从《小时代》到中国奢侈品形象危机

从《小时代》到中国奢侈品形象危机

唐霜为纽约时报中文网撰稿 10:26

在中国，纵使时尚媒体刊出一百篇时尚与人文之作，都挽救不了一次社会事件对奢侈品形象的打击。电影《小时代》的恶俗时尚观是奢侈品牌在中国形象危机的又一

中国难遏土壤污染

• 中国难遏土壤污染

  吴海燕为纽约时报中文网撰稿 07:27

  土壤污染直接影响食品质量和安全。在中国，土壤污染严重，但政府却不愿意公布具体的数据，更让人们担心的是，土壤污染仍在加剧，并且土壤治理难以开展。

薄熙来法庭即席发言触犯中共禁忌

• 薄熙来法庭即席发言触犯中共禁忌

  黄安伟 14:04

  
  在庭审最后陈述中，薄熙来否认关于自己有权力野心的指控。中国高层只在私下谈论内部权力斗争，薄熙来违反了这条不成文规定。

STEM CELLS MIMIC HUMAN BRAIN

From Nature:

With the right mix of nutrients and a little bit of coaxing, human stem cells derived from skin can assemble spontaneously into brain-like chunks of tissue. Researchers provide the first description and application of these ‘mini-brains’ today in Nature¹.“It’s a seminal study to making a brain in a dish,” says Clive Svendsen, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. “That’s phenomenal.” A fully formed artificial brain might still be years away, he notes, but the pea-sized neural clumps developed in this work could prove useful for researching human neurological diseases. Researchers have previously used human stem cells to grow structures resembling the eye² and even tissue layers similar to the brain's cortex³. But in the latest advance, scientists developed bigger and more complex neural-tissue clumps by first growing the stem cells on a synthetic gel that resembled natural connective tissues found in the brain and elsewhere in the body. Then, they plopped the nascent clumps into a spinning bath to infuse the tissue with nutrients and oxygen.

“The big surprise was that it worked,” says study co-author Juergen Knoblich, a developmental biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. The blobs grew to resemble the brains of fetuses in the ninth week of development. Under a microscope, researchers saw discrete brain regions that seemed to interact with one another. But the overall arrangement of the different proto-brain areas varied randomly across tissue samples — amounting to no recognizable physiological structure.

More here.

当代艺术：意义何在？

当代艺术：意义何在？

LEADERS ARE BORN, NOT MADE

 Shinnosuke Nakayama in Scientific American:

In humans, leaders generally show higher scores in certain personality traits, notably extraversion. Similarly, in animals, bolder and more active individuals tend to be found as leaders. Evolutionary theories suggest that boldness and leadership can coevolve through positive feedback. Individuals who force their preferences on others are more likely to be followed, which in turn encourages these individuals to initiate more often. This feedback results in distinct social roles for leaders and followers within a group, as shown by several experimental studies. It would therefore seem that leaders and followers are born through natural selection, and that you have no chance of becoming a leader if you are born a follower. But our work with stickleback fish suggests that while followers may not have what it takes to lead, leaders can learn to follow. In our paper, we tested the nature of leaders and followers using pairs of fish. Sticklebacks are well known for showing individual differences in boldness, such as when foraging. When they emerge from safe cover to a risky foraging area, the bolder fish are more likely to initiate collective movement, while the shyer animals tend to follow.

We forced the pairs of fish to take opposite roles to see if they could switch with a little training. The shy fish was rewarded with a small amount of food every time it initiated collective movement, regardless of whether it was followed by the bolder partner or not. The bolder fish was also rewarded every time it followed the shyer member, but not when it emerged from safe cover by itself. In this way, we trained pairs to swap their natural roles and compared their behavior to the pairs that assume their natural roles. Our prediction was that bold individuals would perform poorly when forced to become followers, because they are less responsive to the behavior of others in their natural role, while shy individuals would adopt the role of leader more easily. However, the results were completely opposite: for both bold and shy individuals, the tendency to lead is much less flexible than the tendency to follow. The bold fish readily adapted to following but the shy fish could not be trained to lead, even when it learnt to stop following the other fish.

More here.

隐私成为基因革命“路障”

隐私成为基因革命“路障”

FT专栏作家邰蒂：基因测序成本大幅降低，使科学家有望找到与许多疾病有关的“问题基因”。然而近期公众对...

中国人为何对文革少有忏悔

中国人为何对文革少有忏悔 中国独立撰稿人邓聿文：中国的“灾民理性”让忏悔意识变得稀缺。在权力主宰的社会，掌权者的不愿反省影响着集体的麻木不仁。我们看到的是多有控诉而少有道歉

美国经济的三条“软肋”

美国经济的三条“软肋”

北京大学中国宏观经济研究中心卢锋：美国存在多边财经合作场合承诺执行不力、宏观刺激政策选择矛盾、增长动能不足等问题。 对这些问题的研究，关系着中国能否对应对美国等货币放水策略的挑战，并在美国过度扩张政策逼近明斯基时刻时，做好承担更大全球经济引导者的能力和政策储备

媒体札记：话外音

英国《金融时报》中文网专栏作家 徐达内 【作者微博】

薄案回响

在薄熙来案一审结束的这个晚上，石扉客辗转反侧、夜不能寐。将近凌晨2点，他终于忍不住到微博上一抒胸臆：“理解各种无聊和看热闹的心情，但总是不由自主地厌恶这种八卦式的解读与玩闹。这么重大而严肃的新闻，过去几年间的血雨腥风，数以千计的冤狱，无数人的家破人亡，就这么轻轻翻过去了么？”

也难怪。对这位在揭批“红色重庆”方面不遗余力的媒体人来说，从昨天午后一直沸腾到子夜的那些咯咯笑声，实在是让他有些“恨铁不成钢”，担心娱乐化的调侃解构再一次冲淡了沉重的反思。

可是，民意不可违，人民群众就是最爱与八卦“如胶似漆”。虽说这出30年一遇的政治大戏已经令数以亿计的观众目不转睛，但终究还是苦情三角恋的桥段最为喜闻乐见，从庭审记录中得知薄熙来声称王立军暗恋薄谷开来后，不仅是那些时政新闻爱好者兴奋异常、奔走相告，连家庭妇女、星座高手、情感专栏作家也都被惊呼声吸引了过来，围观这出在落幕之际摇身一变成为家庭伦理剧的翻转大片.

全文：http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001052202

中国经济增长的潜力

中国经济增长的潜力

前世界银行副行长林毅夫：从2008年开始，中国应该还有20年时间可以维持平均每年8%增长的潜力。如果中国深化改革，消除结构性缺陷，按比较优势来发展经济，以充分利用后发优势，那么，中国便有可能将8%的增长潜力变为现实的增长率

打击网络传谣背后的微博舆论争夺战

打击网络传谣背后的微博舆论争夺战

王俊岭为纽约时报中文网撰稿 08:14

一方面，官方利用国家机器震慑网络名人；另一方面，则通过加强“微博国家队”，利用手中的垄断资源影响舆论。刚结束的薄熙来案庭审直播便是最好的一例。

年轻艺术家如何呈现光怪陆离的中国

年轻艺术家如何呈现光怪陆离的中国

SHEILA MELVIN 08:00

中国顶级艺术学院之一中央美术学院毕业生优秀作品展开幕， 名为《千里之行》的展览既是年轻艺术家们的名片，从中也可窥见年轻一代如何用艺术回应这个光怪陆离的国家。

科技進步產生更多「垃圾」工作

科技進步產生更多「垃圾」工作

人類學家葛瑞伯（David Graeber）寫了一篇非常有趣的短文，討論現代經濟的工作本質。他寫道：凱因斯（John Maynard Keynes）在1930年預測，到了世紀之末，科技的進步將使得英美等國的上班族每周只需工作15小時。但至今這件事並未發生。科技進步的結果，反倒是我們得尋找各種方式，好拉長我們的工作時間，進而創造了更多沒有意義的工作。詳全文

馬政府最重大經濟政策：「六海一空」救得了台灣經濟嗎？

馬政府最重大經濟政策：「六海一空」救得了台灣經濟嗎？

為了救經濟、搶招商，亞洲各國正瘋經濟特區。但真能成為救經濟的特效藥嗎？《天下》跨國採訪中、日、韓、馬各國經濟特區，台灣優勢在哪裡？…

共和國的長子們

共和國的長子們》

與中國競爭，不能不知道的潛規則！中國經濟之所以快速成長、傲視全球，靠的是獨特制度與政經結合的不公平競爭…

央行行长应擅长“讲故事”

央行行长应擅长“讲故事”FT专栏作家邰蒂：如今支撑金融体系的与其说是有形的基准，不如说是无形的“公众信任”。政策之外的语言交流，本身也成了一种工具，央行行长必须善用其影响

DEBATING POLYAMORY

First, Laurie Penny in the Guardian:

[n]on-monogamy is stereotyped as a bad deal for women and girls, all of whom actually just want a white wedding, because we women are all the same, simple creatures with simple desires. When abuse happens within polyamorous relationships, outsiders often assume that the non-traditional relationship structure is to blame – but the same assumptions are rarely made when a "traditional" marriage turns violent, despite the fact that the practice historically treated women as property and until recently made it legal for men to rape their wives. For plenty of women, that's reason enough to consider other options.
Of course, polyamory isn't always political. People do it for all sorts of reasons, from grand ethical statements to boredom – managing the drama of multiple relationships is a great way to kill time on a Sunday afternoon. Personally, I started practising non-monogamy in my early 20s as a statement against the tyranny of the heterosexual couple form and the patriarchal nuclear family – but then again, I did a lot of silly things for similar reasons in my early 20s. If you'd asked 21-year-old me why precisely I was hanging half-naked out of a fourth-floor window on Holloway Road, I'd probably also have answered "as a statement against the tyranny of the heterosexual couple form". Nowadays, from the wise and serious vantage point of my mid-20s, I practice non-monogamy because it works for me. It doesn't work for everyone, and I might not choose it forever.

Julie Bindel responds, also in The Guardian:

Polyamory is the latest subversive and a la mode sexual practice toreceive extensive media coverage. It appeals as a subject for to those interested in alternative lifestyles, but also attracts commentary from some deeply unpleasant folk who have trashed it alongside gay marriage. "What next?" ask the bigoted opponents of equal marriage. "Polygamy and marriage to your brother/cat/hedge trimmer?"
It is neither my business or concern as to how many sexual partners anyone has at any one time, and I genuinely could not care less how folk organise their relationships. But the co-opting and rebranding of polygamy, so that it loses its nasty association with the oppression of the most disadvantaged women, is as irresponsible as suggesting that because some women chose to enter high-end prostitution as a social experiment, all prostitution is radical and harmless.
Caroline Humphrey, a professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, has argued in favour of the legalisation of polygamy because, according to a number of women in polygamous marriages in Russia, "half a good man is better than none at all".

WHY, AND WHAT, YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CENTRAL ASIA

Ahmed Rashid reviews a number of new books on the region including 3QD friend and occasional contributor Alex Cooley's Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, in the NYRB:

Central Asia has reached a turning point and what comes next really worries it. Will the Taliban return to conquer Afghanistan and open the way for the Central Asian Islamist groups that are closely linked to al-Qaeda and have increased their forces while based in Pakistan? Will populist riots reminiscent of the Arab Spring sweep through the region? They have already done so twice in Kyrgyzstan, in March 2005 and April 2010, bringing down two presidents.
Will the weaker states, lacking economic resources, become hostage to China or Russia? Will the most important regional organization they all belong to—the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—help them overcome instability or will it continue to help them avoid making serious reforms?
None of the works under review provides the full answers to these questions, although Alexander Cooley’s book, Great Games, Local Rules, comes closest. They all agree on the unprecedented rise of China’s influence in Central Asia. Marlène Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse, scholars at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., demonstrate in The Chinese Question in Central Asia that China is already the dominant economic power in the region.
China has also taken care of one vital strategic interest since 1991: making sure that the Uighurs, China’s largest Muslim ethnic group who live in the western province of Xinjiang, do not seriously threaten to become independent and that the hundreds of thousands of Uighurs who live in Central Asia do not help them do so. During the 1950s large numbers of Uighurs fled the Maoist regime to seek shelter in Soviet Central Asia where they were relatively well treated.

MULTIPLES

Too often translation is discussed in terms of loss. What hasn't come through? How is the translation inferior to the original? Multiples, refreshingly, does the opposite: it asks, instead, what is it that survives? And in particular, can something like "style", which we attach so closely to the specificities of linguistic activity, survive being wrenched out of a language entirely and remade in another? Novelist Adam Thirlwell devised an experiment to put these questions to the test. The outcome is this impossible, fascinating book. The idea in brief: get a story translated several times in series (Russian to French, to English, to Dutch …) and as the distance from the original increases, watch what changes and what remains. To put extra strain on the original's integrity, Thirlwell invited novelists to do the translating. Many hadn't translated before. Some possessed – it transpired – only the ropiest understanding of the source language. And novelists are expected to have styles of their own (unlike us translators, who aren't allowed), so might struggle to avoid incorporating their particular stylistic distortions. How could an original survive?

more from Daniel Hahn at The Guardian here.

RIVAL ECONOMISTS IN PUBLIC BATTLE OVER CURE FOR INDIA’S POVERTY

Gardiner Harris in the NYT:

India’s inability to pull Kamlesh and hundreds of millions of others out of desperate poverty despite decades of robust economic growth has been one of history’s great governance failures and economic mysteries.
Does India simply need more time for growth to work its magic, or is there something fundamentally wrong with its formula? Do improvements in health and literacy create growth or simply derive from it? And would India’s people have better lives if the government focused on improving workers’ skills or on bettering investors’ opportunities?
Those are some of the questions behind an unusually nasty fight between two of this nation’s greatest economists. It is a fight that has echoes in poor countries across the globe.
The battle between Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner and Harvard professor, and Jagdish Bhagwati, an eminent professor at Columbia University, has broken out just as India’s economy seems to be coming undone. The rupee has plunged to historical lows against the dollar, and extraordinary efforts by the government to stem the slide, including limits on investments abroad by Indian companies, appear to be having little effect. Growth has fallen to 5 percent annually, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently admitted that it was unlikely to snap back soon. Foreign investors are turning away, and the nation’s stock market has recently swooned.
Into this combustible mix came Mr. Sen and Mr. Bhagwati.

LIKELY TO SUCCEED

Annie Murphy Paul in The New York Times:

“If you want the American dream, go to Finland.” These blunt words from a British politician, quoted by Amanda Ripley in “The Smartest Kids in the World,” may lead readers to imagine that her book belongs to a very particular and popular genre. We love to read about how other cultures do it better (stay slim, have sex, raise children). In this case, Ripley is offering to show how other nations educate students so much more effectively than we do, and her opening pages hold out a promising suggestion of masochistic satisfaction. “American educators described Finland as a silky paradise,” she writes, “a place where all the teachers were admired and all the children beloved.”

...In reporting her book, Ripley made the canny choice to enlist “field agents” who could penetrate other countries’ schools far more fully than she: three American students, each studying abroad for a year. Kim, a restless 15-year-old from rural Oklahoma, heads off to Finland, a place she had only read about, “a snow-castle country with white nights and strong coffee.” Instead, what she finds is a trudge through the cold dark, to a dingy school with desks in rows and an old-fashioned chalkboard — not an iPad or interactive whiteboard in sight. What Kim’s school in the small town of Pietarsaari does have is bright, talented teachers who are well trained and love their jobs. This is the first hint of how Finland does it: rather than “trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis,” as we do, they ensure high-quality teaching from the beginning, allowing only top students to enroll in teacher-training programs, which are themselves far more demanding than such programs in America. A virtuous cycle is thus initiated: better-prepared, better-trained teachers can be given more autonomy, leading to more satisfied teachers who are also more likely to stay on.

Kim soon notices something else that’s different about her school in Pietarsaari, and one day she works up the courage to ask her classmates about it. “Why do you guys care so much?” Kim inquires of two Finnish girls. “I mean, what makes you work hard in school?” The students look baffled by her question. “It’s school,” one of them says. “How else will I graduate and go to university and get a good job?” It’s the only sensible answer, of course, but its irrefutable logic still eludes many American students, a quarter of whom fail to graduate from high school. Ripley explains why: Historically, Americans “hadn’t needed a very rigorous education, and they hadn’t gotten it. Wealth had made rigor optional.” But now, she points out, “everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; they need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.”

More here.

CANCER’S ORDERED DISORDER

From The New York Times:

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s authoritative 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning “biography” of cancer, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” ran almost 600 pages. In comparison, George Johnson has written a very small book, barely half that length. That Mr. Johnson’s story is as gripping, illuminating and affecting as the bigger book — or, for that matter, any other book out there — is testament to both his poet’s talents and his unusual perspective. An award-winning science writer, Mr. Johnson was for some years an editor at The New York Times and a contributor to Science Times (where portions of this book eventually appeared). Initially, though, his interests kept him firmly on the physical science side of things, covering particles and planets, a foreign terrain that often seems enviably organized, if a little dry, to those of us in the mushier, less rigorous zones of health. Then came a sad new assignment, self-imposed: Mr. Johnson set out to learn everything he could about cancer when his then-wife received a diagnosis at a relatively young age. So he gamely crossed over from the hard sciences to the soft, Gulliver with a notepad and a recorder. He understood the language well enough, but the customs were surpassing strange.

...Mr. Johnson’s wife, Nancy, was a trim, exercising, vegetable- and fiber-chomping nonsmoker in her early 40s when she felt a lump in her groin. It proved to be a metastasis from a malevolent form of uterine cancer, one whose cells are atypically aggressive and prone to spreading. Her situation and her terrible prognosis reminded Mr. Johnson of nothing more than his New Mexico backyard, with headstrong wildflowers blooming where they choose and intractable weeds exploding by night.

More here.

Miley Cyrus is sexual -- get over it

Miley Cyrus is sexual -- get over it

August 27, 2013 -- Updatd 1854 GMT (0254 HKT)

Pepper Schwartz says we need to tell kids that in real life, there are better ways to be attractive.

刺青

地铁快照

HOW THE LIGHT GETS OUT

Michael Graziano in Aeon Magazine:

Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the ‘easy’ problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the ‘hard’ problem.
I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain’s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.

SELF-FASHIONING IN SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

From Harvard Magazine:

Self-fashioning is part of the age-old purpose of higher education, particularly in the liberal arts and sciences. The key point is to be aware, sometimes, that this is happening—to deliberately engage infashioning—not just let events and experiences sweep you along without your conscious participation. Richard Brodhead expressed this well in his speech to the entering class as dean of Yale College in 1995: “You’ve come to one of the great fresh starts in your life, one of the few chances your life will offer to step away from the person you’ve been taken for and decide anew what you would like to become.” In this mood, students typically see college as a place where a new stage of life’s journey begins. “Incipit Vita Nova” was one motto of my alma mater, Wellesley, and it surely seemed appropriate at the time.

You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not competing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change. You now also have the materials to shape your character and your purposes: the rich context, resources, incomparable opportunities that Harvard provides. And the combination of time and materials is truly an opportunity to treasure. My purpose in this essay is to think with you about how you might use this time and these materials wisely, with full awareness that this experience will be unique for each of you, but also the conviction that since countless other men and women have set out on the same journey, they can offer some perspectives that will be helpful to you now.

More here.

MORE ON FAT ASSES

Changes during the early nineteenth century revolutionized responses to fat. A new focus on statistics brought with it the concept of weight norms, and advances in chemistry suggested that sugar intake and fat were closely related. Fat was now considered unburned fuel, whereas before it was thought of in very different terms, related to an early understanding of the body as rooted in liquids and humours. And as technology slowly moved into the domestic sphere, people weighed themselves more. One consequence: “There is an intensified will to thinness in the second half of the nineteenth century”, and it is a consequence that falls differentially on women. Indeed, an enduring response to fatness, a response that stands impervious to change with the century, society, or culture is the double standard “between”, Vigarello explains, “the male case where relatively big sizes are tolerated” and “the female case where thinness is obligatory”. The gendered aspect of fatness, a phenomenon which results in “two adipose cultures”, is a star point in Vigarello’s book; his discussion of the “disparities of alimentation” at work within France’s class structure is another. By 1920, Georges Vigarello tells us, obesity was viewed in much the same terms as it is today: “The fat person is both an aesthetic threat and a health risk”. As he readily admits, what is new is what is emphasized by Lustig and Moss: the runaway nature of it, the global nature of the problem.

more from Barbara J. King at the TLS here.

AS HUMANS CHANGE LANDSCAPE, BRAINS OF SOME ANIMALS CHANGE, TOO

Carl Zimmer in the NYT:

Evolutionary biologists have come to recognize humans as a tremendous evolutionary force. In hospitals, we drive the evolution of resistant bacteria by giving patients antibiotics. In the oceans, we drive the evolution of small-bodied fish by catching the big ones.
In a new study, a University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting we may be driving evolution in a more surprising way. As we alter the places where animals live, we may be fueling the evolution of bigger brains.
Dr. Snell-Rood bases her conclusion on a collection of mammal skulls kept at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Snell-Rood picked out 10 species to study, including mice, shrews, bats and gophers. She selected dozens of individual skulls that were collected as far back as a century ago. An undergraduate student named Naomi Wick measured the dimensions of the skulls, making it possible to estimate the size of their brains.
Two important results emerged from their research. In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood concludes that when these species moved to cities and towns, their brains became significantly bigger.

YOUR BRAIN AT WORK

David Rock quoted in DelanceyPlace:

In today's selection -- you can't do two things that require concentration at once -- or at least you can't do them very well. And doing too much, even if not all at once, has a debilitating effect: "The idea that conscious processes need to be done one at a time has been studied in hundreds of experiments since the 1980s. For example, the scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It's a phenomenon called dual-task interference. In one experiment, Pashler had volunteers press one of two keys on a pad in response to whether a light flashed on the left or right side of a window. One group only did this task over and over. Another group had to define the color of an object at the same time, choosing from among three colors. These are simple variables: left or right, and only three colors. Yet doing two tasks took twice as long, leading to no time saving. This finding held up whether the experiment involved sight or sound, and no matter how much participants practiced. If it didn't matter whether they got the answers right, they could go faster. The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don't divide your attention.

..."A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep. For men, it's around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it's really not that amusing that one of the most common 'productivity tools' can make one as dumb as a stoner. (Apologies to technology manufacturers: there are good ways to use this technology, specifically being able to 'switch off' for hours at a time.) 'Always on' may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on 'alert' far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear from this has an impact. As Stone says, 'This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It's great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?' "

More here.

POLYGLOT PROCESSING

From HimalSouthAsian:

The internet as we know it today is largely an American phenomenon. Our daily online needs are served almost exclusively by US internet giants based in the Silicon Valley: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Dropbox, Amazon, Ebay and more. As a result, the internet’s design and evolution has been shaped by Western democratic values. We’d likely not have the internet in its relatively unstructured and decentralised current form had it come out of Soviet Russia. But with those values also came the language – English. The American Standards Association’s original ASCII code, the dominant encoding scheme of the web until a few years ago, uses only 128 characters to represent all textual information necessary for a computer, to the exclusion of characters alien to English. A German equivalent, if Germans had got the lead, for instance, would certainly have accommodated accented characters. Still, regardless of which Western culture computing advances might have come from, for Southasia and other regions with non-Latin alphabets computing would still have had to be done in a foreign language and alphabet, or in unintuitive versions of their own languages. The UTF-8 (more commonly known as Unicode), popularised in the last decade, has transcended the limitations of ASCII to represent thousands of characters with a single encoding scheme. This has made it possible to represent many different writing systems using one encoding scheme, instead of having to use separate ones for each. Today, this is the most popular standard of character encoding on the web. 

 

Computer users from Southasia will remember the pains of typing and reading their native languages on computers until a few years ago. Today, the smoothness with which one can communicate in regional languages is remarkable, even though the transition to Unicode is not yet complete. In Nepal, for example, several government organisations and news outlets still use old standards, but online discourse that used to be dominated by Romanised transliterations has been replaced by streams of conversation in the original alphabet, accompanied by almost an abhorrence of Romanised variants. 

More here.

香港人为普选权策划“占领中环”运动

香港人为普选权策划“占领中环”运动

狄雨霏 08:13

香港公民社会研究专家陈健民解释了他与两位同志者发起“占领中环”运动的想法。他说，香港是成熟社会，民主不能再等。但他对中共兑现2017年港人直选特首的承诺感到悲观。为了争取普选权，他做好了坐牢的准备。

奥巴马大学评分计划寻求降低教育成本

• 奥巴马大学评分计划寻求降低教育成本

  TAMAR LEWIN 19:54

  奥巴马即将提出一个旨在提高教学质量、降低教育成本的高校评分方案，根据学费、毕业率、毕业生收入水平等指标给大学打分。得分高的大学将获得更多联邦教育拨款。

中国独立影像，在红线与黄线之间纪录现实

中国独立影像，在红线与黄线之间纪录现实

杰安迪 08:16

• 
  由三个台湾人创立的“华人新世代”基金会希望在10年内资助100部独立纪录片，为下一代纪录下中国这个充满磨难的年代。他们小心规避政府红线，在大片灰色区域里搜寻真相。

克鲁格曼：奥巴马医改势在必行

• 克鲁格曼：奥巴马医改势在必行

  
  奥巴马的医疗法案将使数百万人的医疗开支大幅降低，有如此明显的好处，它一定会得到实施，并且不可逆转。抵制医改的共和党只会自食其果。

美国无力左右埃及局势

• 西蒙：美国无力左右埃及局势

  
  美国无法利用经济援助影响埃及政局，因为这种援助本来只是为了确保战略合作而存在的，况且埃及也不会为了几十亿美元听命于人。

断翅的枭雄薄熙来

断翅的枭雄薄熙来FT中文网专栏作家老愚：庆幸的是，枭雄薄熙来已经被锯掉了翅膀。企图模仿他飞行的，当以此为戒。这是2013年的中国。

香港未完成的實驗

2013-7-18 17:45:04

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on sinaweiboShare on emai

圖：陳健民 facebook

(編按：香港書展2013年度作家陳冠中，今天出席分享會「香港未完成的實驗」，本文為他的發言稿全文。)

香港未完成的實驗。

2000年那年，我一如以往，將自己的一些舊作交給了梁秉鈞先生，請他編輯成書並替我找出版社。這次他問說交給一家新出版社以示支持好不好？我同意了。這就成了指南針出版社在2001年替我出版的文章集《香港未完成的實驗》，銷售量很低，很少人注意到。裏面，有一篇同名的文章，曾經在明報刊登，首次發表日期是1998年3月27日，回歸後不到一年。我在那篇也叫做《香港未完成的實驗》的文章裏寫下了這樣的一些句子：

「香港也是人類最偉大的成功實驗之一。」

「香港的實驗還有未完成的部份嗎？我們不是『什麼都有』了嗎？作為戰後嬰兒潮代的一份子，我還有一種痛，而相信同代很多人會有同感。那就是民主。或者說，以市民普選出代議決策者和行政長官的制度。」

「我相信香港民主也會有改進，只是慢了一點，慢得有點荒謬。」

「民主是香港未完成的實驗，其他實驗的成果不會因為民主的成形而失敗，因為民主是整個實驗的一部份。有了民主，這一代人才完成任務。」

「要完成，就在這一代。」

這是在十五年前寫的。

今天，我想繼續講香港未完成的實驗，香港未竟之業，這一代香港人未了的心願，早該完成的任務、必須達成的使命。

感謝香港書展給我這個機會，感謝大家來聽我演講。我們知道語言既是理性商討的重要工具也可以包裝虛偽、蠱惑人心，說話是有後果的、要負責任的。作為香港人，我覺得有責任將我經過深思熟慮的一些意見完整的講出來，雖然這些意見很多人會不同意。首先我會先簡短的談香港幾個方面的未竟之業，然後專注談當前我們大家最關注的一些議題。我會談到香港與大陸，為什麼我們要多交流，為什麼不該互相羞辱；我會談到本土和自治，以及我們為什麼不能不守基本法；我也會談到我對內地「對港班子」的看法，探討公民直接行動，還會提出我個人的普選方案。

香港不僅止只有民主普選一項未完成的實驗。現在看來，回歸後香港很多方面亦令人失望。譬如以我們的經濟水準，我們的環保事業應做得比現在更好才對。我們在同性戀、少數族群等平權議題上顯得落後於很多同等發達的地區。我們的成熟社區繼續受地產發展威脅和政府發展主義政策的破壞，房價繼續在扼殺老店鋪及年輕人創業、安居的願望。以上世紀70、80年代社會政策的成效和路徑，我們的貧富差距怎麼竟會被容許再度拉開到近年的可恥地步？此外，本來以我們一城之力在本土文化上歷年來的出色表現，我們應以擁有自己的主體文化而自豪才對，但是為什麼殖民地心態往往揮之不去而令我們的政府常常自我膨脹卻同時自我矮化？還有，以香港自由港、移民城市兼旅遊城市的百年傳統，怎麼還會有羞辱來客的行為？

全文：http://thehousenews.com/politics/%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E6%9C%AA%E5%AE%8C%E6%88%90%E7%9A%84%E5%AF%A6%E9%A9%97/

监控与美国的公民自由

约瑟夫·奈 
2013年08月21日 

自斯诺登披露，美国国家安全局一直在搜集来自美国公民和非公民的大量电子通讯数据以来，人们的目光一直集中在他的个人状况上。但更重要的问题——即使是在俄罗斯授予他临时庇护之前——应该是美国公民自由的问题。美国真的像俄罗斯、中国和其他人所指的那样伪善吗？ 
要回答这个问题，很重要的一点是区分在公共辩论中常被混为一谈的两个问题：针对外国实体的电子间谍，和政府对本国人民的国内监控。 
在斯诺登爆料前，网络间谍已成为中美关系的一大争议点。今年6月的“习奥会”就讨论了这个问题，两国政府也同意成立特别工作小组来处理这一问题。 
美国指责中国以前所未见的规模，使用网络间谍盗取知识产权。美国引用的证据之一，是网络安全公司曼迪安特（Mandiant）的一份研究报告，报告指许多这类袭击，可以追踪到中国人民解放军位于上海的设施。中国反驳说，它也是不计其数网络入侵的受害者，而其中许多来自美国。 
两国各有各的理由。如果一个火星人观察东亚和北美之间的电子数据，他可能会注意到大量的双向流动。但如果他细看数据包内部，就会发现非常不同的内容。 
美国的政策不是为了偷取知识产权，而中国的政策似乎正好相反。与此同时，两国政府都在不断地侵入对方的电脑，窃取传统政治和军事秘密。间谍活动并不违反国际法（尽管它通常会违反各种本国法律），但美国认为窃取知识产权，违反了国际贸易协定的精神与实质。 
中国不是唯一窃取知识产权的国家。美国的一些盟国——目前纷纷对被曝光的美国间谍活动表示愤慨——也一直在对美国做同样的事。按照美国的说法，当它检查非美国人的电子邮件时，它寻找的是与恐怖分子的联系，并且通常会将信息与盟国分享。 
照此看，安全监控应该对美国和其他国家都有利。毕竟，2001年9月11日恐怖袭击阴谋的一部分，是由一名居住在汉堡的埃及人策划的。 
美国不是完全无辜的 
但美国也不是完全无辜的。斯诺登的爆料显示，美国监控了欧盟代表在准备贸易谈判时的通讯。这可没有带来共同的好处；这是一个糟糕的决定，奥巴马应该摈弃这样的做法。 
从策略上讲，俄罗斯、中国和其他国家将间谍问题与公民自由混为一谈，并指责美国的伪善是有效的。但这些指责来自法治薄弱、互联网审查严格的国家，倒是让人觉得有点不可思议。 
据斯诺登透露，美国国内有两个重大监控项目。从公民自由角度来看，检查可疑非美国来源信息的内容，比较不容易引起争议。引发较激烈争论的是，国安局监听美国公民电话通讯的来源地和目的地，并予以存档，以供未来可能进行调查之用（也许需要法院下令）。利用技术能力来存储所谓的“大数据”，带来了一系列关于侵犯公民隐私的新问题。 
为这个监控项目辩护的人指出，它符合当前法律，也符合美国宪法的制衡原则，因为它同时获得立法与司法机构的批准。反对者认为，1978年在《外国情报监控法》（FISA）下成立的法庭，是在“大数据”出现之前的时代构思的，当前的做法，扩大了九一一袭击后通过的《爱国者法令》的范围。 
反对者呼吁制定新法令。上个月，当前法律框架在众议院以微弱多数（217对205）得以保留。值得注意的是，两大党派内都存在分歧。反对票来自保守派茶党共和党人和自由派民主党人。目前还有几项修改FISA法庭的法案待通过，这一课题势必再次出现， 
斯诺登的爆料并不能证明美国的伪善，和放任公民自由被侵犯，它引发的争论显示，美国正以其传统的混乱方式，恪守着其民主原则。美国面临着安全和自由之间的权衡，但它们之间的关系比乍看上去更加复杂。 
全文：http://www.21ccom.net/articles/qqsw/qyyj/article_2013082190312.html

為什麼香港人瘋台灣？

為什麼香港人瘋台灣？

中國愈是想抓住香港，香港人就愈想逃開。近年來，香港人來台灣慢活、逛小店、吃小吃、學烘焙，甚至學不悲情的「快樂抗爭」。香港人的台灣情，背後反映了什麼？北京當初承...

• 一國兩制變奏曲　為什麼香港人瘋台灣？
• 互動／變調的一國兩制，香港公民運動...

中国需警惕美联储退市冲击波

中国需警惕美联储退市冲击波 FT中文网财富管理编辑冯涛：美联储退市预期冲击亚洲市场，引发97金融危机或会重现的担忧。中国抗击能力强于邻国，但汇率缺乏弹性、政府债务居高，仍需警惕。

新兴经济体经得起“折腾”

FT社评：新兴经济体经得起“折腾” 美联储减少量化宽松规模的暗示，让一波市场动荡席卷了新兴经济体。但新兴国家的经济转型已进行得非常深入，近期的市场动荡很难逆转它们的发展趋势。

• 新兴经济体货币受挫

美国不应急于在埃及推行民主

• 库普钱：美国不应急于在埃及推行民主

  推动埃及等中东国家民主化，无疑是美国的信条。但最好的方式是循序渐进，首先帮助他们建立负责的政府，恢复国家基本职能。急于将过渡政府推向民主选举则弊大于利。

数据改变阅读

数据改变阅读

魏武挥为纽约时报中文网撰稿 08:36

媒介平台无非是依据信息发布者的专业和信息接受者的兴趣，进行供需匹配。由于信息消费发生了改变，媒介生态也需要改变。

THE CORE OF ‘MIND AND COSMOS’

Thomas Nagel in the NYT's in The Stone:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view.