每天坚持读the economist~

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-18 14:06:07

  Hotels Asset-light or asset-right? A boardroom tussle over strategy at Accor illustrates the hotel industry’s debate about its business model Nov 11th 2010 “PARIS is very chatty,” says Philippe Citerne, the vice-chairman of Accor, Europe’s biggest hotel group. Fearing that its secret might not last, on November 3rd Accor’s board rushed out the news that Gilles Pélisson, the chairman and chief executive, would be replaced by Denis Hennequin, the boss of McDonald’s in Europe. The board was anxious to avoid another fiasco like the one over Mr Pélisson’s appointment in 2005, when its announcement that it was removing his predecessor, Jean-Marc Espalioux, was preceded by destabilising leaks. Adding to the strife back then was the fact that Mr Pélisson is the nephew and heir of Gérard Pélisson, one of Accor’s founders. This inevitably prompted questions over whether he had won the job purely on merit. Since then, however, Mr Pélisson has dispelled any such doubts. He built up the group’s business in pre-paid service vouchers through a series of acquisitions before floating it as a separate company in July. He steered Accor safely through the recent downturn, in which its hotels—mainly budget and mid-range brands, such as Motel 6 and Ibis—did better than those of other groups. He also pushed through an upgrading of Accor’s more upmarket Sofitel brand. The hotel business’s revenues for the first nine months of the year were 7.4% higher than a year before, and it recently raised its target for full-year operating profits to more than €400m ($550m). Mr Pélisson says he would have liked to stay another year or two, though he admits that he didn’t have a harmonious relationship with the board. Mr Citerne says the board decided to part with him because of “strategic divergences” over the future of Accor. The other reason was that Mr Hennequin was suddenly available, having decided not to stay with McDonald’s, but was getting other attractive job offers. The altercations between Mr Pélisson and his board (and two big shareholders, Colony Capital and Eurazeo) centred on the group’s property divestments and on the pace and model of its expansion. Like other large hotel chains, Accor has a big “pipeline” of new hotel projects under way (see chart). It wants to increase its capacity from 500,000 rooms now to 600,000 in 2013 and perhaps 700,000 by 2015. Of these 28% will be franchised to other hotel operators, 30% will be managed but not owned by Accor and the rest will be fully owned or leased. Having sold 841 hotels between 2005 and 2009, it is in the process of selling another 450 of its remaining 800 by 2013. Even so, Accor will still own (or lease long-term) more hotels than most of its rivals. It calls its strategy “asset-right” as opposed to “asset-light”—industry jargon for franchising out or managing hotels whose bricks-and-mortar belong to someone else, often an individual or an investment fund. Marriott, a big American hotel group, started to sell its property in the late 1970s and today owns only six of the 3,400 hotels that bear its brands. InterContinental, a British-based firm that is another big believer in being asset-light, owns only 15 hotels, manages 628 and has its brands woven into the towels of a further 3,800 franchised operations. One advantage of owning the bricks-and-mortar is that the company has absolute control over the hotel and its maintenance. Another is that hotel property can appreciate considerably. In the four years to 2006 the value of London’s Ritz hotel increased fourfold to £500m (then $980m). Yet stockmarket valuations often fail to reflect rising property valuations, and investors do not like hotel groups tying up so much capital in this way, says Simon Mezzanotte of Société Générale, a bank. Some 60-70% of the property costs of a hotel are pretty much fixed, including mortgage payments, taxes and energy bills, reckons Bjorn Hanson of New York University. He therefore sees the rationale for separating ownership and management, since asset-light firms, having more variable costs, have more scope for efficiency gains. Even in hotels that are franchised out, the brand owner exerts strict control over the finest details, such as the types of mattress in the bedrooms. In those that they manage, they get 12.5% of gross revenues, an attractive slice. The attraction of franchising is that it is the quickest way to expand. All the hotel group provides is its brand and its online reservation system in return for a cut of the takings. But it is risky, because the hotel is putting the brands that it has spent decades painstakingly nurturing in the hands of outsiders. For this reason, Marriott rarely franchises outside America, where it has 2,246 such outlets. And Accor says it would never franchise in China, where it manages 100 hotels, because it does not know the market, the people and the culture well enough. “Franchising has the highest risk and potentially the least reward,” worries Stephen Broome of PwC, a consultancy. Despite such worries, Accor will rely on franchised outlets to deliver a large share of the new rooms it is planning. Who better to lead it, then, than Mr Hennequin from McDonald’s, a company that knows plenty about maintaining a brand image while using franchises to expand around the world. ”But it is risky, because the hotel is putting the brands that it has spent decades painstakingly nurturing in the hands of outsiders.“ 以前写过类似的一句话，老师说语法错误。。～》。

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  隔壁老王 (怀念贝尔法斯特的时光) 2010-11-18 14:06:49

  nice，希望每天都能更新。。。

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-19 07:51:28

  nimation and robotics Crossing the uncanny valley As computer graphics and robots get more human, they often seem more surreal Nov 18th 2010 ROBOT-MAKERS and the animators who design characters for films and video games face a paradox. People readily accept machines and cartoons that are simplifications or distortions of the human form. Simulacra that are intended to look like real people, though, are frequently perceived as creepy. In November 2004, for example, two films intended as light entertainment were released to very different receptions. “The Incredibles”, a cartoon in traditional style, was one of the most successful movies in history. “The Polar Express”, which used motion capture and computer graphics to produce an animation whose characters looked almost human, received a critical panning: one reviewer suggested its characters were so frightening the film should be subtitled “The Night of the Living Dead”. The difference lay in that one crucial word: almost. Workers in the field refer to the perceptual crevasse which separates acceptable caricature from accurate representation as “the uncanny valley”—and the “The Polar Express” fell right into it. Mapping the uncanny valley, to avoid its perils, would be of great benefit to film-makers. It would also, as robots become smart and safe enough for use outside factories, help engineers to design plastic pals who are truly fun to be with. Though several previous expeditions have been lost in the valley, there is no shortage of volunteers to have another go. The latest pair to harness up the metaphorical huskies are Chin-Chang Ho and Karl MacDorman of the Indiana University School of Informatics. They think they can find their way by following a new compass direction—the quality of eeriness. The valley below The idea of the uncanny valley was originally proposed by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, in 1970. Though he had no hard data, his intuition was that increasing humanness in a robot was positive only up to a certain point. Dr Mori drew a graph (see chart) with “human-likeness” on the horizontal axis and a quality he called shinwakan (variously translated as “familiarity” and “comfort level”) on the vertical one. As an object or image looks and behaves more like a human, the viewer’s level of shinwakan increases. Beyond a certain point, however, the not-quite-human object strikes people as creepy, and shinwakan drops. This is the uncanny valley. Only when the object becomes almost indistinguishable from a human does shinwakan increase again. Dr Ho and Dr MacDorman accept the general idea, but they began by throwing out the idea of shinwakan. In their study, just published in Computers in Human Behavior, they say that Dr Mori’s ideas of familiarity and comfort level do not properly get at the quality of uncanniness. Neither do some suggested alternatives, such as warmth and likeability. The wicked queen in Disney’s “Snow White”, for instance, was hardly likeable. But she was not uncanny either. To isolate the factors that really affect how people feel about simulacra, the two researchers rounded up several hundred undergraduates and showed them ten video clips, five of robots and five of animations. These included sequences from “The Polar Express”, “The Incredibles” and also an animation of Orville Redenbacher, an American businessman who died in 1995, that many people think falls right at the bottom of the valley. The robots were the Roomba, a disc-shaped autonomous vacuum cleaner, and four anthropoid machines of varying degrees of humanness. The volunteers were asked to apply ratings from dozens of scales to each video: machinelike to humanlike, synthetic to real and so on. Scales that turned out to measure the same qualities with different words were eliminated and the researchers eventually lighted on 19 that described aspects of four underlying qualities that they dub attractiveness, eeriness, humanness and warmth. According to Dr MacDorman, all four are important qualities for designers. A robot that exhibits warmth and attractiveness will be easier to interact with than one that looks cold and ugly. Only two of them, however, are needed to explain the uncanny valley. These are humanness and eeriness. Eeriness is not quite the same thing as comfort level, likeability or even strangeness. Levels of eeriness were indicated by eight descriptive scales, including “ordinary/supernatural”, “boring/shocking” and “uninspiring/spine-tingling”. By plotting perceived humanness along the horizontal axis and eeriness along the vertical, Dr MacDorman says that he can recreate Dr Mori’s chart of the uncanny valley, this time using real data about how people feel about a particular robot or animation. That could be useful information. Although robot butlers remain a distant dream, if people are ever to interact with robots in a comfortable way those robots will need to avoid making users’ skins crawl. In the meantime, the video-game industry is continually trying to increase the realism of its basketball players and brawny mercenaries. Hollywood, too, would probably enjoy replacing stuntmen—and perhaps even temperamental stars—with computer-generated versions. A world without celebs? That really would be eerie. Science and Technology 机器人～

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-19 07:52:03

  要出去旅行了，休业三天。带着杂志慢慢看。

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-22 06:42:28

  Israel, the United States and Palestine Fix those borders first Hillary Clinton has told Binyamin Netanyahu to persuade his colleagues to freeze settlement-building again. He can do it if he really wants to Nov 18th 2010 | JERUSALEM “I COMMEND Prime Minister Netanyahu for taking, I think, a very constructive step,” Barack Obama told reporters aboard Air Force One on November 14th. “It’s not easy for him to do.” But Binyamin Netanyahu had not actually put his best foot forward. He had flown home the day before from New York after a gruelling seven-hour session with America’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in an effort to enable his talks with the Palestinians to resume. Now he needed to get his largely right-wing-cum-religious cabinet to accept his understandings with Mrs Clinton. Mr Obama presumably intended his advance praise to make it easier for Mr Netanyahu to woo the waverers and harder for him to backslide into the arms of the hawks. The waverers demanded the deal in writing. The squabbling went on. As The Economist went to press, the chances were that a refreezing deal would indeed be struck. If so, Israel’s settlement building in the occupied Palestinian West Bank will stop for another 90 days. An earlier ten-month freeze ran out in late September, just weeks after the long-stalled talks had finally resumed. Mr Netanyahu refused to extend it. To the applause of Arabs, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, walked out. In return for a new freeze, America says it will give Israel another 20 F-35 stealth fighters, worth $3 billion, to be added gratis to the original 20 ordered by Israel for delivery in the middle of the next decade. America also promises to stiffen its backing for Israel at the UN and in particular to veto moves to endorse a Palestinian declaration of independence if the talks fizzle. These are tempting goodies. Mr Netanyahu is poised to persuade ministers in the religious Shas party, a pivot of his ruling coalition, not to oppose the deal. If Shas stays on board, he has a reliable majority. But Shas’s spiritual leader, Ovadia Yosef, a 90-year-old rabbi, insists that America should agree in writing that the freeze would not apply to the large Jewish suburbs in East Jerusalem, whereas the Americans had left that vague. Shas’s fast-growing young constituency is desperate for housing, so this waiver is critical for the party. The aged rabbi also wants to be sure that as soon as the 90 days are up, building can resume in the two largest settlements, Beitar and Modiin Ilit, both sprawling Orthodox communities close to Jerusalem, just across the 1967 border. The Palestinians, who closely follow this haggle, had been balking. So were the Americans, lest Mr Netanyahu, constrained by his hardliners, struck a deal only to drag his feet for 90 days and then let building start again. The Americans’ latest hope is that the two sides immediately set about demarcating the borders of a Palestinian state so that by Day 91 the contours are fairly clear and the question of where Israel can build becomes moot. After her long session with Mr Netanyahu, Mrs Clinton spoke of an accord that “reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognised borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.” The wording is crucial. It repeats the aims expressed by the two previous American presidents, Bill Clinton in December 2000 and George Bush in April 2004. “Subsequent developments” refers to the large Jewish settlement blocks, including those such as Beitar and Modiin Ilit, that Israel has built close to the 1967 border and which it would absorb under any workable deal. The size and whereabouts of the “agreed swaps” of Israeli land to be taken by Palestine would be determined in the upcoming negotiations. Two states or one? Everyone understands, says a senior Israeli minister, that this is the core issue behind the row over the freeze. When ministerial hawks such as Benny Begin (who belongs to Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party) or Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister who leads the far-right Yisrael Beitenu, oppose a new freeze, in truth they resist the idea of the two-state deal that may ensue. When Mr Netanyahu tries to make his coalition partners agree to a freeze by using imprecise wording, he wants to defer the day when this fundamental ideological conflict in his cabinet is laid bare, between pragmatists who are reconciled to an independent Palestine and the ideologues who still want a Greater Israel. He also means to defer the day when he must himself decide which camp he belongs to. Middle East & Africa

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-22 10:50:18

  A Fela-good musical Nov 19th 2010, 11:44 by C.H. | LONDON FELA ANIKULAPO KUTI, the late and legendary Nigerian Afrobeat star whose life is the subject of “Fela!”, a musical that has opened at London’s National Theatre this week after acclaim on Broadway, was a colourful character, to say the least. Born into Nigeria’s intelligentsia in 1938, he headed to London in the late 1950s to study medicine, but discovered music and soon became a star back home. Influenced by black power in 1960s America, he set his sights on Nigeria’s military regime, which reacted brutally, killing his mother in a raid on his compound in 1977. Fela remained their nemesis, his Shrine nightclub in Lagos an island of libertarianism (at one point he simultaneously married his 27 backing singers onstage) until his reclusive retreat into Yoruba spiritualism and his AIDS-related death in 1997. At its best, Fela’s music fused Yoruba polyrhythms, Ghanaian highlife, and a western jazz/blues/funk sound into a heart-stopping combination. "Fela!" is a musical so no-one should attend this show expecting a nuanced analysis of the life of this complex man—indeed, it suffers from the clunky scene-setting typical of the genre. But the important stuff—the singing, the dancing and especially the music, delivered by a band of virtuosos whom Fela, a tyrannical bandleader, may have approved of—is all hot, Sahr Ngaujah occupying Fela’s persona with larger-than-life precision. Wisely, it keeps its focus narrow, on key episodes such as Fela’s final performance at the Shrine and the earlier raid that killed his mother. At times the show verges on sanctification of a man who was certainly no saint (his death, after his last record “Condom Scallywag and Scatter” condemned condoms as “un-African” is not touched on). But there is plenty of darkness, as we are reminded of the context by displays of newspaper front pages flanking the set, on billboards displayed by dancers during the rendition of “International Thief Thief” (brought up to date with the likes of Enron named and shamed), and, most chillingly, by projections of transcripts in which members of Fela's entourage describe the violence meted out during the 1977 raid. What the production has managed—apart from simply being a raucous and joyous night out, and at least offering some tiny sense about what a night at the Shrine might have been like—is to set off a new wave of Fela-worship in the West, bringing his music to those it passed by in his lifetime. It will be interesting to see if the show is taken up by a crowd beyond the National’s usual chattering-class attendees, and wins the approval of London’s huge Nigerian diaspora. If they buy in, I’m convinced. “Fela!” is at the National Theatre, South Bank, London until January 23rd 2011

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-22 10:54:24

  Browsing the galactic zoo Nov 21st 2010, 15:45 by T.C. IN AN age of compulsory PhDs, expensively equipped laboratories and a collaborative approach to research, astronomy is one of the few sciences still amenable to the interested amateur. For a few hundred dollars anybody can buy a decent telescope, set it up in his garden and hope to make a meaningful contribution, such as spotting a supernova or a new comet. Nowadays, indeed, not even the telescope is necessary. An online project called Galaxy Zoo lets amateurs do astronomy from the comfort of their own living rooms. Inspired by distributed-computing projects—which use idle time on internet-connected computers to achieve the sort of number-crunching power normally reserved for supercomputers—Galaxy Zoo employs human brainpower rather than silicon chips to make sense of the sky. The project’s 300,000 volunteers receive pictures of galaxies taken as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by an automated telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, which they then assign to categories based on a few simple rules. The project’s first iteration, launced in 2007, simply asked volunteers whether galaxies were elliptical or spiral-shaped, and which direction they seemed to be rotating in. It proved a huge success. Hundreds of thousands of people took part, and generally did a better job than the computer algorithms that offer the only other plausible way of crunching large amounts of astronomical data. A newer version, launched last year, added more detailed questions. Galaxy Zoo 2, as it is called, is now yielding its first results. In a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a group of researchers, led by Karen Masters at the University of Portsmouth, in England, analysed a sample of 13,665 spiral galaxies that had been categorised by volunteers, investigating which had bars and which did not. Bars—linear clusters of stars and gas that bisect a galaxy rather like a single spoke on a wheel—are found in about 30% of all spirals, but they remain mysterious. One theory is that they are a reaction to a gravitational disturbance, perhaps from a close approach by another galaxy. Another is that the presence of a bar depends on the ratio of “normal” matter (the sort made of protons, neutrons and electrons) to “dark” matter (whose true nature is unknown, but whose existence is clear from gravitational effects) in a particular galaxy. Dr Masters’s team found that the presence of a bar correlated strongly with a galaxy’s colour. Red galaxies are much more likely to host bars than blue ones. The colour of a galaxy reflects the sorts of stars found within it. A blue galaxy contains massive, bright, quick-burning stars, whose light tends to the blue end of the spectrum, whereas a red one contains only smaller, dimmer, longer-lasting stars. Because blue stars burn out much more quickly than red ones, the bluer the galaxy is, the higher must be its rate of star formation. The preponderance of bars in red galaxies calls into question one widely held idea—that they act as cosmic conveyor belts, transferring material from the galactic fringes to the centre. That is a process which should encourage star formation, not hinder it. But teasing causation from the results is difficult, says Dr Masters. It may be that bars slow the rate of star formation, or it may be that they are a side effect of some other process that does so. With its large sample size, the paper puts extra statistical heft behind similar correlations found in other, smaller studies. And, intriguingly, the results suggest that a crowd of amateurs can be just as good as professional astronomers at classifying galaxies. The authors inspected a random subset of user-sorted galaxies and found little to disagree with, and the fraction of galaxies with bars found in the study—29.4%—lines up nicely with numbers generated by professional stargazers. Galaxy Zoo has produced 18 papers so far, with at least two more in preparation. The newest version sees volunteers fed images from the powerful space-based Hubble telescope, and the Zoo’s user-generated data are also being used in machine-learning experiments, to see if computers can be taught how to do the job better. Not bad for a few hundred thousand amateurs.

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-26 20:34:14

  Coping with North Korea How do you solve a problem like Korea? Only by persuading China that it’s in its own interest to rein in the Kims Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION IF EVER a ruling elite seemed to justify the Bush-era doctrine of “pre-emption”, it is the Kim dynasty in North Korea. No government anywhere subjects its own people to such a barbarous regime of fear, repression and hunger. And the Kims are complicit in international outrages ranging from murderous terrorism and nuclear proliferation to drug-smuggling and currency-counterfeiting. The present dictator, Kim Jong Il, is apparently not long for this world, and seems to be boosting his 27-year-old son and anointed successor as a victorious warrior. When the elder Kim was himself dauphin, in the 1980s, he earned his spurs through international terrorism. This week the North waged war for the second time this year with South Korea when it shelled a South Korean island near the disputed maritime boundary, killing two soldiers and two civilians, injuring others and burning a score of houses. In March, when one of its torpedoes sank the Cheonan, a naval vessel, killing 46, North Korea could, albeit implausibly, deny culpability. This time, though the North describes its aggression as retaliation (for a harmless South Korean military exercise), there is no gainsaying its responsibility for one of the most serious incidents since the end of the Korean war in 1953. To add to this dismal catalogue, the latest onslaught came just three days after the revelation that, in defiance of international efforts to curb its nuclear programme, North Korea has developed a sophisticated facility for enriching uranium. That gives it a further potential source of material for bombmaking. Don’t shoot back Related topics Asia China East Asia Politics Political policy The starting-point for answering the North’s aggression has to be that, in the most basic sense, the Kims will almost certainly get away with only a symbolic return of fire. It is entirely wrong for North Korea to act as it does. But punitive military reprisals against the North risk a spiral of escalation and catastrophic war. Deterrence works badly against a dictator who blithely imposes famine and gulags on his people during peacetime. Even if there are doubts about the efficacy of its tiny nuclear arsenal, North Korea has enough men under arms, and enough conventional ammunition within range of Seoul—just 35 miles (60km) from the frontier—to make war seem very much a last resort. If war and the threat of war are hardly even options, what can the world do? The best card in a bad hand is to heal the divisions among other countries about how to handle North Korea. That means, in particular, making China see that a tinderbox it has long regarded as a strategic asset has become an appalling liability. China also struggles to control North Korea. But a united front would change the environment that encourages the rogue state’s bad behaviour. China cannot be blind to the Kims’ bungling and bellicosity, nor welcome their nuclear ambitions. But it has had two worse fears. One is of a rekindled war on the peninsula, which would damage China. The other is of North Korean collapse, with millions of desperate refugees pouring into China and South Korea or even American troops on China’s border. It is as a bulwark against this “instability” that China cossets the Kims. It refused to condemn them even for the sinking of the Cheonan, and this week issued blandly even-handed calls for restraint. It apparently believes that if their only ally abandons them, the Kims might do something really rash. But they already have. Whatever it says publicly, China must surely see that this regime flirts with war as an instrument of diplomacy and that its desire to shock the world into negotiating with it requires ever greater outrages. Ultimately, this pattern of behaviour threatens the very stability China craves. China’s alliance with North Korea thus undermines not just its image as a global power but also its own interests. So how to nudge China in the right direction? One possibility is the revival of the six-party forum, chaired by China and involving Japan and Russia. Talks stalled after North Korea forged ahead with its nuclear programme. The Kims would regard a revival as a victory. But talks will eventually have to resume if North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are to be negotiated down. If they also help persuade China to rein in North Korea, that would be a double benefit. Leaders

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-28 23:41:30

  Economics focus The joyless or the jobless Should governments pursue happiness rather than economic growth? Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION IN 2006 Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics, argued that unhappiness was a bigger social problem in Britain than unemployment. In the “Depression Report”, which he co-wrote, Lord Layard pointed out that more people were claiming incapacity benefits because of depression and other mental disorders than were on the dole. The subsequent recession fixed that. The jobless now outnumber the joyless—there is nothing like a drop in GDP to remind everyone how much this much-maligned metric matters. But despite the economic gloom, economists and policymakers have not lost their interest in happiness. This month David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, asked the Office of National Statistics to measure the country’s “general well-being”, as part of his promise to focus on GWB not just GDP. Lord Layard has long argued that GDP is overrated as a gauge of a country’s well-being. Once an economy reaches an income per person of about $15,000 (measured at purchasing-power parity), economic growth ceases to add to happiness, he says. America, for example, is considerably richer than Denmark, but Americans are no more satisfied with their lives. His claim was echoed in “The Spirit Level”, a recent book by two British academics, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Related topics David Cameron Europe United Kingdom Western Europe Influential though it may be, Lord Layard’s argument does not make everyone happy. Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania says he has read this claim “literally hundreds of times and it irritates me so much”. He and Betsey Stevenson, also at Wharton, have never found a formal statistical test of the proposition. Angus Deaton of Princeton University also doubts the claim. It is based, he points out, on charts similar to the one below (left-hand side), which plots national well-being against absolute levels of per person income. In the chart shown, each increment represents an extra $10,000. Sure enough, well-being rises steeply with income, then levels off, just as Lord Layard contends. But all the chart really shows is that an extra dollar is worth less to the rich than to the poor. The interesting question is whether the same percentage increase in income means as much to a rich country as to a poor one. Economic growth, after all, is normally expressed in proportional terms: we say GDP grew by 1%, not by $1 billion. The chart on the right-hand side shows the same data plotted on a logarithmic scale, so that each increment represents a 100% increase in income per head. It shows that the relationship between income and well-being remains fairly steady, from the poorest countries to the richest. This suggests that governments cannot afford to ignore growth, even if they seek the happiness of their citizens, rather than their prosperity. But is happiness, in fact, the right goal for governments? Lord Layard is an unapologetic follower of Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher born in 1748 who thought that enlightened policymakers should seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. But Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University points out that happiness is not always a good guide to policy. He retells the story of a Brahmin in colonial India who informed a Benthamite official: “I am ten times as capable of happiness as that untouchable over there.” Mr Kanbur contends that governments should “tax the millionaire in favour of the pauper, however great the millionaire’s capacity for happiness relative to the pauper.” Sleepy but solvent Happiness, of course, makes an appearance in America’s founding documents. But the Declaration of Independence does not say that government should pursue the happiness of its citizens, only that it should secure its citizens’ unalienable right to pursue it for themselves. If people do not know what will make them happy (just as if they do not realise that smoking kills or calories fatten) governments could helpfully tell them what might. If people know what is best for them, but lack the self-discipline to choose it, some governments might also be tempted to nudge their citizens in the right direction. Mr Cameron’s party has flirted with the idea of soft paternalism advocated by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book “Nudge”. The book suggests lots of ingenious ways to help people choose what they would choose for themselves, if only they had the know-how and the willpower. But sometimes people have the knowledge and the self-command to choose happiness, and they still fail to do so. That is the surprising finding of a recent study by Daniel Benjamin, Ori Heffetz and Alex Rees-Jones, three economists from Cornell University, and Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan. They persuaded hundreds of people to answer conundrums such as: would you rather earn $80,000 a year and sleep 7.5 hours a night, or $140,000 a year with six hours’ sleep a night? About 70% of people said they would be happier earning less money and sleeping more. Likewise, almost two-thirds would be happier making less money and living close to their friends, rather than more money in a city of strangers. In response to another question, over 40% said they would be happier paying twice the rent to enjoy a shorter commute of ten minutes, rather than 45. These findings support the notion that money isn’t everything. But ask people what they would actually choose, as opposed to what would make them happy, and their answers can sometimes surprise: 17% of those who say they would be happier sleeping for longer and earning less also say they would still choose the higher-paying job; 26% of those prizing short commutes over low rents would still take the cheaper home; and 22% of those who value friends over money would still move to where the money is. Mr Cameron will therefore need to tread carefully. Even if voters believe that his policies will make Britain happier, they may still choose a party offering lower taxes and bigger subsidies. Money may not buy happiness. But why take the chance? Finance and Economics 幸福学。

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-30 09:48:38

  As bad as advertised Nov 29th 2010, 19:46 by P.B. | PORT-AU-PRINCE ELECTIONS in Haiti have never been tidy affairs. Following a devastating earthquake in January and a cholera epidemic that began last month, international observers set the bar for this year’s contest particularly low. “We’re looking at the best possible elections under the circumstances,” Albert Ramdin, the assistant secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the head of an observer mission, said before the vote. But the presidential and legislative elections Haiti held on November 28th managed to disappoint even such modest hopes. The government had failed to distribute hundreds of thousands of voting credentials on time. Across the country, would-be voters were turned away from multiple polling centres after failing to find their names on the rolls. Many polls opened hours late; ballots failed to arrive at others; and reports of trashed voting centres, stuffed boxes, and intimidation of voters abounded. Some observers from Mr Ramdin’s mission ran off fearing for their safety. Preliminary results are not expected for a week and may be delayed even longer. The candidates who will advance to the run-off—assuming one is held as scheduled—will not be confirmed until December 20th. Haiti’s electoral authorities insisted that over 96% of voting sites produced trustworthy results. But 12 of the 17 presidential candidates called for the election to be annulled, citing charges of improprieties by Inite, the current governing party. (The only major contender who did not question the process is Inite’s own candidate, Jude Celestin, who was an unknown engineer before René Préval, the president, began supporting him in August.) So far, little concrete evidence has emerged of wrongdoing by Inite. But the fact that the members of the electoral council overseeing the vote were chosen by Mr Préval has invited suspicion—as has the lavishness of the party’s campaign for Mr Celestin, which blanketed the country with his smiling, confident mug on billboards, banners and leaflets dropped from airplanes. Inite’s critics speculate that the money for such expenditures could have come from a $197m disaster-relief fund that Haiti received from a Venezuelan-led regional oil distribution scheme in 2008, which has not been audited by the legislature. Even if Inite did not break any rules, many Haitians still view the party as guilty by association with Mr Préval, who has been widely criticised for failing to show leadership after the earthquake. Haitians made their discontent with the electoral process known by staging demonstrations across the country in support of the opposition. At the rally in Port-au-Prince for Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, a bawdy musician who has been ahead in some polls, the atmosphere was peaceful and carnival-like. That may have been because Mr Martelly was somewhat overshadowed by Wyclef Jean, the Haitian hip-hop star who was the night’s other headliner. Since Mr Jean’s own presidential bid was stymied by his failure to meet a constitutional residency requirement, he is now focusing on promoting his new single, “ Election Time”, from his upcoming album “If I Were President: My Haitian Experience”.

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-02 02:35:27

  Engine trouble for Google Nov 30th 2010, 21:06 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO GOOGLE has built an impressive digital empire on the back of its powerful search engine, which dominates many of the markets in which the firm is active. Now that engine is attracting the attention of Europe’s antitrust watchdogs: on November 30th the European Commission launched a formal inquiry into allegations that Google has been manipulating the results of searches in ways that unfairly benefit it. The news of the investigation comes at a sensitive time for Google, which is already nursing several other antitrust headaches. The attorney-general of Texas is also looking into accusations that the company has abused its dominant position in search. And a bunch of online travel firms have been lobbying the American government to block Google’s $700m acquisition of ITA, which provides flight-search technology, because this would give it too much power over their industry. That Google should attract the attention of the commission’s regulators too isn’t surprising given its clout. In some EU countries it has an even higher share of general online-search activity than in America, where its engine accounts for two out of every three searches. Among other things, the investigation will probe whether Google has abused that clout by manipulating search results to benefit its own services over those offered by competing firms. The commission also wants to know whether the company has tried to restrict competition by preventing advertisers from placing certain types of ads on other websites. It appears to have been spurred into action by concerns raised by several European online firms, including Foundem, a vertical-search service and price-comparison site, and Ciao, another price-comparison site for European shoppers owned by Microsoft, one of Google’s archrivals. News of the investigation brought a swift response from Google, which claims the complaints against it are groundless. It argues that it inevitably has to make judgments in deciding how best to present unpaid search results, but denies that it has deliberately shown favouritism to its own services. It also rejects the claim that it manipulates the results of paid search ads in ways that disadvantage firms that compete with it. And it says that it does not impose exclusivity agreements on advertisers. Google also maintains that the claims that it has a dominant position in search are overblown, pointing out that people also get information from vertical-search engines, social networks and other sources. That may not cut much ice with the EU’s regulators, who have a record of tussling with large technology firms. Their investigation into Microsoft’s practice of bundling its internet browser with its Windows operating system dragged on for ten years and resulted in huge fines for the firm. Google will be hoping it can avoid a similar fate. 语法：名词活用～ 内容：谷歌也有麻烦了

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-03 11:22:22

  The internet How long will Google's magic last? It flourished during the first phase of the internet. The next one may be tougher Dec 2nd 2010 | SAN FRANCISCO | from PRINT EDITION * * Eurocops say: “Don’t be evil.” “GOOGLE is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one,” wrote Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the search firm’s founders, in a letter to investors ahead of its stockmarket flotation in 2004. Since then, Google has burnished its reputation as one of the quirkiest companies on the planet. This year alone it has raised eyebrows by taking a stake in a wind-energy project off the east coast of America and by testing self-driving cars, which have already covered over 140,000 miles (225,000km) on the country’s roads. Google has been able to afford such flights of fancy thanks to its amazingly successful online-search business. This has produced handsome returns for the firm’s investors, who have seen the company transform itself in the space of a mere 12 years from a tiny start-up into a behemoth with a $180 billion market capitalisation that sprawls across a vast headquarters in Silicon Valley known as the Googleplex. Google also stretches across the web like a giant spider, with a leg in everything from online search and e-mail to social networking and web-based software applications, or apps. Much of its growth has been organic, but Google has also splashed out on some sizeable acquisitions. In 2006 it paid $1.7 billion for YouTube, a website that lets people post videos of their children, kittens and Lady Gaga impersonations. The following year it snapped up DoubleClick, an online-advertising network, for $3.1 billion. More deals are likely. Google is bidding for Groupon, a trendy e-commerce business, using some of the $33 billion sitting in its coffers. All this has turned Google into a force to be reckoned with. But now the champion of the unorthodox is faced with two conventional business challenges. The first involves placating regulators, who fret that it may be abusing its considerable power. On November 30th the European Union announced a formal investigation into claims that Google has been manipulating search results to give an unfair advantage to its own services—a charge the firm vigorously denies. In America, Google faces a similar investigation in Texas and is also battling with a bunch of online-travel companies who have been lobbying the government to veto its recent purchase of ITA Software, a company that provides data about flights. The other challenge facing Google is how to find new sources of growth. In spite of all the experiments it has launched, the firm is still heavily dependent on search-related advertising. Last year this accounted for almost all of its $24 billion of revenue and $6.5 billion of profit. Acquisitions such as YouTube have deepened rather than reduced the firm’s dependence on advertising. Steve Ballmer, the boss of Google’s arch-rival Microsoft, has derided the search company for being “a one-trick pony”. Ironically, investors’ biggest worry is that Google will end up like Microsoft, which has failed to find big new sources of revenue and profit to replace those from its two ageing ponies, the Windows operating system and the Office suite of business software. That explains why Google’s share price has stagnated. “The market seems to believe this could be like Microsoft version two,” says Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup. News of the formal EU antitrust enquiry will no doubt invite further comparisons with Mr Ballmer’s firm, which fought a long and bruising battle with European regulators. Is such a comparison fair? Those who think it is point to several changes that could damage Google. The first is the rise of new ways in which people can find information online. They include social networks such as Facebook, which saw traffic to its site in America surpass that to Google’s sites earlier this year (see chart 1), and apps offered by Apple and other firms that help people find information without using a web browser. Appalled by walled gardens Another cause for concern is that firms such as Facebook and Apple are hoarding customer data, thereby making them inaccessible to Google’s search engine. The rise of such “walled gardens” on the web clearly bothers Google’s top brass. “Two years ago I would have told you this isn’t a problem,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. “Now I will tell you it is a threat.” Google recently clashed publicly and caustically with Facebook over the latter’s data practices, warning potential users that the social network had become “a data dead end”. The search firm is seeing barriers go up elsewhere too. Take media companies, which are now thinking twice before licensing content to Google or making it freely available on the web. The biggest producers of television content in America are wary of supplying programming to new internet-enabled television services such as Google TV. And the rush towards tablet computers by newspaper companies hungry for new sources of revenue means that many of them are withdrawing free content from the internet. Google could also suffer from any backlash against companies that are perceived to have violated users’ privacy online. If governments tighten rules in response, they could make it harder for the firm to carry on minting money from ads. And pressure for action is growing: on December 1st America’s Federal Trade Commission said it favoured a plan to allow consumers to choose whether or not their web-surfing habits are tracked by others. Eurocops say: “Don’t be evil.” Vexed in the Googleplex Lastly, there are problems inside the Googleplex itself. The company has lost a number of stars, such as Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob, a mobile-advertising company that Google acquired last year, and Lars Rasmussen, who led a project called Wave to create a new kind of online collaborative tool. Mr Rasmussen recently moved to Facebook, complaining that it had become impossible to get things done at Google because of the bureaucracy at the company, which now boasts 23,000 employees. Admittedly, Mr Rasmussen may still be sore that Google shuttered his project, which flopped. But his complaint resonates with some Xooglers (the nickname for former Google employees), who say decision-making has become painfully slow as the firm has grown. Jon Holman, an executive recruiter, reckons Google is going through what he calls “a Darwinian evolution” that could make it harder to attract top talent in future. Does all this mean that Google’s glory days are over? Don’t bet on it. True, the firm’s revenue growth slowed from 56% in 2007 to 9% last year, but that was still respectable considering that the global economy fell howling off a cliff. And there are signs that the company is picking up steam again: its third-quarter revenue rose by 23% to $7.3 billion, which beat most analysts’ expectations. Moreover, Google is well placed to benefit from several important trends. One is the rapid growth in the amount of data being produced worldwide, which provide the raw material on which Google’s search engine feasts. For instance, YouTube is now taking in 35 hours-worth of video content every minute of the day, up from about six hours-worth in June 2007. That suggests there is still likely to be a big role for a general-purpose search engine, even if people do use apps and social networks more often to get information. Google also stands to gain as more advertising moves to the web. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, finds that Americans spend 28% of their media time online, yet only 13% of total ad spending is devoted to the internet. If ads ultimately catch up with eyeballs, an extra $50 billion-worth of advertising could be shifted online each year, Morgan Stanley estimates. Then there is the rise of the mobile web, which looks as if it will form the cornerstone of Google’s second act. At the heart of that act lies Android, the firm’s smartphone operating system, which it lets telecoms firms and phone-makers use for nothing. Some critics have hammered Google for giving Android away when other companies such as Microsoft charge for their operating systems. But the firm wants as many people as possible to adopt Android, which acts as a “platform” that encourages them to explore other Google services, including e-mail and search. This approach seems to be working. From practically nothing a couple of years ago, Android now accounts for an impressive 26% of the market, rivalling Apple’s popular iPhone (see chart 2). To support it, Google has been developing its own library of online apps, and it is looking at other ways to please smartphone users, such as e-commerce. The firm also hopes that an operating system it has developed around its lightning-fast web browser, Chrome, will prove popular. This might be ideal for powering netbooks (small laptop computers), for example. Your phone is watching you Google is particularly excited about the commercial prospects for its mobile activities because smartphones make possible revolutionary developments in areas such as voice-commanded search (you say “holidays in Spain” and your handset finds you a villa on the Costa del Sol). If this technology catches on, it should drive up the total number of searches conducted. Moreover, because a mobile phone knows where you are, Google will be able to send you ads for a shop or restaurant only a few paces away. Such ads are expected to lead to lots of sales, so Google will be able to charge a premium for them. This may explain why Google is so keen on a company like Groupon. The rumoured price tag sounds excessive, but it would bring Google some badly needed muscle in local search, where it is relatively weak. Google has also been building up its activities in online display advertising, which is a very different business from the more straightforward ads that it serves up alongside search results. Display ads tend to be more complex than search ads and are designed primarily to enhance a company’s brand rather than to clinch a sale. Google’s market share in this business is tiny, but Susan Wojcicki, who oversees DoubleClick and other operations, reckons there is “a lot of friction in the system” that it can still remove. Indeed, there are already encouraging signs that Google’s big bets on mobile phones and display advertising are starting to bear fruit. It recently revealed that mobile advertising is now on track to generate $1 billion a year in revenue. And it reckons that display ads will bring in about $2.5 billion. Analysts estimate that roughly half of this amount will come from ads on YouTube. Even as it looks for a second act, Google has been investing heavily in its first one, which accounts for roughly two out of every three online queries in America and handles some 2 billion searches a day. Earlier this year the firm unveiled Google Instant, an enhancement that displays search results before users finish typing a query, shaving two to five seconds from the average search. By helping users find information faster, the company is betting they will conduct more searches. And every time they do, Google can ping carefully targeted ads at them. Boy billionaires at play Looking ahead, Google executives depict a world in which the firm not only helps people to find information they are looking for, but delivers it to them before they know they need it. To do this, it will use data about them which they have given Google permission to use. For instance, such a “serendipity engine” could alert someone to the publication of a new book by one of their favourite authors. Creating these capabilities will be hugely difficult technically, but Udi Manber, who oversees Google’s search activities, says his team is inspired by “doing things that are on the cusp of the possible”. All this suggests that Google’s one-trick pony is really more of a thoroughbred. And the company’s nurturing of its mobile business and its success in display advertising indicates that there is plenty of life left in it yet. Google is also trying to get to grips with areas of weakness, such as social networking. Rather than try to create a competitor to Facebook, it plans to introduce a “social layer” across its existing products in the coming months. So, for example, people using YouTube with such a layer in place will be able to see what their friends have been watching on the service, assuming Google has been given permission to share such data. The sheer number of projects running at Google at any one time raises the question of whether the company may be trying to do too many things at once. In some ways, Google represents the internet-era equivalent of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC—legendary corporate research outfits that shaped the evolution of technology in earlier periods. The difference is that most of Google’s novel ideas come from people embedded in the company’s core operations rather than cloistered in a stand-alone brains trust. The firm’s senior executives argue that the ferocious rate of experimentation they encourage is precisely why Google will avoid the sclerosis that typically sets in when a firm gets too big. “Every McKinsey consultant will tell me I’m spreading things too thin,” says Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s head of product management. “But you only win if you innovate faster than the players in the rest of the system.” To keep winning, the firm will need to hang on to its remarkable talent pool. Google has been so successful partly because it has created a kind of paradise for software engineers, which offers perks such as massages, free gourmet meals and the like. But competition for talent in Silicon Valley is now reaching fever pitch. Facebook, in particular, has been a merciless poacher from Google. Not only does it pinch some of Google’s best geeks; it even pinched one of its best cooks. Google says its attrition rate has not changed in seven years, but it has clearly been rattled by some of the most recent departures. Last month the company gave all of its workers a 10% pay rise plus a $1,000 bonus. And it is rumoured to have made multi-million-dollar counter-offers to keep especially valuable personnel from jumping to Facebook or elsewhere. This has sent a clear signal to rivals that it intends to fight to keep its most valuable assets. The firm has also been using acquisitions of small businesses to bring in new ones, as well as to beef up its expertise in certain areas. Its purchases this year include Slide, which makes social-networking software, and Social Deck, which makes social games for mobile devices. Google is also making a rather conventional move to create business units whose heads have more autonomy over the way their operations are run. The aim is to hang on to talented folk who might otherwise leave and do their own thing. Andy Rubin, the tech whizz who oversees the Android empire, reckons Google can be a start-up that is home to many other start-ups run by the entrepreneurially minded. The firm has also launched a venture-capital arm that can take stakes in businesses that Xooglers might set up. Dynamos and dinosaurs But money and decision-making power alone won’t secure the services of the smartest software types, who want work not only to reward them but also to inspire them. That is why projects such as green energy and driverless cars matter so much. Some of these ventures may seem like long shots, but that is the point. People work for Google in part because it uses technology in cool ways that might make a real difference to humanity. “Ambition is a very important part of our culture,” says Mr Brin, “and the depth of science you can do at Google is [like] nowhere else in the world.” Google’s quirkiness is embodied in a bronze replica of a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed Stan, which stands near the entrance to a building in the Googleplex. It might seem a bizarre symbol for a high-tech powerhouse. But Stan is a salutary reminder that the internet dynamo needs to keep evolving fast if it is to avoid becoming a digital dinosaur. 谷歌文章不少。。。

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-03 11:41:55

  Instead of trying to host the World Cup, how about trying to win it? Dec 2nd 2010, 19:06 by J.G. | LONDON THE country which invented, or at least codified, the world’s favourite sport will go at least 60 years without hosting its ultimate spectacle. At a ceremony held in Zurich today by Fifa, football’s governing body, England failed in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Russia got the nod; Qatar will host the competition four years later. England, which last held the tournament in 1966, will not be able to bid again until Europe’s turn next comes around with the 2026 World Cup. England’s disappointment is mixed with anger and suspicion. Its bid was regarded by many as the most technically complete. Unlike its rival nations (joint bids between Holland/Belgium and Spain/Portugal were contenders along with Russia) it had all the stadiums and facilities needed to host the tournament tomorrow. The English presentation at Zurich—fronted by the trio of Prince William, David Beckham, and another David (Cameron) who merely serves as the country’s prime minister—was also the most acclaimed. To have failed to win the right to host the World Cup was bad enough; to have been eliminated in the first round of voting has aroused suspicion, even among those who were indifferent to the result, that there were hidden agendas at play. The English media have pointed at alleged corruption in Fifa in recent months. There is a fear that today’s humiliating last-place finish was an act of retribution by at least some of the 22 officials who made up the voting panel. However, the ill-feeling should be balanced by two consoling thoughts. Firstly, there was a strong case for both Russia and Qatar. The technical quality of a bid is not all that matters. Another major question considered by the panel is whether a country would see its football culture and infrastructure enhanced by hosting a World Cup. Although football is already an empire on which the sun never sets, Fifa wants to expand it further. A World Cup cannot make the game much more popular in England or Iberia than it already is; neither do these old powers need a tournament to leave a legacy of new stadiums. Russia, where football is popular but not all-conquering in the way it is in western Europe, and Qatar, which has little football tradition at all, are relatively virgin territories. The second reason is more pertinent for England. The country has allowed itself to become more preoccupied with hosting major sporting events than with winning them. Remember, England’s record in international football is, given its population, wealth and mania for the game, dismal. It has reached the final of either the World Cup or the European Championships once (in 1966, when it had home advantage). Italy, with roughly the same population, has won four World Cups and been runner-up in a few more. Argentina, with a much smaller population and less money, has two World Cups. Holland, with one quarter of the population, has never won a World Cup but has reached three finals and won the European Championship. Germany has a bigger population than England but not by enough of a margin to explain its crushingly superior record of tournaments won and finals reached. The reason for England’s under-achievement is that it lacks the grassroots infrastructure to develop skillful young players. According to statistics unearthed by the Guardian before England’s abysmal showing at last summer’s World Cup, the country has 2,679 coaches who hold either the ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘Pro’ coaching licenses recognized by Europe’s governing body, UEFA. How many does Spain have? 23,995. Italy? 29,420. Germany? 34,970. And whereas the best English coaches are busy training professional footballers and late-teenagers about to reach that level, European coaching talent is deployed where it really makes a difference—on children between the ages of 5 and 14, after which age a player’s basic technical ability is hard to improve. This Jesuit-like focus on very young players can sometimes be unsettling (a New York Times feature earlier this year on the Ajax academy in Holland described how coaches would refer to their charges by their year of birth, so that a six year old is "a 2004") but it works. Horror stories of the misguided coaching of English youngsters have been around for decades: skillful but small children being sidelined in favour of guileless brutes, 8 year olds being allowed to play matches on full-sized pitches where they will spend more time running than touching the ball, a hectoring intolerance of risk-taking flair. As The Economist wrote three years ago, many English youngsters are considered “damaged goods” by the time they enter professional academies. Coaches bemoan the "skills gap" with continental or Latin American youngsters. France overhauled its youth system by building the famous Clairefontaine academy in the 1980s, and went on win the World Cup and European Championships consecutively, after years of failure. Spain did the same, with the same spectacular results. Germany’s recent resurgence after a brief fallow period can be traced to two reforms: the loosening of naturalization laws that allowed talented young players from Turkish, African and other immigrant backgrounds to play for Germany, and, yes, a radical overhaul of the country youth-development system. Countries such as Brazil and Argentina, whose success is sometimes sweetly attributed by the English to some kind of natural Latin gift, have extraordinarily sophisticated youth-coaching systems. England has always seemed vaguely aware of this problem without ever feeling compelled to act upon it. Almost a decade ago, the English Football Association mooted the idea of building its own version of the Clairefontaine academy in Burton upon Trent. It chose to sink the money into a new Wembley stadium instead. As a result, England now has a palatial home for a mediocre team. Choosing to make a priority of hosting the World Cup rather than creating a pool of talent that could win it was another act of profound myopia. There is no guarantee that the failure of the 2018 bid will get England to focus on what matters (although the Burton academy is, finally, starting to take shape). But it at least gets rid of a distraction. 越读越顺畅了。 英格兰，哎，没能办2018世界杯。。。

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-04 09:43:04

  Gardening Planting ideas Amused and amusing Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION Thoughtful Gardening. By Robin Lane Fox. Basic Books; 345 pages; $29.95. Published in Britain by Particular Books as “Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens. Great Gardeners”, £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk Blooming marvellous WHAT is thoughtfulness in the garden? It is, partly, the careful application of knowledge about the practical needs of plants. In addition, it is also a kind of two-step between exerting tight, intellectual control over nature and, as with all creative arts, knowing when to let go. Thus reads the central philosophy of this collection of revamped newspaper columns—together with a light top-dressing of new material—from Robin Lane Fox, for 40 years a gardening columnist on the Financial Times in London. And philosophy is not too strong a word. Mr Lane Fox is a tutor in ancient history at Oxford University and a fellow of New College (where he is responsible for its glorious public gardens), and his day job informs every word. No other garden writer would start a discussion of the beauty of bearded irises with a disquisition on Plato’s ideal forms and the hallucinatory experiences of Aldous Huxley. Related topics United States Europe United Kingdom Western Europe This, his third gardening book, is also his first in 25 years, but little here feels fusty or irrelevant. The book was published in Britain in September and is about to come out in America. In it the columns are grouped, usefully, into four seasonal chapters and address the gamut of his horticultural life, past and present—planting and propagating, battling with wildlife at home in the Cotswolds, visiting gardens in America, Ireland, Europe and Britain, and considering other plantsmen and women. These mini-memoirs are a strength. Some Mr Lane Fox reimagines through visits to where they worked the earth —“the dead”, he says, “imprint themselves on gardens”—others he has direct personal experience of. As a young man he worked with Nancy Lancaster, an influential designer-decorator, and draws an evocative thumbnail sketch of her, as a woman who “spent money as freely as water from her garden hose”, and her garden, with its tumbling roses and “Italian cypresses whose leaves smelt of paper in old books”. Valerie Finnis he describes communicating shrub news, with her proud “28 flowers on the xanthoceras”, to her housebound husband using a walkie-talkie “whose volume, eventually, she learned to control”. That “eventually” is priceless. It is also typical of Mr Lane Fox’s donnishness, expressed both by his amused, gently amusing, tone and in his unequivocal dismissal of current trends, among them prairie gardening, organic vegetables and the creation of “natural habitats”. Wildlife lovers will blanch: Mr Lane Fox is a rabid fan of pesticides and herbicides. He laces an oversexed rabbit’s milk with weedkiller and recommends eating squirrels. His years of practical plantsmanship result in deft delineations of the colour, needs and suitable companions of specific flower varieties: he describes one group of cone flowers as looking “as if they have started to put their ears back in anxiety”. But although fecund with practical advice, this not a how-to manual. Rather it is an episodic expression of Mr Lane Fox’s “thoughtfulness”, and his wry acknowledgment that despite all his best efforts—like his triennial battle to prune his classical patte d’oie of ornamental pears—real gardening begins at the moment you understand that nature “can never be pinned down”. It’s a philosophy worth getting your hands dirty for. Books and Arts It’s a philosophy worth getting your hands dirty for. 喜欢这句。

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-06 04:31:33

  A special report on China's place in the world Brushwood and gall China insists that its growing military and diplomatic clout pose no threat. The rest of the world, and particularly America, is not so sure, says Edward Carr Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION IN 492BC, at the end of the “Spring and Autumn” period in Chinese history, Goujian, the king of Yue in modern Zhejiang, was taken prisoner after a disastrous campaign against King Fuchai, his neighbour to the north. Goujian was put to work in the royal stables where he bore his captivity with such dignity that he gradually won Fuchai’s respect. After a few years Fuchai let him return home as his vassal. Goujian never forgot his humiliation. He slept on brushwood and hung a gall bladder in his room, licking it daily to feed his appetite for revenge. Yue appeared loyal, but its gifts of craftsmen and timber tempted Fuchai to build palaces and towers even though the extravagance ensnared him in debt. Goujian distracted him with Yue’s most beautiful women, bribed his officials and bought enough grain to empty his granaries. Meanwhile, as Fuchai’s kingdom declined, Yue grew rich and raised a new army. Goujian bided his time for eight long years. By 482BC, confident of his superiority, he set off north with almost 50,000 warriors. Over several campaigns they put Fuchai and his kingdom to the sword. In this special report » Brushwood and gall « Less biding and hiding In the balance Friends, or else Strategic reassurance The fourth modernisation Sources and acknowledgments Offer to readers The king who slept on brushwood and tasted gall is as familiar to Chinese as King Alfred and his cakes are to Britons, or George Washington and the cherry tree are to Americans. In the early 20th century he became a symbol of resistance against the treaty ports, foreign concessions and the years of colonial humiliation. Taken like that, the parable of Goujian sums up what some people find alarming about China’s rise as a superpower today. Ever since Deng Xiaoping set about reforming the economy in 1978, China has talked peace. Still militarily and economically too weak to challenge America, it has concentrated on getting richer. Even as China has grown in power and rebuilt its armed forces, the West and Japan have run up debts and sold it their technology. China has been patient, but the day when it can once again start to impose its will is drawing near. However, Goujian’s story has another reading, too. Paul Cohen, a Harvard scholar who has written about the king, explains that the Chinese today see him as an example of perseverance and dedication. Students are told that if they want to succeed they must be like King Goujian, sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall—that great accomplishments come only with sacrifice and unyielding purpose. This Goujian represents self-improvement and dedication, not revenge. Which Goujian will 21st-century China follow? Will it broadly fit in with the Western world, as a place where people want nothing more than a chance to succeed and enjoy the rewards of their hard work? Or, as its wealth and power begin to overshadow all but the United States, will China become a threat—an angry country set on avenging past wrongs and forcing others to bend to its will? China’s choice of role, says Jim Steinberg, America’s deputy secretary of state, is “the great question of our time”. The peace and prosperity of the world depends on which path it takes. Some people argue that China is now too enmeshed in globalisation to put the world economy in jeopardy through war or coercion. Trade has brought prosperity. China buys raw materials and components from abroad and sells its wares in foreign markets. It holds $2.6 trillion of foreign-exchange reserves. Why should it pull down the system that has served it so well? But that is too sanguine. In the past integration has sometimes gone before conflagration. Europe went up in flames in 1914 even though Germany was Britain’s second-largest export market and Britain was Germany’s largest. Japan got rich and fell in with the European powers before it brutally set about colonising Asia. Others go to the opposite extreme, arguing that China and America are condemned to be enemies. Ever since Sparta led the Peloponnesian League against Athens, they say, declining powers have failed to give way fast enough to satisfy rising powers. As China’s economic and military strength increase, so will its sense of entitlement and its ambition. In the end patience will run out, because America will not willingly surrender leadership. Reasons for optimism But that is too bleak. China clings to its territorial claims—over Taiwan, the South China Sea, various islands and with India. Yet, unlike the great powers before 1945, China is not looking for new colonies. And unlike the Soviet Union, China does not have an ideology to export. In fact, America’s liberal idealism is far more potent than token Communism, warmed-up Confucianism or anything else that China has to offer. When two countries have nuclear weapons, a war may not be worth fighting. In the real world the dealings between rising and declining powers are not straightforward. Twice Britain feared that continental Europe would be dominated by an expansionary Germany and twice it went to war. Yet when America took world leadership from Britain, the two remained constant allies. After the second world war Japan and Germany rose from the ashes to become the world’s second- and third-largest economies, without a whisper of a political challenge to the United States. International-relations theorists have devoted much thought to the passing of empires. The insight of “power-transition theory” is that satisfied powers, such as post-war Germany and Japan, do not challenge the world order when they rise. But dissatisfied ones, such as pre-war Germany and Japan, conclude that the system shaped and maintained by the incumbent powers is rigged against them. In the anarchic arena of geopolitics they believe that they will be denied what is rightfully theirs unless they enforce their claim. So for most of the past decade the two great powers edged towards what David Lampton, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, calls a double wager. China would broadly fall in with America’s post-war order, betting that the rest of the world, eager for China’s help and its markets, would allow it to grow richer and more powerful. America would not seek to prevent this rise, betting that prosperity would eventually turn China into one of the system’s supporters—a “responsible stakeholder” in the language of Robert Zoellick, a deputy secretary of state under George Bush junior and now president of the World Bank. For much of the past decade, barring the odd tiff, the wager worked. Before 2001 China and America fell out over Taiwan, the American bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade and a fatal mid-air collision between an American EP3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter. Many commentators back then thought that America and China were on a dangerous course, but Chinese and American leaders did not pursue it. Since then America has been busy with the war on terror and has sought plain dealing with China. American companies enjoyed decent access to Chinese markets. China lent the American government huge amounts of money. This suited China, which concluded long ago that the best way to build its “comprehensive national power” was through economic growth. According to its analysis, articulated in a series of white papers and speeches in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the country needed a “New Security Concept”. Growth demanded stability, which in turn required that China’s neighbours did not feel threatened. To reassure them, China started to join the international organisations it had once shunned. As well as earning it credentials as a good citizen, this was also a safe way to counter American influence. China led the six-party talks designed to curb North Korea’s nuclear programme. The government signed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and by and large stopped proliferating weapons (though proliferation by rogue Chinese companies continued). It sent people on UN peacekeeping operations, supplying more of them than any other permanent member of the security council or any NATO country. Inevitably, there were still disputes and differences. But diplomats, policymakers and academics allowed themselves to believe that, in the nuclear age, China might just emerge peacefully as a new superpower. However, that confidence has recently softened. In the past few months China has fallen out with Japan over a fishing boat that rammed at least one if not two Japanese coastguard vessels off what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands and the Chinese the Diaoyu Islands. Earlier, China failed to back South Korea over the sinking of a Korean navy corvette with the loss of 46 crew—even though an international panel had concluded that the Cheonan was attacked by a North Korean submarine. When America and South Korea reacted to the sinking by planning joint exercises in the Yellow Sea, China objected and got one of them moved eastward, to the Sea of Japan. And when North Korea shelled a South Korean island last month, China was characteristically reluctant to condemn it. China has also begun to include territorial claims over large parts of the South China Sea among its six “primary concerns”—new language that has alarmed diplomats. When members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) complained about this in a meeting in Hanoi in the summer, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, worked himself into a rage: “All of you remember how much of your economic prosperity depends on us,” he reportedly spat back. Last year a vicious editorial in China’s People’s Daily attacked India after its prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited disputed territory near Tibet; Barack Obama was shabbily treated, first on a visit to Beijing and later at the climate-change talks in Copenhagen, where a junior Chinese official wagged his finger at the leader of the free world; Chinese vessels have repeatedly harassed American and Japanese naval ships, including the USS John S. McCain and a survey vessel, the USNS Impeccable. Such things are perhaps small in themselves, but they matter because of that double bet. America is constantly looking for signs that China is going to welsh on the deal and turn aggressive—and China is looking for signs that America and its allies are going to gang up to stop its rise. Everything is coloured by that strategic mistrust. Peering through this lens, China-watchers detect a shift. “The smiling diplomacy is over,” says Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state under George Bush. “China’s aspiration for power is very obvious,” says Yukio Okamoto, a Japanese security expert. Diplomats, talking on condition of anonymity, speak of underlying suspicions and anxiety in their dealings with China. Although day-to-day traffic between American and Chinese government departments flows smoothly, “the strategic mistrust between China and the US continues to deepen,” says Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. There is nothing inevitable about this deterioration. Peace still makes sense. China faces huge problems at home. It benefits from American markets and good relations with its neighbours, just as it did in 2001. The Chinese Communist Party and the occupant of the White House, of any political stripe, have more to gain from economic growth than from anything else. China’s leaders understand this. In November 2003 and February 2004 the Politburo held special sessions on the rise and fall of nations since the 15th century. American policymakers are no less aware that, though a powerful China will be hard to cope with, a dissatisfied and powerful China would be impossible. Now, however, many factors, on many sides, from domestic politics to the fallout from the financial crisis, are conspiring to make relations worse. The risk is not war—for the time being that remains almost unthinkable, if only because it would be so greatly to everyone’s disadvantage. The danger is that the leaders of China and America will over the next decade lay the foundations for a deep antagonism. This is best described by Henry Kissinger. 用卧薪尝胆举例。。。给力！

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  农村B (被人遗弃的狗) 2010-12-06 05:33:42

  M

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  Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-07 12:39:09

  http://www.douban.com/group/topic/15694943/ 转移主作战地。

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  鲁鲁 (影子的春夏秋Dong南西北) 2011-01-10 10:06:07

  mark

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  水天一 2011-05-19 15:15:47

  压力好大

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