u011631929的博客

Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December....

If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition — wealth, distinction, control over one’s destiny — must be deemed worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition’s behalf. If the tradition of a...

Aimlessness has hardly been typical of the postwar Japan whose productivity and social harmony are the envy of the United States and Europe. But increasingly the Japanese are seeing a decline of the t...

When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for, however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today, it is poss...

An invisible border divides those arguing for computers in the classroom on the behalf of students’ career prospects and those arguing for computers in the classroom for broader reasons of radical edu...

In the first year or so of Web business, most of the action has revolved around efforts to tap the consumer market. More recently, as the Web proved to be more than a fashion, companies have started t...

It’s a rough world out there, Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of ...

Bankers have been blaming themselves for their troubles in public. Behind the scenes, they have been taking aim at someone else: the accounting standard-setters. Their rules, moan the banks, have forc...

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Aladuell argues that social epidemics are driven in large part by the acting of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusua...

Over the past decade, thousands of patents have been granted for what are called business methods. Amazon.com received one for its “one-click” online payment system. Merrill Lynch got legal protection...

A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of...

When a Scottish research team startled the world by revealing 3 months ago that it had cloned an adult sheep, President Clinton moved swiftly. Declaring that he was opposed to using this unusual anima...

Science, in practice, depends far less on the experiments it prepares than on the preparedness of the minds of the men who watch the experiments. Sir Isaac Newton supposedly discovered gravity through...

Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December....

Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics — ...

If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems. Your humor must be relevant to the audience and should help to show them tha...

When I decided to quit my full time employment it never occurred to me that I might become a part of a new international trend. A lateral move that hurt my pride and blocked my professional progress p...

The world is going through the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions ever witnessed. The process sweeps from hyperactive America to Europe and reaches the emerging countries with unsurpassed might....

Why do so many Americans distrust what they read in their newspapers? The American Society of Newspaper Editors is trying to answer this painful question. The organization is deep into a long self-ana...

A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide — the division of the world into the info(information) rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife a...

Specialisation can be seen as a response to the problem of an increasing accumulation of scientific knowledge. By splitting up the subject matter into smaller units, one man could continue to handle t...

Beingamanhasalwaysbeendangerous.Thereareabout105malesbornforevery100females,butthisratiodropstonearbalanceattheageofmaturity,andamong70-year-oldstherearetwiceasmany...

　　Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of...

Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world’s volcanoes, they are not always found at the bounda...

Stratford-on-Avon, as we all know, has only one industry—William Shakespeare—but there are two distinctly separate and increasingly hostile branches. There is the Royal Shakespeare Company （ASC）, whic...

(2006年Text1)In spite of “endless talk of difference,” American society is an amazing machine for homogenizing people. This is “the democratizing uniformity of dress and discourse, and the casualness ...

Americans no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doin...

Of all the components of a good night’s sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens int0 a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud f...

Do you remember all those years when scientists argued that smoking would kill us but the doubters insisted that we didn’t know for sure? That the evidence was inconclusive, the science uncertain? Tha...

Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. ...

It never rains but it pours. Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens...

During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure had been transformed by economic risk and new realties. ...

For the past several years, the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade has featured a column called “Ask Marilyn.” People are invited to query Marilyn vos Savant, who at age 10 had tested at a mental leve...

When prehistoric man arrived in new parts of the world, something strong happened to the large animals; they suddenly became extinct. Smaller species survived; the large, slow-growing animals were eas...

Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.This wasn’t always so. T...

Text 1　　While still catching-up to men in some spheres of modern life, women appear to be way ahead in at least one undesirable category. “Women are particularly susceptible to developing depression...

Emerging from the 1980 census is the picture of a nation developing more and more regional competition, as population growth in the Northeast and Midwest reaches a near standstill.This development — ...

Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Galileo's 17th-century trial for his rebelling belief before the Catholic Church or poet William Blake's harsh remar...

Well, no gain without pain, they say. But what about pain without gain? Everywhere you go in America, you hear tales of corporate revival. What is harder to establish is whether the productivity revol...

Few creations of big technology capture the imagination like giant dams. Perhaps it is humankind’s long suffering at the mercy of flood and drought that makes the idea of forcing the waters to do our ...