision some of the grandest names in the industry were soon to regret. Hicks, Muse, Furst and Tate (Rhythm NetConnections) and Forstmann Little (XO) have both been shadows of their old selves since losing fortunes on telecoms.Now, investing in technology and telecoms is once again one of the hottest areas in the super-heated privateequity market. The multi-billion-dollar question is: will this round of investment end any less horribly than the previous two?Last month TDC, a Danish phone company, was finally acquired after a bid of $15.3 billion by a consortium including European giants Permira Advisors and Apax Partners, and American veterans Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), Blackstone Group and Providence Equity Partners. In the past five years, there has been private-equity involvement in about 40% of telecoms deals in Europe.On the other side of the Atlantic, the action has focused mainly on technology, rather than telecoms. Last summer, a consortium including Silver Lake Partners and KKR completed the biggest private-equity tech deal to date, buying SunGard Data Systems, a financial-technology firm, for $11.3 billion. Since then the deals have continued to flow. The $1.2 billion acquisition of Serena Software by Silver Lake is due to be completed by the end of March. Blackstone and others are said to be circling two IT outsourcing firms—Computer Sciences and ACS.There are reasons to hope that this time will be different. In telecoms, for instance, private-equity firms are mostly trying to buy established firms—often former national monopolists—that, while they might be threatened by internet telephony, have strong cash flow, physical assets and plenty of scope to improve the quality of management. These are the sorts of characteristicsprivate-equity investors thrive on. By contrast, the disastrous investments in the late 1990s were in new telecoms firms that were building their operations.In technology, private-equity interest has grown as the industry has matured, and cash-flow and profitability have become more predictable. Until recently, it has been the norm for tech firms to plough back all their profit and cashflow into investing in the business. They have carried no debt and paid no dividends. Now private-equity firms see the opportunity to pursue their classic strategy of buying firms by borrowing against cashflow, and then returning money to shareholders. Glenn Hutchins of Silver Lake thinks the tech sector is now in a similar condition to the old economy in America in the early 1980s, which is when private equity first started to have an impact, by restructuring and consolidating many industries.How to live for everThe latest from the wacky world of anti-senescence therapyDEATH is a fact of life—at least it has been so far. Humans grow old. From early adulthood, performance starts to wane. Muscles become progressively weaker, cognition fails. But the point at which age turns to ill health and, ultimately, death is shifting—that is, people are remaining healthier for longer. And that raises the question of how death might be postponed, and whether it might be postponed indefinitely.Humans are certainly living longer. An American child born in 1970 could expect to live 70.8 years. By 2000, that had increased to 77 years. Moreover, an adult still alive at the age of 75 in 2002 could expect a further 11.5 years of life.Much of this change has been the result of improved nutrition and better medicine. But to experience a healthy old age also involves maintaining physical and mental function. Age-related non-pathological changes in the brain, muscles, joints, immune system, lungs and heart must be minimised. These changes are called “senescence”.Research shows that exercise can help to maintain physical function late in life and that exercising one's brain can limit the progression of senescence. Other work—on the effects of caloric restriction, consuming red wine and altering genes in yeast, mice and nematodes—has shown promise in slowing senescence.The approach advocated by Aubrey de Grey of the University of Cambridge, in England, and presented at last week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is rather more radical. As an engineer, he favours intervening directly to repair the changes in the body that are caused by ageing. This is an approach he dubs “strategies for engineered negligible senescence”. In other words, if ageing humans can be patched up for 30 years, he argues, science will have developed sufficiently to make further repairs more effective, postponing death indefinitely.Dr de Grey's ideas, which are informed by literature surveys rather than experimental work, have been greeted with scorn by those working at developing such repair kits. Steven Austad, a gerontologist based at the University of Texas, warns that such therapies are many years away and may never arrive at all. There are also the side effects to consider. While mice kept onlow-calorie diets live longer than their fatter friends, the skinny mice are less fertile and are sometimes sterile. Humans wishing both to prolong their lives and to procreate might thus wish to wait until their child-bearing years were behind them before embarking on such a diet, although, by then, relatively more age-related damage will have accumulated.No one knows exactly why a low-calorie diet extends the life of mice, but some researchers think it is linked to the rate at which cells divide. There is a maximum number of times that a human cell can divide (roughly 50) before it dies. This is because the ends of chromosomes, structures called telomeres, shorten each time the cell divides. Eventually, there is not enough left for any further division.Cell biologists led by Judith Campisi at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California doubt that every cell has this dividing limit, and believe that it could be only those cells that have stopped dividing that cause ageing. They are devising an experiment to create a mouse in which senescent cells—those that no longer divide—are prevented from accumulating. They plan to activate a gene in the mouse that will selectively eliminate senescent cells. Such a mouse could demonstrate whether it is。
经济学人文章摘录32篇（中英对照）
经济学人文章摘录32篇（中英对照）第一篇：经济学人文章摘录32篇(中英对照)【经济学人】双语阅读：律师事务所标价更高收益更少Business 商业报道Law firms 律师事务所Charging more, getting less 标价更高，收益更少Lawyers' biggest customers are discovering that they can haggle 律师的最大客户们发现他们能与律师还价THERE were groans in big companies' legal departments in the mid-2000s, when the fees of America's priciest lawyers first hit 1,000 an hour.当美国最高的律师酬金达到每小时1000美元，20世纪中期，一些大公司的法律部门里开始抱怨连连。
Such rates have since become common at firms with prestige.自此以后，这样的价格在名企变得普遍。
A survey published this week by the National Law Journal found that they now go as high as 1,800.美国法律期刊刊登的一项调查表明，现在的律师费用已经高达1800美元/时，But the general counsels of large businesses are increasingly finding that they can ignore these extravagant rates, and insist on big discounts.但是那些为大公司效力的法律顾问却逐渐发现，他们忽视高额酬金，并坚持较大折扣。
Price-discounting tends to be associated more with used-car lots than with posh law firms.There was a time when a lawyer could submit his bill and be confident of receiving a cheque for the same amount.价格折扣渐渐常见于二手车交易，并非光鲜的律师律师事务所。
经济学人(英语文章带翻译)
Nice work if you can get out 谁都不愿摊上这种好事Free exchange自由交流Why the rich now have less leisure than the poor为什么当今富人的休闲时间比穷人还少Apr 19th 2014 | From the print edition1 FOR most of human history rich people had the most leisure. In “Downton Abbey”, a drama a bout the British upper classes of the early 20th century, one aloof aristocrat has never heard of the term “weekend”: for her, every day is filled with leisure. On the flip side, the poor have typically slogged. Hans-Joachim Voth, an economichistorian at the University of Zurich, shows that in 1800 the average English worker laboured for 64 hours a week. “In the 19th century you could tell how poor somebody was by how long they worked,” says Mr Voth.”2 In today's advanced economies things are different. O verall working hours have fallen over the past century. But the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only completed high school. But by 2005 the college-educated had eight hours less of it a week than the high-school grads. Figures from the American Time Use Survey, released last year, show that Americans with abachelor's degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006, but fell for high-school dropouts. The rich, it seems, are no longer the class of leisure.3 There are a number of explanations. One has to do with what economists call the “substitution effect”. Higher wages make leisure moreexpensive: if people take time off they give up more money. Since the 1980s the salaries of those at the top have risen strongly, while those below the median have stagnated or fallen. Thus rising inequality encourages the rich to work more and the poor to work less.，4 The “winner-takes-all” nature of modern economies may amplify the substitution effect. The scale of the global market means businessesthat innovate tend to reap huge gains (think of YouTube, Apple and Goldman Sachs). The returns for beating your competitors can be enormous. Research from Peter Kuhn of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fernando Lozano of Pomona College shows that the same is true for highly skilled workers. Although they do not immediately get overtimepay for “extra” hours, the most successful workers, often the ones putting in the most hours, may reap gains from winner-takes-all markets. Whereas in the early 1980s a man working 55 hours a week earned 11% more than a man putting in 40 hours in the same type of occupation, that gap had increased to 25% by the turn of the 5 Economists tend to assume that the substitution effec t must at some stage be countered by an “income effect”: as higher wages allow people to satisfy more of their material needs, they forgo extra work and instead choose more leisure. Abillionaire who can afford his own island has little incentive to work that extra hour. But new social mores may have flipped the income effect on its head.6 The status of work and leisure in the rich world has changed since the days of “Downton Abbey”. Back in 1899 Thorstein Veblen, an American economist who dabbled in sociology, offered his take on things. He argued that leisure was a “badge of honour”. Rich people could get others to do the dirty, repetitive work—what Veblen called “industry”. Yet Veblen's leisure class was not idle. Rather they engaged in“exploit”: challe nging and creative activities such as writing, philanthropy and debating.7 Veblen's theory needs updating, according to a recent paper from researchers at Oxford University*. Work in advanced economies has become more knowledge-intensive and intellectual. There are fewer really dull jobs, like lift-operating, and more glamorous ones, like fashion design. That means more people than ever can enjoy “exploit” at the office. Work has come to offer the sort of pleasures that rich people used to seek in their time off. On the flip side, leisure is no longer a sign of social power. Instead it symbolises uselessness and unemployment.8 The evidence backs up the sociological theory. The occupations inwhich people are least happy are manual and service jobs requiringlittle skill. Job satisfaction tends to increase with the prestige ofthe occupation. Research by Arlie Russell Hochschild of the Universityof California, Berkeley, suggests that as work becomes moreintellectually stimulating, people start to enjoy it more than home life. “I come to work to relax,” one interviewee tells Ms Hochschild. And wealthy people often feel that lingering at home is a waste of time. A study in 2006 revealed that Americans with a household income of more than $100,000 indulged in 40% less “passive leisure” (such as watching TV) than those earning less than $20,000.Condemned to relax休闲是无奈之举9 What about less educated workers? Increasing leisure time probably reflects a deterioration in their employment prospects as low-skill and manual jobs have withered. Since the 1980s, high-school dropouts have fared badly in the labour market. In 1965 the unemployment rate of American high-school graduates was 2.9 percentage points higher than forthose with a bachelor's degree or more. Today it is 8.4 points higher. “Less educated people are not necessarily buying their way into leisure,” explains Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago. “Some of that time off work may be involuntary.” There may also be change in the income effect for those on low wages. Information technology, by opening a vast world of high-quality and cheap home entertainment, means that low-earners do not need to work as long to enjoy a reasonably satisfying leisure.从历史上来看，但凡富人都是最闲的。
(1-5)《经济学人》中英对照
TEXT 1Rebuilding the American dream machine重建美国梦机器Jan 19th 2006 | NEW YORKFrom The Economist print editionFOR America's colleges, January is a month ofreckoning. Most applications for the next academicyear beginning in the autumn have to be made by theend of December, so a university's popularity is put toan objective standard: how many people want toattend. One of the more unlikely offices to have beenflooded with mail is that of the City University ofNew Y ork (CUNY), a public college that lacks,among other things, a famous sports team, bucoliccampuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even havedorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.对美国的大学而言，一月是一个清算的月份。
大多数要进入将于秋季开学的下一学年学习的申请必须在12月底前完成，因此一所大学的声望就有了客观依据：申请人的多少。
纽约城市大学，一所公立学院，与其他学校相比，它没有一支声名显赫的运动队，没有田园诗一般的校园，也没有喧嚣嘈杂的派对——甚至连宿舍都没有，而且，直到最近也没取得学术上的可信度，可就是这所大学的办公室塞满了学生们寄来的申请函，这简直有些令人难以置信。
经济学人文章(英汉双语对照)汇集
经济学人文章(英汉双语对照)汇集The Economist thinks that media is diverging into blockbusters and niches—with everything else struggling. Why are blockbusters still doing well in this world of almost limitless entertainment choice? First,blockbusters are the common topics that people talk about with their friends.Second, all that technology that has made niche content so much more accessible has also proved handy for pushing blockbusters.Third,in a world of growing entertainment options that make people freaking out, it's easier for some people to choose what others are talking about or what they have heard.So,is the increasing polarization of media products into blockbusters and niches a good or a bad thing? Of course it is a challenge for media companies.But is a boon to consumers.Media companies must raise their game to outshine others.Creative types must learn how to move between big-budget blockbusters and niche, small-budget fare, observing the different genre and budget constraints that apply in these worlds.So, the growth of those niche products grab the market of middle class's instead of blockbusters'.It comes to aconclussion by The Economist that there are only a few things that can be guaranteed to delight large numbers of people.Thus the future of blockbusters is stable.经济学人杂志认为娱乐产品正在发生两级分化,一边是风靡一时,流行大卖的娱乐产品,另外一边是满足小部分人需求和兴趣的小众利基产品,而介于两者之间的产品日子越来也难过.在娱乐选择越来越多的年代,流行热卖的作品还能有这么大的市场呢?原因有三.第一,流行大卖作品是人们与朋友交谈时的共同话题,因为人们对此都会略知一二.第二,让小众产品更易获取的因特网技术也帮助流行热卖产品横行世界.第三,在娱乐选择多得让人抓狂的情况下,对很多来讲,选择别人都在谈论的,或是自己听说过的作品总是来得更容易一些.那么娱乐产业的两级分化是好还是坏?当然对于娱乐公司来讲这是巨大的挑战,但对消费者来讲,却是好事,因为娱乐公司为了让他们的产品能够在成千上万的同类产品中脱颖而出,他们必须要精益求精.对于创作者来讲他们必须要在流行大卖作品和小众利基产品的世界做出合适的定位.所以,那些不知名小众产品的增长抢夺的不是流行热卖作品的市场,付出代价的是中等受欢迎,质量一般般的娱乐产品.经济学人杂志得出结论说,注定只有少部分产品会受到绝大多数人的欢迎,所以流行热卖作品的未来是稳固的.。
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It is a remarkable exhibit of revolutionary kitsch. The museum is new, inaugurated on September 28th 2007. Yet on a recent Saturday afternoon it was empty; not one person among the throngs of Cubans and tourists strolling down Calle Obispo felt inspired to cross its threshold. With the mixture of friendly warmth and necessary opportunism that characterises Cubans nowadays, one of the bored women attendants was soon asking your correspondent's wife if she could spare a packet of antacids (“medicines are very scarce”).
布告上广告着古巴革命防御各级委员会(CDRs)的博物馆，这些委员会是由菲德尔?卡斯特罗在1960年建立起来的社区团体，以作为他的革命的基层组织。建立广告的目的在于安排各项社会服务，并告知新近建立起的共产主义路线的异己省份或反叛省份。博物馆里摆设着一些陈列革命大事记的玻璃橱柜。在博物馆的室内的墙上贴着一些用放大的字体摘录的卡斯特罗演讲，并且还有一张显示革命防御各级委员会的成员加入趋势的图表。2007年，这些委员会的成员增加到了 840万古巴人，而全国总人数仅有1100万。博物馆内一楼有一处显眼的物品，那就是一条用石膏制作而成的一些几何模型，其中包括了一条具有古巴特色的街道，一些前门有着希腊复古风格石柱的房屋…，以及一些依次以显眼的粉色、黄绿色、牙膏蓝、桃色与柠檬色粉刷的各个房屋的正面。
《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版
Translated From 《The Economist》,By ecocn team
古巴:总司令的最后行动2008-03-05[2008.2.23]Cuba-The comandante's last move 总司令的最后行动
It was ill-health and impending mortality, not any sense of failure or repudiation, that obliged Mr Castro to issue his statement that he would not seek to retain his posts. In July 2006, facing abdominal surgery, he turned over his powers to his brother, Raúl Castro. Since then he has not appeared in public. Photographs suggest that while he has been convalescing he remains extremely frail. In November he allowed his name to go forward as a candidate for the National Assembly. But this week he said: “it would be a betrayal of my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer.”
在长长的主教大街，你能欣赏到哈瓦那老城重建后的殖民风采，也能目睹19世纪城市的破旧房屋。而今，在这条大街的中心区域，一张大的红色布告牌上用醒目的浅黄绿色的字母写下了西班牙语-英语的条幅，并让路人感到了它那狂怒的反抗。“你懂吗：我们不休战!(No hay tregua, compay!)。(布什先生：你没法欺骗我们的人民，也买通不了我们(Sr Bush: este pueblo no puede ser enga?ado ni comprador)。
The placard advertises the museum of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), the neighbourhood groups set up by Fidel Castro in 1960 to be the grass roots of his revolution, to organise services but also to inform the newly installed Communist-run state of dissent or subversion. The museum contains glass cases of revolutionary memorabilia. On the walls are blown-up extracts from Mr Castro's speeches, and a chart showing the growth of membership in the CDRs, which in 2007 reached 8.4m of Cuba's 11m people. The highlight, on the first floor, is a scale model in plaster of a typical Cuban street, the houses fronted with the Greek-revival columns that past sugar wealth bequeathed, the fa?ades painted in turn in shocking pink, lime green, toothpaste blue, peach and lemon.
这个革命遗留物品的展览是非同寻常的。博物馆是新建成的——2007年9月28日完成的落成仪式。然而，在最近一个周六的下午，博物馆却空无一人；在主教大街漫步的古巴人以及国外游客的人群中没有一人想着要进入博物馆。如今的古巴人的性格里混杂着友好热情与绝对必要的机会主义，而不一会博物馆里那些无聊的女服务员中就会很快走出一名，来问我们的随行记者的妻子能不能给她一包抗酸剂（她会说，“药物在古巴非常稀少”）。
菲德尔?卡斯特罗已经退下总统职位。但是，只要卡斯特罗还活着，那么古巴人强烈渴望的变革仍会放缓并在低调中进行
AP 美联社供图
HALFWAY along Calle Obispo, a long street that links the restored colonial splendours of Old Havana to the crumbling tenements of the 19th-century city, a large red placard shouts its defiance in lime-green lettering in an arresting mixture of Spanish and English. “No hay tregua, compay! You understand: No Truce. Sr Bush: este pueblo no puede ser enga?ado ni comprado.” (“Mr Bush: this people cannot be deceived nor bought.”)
Mr Castro, ailing and aged 81, this week announced his retirement from the posts of Cuba's president and its “commander in chief”. But his revolution has long since become a shell, a work of theatre in which the old trouper rants on even as many in the bored audience desperately want to slip away—if only they could. As the curtain comes down on Mr Castro's 49 years of rule, change is inevitable. But of what kind and at what pace is far less clear.
On February 24th the new assembly is due to meet to unveil the Council of State, and thus Cuba's president and its other top officials. The council's members will be picked by the Castro brothers and a handful of senior advisers. Most Cuba-watchers expect Raúl Castro to be confirmed as the new president. Since Raúl is himself aged 76, a bolder move would be to hand the top job to Carlos Lage, a 56-year-old doctor who is the number three in the hierarchy's last move 总司令的最后行动