The following information is used for educational purposes only.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Monday, December 31, 2012
The Year in Social Media
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.time.com
APPLE-Tim Cook,CEO
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Runner-Up: Tim Cook, the Technologist
By Lev Grossman ,Dec. 19, 2012
Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. “Each time,” Cook says, “the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.”This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. “Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,” Cook says. “That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.” As we now know, it wasn’t.As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple. Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic.On the day Jobs died, Apple was valued at $351 billion; at press time its market cap stood at $488 billion, more than that of Google and Microsoft. That’s and as in plus: Apple is now worth significantly more than those companies combined. Apple’s cash hoard alone comes to more than $120 billion. It was news in 2011 when Apple passed Exxon Mobil to become the world’s most valuable company. Now Exxon Mobil can barely see Apple’s taillights in the distance, across an $83 billion lead.And Cook has done it his way. Jobs was famously over the top: he came at you from across the room, flashing his lightning-bolt eyebrows, and he browbeat you till you either agreed with him or pretended to, just to make him for God’s sake stop. That’s not how Cook operates. He’s a seducer, a Southern drawler, slow and soft-spoken. He has been observed winking. He doesn’t come at you; he waits for you to come to him. And sooner or later you do, not because you have to but because, dang it, you want to.Cook himself is reluctant to lean too hard on the contrast. “I think there’s some obvious differences,” he says. (He allows himself a chuckle at the understatement.) “The way we conduct ourselves is very different. I decided from negative time zero — a long time before he talked to me about his decision to pass the CEO title — that I was going to be my own self. That’s the only person that I could do a good job with being.”That’s what Jobs wanted.
He didn’t want Cook to be a Jobs knockoff. He wanted Cook to be Cook. “He said, ‘From this day forward, never ask what I would do. Just do what’s right.’ I brought up a couple of examples: ‘Suppose A — do you really want me to make the call?’ Yes. Yes! He talked about Disney and what he saw had happened to Disney [after Walt Disney died], and he didn’t want it to happen to Apple.”Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.”Like Jobs, Cook suffers fools neither gladly nor in any other way (except when he has to, i.e., when talking to journalists). Behind the scenes, that measured calm can — if the legends are true — become a merciless coldness that roots out confusion and incompetence. “I’ve always felt that a part of leadership is conveying a sense of urgency in dealing with key issues,” he says. “Apple operates at an extreme pace, and my experience has been that key issues rarely get smaller on their own.” The definitive Tim Cook anecdote involves a meeting he once called about a crisis in China that required a hands-on solution. After 30 minutes, he looked at one executive and said, “Why are you still here?” The man — a sense of urgency having been successfully conveyed — immediately left the meeting, drove directly to the airport and flew to China, without even a change of clothes.Like Jobs, Cook never shows any doubt in public, either about himself or about Apple, not a scintilla, not for an instant. He rarely strays far from his core message about Apple: that it’s the best, most innovative company in the world, that consumers love it and that it is his privilege to work for it and for them. When speaking about his management style, Cook begins, “CEOs are all packages of strengths and …” He hesitates, looking for some way to reroute the sentence around the word weaknesses. Then he finds it: “and so forth.”And like Jobs, Cook has reason to think of himself as an outsider, even as he sits at the center of global techno-cool, piling up a considerable personal fortune. (In 2011, Apple awarded Cook a golden-handcuffs package of options potentially worth more than $376 million.) Jobs’ story is well known: he was adopted — the biological son of a Syrian graduate student — and he was a college dropout. Cook’s story is very different but no less singular. He’s highly discreet about his private life, but this much is public record: Cook grew up in a small Alabama town called Robertsdale (pop. 5,402), the son of a shipyard worker. According to a speech Cook gave at Goldman Sachs this year, he worked in a paper mill and an aluminum plant. Jobs was at least middle class and a native son of Silicon Valley. Cook is, by all indications, a working-class kid from the Deep South.Cook earned a degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. From there he did the expected thing: he spent 12 years at IBM, where he showed a flair for a finicky, unglamorous side of the business: manufacturing and distribution. From IBM, Cook bounced to Intelligent Electronics and then in 1997 to Compaq as vice president for corporate materials. Then he did the unexpected thing.Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving.
But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”It wasn’t just what they were doing at Apple, it was how they were doing it. The culture was different. “I loved the fact that I could disagree with Steve and he wasn’t offended by it.” For his part, Jobs must have seen something in Cook that wasn’t obvious to anybody else: the maverick, the outsider. “I’ve never thought going the way of the herd was a particularly good strategy,” Cook says. “You can be assured to be at best middle of the pack if you do that. And that’s at best.”Cook got home on Sunday. Jobs offered him the job on Monday. On Tuesday, Cook resigned from Compaq. The same way Ive became Jobs’ trusted lieutenant on the design side, Cook stepped into that role in the less sexy and consumer-facing but equally vital area of manufacturing and distribution.As COO, Cook was content to be a wizard in the dark art of supply-chain management. As CEO, Cook has had to decloak, to focus on the very public product side, the way Jobs did. When Cook looks back at 2012, that’s where he puts the emphasis. “It’s the most prolific year of innovation ever,” he says. “If you went back and were to watch a compressed movie of it, it’s amazing the products that have come out.”He is, of course, correct. In 2012, Apple released the iPhone 5, the newly redesigned MacBook Pro, two new iPods and both the third- and fourth-generation iPads, plus the iPad Mini. Apple completely redesigned its flagship media software, iTunes, and added more than 272,000 new apps to the iTunes store. “This year has been an intense year on products,” he says. “Like no other.”All that is true and amazing and at the same time not 100% surprising. Cook has had the effect on Apple that you’d expect from an operations genius: he’s made all the existing product-improving machinery run even faster and smoother than it already did. The real story of Apple in 2012 may be what Cook has done in China.Jobs never visited the country where most of Apple’s products are built, at least not in any official capacity, but as a manufacturing guy Cook is an old China hand, and on his watch Apple has broken out as a consumer brand there. The iPhone got Apple inside the Great Wall, and it has proved to be a Trojan horse: Apple products are now a status symbol among the newly affluent.When the iPhone 4S launched there in January, there were near riots outside Apple stores; the iPhone 5 sold 2 million units in China in three days. Overall, Apple’s revenue from China grew by $10 billion in 2012. “It’s a huge market with huge potential,” Cook says, “with an enormous emerging middle class that really wants Apple products. I think it will be our largest market, over time.”Apple also met with some serious and very public reversals in 2012. The labor practices of its Chinese manufacturing partners’ factories continued to be a source of embarrassment. September saw the distinctly un-Apple-like launch of Apple Maps, which was buggy and reportedly misinformed as to the location of landmarks like Washington’s Dulles International Airport. These were, if nothing else, opportunities for Cook to show off his chops as a swift, steely decisionmaker.
Cook arranged for independent audits of Apple’s Chinese factories by the Fair Labor Association, and he toured China and met with Vice Premier Li Keqiang. After the Maps debacle, Cook stepped up and made a public apology, in which he took the extraordinary step of urging consumers to use competitors’ products until Apple got its house in order. He also reshuffled his cabinet, ousting the heads of Apple’s retail and mobile-software divisions.Nevertheless, the market’s faith in Apple has seriously wavered since September, when its stock briefly, ecstatically crested above 700. Apple missed earnings estimates in the third and fourth quarters, and while it remains the world’s most valuable company, its stock has taken a sustained three-month hammering that has left it down 25% from that high point.There is a babel of opinions among analysts about what this does or doesn’t mean. Some blame Maps. Some think the increasingly ferocious competition in the smart-phone and tablet markets is making investors nervous. Some think Apple has lost its innovative spark. Others say Apple’s numbers are still so huge, who cares if they’re slightly less than the even more huge but essentially arbitrary numbers that Wall Street analysts expected? Apple’s price-earnings ratio hovers around a robust 12. There are commentators who still consider Apple undervalued. But there’s no question that Cook also has plenty of doubters left to convince.None of this appears to ruffle Cook particularly. “I’ve worked at Apple for 15 years,” he says, “so Apple’s not foreign to me. I don’t mean to sound like it’s all a predictable ride. It’s unpredictable. But it’s always been unpredictable.” He hasn’t altered his personal style any. He remains, like all great Apple products, a paradoxical combination of open and closed, polished and user-friendly but also sealed up tight against anybody who’s curious about what’s inside. You know there are reams of code churning away down there, just below the surface, but you’ll never know exactly what’s going on.His critics say Cook lacks a true technologist’s vision, but it would be more accurate to say that he has yet to show his hand. Apple finished 2012 with a triumphant record of innovation, but it was innovation with a small i, as in incremental. That’s good enough for an ordinary company, but it’s not what made Apple worth more than Exxon Mobil. The essence of Apple is the quantum leap, the unexpected sideways juke into a heretofore unnoticed and underexploited market — personal computers, digital music players, smart phones, tablet computers. Maybe the next stop is televisions; that’s certainly where the rumor mill is going. But the test for Cook will be to seek out a new category that’s vulnerable to disruption and disrupt the hell out of it.I ask Cook if he would do that — if that would continue to be Apple’s modus operandi going forward. He smiles, seductively as always, and says, “Yes. Yes. Most definitely.” When that happens, that’s when Cook will show his hand, and we’ll get a look below the surface. He’ll do the unexpected thing and double down on something new. And when he does, that’s when the rest of the world will see what Jobs saw in him.
Source: www.time.com
Runner-Up: Tim Cook, the Technologist
By Lev Grossman ,Dec. 19, 2012
Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. “Each time,” Cook says, “the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.”This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. “Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,” Cook says. “That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.” As we now know, it wasn’t.As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple. Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic.On the day Jobs died, Apple was valued at $351 billion; at press time its market cap stood at $488 billion, more than that of Google and Microsoft. That’s and as in plus: Apple is now worth significantly more than those companies combined. Apple’s cash hoard alone comes to more than $120 billion. It was news in 2011 when Apple passed Exxon Mobil to become the world’s most valuable company. Now Exxon Mobil can barely see Apple’s taillights in the distance, across an $83 billion lead.And Cook has done it his way. Jobs was famously over the top: he came at you from across the room, flashing his lightning-bolt eyebrows, and he browbeat you till you either agreed with him or pretended to, just to make him for God’s sake stop. That’s not how Cook operates. He’s a seducer, a Southern drawler, slow and soft-spoken. He has been observed winking. He doesn’t come at you; he waits for you to come to him. And sooner or later you do, not because you have to but because, dang it, you want to.Cook himself is reluctant to lean too hard on the contrast. “I think there’s some obvious differences,” he says. (He allows himself a chuckle at the understatement.) “The way we conduct ourselves is very different. I decided from negative time zero — a long time before he talked to me about his decision to pass the CEO title — that I was going to be my own self. That’s the only person that I could do a good job with being.”That’s what Jobs wanted.
He didn’t want Cook to be a Jobs knockoff. He wanted Cook to be Cook. “He said, ‘From this day forward, never ask what I would do. Just do what’s right.’ I brought up a couple of examples: ‘Suppose A — do you really want me to make the call?’ Yes. Yes! He talked about Disney and what he saw had happened to Disney [after Walt Disney died], and he didn’t want it to happen to Apple.”Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.”Like Jobs, Cook suffers fools neither gladly nor in any other way (except when he has to, i.e., when talking to journalists). Behind the scenes, that measured calm can — if the legends are true — become a merciless coldness that roots out confusion and incompetence. “I’ve always felt that a part of leadership is conveying a sense of urgency in dealing with key issues,” he says. “Apple operates at an extreme pace, and my experience has been that key issues rarely get smaller on their own.” The definitive Tim Cook anecdote involves a meeting he once called about a crisis in China that required a hands-on solution. After 30 minutes, he looked at one executive and said, “Why are you still here?” The man — a sense of urgency having been successfully conveyed — immediately left the meeting, drove directly to the airport and flew to China, without even a change of clothes.Like Jobs, Cook never shows any doubt in public, either about himself or about Apple, not a scintilla, not for an instant. He rarely strays far from his core message about Apple: that it’s the best, most innovative company in the world, that consumers love it and that it is his privilege to work for it and for them. When speaking about his management style, Cook begins, “CEOs are all packages of strengths and …” He hesitates, looking for some way to reroute the sentence around the word weaknesses. Then he finds it: “and so forth.”And like Jobs, Cook has reason to think of himself as an outsider, even as he sits at the center of global techno-cool, piling up a considerable personal fortune. (In 2011, Apple awarded Cook a golden-handcuffs package of options potentially worth more than $376 million.) Jobs’ story is well known: he was adopted — the biological son of a Syrian graduate student — and he was a college dropout. Cook’s story is very different but no less singular. He’s highly discreet about his private life, but this much is public record: Cook grew up in a small Alabama town called Robertsdale (pop. 5,402), the son of a shipyard worker. According to a speech Cook gave at Goldman Sachs this year, he worked in a paper mill and an aluminum plant. Jobs was at least middle class and a native son of Silicon Valley. Cook is, by all indications, a working-class kid from the Deep South.Cook earned a degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. From there he did the expected thing: he spent 12 years at IBM, where he showed a flair for a finicky, unglamorous side of the business: manufacturing and distribution. From IBM, Cook bounced to Intelligent Electronics and then in 1997 to Compaq as vice president for corporate materials. Then he did the unexpected thing.Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving.
But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”It wasn’t just what they were doing at Apple, it was how they were doing it. The culture was different. “I loved the fact that I could disagree with Steve and he wasn’t offended by it.” For his part, Jobs must have seen something in Cook that wasn’t obvious to anybody else: the maverick, the outsider. “I’ve never thought going the way of the herd was a particularly good strategy,” Cook says. “You can be assured to be at best middle of the pack if you do that. And that’s at best.”Cook got home on Sunday. Jobs offered him the job on Monday. On Tuesday, Cook resigned from Compaq. The same way Ive became Jobs’ trusted lieutenant on the design side, Cook stepped into that role in the less sexy and consumer-facing but equally vital area of manufacturing and distribution.As COO, Cook was content to be a wizard in the dark art of supply-chain management. As CEO, Cook has had to decloak, to focus on the very public product side, the way Jobs did. When Cook looks back at 2012, that’s where he puts the emphasis. “It’s the most prolific year of innovation ever,” he says. “If you went back and were to watch a compressed movie of it, it’s amazing the products that have come out.”He is, of course, correct. In 2012, Apple released the iPhone 5, the newly redesigned MacBook Pro, two new iPods and both the third- and fourth-generation iPads, plus the iPad Mini. Apple completely redesigned its flagship media software, iTunes, and added more than 272,000 new apps to the iTunes store. “This year has been an intense year on products,” he says. “Like no other.”All that is true and amazing and at the same time not 100% surprising. Cook has had the effect on Apple that you’d expect from an operations genius: he’s made all the existing product-improving machinery run even faster and smoother than it already did. The real story of Apple in 2012 may be what Cook has done in China.Jobs never visited the country where most of Apple’s products are built, at least not in any official capacity, but as a manufacturing guy Cook is an old China hand, and on his watch Apple has broken out as a consumer brand there. The iPhone got Apple inside the Great Wall, and it has proved to be a Trojan horse: Apple products are now a status symbol among the newly affluent.When the iPhone 4S launched there in January, there were near riots outside Apple stores; the iPhone 5 sold 2 million units in China in three days. Overall, Apple’s revenue from China grew by $10 billion in 2012. “It’s a huge market with huge potential,” Cook says, “with an enormous emerging middle class that really wants Apple products. I think it will be our largest market, over time.”Apple also met with some serious and very public reversals in 2012. The labor practices of its Chinese manufacturing partners’ factories continued to be a source of embarrassment. September saw the distinctly un-Apple-like launch of Apple Maps, which was buggy and reportedly misinformed as to the location of landmarks like Washington’s Dulles International Airport. These were, if nothing else, opportunities for Cook to show off his chops as a swift, steely decisionmaker.
Cook arranged for independent audits of Apple’s Chinese factories by the Fair Labor Association, and he toured China and met with Vice Premier Li Keqiang. After the Maps debacle, Cook stepped up and made a public apology, in which he took the extraordinary step of urging consumers to use competitors’ products until Apple got its house in order. He also reshuffled his cabinet, ousting the heads of Apple’s retail and mobile-software divisions.Nevertheless, the market’s faith in Apple has seriously wavered since September, when its stock briefly, ecstatically crested above 700. Apple missed earnings estimates in the third and fourth quarters, and while it remains the world’s most valuable company, its stock has taken a sustained three-month hammering that has left it down 25% from that high point.There is a babel of opinions among analysts about what this does or doesn’t mean. Some blame Maps. Some think the increasingly ferocious competition in the smart-phone and tablet markets is making investors nervous. Some think Apple has lost its innovative spark. Others say Apple’s numbers are still so huge, who cares if they’re slightly less than the even more huge but essentially arbitrary numbers that Wall Street analysts expected? Apple’s price-earnings ratio hovers around a robust 12. There are commentators who still consider Apple undervalued. But there’s no question that Cook also has plenty of doubters left to convince.None of this appears to ruffle Cook particularly. “I’ve worked at Apple for 15 years,” he says, “so Apple’s not foreign to me. I don’t mean to sound like it’s all a predictable ride. It’s unpredictable. But it’s always been unpredictable.” He hasn’t altered his personal style any. He remains, like all great Apple products, a paradoxical combination of open and closed, polished and user-friendly but also sealed up tight against anybody who’s curious about what’s inside. You know there are reams of code churning away down there, just below the surface, but you’ll never know exactly what’s going on.His critics say Cook lacks a true technologist’s vision, but it would be more accurate to say that he has yet to show his hand. Apple finished 2012 with a triumphant record of innovation, but it was innovation with a small i, as in incremental. That’s good enough for an ordinary company, but it’s not what made Apple worth more than Exxon Mobil. The essence of Apple is the quantum leap, the unexpected sideways juke into a heretofore unnoticed and underexploited market — personal computers, digital music players, smart phones, tablet computers. Maybe the next stop is televisions; that’s certainly where the rumor mill is going. But the test for Cook will be to seek out a new category that’s vulnerable to disruption and disrupt the hell out of it.I ask Cook if he would do that — if that would continue to be Apple’s modus operandi going forward. He smiles, seductively as always, and says, “Yes. Yes. Most definitely.” When that happens, that’s when Cook will show his hand, and we’ll get a look below the surface. He’ll do the unexpected thing and double down on something new. And when he does, that’s when the rest of the world will see what Jobs saw in him.
Source: www.time.com
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
SEASON´S GREETINGS!!!!!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Whatever is bright and beautiful,
Whatever brings you happiness,
These are the things Clara Moras wishes for you and your family.
Whatever is bright and beautiful,
Whatever brings you happiness,
These are the things Clara Moras wishes for you and your family.
Friday, December 7, 2012
TED Talks-Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and Listen!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Everything I do, and everything I do professionally --my life -- has been shapedby seven years of work as a young man in Africa.From 1971 to 1977 --I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) --I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia,in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.
I worked for an Italian NGO,and every single project that we set up in Africafailed.And I was distraught.I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good peopleand we were doing good work in Africa.Instead, everything we touched we killed.
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book,"Ripples from the Zambezi,"was a project where we Italiansdecided to teach Zambian people how to grow food.So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambiain this absolutely magnificent valleygoing down to the Zambezi River,and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoesand zucchini and ...And of course the local people had absolutely no interestin doing that, so we paid them to come and work,and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter)And we were amazed that the local people,in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture.But instead of asking them how come they were notgrowing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter)"Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation."
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully.We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomatowould grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size.And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians,"Look how easy agriculture is."When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red,overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the riverand they ate everything. (Laughter)
And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!"
And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter)
"Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked."
I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa,but then I saw what the Americans were doing,what the English were doing, what the French were doing,and after seeing what they were doing,I became quite proud of our project in Zambia.Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.
You should see the rubbish — (Applause) --You should see the rubbish that we have bestowedon unsuspecting African people.You want to read the book,read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo,Zambian woman economist.The book was published in 2009.We Western donor countries have given the African continenttwo trillion American dollars in the last 50 years.I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done.Just go and read her book.Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done.
We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries,and there are only two ways we deal with people:We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic.The two words come from the Latin root "pater,"which means "father."But they mean two different things.Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different cultureas if they were my children. "I love you so much."Patronizing, I treat everybody from another cultureas if they were my servants.That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.
I was given a slap in the face reading a book,"Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said,above all in economic development, if peopledo not wish to be helped, leave them alone.This should be the first principle of aid.The first principle of aid is respect.This morning, the gentleman who opened this conferencelay a stick on the floor, and said,"Can we -- can you imagine a citythat is not neocolonial?"
I decided when I was 27 years oldto only respond to people,and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation,where you never initiate anything,you never motivate anybody, but you become a servantof the local passion, the servant of local peoplewho have a dream to become a better person.So what you do -- you shut up.You never arrive in a community with any ideas,and you sit with the local people.We don't work from offices.We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub.We have zero infrastructure.And what we do, we become friends,and we find out what that person wants to do.
The most important thing is passion.You can give somebody an idea.If that person doesn't want to do it,what are you going to do?The passion that the person has for her own growthis the most important thing.The passion that that man has for his own personal growthis the most important thing.And then we help them to go and find the knowledge,because nobody in the world can succeed alone.The person with the idea may not have the knowledge,but the knowledge is available.
So years and years ago, I had this idea:Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the communityto tell people what to do, why don't, for once,listen to them? But not in community meetings.
Let me tell you a secret.There is a problem with community meetings.Entrepreneurs never come,and they never tell you, in a public meeting,what they want to do with their own money,what opportunity they have identified.So planning has this blind spot.The smartest people in your community you don't even know,because they don't come to your public meetings.
What we do, we work one-on-one,and to work one-on-one, you have to createa social infrastructure that doesn't exist.You have to create a new profession.The profession is the family doctor of enterprise,the family doctor of business, who sits with youin your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe,and helps you find the resources to transform your passioninto a way to make a living.
I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia.I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time,trying to go away from this patronizing bullshitthat we arrive and tell you what to do.And so what I did in Esperance that first yearwas to just walk the streets, and in three daysI had my first client, and I helped this first guywho was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy,and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth,to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say,"You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?"And I helped these five fishermen to work togetherand get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albanyfor 60 cents a kilo, but we found a wayto take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo,and the farmers came to talk to me, said,"Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?"In a year, I had 27 projects going on,and the government came to see me to say,"How can you do that?How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult.I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter)
So — (Applause) —So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter)We've done it in 300 communities around the world.We have helped to start 40,000 businesses.There is a new generation of entrepreneurswho are dying of solitude.
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history,died age 96, a few years ago.Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophybefore becoming involved in business,and this is what Peter Drucker says:"Planning is actually incompatiblewith an entrepreneurial society and economy."Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
So now you're rebuilding Christchurchwithout knowing what the smartest people in Christchurchwant to do with their own money and their own energy.You have to learn how to get these peopleto come and talk to you.You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy,you have to be fantastic at helping them,and then they will come, and they will come in droves.In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients.Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people,the intelligence and the passion?Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning?Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.
So what I'm saying is thatentrepreneurship is where it's at.We are at the end of the first industrial revolution --nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing --and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable.The internal combustion engine is not sustainable.Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable.What we have to look at is at how wefeed, cure, educate, transport, communicatefor seven billion people in a sustainable way.The technologies do not exist to do that.Who is going to invent the technologyfor the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it!Government? Forget about it!It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.
There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazinemany, many years ago.There was a group of experts who were invitedto discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860.And in 1860, this group of people came together,and they all speculated about what would happento the city of New York in 100 years,and the conclusion was unanimous:The city of New York would not exist in 100 years.Why? Because they looked at the curve and said,if the population keeps growing at this rate,to move the population of New York around,they would have needed six million horses,and the manure created by six million horseswould be impossible to deal with.They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter)So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technologythat is going to choke the life out of New York.
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900,in the United States of America, there were 1,001car manufacturing companies -- 1,001.The idea of finding a different technologyhad absolutely taken over,and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters.Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.
However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs.First, you have to offer them confidentiality.Otherwise they don't come and talk to you.Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated,passionate service to them.And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship.The smallest company, the biggest company,has to be capable of doing three things beautifully:The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic,you have to have fantastic marketing,and you have to have tremendous financial management.Guess what?We have never met a single human beingin the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money.It doesn't exist.This person has never been born.We've done the research, and we have lookedat the 100 iconic companies of the world --Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford,all the new companies, Google, Yahoo.There's only one thing that all the successful companiesin the world have in common, only one:None were started by one person.Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-oldsin Northumberland, and we start the classby giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography,and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline,in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiographyhow many times Richard uses the word "I"and how many times he uses the word "we."Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times.He wasn't alone when he started.Nobody started a company alone. No one.So we can create the communitywhere we have facilitators who come from a small business backgroundsitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddieswho will do to you, what somebody did for this gentlemanwho talks about this epic,somebody who will say to you, "What do you need?What can you do? Can you make it?Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?""Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?"We activate communities.We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitatorto help you to find resources and peopleand we have discovered that the miracleof the intelligence of local people is suchthat you can change the culture and the economyof this community just by capturing the passion,the energy and imagination of your own people.
Thank you. (Applause)
Transcript:
Everything I do, and everything I do professionally --my life -- has been shapedby seven years of work as a young man in Africa.From 1971 to 1977 --I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) --I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia,in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.
I worked for an Italian NGO,and every single project that we set up in Africafailed.And I was distraught.I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good peopleand we were doing good work in Africa.Instead, everything we touched we killed.
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book,"Ripples from the Zambezi,"was a project where we Italiansdecided to teach Zambian people how to grow food.So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambiain this absolutely magnificent valleygoing down to the Zambezi River,and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoesand zucchini and ...And of course the local people had absolutely no interestin doing that, so we paid them to come and work,and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter)And we were amazed that the local people,in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture.But instead of asking them how come they were notgrowing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter)"Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation."
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully.We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomatowould grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size.And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians,"Look how easy agriculture is."When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red,overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the riverand they ate everything. (Laughter)
And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!"
And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter)
"Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked."
I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa,but then I saw what the Americans were doing,what the English were doing, what the French were doing,and after seeing what they were doing,I became quite proud of our project in Zambia.Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.
You should see the rubbish — (Applause) --You should see the rubbish that we have bestowedon unsuspecting African people.You want to read the book,read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo,Zambian woman economist.The book was published in 2009.We Western donor countries have given the African continenttwo trillion American dollars in the last 50 years.I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done.Just go and read her book.Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done.
We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries,and there are only two ways we deal with people:We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic.The two words come from the Latin root "pater,"which means "father."But they mean two different things.Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different cultureas if they were my children. "I love you so much."Patronizing, I treat everybody from another cultureas if they were my servants.That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.
I was given a slap in the face reading a book,"Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said,above all in economic development, if peopledo not wish to be helped, leave them alone.This should be the first principle of aid.The first principle of aid is respect.This morning, the gentleman who opened this conferencelay a stick on the floor, and said,"Can we -- can you imagine a citythat is not neocolonial?"
I decided when I was 27 years oldto only respond to people,and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation,where you never initiate anything,you never motivate anybody, but you become a servantof the local passion, the servant of local peoplewho have a dream to become a better person.So what you do -- you shut up.You never arrive in a community with any ideas,and you sit with the local people.We don't work from offices.We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub.We have zero infrastructure.And what we do, we become friends,and we find out what that person wants to do.
The most important thing is passion.You can give somebody an idea.If that person doesn't want to do it,what are you going to do?The passion that the person has for her own growthis the most important thing.The passion that that man has for his own personal growthis the most important thing.And then we help them to go and find the knowledge,because nobody in the world can succeed alone.The person with the idea may not have the knowledge,but the knowledge is available.
So years and years ago, I had this idea:Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the communityto tell people what to do, why don't, for once,listen to them? But not in community meetings.
Let me tell you a secret.There is a problem with community meetings.Entrepreneurs never come,and they never tell you, in a public meeting,what they want to do with their own money,what opportunity they have identified.So planning has this blind spot.The smartest people in your community you don't even know,because they don't come to your public meetings.
What we do, we work one-on-one,and to work one-on-one, you have to createa social infrastructure that doesn't exist.You have to create a new profession.The profession is the family doctor of enterprise,the family doctor of business, who sits with youin your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe,and helps you find the resources to transform your passioninto a way to make a living.
I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia.I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time,trying to go away from this patronizing bullshitthat we arrive and tell you what to do.And so what I did in Esperance that first yearwas to just walk the streets, and in three daysI had my first client, and I helped this first guywho was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy,and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth,to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say,"You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?"And I helped these five fishermen to work togetherand get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albanyfor 60 cents a kilo, but we found a wayto take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo,and the farmers came to talk to me, said,"Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?"In a year, I had 27 projects going on,and the government came to see me to say,"How can you do that?How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult.I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter)
So — (Applause) —So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter)We've done it in 300 communities around the world.We have helped to start 40,000 businesses.There is a new generation of entrepreneurswho are dying of solitude.
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history,died age 96, a few years ago.Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophybefore becoming involved in business,and this is what Peter Drucker says:"Planning is actually incompatiblewith an entrepreneurial society and economy."Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
So now you're rebuilding Christchurchwithout knowing what the smartest people in Christchurchwant to do with their own money and their own energy.You have to learn how to get these peopleto come and talk to you.You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy,you have to be fantastic at helping them,and then they will come, and they will come in droves.In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients.Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people,the intelligence and the passion?Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning?Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.
So what I'm saying is thatentrepreneurship is where it's at.We are at the end of the first industrial revolution --nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing --and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable.The internal combustion engine is not sustainable.Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable.What we have to look at is at how wefeed, cure, educate, transport, communicatefor seven billion people in a sustainable way.The technologies do not exist to do that.Who is going to invent the technologyfor the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it!Government? Forget about it!It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.
There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazinemany, many years ago.There was a group of experts who were invitedto discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860.And in 1860, this group of people came together,and they all speculated about what would happento the city of New York in 100 years,and the conclusion was unanimous:The city of New York would not exist in 100 years.Why? Because they looked at the curve and said,if the population keeps growing at this rate,to move the population of New York around,they would have needed six million horses,and the manure created by six million horseswould be impossible to deal with.They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter)So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technologythat is going to choke the life out of New York.
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900,in the United States of America, there were 1,001car manufacturing companies -- 1,001.The idea of finding a different technologyhad absolutely taken over,and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters.Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.
However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs.First, you have to offer them confidentiality.Otherwise they don't come and talk to you.Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated,passionate service to them.And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship.The smallest company, the biggest company,has to be capable of doing three things beautifully:The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic,you have to have fantastic marketing,and you have to have tremendous financial management.Guess what?We have never met a single human beingin the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money.It doesn't exist.This person has never been born.We've done the research, and we have lookedat the 100 iconic companies of the world --Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford,all the new companies, Google, Yahoo.There's only one thing that all the successful companiesin the world have in common, only one:None were started by one person.Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-oldsin Northumberland, and we start the classby giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography,and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline,in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiographyhow many times Richard uses the word "I"and how many times he uses the word "we."Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times.He wasn't alone when he started.Nobody started a company alone. No one.So we can create the communitywhere we have facilitators who come from a small business backgroundsitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddieswho will do to you, what somebody did for this gentlemanwho talks about this epic,somebody who will say to you, "What do you need?What can you do? Can you make it?Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?""Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?"We activate communities.We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitatorto help you to find resources and peopleand we have discovered that the miracleof the intelligence of local people is suchthat you can change the culture and the economyof this community just by capturing the passion,the energy and imagination of your own people.
Thank you. (Applause)
CANVAS-Introduction & Video Guides
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•How are assignments re-submitted and what does it look like? (Video)
•What are the different types of online submissions? (Video)
•What is the difference between assignments and events? (Video)
•How do I lock an Assignment? (Video)
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Course Home Page
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•InstructureCon 2011: Desire2Migrate Angels and Blackboards (Video)
•What is the Course Import Tool? (Video)
•How do I use the Course Import Tool? (Video)
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Course Setup Checklist
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Course Statistics
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Course Status
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Grades
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•How do I publish grades to my students? (Video)
•How do I drop the lowest score and curve grades? (Video)
•How do students check their hypothetical grades? (Video)
Groups
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Help Corner
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•How do I hide Module contents?
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Notification Preferences
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•What are Outcomes? (Video)
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Pages
•How do I link to the Equella Content Repository?
•What are Pages? (Video)
•How do I export Apple Pages documents to PDF? (Video)
People
•How does the People feature work? (Video)
•How can I view student statistics? (Video)
•How do I add a new user to my course? (Video)
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•How do Quizzes work? (Video)
•How do I make a Quiz visible to my students? (Video)
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•How can I give my students an extra attempt on a Quiz? (Video)
•How do I import quizzes from Respondus 4.0? (Video)
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•How do I record media comments in the SpeedGrader™? (Video)
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Wednesday, December 5, 2012
TOEIC-Practice Exam-Abridged Version-25pg
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TOEIC-Essential Tactics & Model Test 2-67pg
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TOEIC-Essential Tactics & Model Test 1-69pg
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Saturday, December 1, 2012
TED Talks-Janine Shepherd: A broken body isn´t a broken person
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Life is about opportunities,creating them and embracing them, and for me,that was the Olympic dream.That's what defined me. That was my bliss.
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team,headed towards the Winter Olympics,I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates.As we made our way up towardsthe spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney,it was the perfect autumn day:sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream.Life was good.We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hourswhen we got to the part of the ride that I loved,and that was the hills, because I loved the hills.And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I startedpumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air,I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked upto see the sun shining in my face.
And then everything went black.Where was I? What was happening?My body was consumed by pain.I'd been hit by a speeding utility truckwith only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride.I was airlifted from the scene of the accidentby a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney.I had extensive and life-threatening injuries.I'd broken my neck and my back in six places.I broke five ribs on my left side.I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone.I broke some bones in my feet.My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel.My head was cut open across the front, lifted back,exposing the skull underneath.I had head injures. I had internal injuries.I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five litersof blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold.By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospitalin Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing.I was having a really bad day. (Laughter)
For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions.I had an awareness of being in my body, but alsobeing out of my body, somewhere else, watchingfrom above as if it was happening to someone else.Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken?
But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me."
"No. It's too hard."
"Come on. This is our opportunity."
"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me."
"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together."
I was at a crossroads.I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever.It was the fight of my life.After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body,and the internal bleeding stopped.
The next concern was whether I would walk again,because I was paralyzed from the waist down.They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture,but the back was completely crushed.The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut,stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces.They'd have to operate.They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me,literally cut me in half, I have a scarthat wraps around my entire body.They picked as much broken bone as they couldthat had lodged in my spinal cord.They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back,L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib,they fused T12, L1 and L2 together.Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up.I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excitedthat the operation had been a success because at that stageI had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes,and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!"(Laughter)I had no idea. That's the sort of thingthat happens to someone else, not me, surely.
But then the doctor came over to me, and she said,"Janine, the operation was a success, and we've pickedas much bone out of your spinal cord as we could,but the damage is permanent.The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure.You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll haveall of the injuries that go along with that.You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most,you might get 10- or 20-percent return.You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life.You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life.And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame."And then she said, "Janine,you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life,because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before."
I tried to grasp what she was saying.I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done.If I couldn't do that, then what could I do?And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that,then who was I?
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal.I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed.I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings onto protect from blood clots.I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips.I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my headand I saw my world through a mirrorthat was suspended above my head.I shared the ward with five other people,and the amazing thing is that because we were all lyingparalyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like.How amazing is that? How often in lifedo you get to make friendships, judgment-free,purely based on spirit?And there were no superficial conversationsas we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears,and our hopes for life after the spinal ward.
I remember one night, one of the nurses came in,Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws.He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said,"Start threading them together."Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did.And when we'd finished, he went around silentlyand he joined all of the straws uptill it looped around the whole ward, and then he said,"Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws."And we did. And he said, "Right. Now we're all connected."And as we held on, and we breathed as one,we knew we weren't on this journey alone.And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward,there were moments of incredible depth and richness,of authenticity and connectionthat I had never experienced before.And each of us knew that when we left the spinal wardwe would never be the same.
After six months, it was time to go home.I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair,wrapped in a plaster body cast,and feeling the sun on my face for the first time.I soaked it up and I thought,how could I ever have taken this for granted?I felt so incredibly grateful for my life.But before I left the hospital, the head nursehad said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready,because when you get home, something's going to happen."And I said, "What?" And she said,"You're going to get depressed."And I said, "Not me, not Janine the Machine,"which was my nickname.She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone.In the spinal ward, that's normal.You're in a wheelchair. That's normal.But you're going to get home and realizehow different life is."
And I got home and something happened.I realized Sister Sam was right.I did get depressed.I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down,attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk.I'd lost so much weight in the hospitalI now weighed about 80 pounds.And I wanted to give up.All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door.I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed,and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again."
And I thought, "How could it? Because I've lost everythingthat I valued, everything that I'd worked towards.Gone."And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?"
And then I remembered my friendsthat were still in the spinal ward,particularly Maria.Maria was in a car accident, and she woke upon her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic,had no movement from the neck down,had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk.They told me, "We're going to move you next to herbecause we think it will be good for her."I was worried. I didn't know how I'd reactto being next to her.I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing,because Maria always smiled.She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again,albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once.And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance.
And I realized that this wasn't just my life.It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain.It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before,that I had a choice. I could keep fighting thisor I could let go and accept not only my bodybut the circumstances of my life.And then I stopped asking, "Why me?"And I started to ask, "Why not me?"And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottomis actually the perfect place to start.
I had never before thought of myself as a creative person.I was an athlete. My body was a machine.But now I was about to embark on the most creative projectthat any of us could ever do:that of rebuilding a life.And even though I had absolutely no ideawhat I was going to do, in that uncertaintycame a sense of freedom.I was no longer tied to a set path.I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities.And that realization was about to change my life.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast,an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up,and I thought to myself, "That's it!If I can't walk, then I might as well fly."I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly."She said, "That's nice, dear." (Laughter)I said, "Pass me the yellow pages."She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school,I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight.They said, "You know, when do you want to come out?"I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me outbecause I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either.Is that a problem?"I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chrisand my mom drove me out to the airport,all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body castin a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter)I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidateto get a pilot's license. (Laughter)I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand.I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson."And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws."You get her." "No, no, you take her."Finally this guy comes out. He goes,"Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying."I go, "Great." And so they drive me down,they get me out on the tarmac,and there was this red, white and blue airplane.It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit.They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit.They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere.I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?"Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up.He said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?"That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedalsto control the airplane on the ground.I said, "No, I can't use my legs."He went, "Oh."I said, "But I can use my hands," and he said, "Okay."
So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power.And as we took off down the runway,and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne,I had the most incredible sense of freedom.And Andrew said to me,as we got over the training area,"You see that mountain over there?"And I said, "Yeah."And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain."And as I looked up, I realizedthat he was pointing towards the Blue Mountainswhere the journey had begun.And I took the controls, and I was flying.And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward,and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot.Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical.But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream.So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan.And I practiced my walking as much as I could,and I went from the point of two people holding me upto one person holding me upto the point where I could walk around the furnitureas long as it wasn't too far apart.And then I made great progression to the pointwhere I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls,like this, and Mom said she was forever following me,wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter)But at least she always knew where I was.
So while the doctors continued to operateand put my body back together again,I went on with my theory study, and then eventually,and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical,and that was my green light to fly.And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school,way out of my comfort zone,all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots,you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast,and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls,my bag of medication and catheters and my limp,and they used to look at me and think,"Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this."And sometimes I thought that too.But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burnedthat far outweighed my injuries.
And little goals kept me going along the way,and eventually I got my private pilot's license,and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia.And then I learned to fly an airplane with two enginesand I got my twin engine rating.And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weatherand got my instrument rating.And then I got my commercial pilot's license.And then I got my instructor rating.And then I found myself back at that same schoolwhere I'd gone for that very first flight,teaching other people how to fly,just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward.(Applause)
And then I thought, "Why stop there?Why not learn to fly upside down?"And I did, and I learned to fly upside downand became an aerobatics flying instructor.And Mom and Dad? Never been up.But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited,it was my spirit that was unstoppable.
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said,"When you let go of what you are,you become what you might be."I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I wasthat I was able to create a completely new life.It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should havethat I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me.I now know that my real strengthnever came from my body,and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically,who I am is unchanged.The pilot light inside of me was still a light,just as it is in each and every one of us.
I know that I'm not my body,and I also know that you're not yours.And then it no longer matters what you look like,where you come from, or what you do for a living.All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanityby living our lives as the ultimate creative expressionof who we really are,because we are all connectedby millions and millions of straws,and it's time to join those upand to hang on.And if we are to move towards our collective bliss,it's time we shed our focus on the physicaland instead embrace the virtues of the heart.
So raise your straws if you'll join me.
Thank you. (Applause)Thank you.
Transcript:
Life is about opportunities,creating them and embracing them, and for me,that was the Olympic dream.That's what defined me. That was my bliss.
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team,headed towards the Winter Olympics,I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates.As we made our way up towardsthe spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney,it was the perfect autumn day:sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream.Life was good.We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hourswhen we got to the part of the ride that I loved,and that was the hills, because I loved the hills.And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I startedpumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air,I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked upto see the sun shining in my face.
And then everything went black.Where was I? What was happening?My body was consumed by pain.I'd been hit by a speeding utility truckwith only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride.I was airlifted from the scene of the accidentby a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney.I had extensive and life-threatening injuries.I'd broken my neck and my back in six places.I broke five ribs on my left side.I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone.I broke some bones in my feet.My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel.My head was cut open across the front, lifted back,exposing the skull underneath.I had head injures. I had internal injuries.I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five litersof blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold.By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospitalin Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing.I was having a really bad day. (Laughter)
For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions.I had an awareness of being in my body, but alsobeing out of my body, somewhere else, watchingfrom above as if it was happening to someone else.Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken?
But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me."
"No. It's too hard."
"Come on. This is our opportunity."
"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me."
"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together."
I was at a crossroads.I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever.It was the fight of my life.After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body,and the internal bleeding stopped.
The next concern was whether I would walk again,because I was paralyzed from the waist down.They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture,but the back was completely crushed.The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut,stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces.They'd have to operate.They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me,literally cut me in half, I have a scarthat wraps around my entire body.They picked as much broken bone as they couldthat had lodged in my spinal cord.They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back,L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib,they fused T12, L1 and L2 together.Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up.I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excitedthat the operation had been a success because at that stageI had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes,and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!"(Laughter)I had no idea. That's the sort of thingthat happens to someone else, not me, surely.
But then the doctor came over to me, and she said,"Janine, the operation was a success, and we've pickedas much bone out of your spinal cord as we could,but the damage is permanent.The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure.You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll haveall of the injuries that go along with that.You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most,you might get 10- or 20-percent return.You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life.You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life.And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame."And then she said, "Janine,you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life,because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before."
I tried to grasp what she was saying.I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done.If I couldn't do that, then what could I do?And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that,then who was I?
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal.I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed.I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings onto protect from blood clots.I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips.I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my headand I saw my world through a mirrorthat was suspended above my head.I shared the ward with five other people,and the amazing thing is that because we were all lyingparalyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like.How amazing is that? How often in lifedo you get to make friendships, judgment-free,purely based on spirit?And there were no superficial conversationsas we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears,and our hopes for life after the spinal ward.
I remember one night, one of the nurses came in,Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws.He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said,"Start threading them together."Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did.And when we'd finished, he went around silentlyand he joined all of the straws uptill it looped around the whole ward, and then he said,"Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws."And we did. And he said, "Right. Now we're all connected."And as we held on, and we breathed as one,we knew we weren't on this journey alone.And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward,there were moments of incredible depth and richness,of authenticity and connectionthat I had never experienced before.And each of us knew that when we left the spinal wardwe would never be the same.
After six months, it was time to go home.I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair,wrapped in a plaster body cast,and feeling the sun on my face for the first time.I soaked it up and I thought,how could I ever have taken this for granted?I felt so incredibly grateful for my life.But before I left the hospital, the head nursehad said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready,because when you get home, something's going to happen."And I said, "What?" And she said,"You're going to get depressed."And I said, "Not me, not Janine the Machine,"which was my nickname.She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone.In the spinal ward, that's normal.You're in a wheelchair. That's normal.But you're going to get home and realizehow different life is."
And I got home and something happened.I realized Sister Sam was right.I did get depressed.I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down,attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk.I'd lost so much weight in the hospitalI now weighed about 80 pounds.And I wanted to give up.All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door.I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed,and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again."
And I thought, "How could it? Because I've lost everythingthat I valued, everything that I'd worked towards.Gone."And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?"
And then I remembered my friendsthat were still in the spinal ward,particularly Maria.Maria was in a car accident, and she woke upon her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic,had no movement from the neck down,had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk.They told me, "We're going to move you next to herbecause we think it will be good for her."I was worried. I didn't know how I'd reactto being next to her.I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing,because Maria always smiled.She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again,albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once.And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance.
And I realized that this wasn't just my life.It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain.It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before,that I had a choice. I could keep fighting thisor I could let go and accept not only my bodybut the circumstances of my life.And then I stopped asking, "Why me?"And I started to ask, "Why not me?"And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottomis actually the perfect place to start.
I had never before thought of myself as a creative person.I was an athlete. My body was a machine.But now I was about to embark on the most creative projectthat any of us could ever do:that of rebuilding a life.And even though I had absolutely no ideawhat I was going to do, in that uncertaintycame a sense of freedom.I was no longer tied to a set path.I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities.And that realization was about to change my life.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast,an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up,and I thought to myself, "That's it!If I can't walk, then I might as well fly."I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly."She said, "That's nice, dear." (Laughter)I said, "Pass me the yellow pages."She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school,I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight.They said, "You know, when do you want to come out?"I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me outbecause I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either.Is that a problem?"I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chrisand my mom drove me out to the airport,all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body castin a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter)I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidateto get a pilot's license. (Laughter)I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand.I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson."And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws."You get her." "No, no, you take her."Finally this guy comes out. He goes,"Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying."I go, "Great." And so they drive me down,they get me out on the tarmac,and there was this red, white and blue airplane.It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit.They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit.They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere.I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?"Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up.He said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?"That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedalsto control the airplane on the ground.I said, "No, I can't use my legs."He went, "Oh."I said, "But I can use my hands," and he said, "Okay."
So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power.And as we took off down the runway,and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne,I had the most incredible sense of freedom.And Andrew said to me,as we got over the training area,"You see that mountain over there?"And I said, "Yeah."And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain."And as I looked up, I realizedthat he was pointing towards the Blue Mountainswhere the journey had begun.And I took the controls, and I was flying.And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward,and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot.Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical.But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream.So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan.And I practiced my walking as much as I could,and I went from the point of two people holding me upto one person holding me upto the point where I could walk around the furnitureas long as it wasn't too far apart.And then I made great progression to the pointwhere I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls,like this, and Mom said she was forever following me,wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter)But at least she always knew where I was.
So while the doctors continued to operateand put my body back together again,I went on with my theory study, and then eventually,and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical,and that was my green light to fly.And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school,way out of my comfort zone,all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots,you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast,and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls,my bag of medication and catheters and my limp,and they used to look at me and think,"Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this."And sometimes I thought that too.But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burnedthat far outweighed my injuries.
And little goals kept me going along the way,and eventually I got my private pilot's license,and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia.And then I learned to fly an airplane with two enginesand I got my twin engine rating.And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weatherand got my instrument rating.And then I got my commercial pilot's license.And then I got my instructor rating.And then I found myself back at that same schoolwhere I'd gone for that very first flight,teaching other people how to fly,just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward.(Applause)
And then I thought, "Why stop there?Why not learn to fly upside down?"And I did, and I learned to fly upside downand became an aerobatics flying instructor.And Mom and Dad? Never been up.But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited,it was my spirit that was unstoppable.
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said,"When you let go of what you are,you become what you might be."I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I wasthat I was able to create a completely new life.It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should havethat I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me.I now know that my real strengthnever came from my body,and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically,who I am is unchanged.The pilot light inside of me was still a light,just as it is in each and every one of us.
I know that I'm not my body,and I also know that you're not yours.And then it no longer matters what you look like,where you come from, or what you do for a living.All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanityby living our lives as the ultimate creative expressionof who we really are,because we are all connectedby millions and millions of straws,and it's time to join those upand to hang on.And if we are to move towards our collective bliss,it's time we shed our focus on the physicaland instead embrace the virtues of the heart.
So raise your straws if you'll join me.
Thank you. (Applause)Thank you.
TED Talks-Paolo Cardini: Forget multitasking, try monotasking
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
I'm a designer and an educator.I'm a multitasking person, and I push my studentsto fly through a very creative, multitasking design process.But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?
Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking.A couple of examples.Look at that.This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter)So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS,and maybe uploading some picturesabout this awesome barbecue.
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers,so this two percent of people who are ableto control multitasking environment.But what about ourselves, and what about our reality?When's the last time you really enjoyedjust the voice of your friend?So this is a project I'm working on,and this is a series of front coversto downgrade our super, hyper —(Laughter) (Applause)to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phonesinto the essence of their function.
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice?How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streetson the island.But our multitasking reality is pretty different,and full of tons of information.So what about something like thatto rediscover our sense of adventure?
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about monowhen the number of possibilities is so huge,but I push you to consider the option offocusing on just one task,or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.
So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product.Why not? So find your monotask spotwithin the multitasking world.Thank you.(Applause)
Transcript:
I'm a designer and an educator.I'm a multitasking person, and I push my studentsto fly through a very creative, multitasking design process.But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?
Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking.A couple of examples.Look at that.This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter)So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS,and maybe uploading some picturesabout this awesome barbecue.
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers,so this two percent of people who are ableto control multitasking environment.But what about ourselves, and what about our reality?When's the last time you really enjoyedjust the voice of your friend?So this is a project I'm working on,and this is a series of front coversto downgrade our super, hyper —(Laughter) (Applause)to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phonesinto the essence of their function.
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice?How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streetson the island.But our multitasking reality is pretty different,and full of tons of information.So what about something like thatto rediscover our sense of adventure?
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about monowhen the number of possibilities is so huge,but I push you to consider the option offocusing on just one task,or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.
So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product.Why not? So find your monotask spotwithin the multitasking world.Thank you.(Applause)
Monday, November 26, 2012
Edgar Dale´s Cone of Learning- Video in Spanish
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Using taboo language can alter behavior
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Using taboo language can alter behavior
Swearing provokes a stress response, even when it is done by accident, although euphemisms don’t, researchers found
By Louise Tickle / The Guardian
Oct 06, 2011
I have a friend who can’t say “fuck.” She never has been able to and shakes her head helplessly when teased and dared to give it a go. She is not a prude, but she has such a strong reaction to the word that she cannot bring herself to utter it.
Using the f-word in the first sentence of this article was not done for gratuitous effect, but how did you react to reading it? Would it have been more agreeable to see the euphemism “the f-word” instead? Do some “bad” words make you more uncomfortable than others?
It has been known for a while that people fluent in two languages respond far less strongly to swear words in their mother tongue than in their second language.
However, a new study of people’s reactions to a “bad” swear word — “fuck,” for example — compared to their reactions to a euphemism that they understood to mean the same thing now suggests our strong emotional reactions to swear words happen as a result of early verbal conditioning, rather than the meaning that is conveyed. This raises the possibility that young children may note their parents’ reactions to taboo words before they understand what the words mean.
All sorts of emotions are associated with the sound of swear words as we are growing up, said Jeff Bowers at the University of Bristol in England, who carried out the research.
The results of his study, Bowers said, throw some light on a question often debated by linguists and psychologists: Do the words you say affect the way you think and perceive the world?
Bowers wired volunteers up to a machine that would assess their stress levels by measuring their sweat. He then asked them to say swear words and their euphemisms aloud.
Even though everyone involved had volunteered for the study and was fully briefed as to what was involved, and therefore presumably not likely to be offended, participants showed higher stress levels when they were asked to swear than when asked to state the common euphemism.
Bowers said the difference in stress levels between swear words and euphemisms shows that we don’t only respond to the meaning of a swear word. The furor in December when the BBC radio journalist James Naughtie made an unfortunate slip of the tongue while introducing the British Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt on air demonstrates his point.
After the slip-up went out live on air at breakfast-time, the BBC was inundated with complaints. Presumably nobody imagined the presenter had intended to use the c-word, but many were still so shocked that they called, wrote and e-mailed to tell the broadcaster of their dismay. The BBC felt bound to apologize.
“In our view, euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger — the offending word form — with another word that is similar conceptually,” Bowers said.
A conversation reported in one of John Pilger’s books, Bowers said, gives a good example of how word forms, rather than their meanings, affect how we think and act.
At an arms fair, Pilger describes asking a salesman to describe how a cluster grenade works: “Bending over a glass case, as one does when inspecting something precious, he said, ‘This is wonderful. It is state of the art, unique. What it does is discharge copper dust, very, very fine dust, so that the particles saturate the objective ...’”
What was that “objective”? asked Pilger.
“Whatever it may be,” the salesman said.
“People?” asked Pilger.
“Well, er ... If you like,” was the salesman’s response.
Pilger observes that salesmen at these events “have the greatest difficulty saying ‘people’ and ‘kill’ and ‘maim.’”
It is doubtful there is any confusion in the minds of buyers or sellers about the function of weapons, Bowers said.
“Nevertheless, the argument we’d make as a result of our research is that the euphemisms allowed business to be conducted with minimal discomfort,” he said.
If people feel uncomfortable with certain words — it doesn’t have to be swear words; it might be bodily functions or the names for genitalia, or saying “kill” and “people” at an arms fair — they may go to great lengths to avoid using them, Bowers explains, including not entering into discussion of a particular subject at all.
This, he said, is a perfect example of how what you say — or what you find too excruciating to say — affects the way you think and act.
In demonstrating that taboo words can create a physiological effect, Bowers’ study highlights how two words that mean the same thing can provoke different responses from us, and, he said, in terms of human relationships, how “subtle differences can make all the difference in the world.”
Bowers’ study, Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity, is freely accessible at www.plosone.org
Source:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2011/10/06/2003515015
Copyright © 1999-2012 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved.
Using taboo language can alter behavior
Swearing provokes a stress response, even when it is done by accident, although euphemisms don’t, researchers found
By Louise Tickle / The Guardian
Oct 06, 2011
I have a friend who can’t say “fuck.” She never has been able to and shakes her head helplessly when teased and dared to give it a go. She is not a prude, but she has such a strong reaction to the word that she cannot bring herself to utter it.
Using the f-word in the first sentence of this article was not done for gratuitous effect, but how did you react to reading it? Would it have been more agreeable to see the euphemism “the f-word” instead? Do some “bad” words make you more uncomfortable than others?
It has been known for a while that people fluent in two languages respond far less strongly to swear words in their mother tongue than in their second language.
However, a new study of people’s reactions to a “bad” swear word — “fuck,” for example — compared to their reactions to a euphemism that they understood to mean the same thing now suggests our strong emotional reactions to swear words happen as a result of early verbal conditioning, rather than the meaning that is conveyed. This raises the possibility that young children may note their parents’ reactions to taboo words before they understand what the words mean.
All sorts of emotions are associated with the sound of swear words as we are growing up, said Jeff Bowers at the University of Bristol in England, who carried out the research.
The results of his study, Bowers said, throw some light on a question often debated by linguists and psychologists: Do the words you say affect the way you think and perceive the world?
Bowers wired volunteers up to a machine that would assess their stress levels by measuring their sweat. He then asked them to say swear words and their euphemisms aloud.
Even though everyone involved had volunteered for the study and was fully briefed as to what was involved, and therefore presumably not likely to be offended, participants showed higher stress levels when they were asked to swear than when asked to state the common euphemism.
Bowers said the difference in stress levels between swear words and euphemisms shows that we don’t only respond to the meaning of a swear word. The furor in December when the BBC radio journalist James Naughtie made an unfortunate slip of the tongue while introducing the British Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt on air demonstrates his point.
After the slip-up went out live on air at breakfast-time, the BBC was inundated with complaints. Presumably nobody imagined the presenter had intended to use the c-word, but many were still so shocked that they called, wrote and e-mailed to tell the broadcaster of their dismay. The BBC felt bound to apologize.
“In our view, euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger — the offending word form — with another word that is similar conceptually,” Bowers said.
A conversation reported in one of John Pilger’s books, Bowers said, gives a good example of how word forms, rather than their meanings, affect how we think and act.
At an arms fair, Pilger describes asking a salesman to describe how a cluster grenade works: “Bending over a glass case, as one does when inspecting something precious, he said, ‘This is wonderful. It is state of the art, unique. What it does is discharge copper dust, very, very fine dust, so that the particles saturate the objective ...’”
What was that “objective”? asked Pilger.
“Whatever it may be,” the salesman said.
“People?” asked Pilger.
“Well, er ... If you like,” was the salesman’s response.
Pilger observes that salesmen at these events “have the greatest difficulty saying ‘people’ and ‘kill’ and ‘maim.’”
It is doubtful there is any confusion in the minds of buyers or sellers about the function of weapons, Bowers said.
“Nevertheless, the argument we’d make as a result of our research is that the euphemisms allowed business to be conducted with minimal discomfort,” he said.
If people feel uncomfortable with certain words — it doesn’t have to be swear words; it might be bodily functions or the names for genitalia, or saying “kill” and “people” at an arms fair — they may go to great lengths to avoid using them, Bowers explains, including not entering into discussion of a particular subject at all.
This, he said, is a perfect example of how what you say — or what you find too excruciating to say — affects the way you think and act.
In demonstrating that taboo words can create a physiological effect, Bowers’ study highlights how two words that mean the same thing can provoke different responses from us, and, he said, in terms of human relationships, how “subtle differences can make all the difference in the world.”
Bowers’ study, Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity, is freely accessible at www.plosone.org
Source:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2011/10/06/2003515015
Copyright © 1999-2012 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
The e-book business
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The e-book business
Binding books
Oct 25th 2012
EVERYONE will be familiar with the frustration of losing a favourite book. But losing an entire library is another thing altogether. Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian technology writer, recently blogged about a woman whose e-reader had been wiped by Amazon because it claimed her account was linked to a previously blocked account. Her books were unreadable and no refund was offered.
Though it now appears that the woman's e-books have since been restored (http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-dele.html) . This incident it hardly a first. In 2009, a copyright problem led to Amazon remotely deleting copies of “Animal Farm” and “1984”, two books by George Orwell, from thousands of Kindles (and proving, once again, that reality often outdoes fiction). That time, the company offered refunds, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, eventually apologised to his customers.
It may come as a surprise that this sort of thing is even possible. After all, a high-street bookseller would not spontaneously remove paperbacks from a customer’s home, whatever infractions they may have committed. But, unlike with paper books, customers do not actually “own” the e-books they buy. Instead, they are licensed to the purchaser. Customers cannot resell them and there are restrictions on lending them. The transaction is more like renting access to a book than owning one outright. Plus, e-book sellers have the capability to take them back without warning.
The furious backlash against Amazon’s Orwell deletions in 2009 suggests that many customers do not realise this distinction. (Those that do are clued-up on software of dubious legality that can strip the electronic locks—called “digital rights management”, or DRM—from e-books.) Yet this lack of awareness of the legal terms-of-use is largely the fault of the e-book sellers. Their websites talk of “buying” books as if the digital transaction is exactly the same as one in a bookshop. And the explanation that customers are, in effect, merely “renting” their e-books is buried in long, jargon-filled license agreements that almost nobody reads.
Why are e-book buyers faced with this encumbrance? Amazon and others have never fully set out their position. But a likely reason is that publishing digital editions opens up a new form of vulnerability to the business. At the moment, people typically share or resell their books in moderation. (A well-thumbed tome has a low resale value anyway.) And they keep them shelved neatly in a sitting room, in order to have information at their fingertips and to serve as a discreet testament to one's character—or perhaps a form of self-congratulation to one's vanity.
All of this is lost with e-books: they don’t suffer from wear and tear, can be transferred at the speed of light and a digital copy may seem less valuable than a tangible one. Booksellers and publishers might reasonably fear that the sale of a single e-book could result in it being shared or resold many times over, denying the author and publisher income from their product. The threat of illegal copying must be taken into account too.
In this view, publishers and booksellers have an interest in licensing e-books and retaining control over their distribution and secondary uses. After all, e-books are a new format and a different product. If the business model needs to change, goes the argument, why shouldn't the terms-of-use and legal rights associated with the product change as well? But, if this is the case, there should be transparency for the customer too.
Source: www.economist.com
The e-book business
Binding books
Oct 25th 2012
EVERYONE will be familiar with the frustration of losing a favourite book. But losing an entire library is another thing altogether. Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian technology writer, recently blogged about a woman whose e-reader had been wiped by Amazon because it claimed her account was linked to a previously blocked account. Her books were unreadable and no refund was offered.
Though it now appears that the woman's e-books have since been restored (http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-dele.html) . This incident it hardly a first. In 2009, a copyright problem led to Amazon remotely deleting copies of “Animal Farm” and “1984”, two books by George Orwell, from thousands of Kindles (and proving, once again, that reality often outdoes fiction). That time, the company offered refunds, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, eventually apologised to his customers.
It may come as a surprise that this sort of thing is even possible. After all, a high-street bookseller would not spontaneously remove paperbacks from a customer’s home, whatever infractions they may have committed. But, unlike with paper books, customers do not actually “own” the e-books they buy. Instead, they are licensed to the purchaser. Customers cannot resell them and there are restrictions on lending them. The transaction is more like renting access to a book than owning one outright. Plus, e-book sellers have the capability to take them back without warning.
The furious backlash against Amazon’s Orwell deletions in 2009 suggests that many customers do not realise this distinction. (Those that do are clued-up on software of dubious legality that can strip the electronic locks—called “digital rights management”, or DRM—from e-books.) Yet this lack of awareness of the legal terms-of-use is largely the fault of the e-book sellers. Their websites talk of “buying” books as if the digital transaction is exactly the same as one in a bookshop. And the explanation that customers are, in effect, merely “renting” their e-books is buried in long, jargon-filled license agreements that almost nobody reads.
Why are e-book buyers faced with this encumbrance? Amazon and others have never fully set out their position. But a likely reason is that publishing digital editions opens up a new form of vulnerability to the business. At the moment, people typically share or resell their books in moderation. (A well-thumbed tome has a low resale value anyway.) And they keep them shelved neatly in a sitting room, in order to have information at their fingertips and to serve as a discreet testament to one's character—or perhaps a form of self-congratulation to one's vanity.
All of this is lost with e-books: they don’t suffer from wear and tear, can be transferred at the speed of light and a digital copy may seem less valuable than a tangible one. Booksellers and publishers might reasonably fear that the sale of a single e-book could result in it being shared or resold many times over, denying the author and publisher income from their product. The threat of illegal copying must be taken into account too.
In this view, publishers and booksellers have an interest in licensing e-books and retaining control over their distribution and secondary uses. After all, e-books are a new format and a different product. If the business model needs to change, goes the argument, why shouldn't the terms-of-use and legal rights associated with the product change as well? But, if this is the case, there should be transparency for the customer too.
Source: www.economist.com
BIOTECH-Gene therapy:Hello mothers, hello father
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Gene therapy
Hello mothers, hello father
A technique intended to eliminate mitochondrial diseases would result in people with three genetic parents
Oct 27th 2012
IS IT possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers.
The reason this is possible is that a mother’s genetic contribution to her offspring comes in two separable pieces. By far the largest is packed into the 23 chromosomes in the nucleus of an unfertilised egg. In that, she is just like the child’s father, who provides another 23 through his sperm. But the mother also contributes what is known as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are a cell’s power-packs. They convert the energy in sugar into a form usable by the cell’s molecular machinery. And because mitochondria descend from a bacterium that, about 2 billion years ago, became symbiotic with the cell from which animals and plants are descended, they have their own, small chromosomes. In people, these chromosomes carry only 37 genes, compared with the 20,000 or so of the nucleus. But all of the mitochondria in a human body are descended from those in the egg from which it grew. The sperm contributes none. And it is that fact which has allowed doctors to conceive of the idea of people with two mothers: one providing the nuclear DNA and one the mitochondrial sort.
The reason for doing this is that mutations in mitochondrial DNA, like those in the nuclear genes, can cause disease. These diseases especially affect organs such as the brain and the muscles, which have high energy requirements. Each particular mitochondrial disease is rare. But there are lots of them. All told, there is about one chance in 5,000 that a child will develop such an inherited disease. That rate is similar, for example, to the rate of fragile-X syndrome, which is the second-most-common type of congenital learning difficulty after Down’s syndrome. Mitochondrial disease is thus not a huge problem, but it is not negligible, either.
New batteries, please
To find out whether mitochondrial transplantation could work in people (it has already been demonstrated in other species of mammal) Dr Mitalipov collected eggs from the ovaries of women with mutated mitochondria and others from donors with healthy mitochondria. He then removed the nuclei of both. Those from the healthy cells, he discarded. Those from the diseased cells, he transplanted into the healthy cells. He then fertilised the result with sperm and allowed the fertilised eggs to start dividing and thus begin taking the first steps on the journey that might ultimately lead to them becoming full-fledged human beings.
Nearly all of the experimental eggs survived the replacement of their nuclei, and three-quarters were successfully fertilised. However, just over half of the resulting zygotes—as the balls of cells that form from a fertilised egg’s early division are known—displayed abnormalities. That compared with an abnormality rate of just an eighth in control zygotes grown from untransplanted, healthy eggs.
This discrepancy surprised—and worried—Dr Mitalipov. The abnormality rate he observed was much higher than those seen when the procedure is carried out on other species. That, though, could be because this is the first time it has been attempted with human eggs. Each species has its quirks, and if mitochondrial transplants were to become routine, the quirks of humans would, no doubt, quickly become apparent. With tweaks, they could be fixed, Dr Mitalipov predicts.
However, turning this experiment into a medical procedure would be a long road, and not just scientifically. Dr Mitalipov has little doubt that his zygotes could be brought to term if they were transplanted into a woman’s womb. That experiment, though, is illegal—and, in the view of some, rightly so. But the fact that it now looks possible will surely stimulate debate about whether the law should be changed.
Two kinds of question arise. One kind is pragmatic: would the process usually work and, if it did, would it always lead to a healthy baby who would have a normal chance of growing into a healthy adult? The second kind of question is moral, for what is being proposed is, in essence, genetic engineering. Not, perhaps, as classically conceived because no DNA is artificially modified. But it is engineering nevertheless. And that might worry some people.
On the first kind of question, the auspices are good. When Dr Mitalipov tested his zygotes, he could find no trace of mutated mitochondrial DNA in them, so the purpose of the procedure seems to have been achieved. And an experiment on monkeys that he began three years ago has produced four healthy offspring that are not apparently different from any other young monkey of their age. These are preliminary results, but they are encouraging.
It is on the moral questions that things may stumble. There is no consensus. Some people oppose such genetic tinkering in principle. Some worry about the consequences of a third adult being involved in the traditionally two-person process of parenthood—though the mitochondrial contribution is restricted to genes for energy-processing proteins and is unlikely to have wider ramifications on, say, family resemblance. Some worry that three-parented individuals may themselves be worried by knowledge of their origin. But until recently such questions have been hypothetical. Now they are real. In September, for example, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which deals with such matters, launched a public consultation to discuss the ethics of creating three-parent offspring of the sort Dr Mitalipov proposes. This consultation runs till December 7th and the results will be given to the government in the spring.
In the end, whether three-parent children are permitted will probably depend on the public “uggh!” factor. There was once opposition to in vitro fertilisation, with pejorative terms like “test-tube baby” being bandied about. Now, IVF is routine, and it is routine because it is successful. In the case of mitochondrial transplants what will probably happen is that one country breaks ranks, permits the procedure, and the world will then see the consequences. If they are good, you will never find anyone who will admit to having opposed the transplants in the first place. If they are bad, the phrase “I told you so” will ring from the rafters.
Source: www.economist.com
Gene therapy
Hello mothers, hello father
A technique intended to eliminate mitochondrial diseases would result in people with three genetic parents
Oct 27th 2012
IS IT possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers.
The reason this is possible is that a mother’s genetic contribution to her offspring comes in two separable pieces. By far the largest is packed into the 23 chromosomes in the nucleus of an unfertilised egg. In that, she is just like the child’s father, who provides another 23 through his sperm. But the mother also contributes what is known as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are a cell’s power-packs. They convert the energy in sugar into a form usable by the cell’s molecular machinery. And because mitochondria descend from a bacterium that, about 2 billion years ago, became symbiotic with the cell from which animals and plants are descended, they have their own, small chromosomes. In people, these chromosomes carry only 37 genes, compared with the 20,000 or so of the nucleus. But all of the mitochondria in a human body are descended from those in the egg from which it grew. The sperm contributes none. And it is that fact which has allowed doctors to conceive of the idea of people with two mothers: one providing the nuclear DNA and one the mitochondrial sort.
The reason for doing this is that mutations in mitochondrial DNA, like those in the nuclear genes, can cause disease. These diseases especially affect organs such as the brain and the muscles, which have high energy requirements. Each particular mitochondrial disease is rare. But there are lots of them. All told, there is about one chance in 5,000 that a child will develop such an inherited disease. That rate is similar, for example, to the rate of fragile-X syndrome, which is the second-most-common type of congenital learning difficulty after Down’s syndrome. Mitochondrial disease is thus not a huge problem, but it is not negligible, either.
New batteries, please
To find out whether mitochondrial transplantation could work in people (it has already been demonstrated in other species of mammal) Dr Mitalipov collected eggs from the ovaries of women with mutated mitochondria and others from donors with healthy mitochondria. He then removed the nuclei of both. Those from the healthy cells, he discarded. Those from the diseased cells, he transplanted into the healthy cells. He then fertilised the result with sperm and allowed the fertilised eggs to start dividing and thus begin taking the first steps on the journey that might ultimately lead to them becoming full-fledged human beings.
Nearly all of the experimental eggs survived the replacement of their nuclei, and three-quarters were successfully fertilised. However, just over half of the resulting zygotes—as the balls of cells that form from a fertilised egg’s early division are known—displayed abnormalities. That compared with an abnormality rate of just an eighth in control zygotes grown from untransplanted, healthy eggs.
This discrepancy surprised—and worried—Dr Mitalipov. The abnormality rate he observed was much higher than those seen when the procedure is carried out on other species. That, though, could be because this is the first time it has been attempted with human eggs. Each species has its quirks, and if mitochondrial transplants were to become routine, the quirks of humans would, no doubt, quickly become apparent. With tweaks, they could be fixed, Dr Mitalipov predicts.
However, turning this experiment into a medical procedure would be a long road, and not just scientifically. Dr Mitalipov has little doubt that his zygotes could be brought to term if they were transplanted into a woman’s womb. That experiment, though, is illegal—and, in the view of some, rightly so. But the fact that it now looks possible will surely stimulate debate about whether the law should be changed.
Two kinds of question arise. One kind is pragmatic: would the process usually work and, if it did, would it always lead to a healthy baby who would have a normal chance of growing into a healthy adult? The second kind of question is moral, for what is being proposed is, in essence, genetic engineering. Not, perhaps, as classically conceived because no DNA is artificially modified. But it is engineering nevertheless. And that might worry some people.
On the first kind of question, the auspices are good. When Dr Mitalipov tested his zygotes, he could find no trace of mutated mitochondrial DNA in them, so the purpose of the procedure seems to have been achieved. And an experiment on monkeys that he began three years ago has produced four healthy offspring that are not apparently different from any other young monkey of their age. These are preliminary results, but they are encouraging.
It is on the moral questions that things may stumble. There is no consensus. Some people oppose such genetic tinkering in principle. Some worry about the consequences of a third adult being involved in the traditionally two-person process of parenthood—though the mitochondrial contribution is restricted to genes for energy-processing proteins and is unlikely to have wider ramifications on, say, family resemblance. Some worry that three-parented individuals may themselves be worried by knowledge of their origin. But until recently such questions have been hypothetical. Now they are real. In September, for example, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which deals with such matters, launched a public consultation to discuss the ethics of creating three-parent offspring of the sort Dr Mitalipov proposes. This consultation runs till December 7th and the results will be given to the government in the spring.
In the end, whether three-parent children are permitted will probably depend on the public “uggh!” factor. There was once opposition to in vitro fertilisation, with pejorative terms like “test-tube baby” being bandied about. Now, IVF is routine, and it is routine because it is successful. In the case of mitochondrial transplants what will probably happen is that one country breaks ranks, permits the procedure, and the world will then see the consequences. If they are good, you will never find anyone who will admit to having opposed the transplants in the first place. If they are bad, the phrase “I told you so” will ring from the rafters.
Source: www.economist.com
INTAFF/POL-China’s new leadership
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
China’s new leadership
Vaunting the best, fearing the worst
China’s Communist Party is preparing for its ten-yearly change of leadership. The new team could be in for a rough ride
Oct 27th 2012
FEW Chinese know much about Xi Jinping, the man who will soon be in charge of the world’s most populous country and its second-largest economy. This makes the inhabitants of the remote village of Xiajiang, nestled by a river amid bamboo-covered hills in the eastern province of Zhejiang, highly unusual. They have received visits from Mr Xi four times in the past decade. Impressed by his solicitude, they recently erected a wooden pavilion in his honour (above). During his expected decade in power, however, Mr Xi will find few such bastions of support. The China he is preparing to rule is becoming cynical and anxious as growth slows and social and political stresses mount.
Mr Xi’s trips to Xiajiang, a long and tortuous journey past tea plantations and paddy fields in a backward pocket of the booming coastal province, were part of his prolonged apprenticeship for China’s most powerful posts. They took place while Mr Xi was the Communist Party chief of Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. He had just turned 50 when he made his first trip, continuing a tradition started by his predecessor as Zhejiang’s chief, Zhang Dejiang, who now also looks likely to be promoted to the pinnacle of power in Beijing. Mr Zhang’s idea was to visit a backward place in the countryside repeatedly to monitor its progress over time. Xiajiang was the lucky target. When Mr Xi adopted it, villagers found themselves with a sugar daddy of even greater power: the scion of a revolutionary family. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Mao’s comrades in arms, but later fell out with him and spent much of the next 16 years in some form of custody. Since 2007, when Mr Xi was elevated to the Politburo’s Standing Committee, no one has ever seriously doubted that he was being groomed for the very top.
Villagers say Mr Xi helped Xiajiang secure funding and approvals for its projects, which included pooling village land to grow grapes and medicinal plants. It is unclear how much Mr Xi was actively involved, or whether his mere interest in the village inspired lower-level officials. It is known that he took a keen interest in converting the village to the use of biogas. “A master of building methane-generating pits,” Mr Xi jokingly called himself on one visit, referring to his similar efforts back in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution when he worked in a People’s Commune in northern Shaanxi. Recalling his dusty labours there, he wrote in 1998: “I am a son of the yellow earth”—as if he, a “princeling” of one of Communist China’s most powerful families, was just a common man.
Xi, the new enigma
Mr Xi kept in touch with Xiajiang’s officials even after he became President Hu Jintao’s heir-apparent. A large copy in bronze of one of his letters, written in May last year, adorns the new pavilion. “I hope you will thoroughly implement the concept of scientific development,” he urges them. By this he means development that is fair to all, environmentally friendly and sustainable.
In a room in the village headquarters, Mr Xi’s face is all over the walls. Officials have recently given a few honoured residents large portraits of Mao Zedong to hang in their living rooms, as well as photographs of Mr Xi touring the village. (The two men look fairly similar, with their portly frames and full cheeks.) The exhibition calls the village “Happy Xiajiang”.
At the party’s 18th congress, which begins on November 8th and is expected to last about a week, it is a foregone conclusion that Mr Xi will be “elected” to the party’s new central committee of around 370 people. This will then meet, immediately after the congress, to endorse a list of members of a new Politburo. Mr Xi’s name will be at the top, replacing that of Hu Jintao as general secretary. He might also be named as the new chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, replacing Mr Hu as China’s commander-in-chief. In March next year, at the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, he will be elected as the country’s new president.
Mr Hu’s speech at the 18th congress will thus be his swansong (even if he keeps his military title for a year or two, as predecessors have done, he will probably stay out of the limelight). It will be suffused with references to the signature slogans of his leadership: “scientific development”, “building a harmonious society”, “putting people first” and generating “happiness”. (Indices measuring which have become a fad among officials in recent years, their credibility somewhat undermined by repeated findings that Lhasa, the troop-bristling capital of Tibet, is China’s happiest city of all.) Xiajiang knows the slogans well. A billboard on the edge of the river urges villagers to “liberate [their] way of thinking, promote scientific development, create a harmonious Xiajiang and bring benefit to the masses”. Mr Hu will proclaim success in endeavours like these across the country. Having presided over a quadrupling of China’s economy since he took over in 2002, he has reason to crow. In the same period China has grown from the world’s fifth-largest exporter to its biggest.
Mr Hu, aided by his prime minister, Wen Jiabao (who is also about to step down), can also point to progress towards helping the poor. During the past ten years fees and taxes imposed on farmers, once a big cause of rural unrest, have been scrapped; government-subsidised health insurance has been rolled out in the countryside, so that 97% of farmers (up from 20% a decade ago) now have rudimentary cover; and a pension scheme, albeit with tiny benefits, has been rapidly extended to all rural residents. Tuition fees at government schools were abolished in 2007 in the countryside for children aged between six and 15, and in cities the following year (though complaints abound about other charges levied by schools).
In urban China there have been improvements, too. These include huge government investment in affordable housing. A building spree launched in 2010 aims to produce 36m such units by 2015 at what China’s state-controlled media say could be a cost of more than $800 billion. Over the past five years more than 220m city-dwellers without formal employment have been enrolled in a medical-insurance scheme that offers them basic protection (though, like the rural one, it provides little comfort for those needing expensive treatment for serious ailments and accidents). This means that 95% of all Chinese now have at least some degree of health cover, up from less than 15% in 2000.
Mr Hu is also likely to highlight China’s growing global status: its rise from a middle-ranking power to one that is increasingly seen as second only to America in its ability to shape the course of global affairs, from dealing with climate change to tackling financial crises. Its influence is now evident in places where it was hardly felt a decade ago, from African countries that supply it with minerals, to European ones that see China’s spending power and its mountain of foreign currency as bulwarks against their own economic ruin. It is even planning to land a man on the moon. In July the People’s Daily, the party’s main mouthpiece, called the last decade a “glorious” one for China. “Never before has China received so much attention from the world, and the world until now has never been more in need of China.”
The people’s mistrust
Unfortunately for Mr Hu, as well as for Mr Xi, the triumphalism of the People’s Daily does not appear to be matched by public sentiment. Gauging this is difficult; but the last three years of Mr Hu’s rule have seen the opening of a rare, even if still limited, window onto the public mood.
This has been made possible by the rapid development of social media: services similar to Twitter and Facebook (both of which are blocked in China) that have achieved extraordinary penetration into the lives of Chinese of all social strata, especially the new middle class. The government tries strenuously to censor dissenting opinion online, but the digital media offer too many loopholes. One of the greatest achievements of the Hu era (though he would claim no credit) has been the creation, through social media, of the next best thing to a free press. China’s biggest microblog service, Sina Weibo, claims more than 300m users. This is misleading, since many have multiple accounts. But nearly 30m are said to be “active daily”, compared with 3m-4m copies of China’s biggest newspaper, Cankao Xiaoxi.
Chinese microbloggers relentlessly expose injustices and attack official wrongdoing and high-handedness. They help scattered, disaffected individuals feel a common bond. Local grievances that hitherto might have gone largely unnoticed are now discussed and dissected by users nationwide. Officials are often taken aback by the fervour of this debate. Sometimes they capitulate. In September photographs circulated by microbloggers of a local bureaucrat smiling at the scene of a fatal traffic accident, and wearing expensive watches, led to his dismissal.
Many of the most widely circulated comments on microblogs share a common tone: one of profound mistrust of the party and its officials. Classified digests of online opinion are distributed among Chinese leaders. They pay close attention.
Stemming this rising tide of cynicism will be one of Mr Xi’s biggest challenges. Dangerously for the country’s stability, it coincides with growing anxiety among intellectuals and the middle-class generally about where the country is heading. Even in the official media, articles occasionally appear describing the next ten years as unusually tough ones for China, economically and politically. In August official-media websites republished an article, “Internal Reference on Reforms: Report for Senior Leaders” that was circulated earlier in the year in a secret journal. Its warning about the “latent crisis” facing China in the next decade was blunt. “There are so many problems now, interlocked like dogs’ teeth,” it said, with dissatisfaction on the rise, frequent “mass disturbances” (official jargon for protests ranging in size from a handful of people to many thousands) and growing numbers of people losing hope and linking up with like-minded folk through the internet. It said these problems could, if mishandled, cause “a chain reaction that results in social turmoil or violent revolution”.
The author, Yuan Xucheng, a senior economist at the China Society of Economic Reform, a government think-tank, proposed a variety of remedies. They ranged from the liberal (such as easing government controls over interest rates, which act as a way of subsidising lending to state enterprises at the expense of ordinary savers) to the draconian (beefing up the police and “resolutely” clamping down on dissidents using “the model of class struggle”). The next ten years, argued Mr Yuan, offered the “last chance” for economic reforms that could prevent China from sliding into a “middle-income trap” of fast growth followed by prolonged stagnation.
Mr Xi is likely to share his concerns about the economy. They are similar to those raised in a report published in February by the World Bank together with another government think-tank, the Development Research Centre of the State Council. This rare joint study, produced with the strong backing of Li Keqiang (who is expected to take over from Mr Wen as prime minister next March), also raised the possibility of a “middle-income trap” and called for wide-ranging economic reforms, including ones aimed at loosening the state’s grip on vital industries, such as the financial sector. It gave warning that a sudden economic slowdown could “precipitate a fiscal and financial crisis”, with unpredictable implications for social stability (though World Bank officials tend to be optimistic that China can avoid a slump).
Dangers pending
Mr Xi is being besieged from all sides by similar warnings of possible trouble ahead. A recurring theme of commentary by both the “left” (meaning, in China, those who yearn for more old-style communism) and the “right” (as economic and political reformers are often termed) is that dangers are growing at an alarming rate. Leftists worry that the party will implode, like its counterparts in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, because it has embraced capitalism too wholeheartedly and forgotten its professed mission to serve the people. Rightists worry that China’s economic reforms have not gone nearly far enough and that political liberalisation is needed to prevent an explosion of public resentment. Both sides agree there is a lot of this, over issues ranging from corruption to a huge and conspicuous gap between rich and poor. Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology says it has become common among intellectuals to wonder whether 70 years is about the maximum a single party can remain in power, based on the records set by the Soviet Communist Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. China’s party will have done 70 years in 2019.
Chinese intellectuals and officials have a habit of worrying. They did a lot of it after the Tiananmen Square protests, as instability swept the communist world. In the early 1990s many wondered whether China could reach the end of the decade without experiencing another upheaval itself. But the forecasters of looming chaos proved dramatically wrong. They failed to predict the economic spurt in 1992 that propelled China free of its planned-economy moorings. By the turn of the century this momentum began to create a middle class whose members had a stake in keeping the growth-loving party in place.
This middle class, however, is now beginning to worry about protecting its gains from the whims of law-flouting officialdom and the caprices of the global economy. It frets about the environment and food contaminated with chemicals. Even if China’s economy, as some analysts expect, continues to grow at strong single-digit rates for the rest of the decade, most agree that the heady double-digit days of much of the past ten years are over.
China’s media censors do not want the supposed difficulties of the next few years blamed on the outgoing leadership. They were very unhappy with an essay written by one of the party’s own senior theoreticians which was published in September on the website of Caijing, a Beijing magazine. The scholar, Deng Yuwen, who is a senior editor of the party journal, Study Times, wrote that the Hu era had possibly created more problems than it had solved.
The party, he said, was facing “a crisis of legitimacy”, fuelled by such issues as the wealth gap and the party’s failure to “satisfy demands for power to be returned to the people”. Mr Deng’s views were deleted from the website within hours. On his Sina Weibo microblog (with around 6,600 followers: not bad for someone whose job is to write for party insiders) he describes himself as one who “cries out for freedom and struggles for democracy”.
Despite the censors, Mr Deng’s views continue to be echoed by party liberals. In mid-September the National Development and Reform Commission, the government’s economic-planning agency, convened a meeting of some 70 scholars in Moganshan, a hillside retreat once beloved of Shanghai’s colonial-era elite. “I strongly felt that those with ideals among the intelligentsia were full of misgivings about the situation in China today,” said Lu Ting, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who took part. Several of the scholars, he wrote for the website of Caixin, a Chinese portal, described China as being “unstable at the grass roots, dejected among the middle strata and out of control at the top”. Almost all agreed that reforms were “extremely urgent” and that without them there could be “social turmoil”.
Liberals have been encouraged by the downfall of Bo Xilai, who was dismissed as party chief of Chongqing, a region in the south-west, in March and expelled from the party in September. Leftists had been hailing Mr Bo as their champion, a defender of the communist faith. They accused the right of inventing allegations of sleaze in an effort to prevent his rise to the top alongside Mr Xi. The authorities have closed down leftist websites which once poured out articles backing him. But they have not silenced the left entirely: on October 23rd leftists published an open letter to the national legislature, signed by hundreds of people including academics and former officials, expressing support for Mr Bo. The question is, what does Mr Xi think? Will he heed the right’s demands for more rapid political and economic liberalisation, maintain Mr Hu’s ultra-cautious approach, or even take up Mr Bo’s mantle as a champion of the left?
Happy Xiajiang?
There is little doubt that Mr Xi is more confident and outgoing than Mr Hu. His lineage gives him a strong base of support among China’s ruling families. But analysts attempting to divine his views are clutching at straws. A meeting in recent weeks between Mr Xi and Hu Deping, the liberal son of China’s late party chief, Hu Yaobang, raised hopes that he might have a soft spot for reformists. Mr Xi’s record in Zhejiang inspires others to believe that he is on the side of private enterprise (the province is a bastion of it). His late father, some note, had liberal leanings. The Dalai Lama once gave a watch to the elder Mr Xi, who wore it long after the Tibetan leader had fled into exile. This has fuelled speculation that Xi Jinping might be conciliatory to Tibetans. Wishful thinking abounds.
The visitor to Mr Xi’s adopted village, Xiajiang, might be encouraged that it has tried a little democracy. A former party chief there says candidates for the post of party secretary have to have the support of 70% of the villagers, including non-party members. During his apprenticeship, however, Mr Xi has been wary of going too far with ballot-box politics. In a little-publicised speech in 2010 he attacked the notion of “choosing people simply on the basis of votes”. That is not a problem he will face at the party congress.
Source: www.economist.com
China’s new leadership
Vaunting the best, fearing the worst
China’s Communist Party is preparing for its ten-yearly change of leadership. The new team could be in for a rough ride
Oct 27th 2012
FEW Chinese know much about Xi Jinping, the man who will soon be in charge of the world’s most populous country and its second-largest economy. This makes the inhabitants of the remote village of Xiajiang, nestled by a river amid bamboo-covered hills in the eastern province of Zhejiang, highly unusual. They have received visits from Mr Xi four times in the past decade. Impressed by his solicitude, they recently erected a wooden pavilion in his honour (above). During his expected decade in power, however, Mr Xi will find few such bastions of support. The China he is preparing to rule is becoming cynical and anxious as growth slows and social and political stresses mount.
Mr Xi’s trips to Xiajiang, a long and tortuous journey past tea plantations and paddy fields in a backward pocket of the booming coastal province, were part of his prolonged apprenticeship for China’s most powerful posts. They took place while Mr Xi was the Communist Party chief of Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. He had just turned 50 when he made his first trip, continuing a tradition started by his predecessor as Zhejiang’s chief, Zhang Dejiang, who now also looks likely to be promoted to the pinnacle of power in Beijing. Mr Zhang’s idea was to visit a backward place in the countryside repeatedly to monitor its progress over time. Xiajiang was the lucky target. When Mr Xi adopted it, villagers found themselves with a sugar daddy of even greater power: the scion of a revolutionary family. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Mao’s comrades in arms, but later fell out with him and spent much of the next 16 years in some form of custody. Since 2007, when Mr Xi was elevated to the Politburo’s Standing Committee, no one has ever seriously doubted that he was being groomed for the very top.
Villagers say Mr Xi helped Xiajiang secure funding and approvals for its projects, which included pooling village land to grow grapes and medicinal plants. It is unclear how much Mr Xi was actively involved, or whether his mere interest in the village inspired lower-level officials. It is known that he took a keen interest in converting the village to the use of biogas. “A master of building methane-generating pits,” Mr Xi jokingly called himself on one visit, referring to his similar efforts back in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution when he worked in a People’s Commune in northern Shaanxi. Recalling his dusty labours there, he wrote in 1998: “I am a son of the yellow earth”—as if he, a “princeling” of one of Communist China’s most powerful families, was just a common man.
Xi, the new enigma
Mr Xi kept in touch with Xiajiang’s officials even after he became President Hu Jintao’s heir-apparent. A large copy in bronze of one of his letters, written in May last year, adorns the new pavilion. “I hope you will thoroughly implement the concept of scientific development,” he urges them. By this he means development that is fair to all, environmentally friendly and sustainable.
In a room in the village headquarters, Mr Xi’s face is all over the walls. Officials have recently given a few honoured residents large portraits of Mao Zedong to hang in their living rooms, as well as photographs of Mr Xi touring the village. (The two men look fairly similar, with their portly frames and full cheeks.) The exhibition calls the village “Happy Xiajiang”.
At the party’s 18th congress, which begins on November 8th and is expected to last about a week, it is a foregone conclusion that Mr Xi will be “elected” to the party’s new central committee of around 370 people. This will then meet, immediately after the congress, to endorse a list of members of a new Politburo. Mr Xi’s name will be at the top, replacing that of Hu Jintao as general secretary. He might also be named as the new chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, replacing Mr Hu as China’s commander-in-chief. In March next year, at the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, he will be elected as the country’s new president.
Mr Hu’s speech at the 18th congress will thus be his swansong (even if he keeps his military title for a year or two, as predecessors have done, he will probably stay out of the limelight). It will be suffused with references to the signature slogans of his leadership: “scientific development”, “building a harmonious society”, “putting people first” and generating “happiness”. (Indices measuring which have become a fad among officials in recent years, their credibility somewhat undermined by repeated findings that Lhasa, the troop-bristling capital of Tibet, is China’s happiest city of all.) Xiajiang knows the slogans well. A billboard on the edge of the river urges villagers to “liberate [their] way of thinking, promote scientific development, create a harmonious Xiajiang and bring benefit to the masses”. Mr Hu will proclaim success in endeavours like these across the country. Having presided over a quadrupling of China’s economy since he took over in 2002, he has reason to crow. In the same period China has grown from the world’s fifth-largest exporter to its biggest.
Mr Hu, aided by his prime minister, Wen Jiabao (who is also about to step down), can also point to progress towards helping the poor. During the past ten years fees and taxes imposed on farmers, once a big cause of rural unrest, have been scrapped; government-subsidised health insurance has been rolled out in the countryside, so that 97% of farmers (up from 20% a decade ago) now have rudimentary cover; and a pension scheme, albeit with tiny benefits, has been rapidly extended to all rural residents. Tuition fees at government schools were abolished in 2007 in the countryside for children aged between six and 15, and in cities the following year (though complaints abound about other charges levied by schools).
In urban China there have been improvements, too. These include huge government investment in affordable housing. A building spree launched in 2010 aims to produce 36m such units by 2015 at what China’s state-controlled media say could be a cost of more than $800 billion. Over the past five years more than 220m city-dwellers without formal employment have been enrolled in a medical-insurance scheme that offers them basic protection (though, like the rural one, it provides little comfort for those needing expensive treatment for serious ailments and accidents). This means that 95% of all Chinese now have at least some degree of health cover, up from less than 15% in 2000.
Mr Hu is also likely to highlight China’s growing global status: its rise from a middle-ranking power to one that is increasingly seen as second only to America in its ability to shape the course of global affairs, from dealing with climate change to tackling financial crises. Its influence is now evident in places where it was hardly felt a decade ago, from African countries that supply it with minerals, to European ones that see China’s spending power and its mountain of foreign currency as bulwarks against their own economic ruin. It is even planning to land a man on the moon. In July the People’s Daily, the party’s main mouthpiece, called the last decade a “glorious” one for China. “Never before has China received so much attention from the world, and the world until now has never been more in need of China.”
The people’s mistrust
Unfortunately for Mr Hu, as well as for Mr Xi, the triumphalism of the People’s Daily does not appear to be matched by public sentiment. Gauging this is difficult; but the last three years of Mr Hu’s rule have seen the opening of a rare, even if still limited, window onto the public mood.
This has been made possible by the rapid development of social media: services similar to Twitter and Facebook (both of which are blocked in China) that have achieved extraordinary penetration into the lives of Chinese of all social strata, especially the new middle class. The government tries strenuously to censor dissenting opinion online, but the digital media offer too many loopholes. One of the greatest achievements of the Hu era (though he would claim no credit) has been the creation, through social media, of the next best thing to a free press. China’s biggest microblog service, Sina Weibo, claims more than 300m users. This is misleading, since many have multiple accounts. But nearly 30m are said to be “active daily”, compared with 3m-4m copies of China’s biggest newspaper, Cankao Xiaoxi.
Chinese microbloggers relentlessly expose injustices and attack official wrongdoing and high-handedness. They help scattered, disaffected individuals feel a common bond. Local grievances that hitherto might have gone largely unnoticed are now discussed and dissected by users nationwide. Officials are often taken aback by the fervour of this debate. Sometimes they capitulate. In September photographs circulated by microbloggers of a local bureaucrat smiling at the scene of a fatal traffic accident, and wearing expensive watches, led to his dismissal.
Many of the most widely circulated comments on microblogs share a common tone: one of profound mistrust of the party and its officials. Classified digests of online opinion are distributed among Chinese leaders. They pay close attention.
Stemming this rising tide of cynicism will be one of Mr Xi’s biggest challenges. Dangerously for the country’s stability, it coincides with growing anxiety among intellectuals and the middle-class generally about where the country is heading. Even in the official media, articles occasionally appear describing the next ten years as unusually tough ones for China, economically and politically. In August official-media websites republished an article, “Internal Reference on Reforms: Report for Senior Leaders” that was circulated earlier in the year in a secret journal. Its warning about the “latent crisis” facing China in the next decade was blunt. “There are so many problems now, interlocked like dogs’ teeth,” it said, with dissatisfaction on the rise, frequent “mass disturbances” (official jargon for protests ranging in size from a handful of people to many thousands) and growing numbers of people losing hope and linking up with like-minded folk through the internet. It said these problems could, if mishandled, cause “a chain reaction that results in social turmoil or violent revolution”.
The author, Yuan Xucheng, a senior economist at the China Society of Economic Reform, a government think-tank, proposed a variety of remedies. They ranged from the liberal (such as easing government controls over interest rates, which act as a way of subsidising lending to state enterprises at the expense of ordinary savers) to the draconian (beefing up the police and “resolutely” clamping down on dissidents using “the model of class struggle”). The next ten years, argued Mr Yuan, offered the “last chance” for economic reforms that could prevent China from sliding into a “middle-income trap” of fast growth followed by prolonged stagnation.
Mr Xi is likely to share his concerns about the economy. They are similar to those raised in a report published in February by the World Bank together with another government think-tank, the Development Research Centre of the State Council. This rare joint study, produced with the strong backing of Li Keqiang (who is expected to take over from Mr Wen as prime minister next March), also raised the possibility of a “middle-income trap” and called for wide-ranging economic reforms, including ones aimed at loosening the state’s grip on vital industries, such as the financial sector. It gave warning that a sudden economic slowdown could “precipitate a fiscal and financial crisis”, with unpredictable implications for social stability (though World Bank officials tend to be optimistic that China can avoid a slump).
Dangers pending
Mr Xi is being besieged from all sides by similar warnings of possible trouble ahead. A recurring theme of commentary by both the “left” (meaning, in China, those who yearn for more old-style communism) and the “right” (as economic and political reformers are often termed) is that dangers are growing at an alarming rate. Leftists worry that the party will implode, like its counterparts in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, because it has embraced capitalism too wholeheartedly and forgotten its professed mission to serve the people. Rightists worry that China’s economic reforms have not gone nearly far enough and that political liberalisation is needed to prevent an explosion of public resentment. Both sides agree there is a lot of this, over issues ranging from corruption to a huge and conspicuous gap between rich and poor. Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology says it has become common among intellectuals to wonder whether 70 years is about the maximum a single party can remain in power, based on the records set by the Soviet Communist Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. China’s party will have done 70 years in 2019.
Chinese intellectuals and officials have a habit of worrying. They did a lot of it after the Tiananmen Square protests, as instability swept the communist world. In the early 1990s many wondered whether China could reach the end of the decade without experiencing another upheaval itself. But the forecasters of looming chaos proved dramatically wrong. They failed to predict the economic spurt in 1992 that propelled China free of its planned-economy moorings. By the turn of the century this momentum began to create a middle class whose members had a stake in keeping the growth-loving party in place.
This middle class, however, is now beginning to worry about protecting its gains from the whims of law-flouting officialdom and the caprices of the global economy. It frets about the environment and food contaminated with chemicals. Even if China’s economy, as some analysts expect, continues to grow at strong single-digit rates for the rest of the decade, most agree that the heady double-digit days of much of the past ten years are over.
China’s media censors do not want the supposed difficulties of the next few years blamed on the outgoing leadership. They were very unhappy with an essay written by one of the party’s own senior theoreticians which was published in September on the website of Caijing, a Beijing magazine. The scholar, Deng Yuwen, who is a senior editor of the party journal, Study Times, wrote that the Hu era had possibly created more problems than it had solved.
The party, he said, was facing “a crisis of legitimacy”, fuelled by such issues as the wealth gap and the party’s failure to “satisfy demands for power to be returned to the people”. Mr Deng’s views were deleted from the website within hours. On his Sina Weibo microblog (with around 6,600 followers: not bad for someone whose job is to write for party insiders) he describes himself as one who “cries out for freedom and struggles for democracy”.
Despite the censors, Mr Deng’s views continue to be echoed by party liberals. In mid-September the National Development and Reform Commission, the government’s economic-planning agency, convened a meeting of some 70 scholars in Moganshan, a hillside retreat once beloved of Shanghai’s colonial-era elite. “I strongly felt that those with ideals among the intelligentsia were full of misgivings about the situation in China today,” said Lu Ting, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who took part. Several of the scholars, he wrote for the website of Caixin, a Chinese portal, described China as being “unstable at the grass roots, dejected among the middle strata and out of control at the top”. Almost all agreed that reforms were “extremely urgent” and that without them there could be “social turmoil”.
Liberals have been encouraged by the downfall of Bo Xilai, who was dismissed as party chief of Chongqing, a region in the south-west, in March and expelled from the party in September. Leftists had been hailing Mr Bo as their champion, a defender of the communist faith. They accused the right of inventing allegations of sleaze in an effort to prevent his rise to the top alongside Mr Xi. The authorities have closed down leftist websites which once poured out articles backing him. But they have not silenced the left entirely: on October 23rd leftists published an open letter to the national legislature, signed by hundreds of people including academics and former officials, expressing support for Mr Bo. The question is, what does Mr Xi think? Will he heed the right’s demands for more rapid political and economic liberalisation, maintain Mr Hu’s ultra-cautious approach, or even take up Mr Bo’s mantle as a champion of the left?
Happy Xiajiang?
There is little doubt that Mr Xi is more confident and outgoing than Mr Hu. His lineage gives him a strong base of support among China’s ruling families. But analysts attempting to divine his views are clutching at straws. A meeting in recent weeks between Mr Xi and Hu Deping, the liberal son of China’s late party chief, Hu Yaobang, raised hopes that he might have a soft spot for reformists. Mr Xi’s record in Zhejiang inspires others to believe that he is on the side of private enterprise (the province is a bastion of it). His late father, some note, had liberal leanings. The Dalai Lama once gave a watch to the elder Mr Xi, who wore it long after the Tibetan leader had fled into exile. This has fuelled speculation that Xi Jinping might be conciliatory to Tibetans. Wishful thinking abounds.
The visitor to Mr Xi’s adopted village, Xiajiang, might be encouraged that it has tried a little democracy. A former party chief there says candidates for the post of party secretary have to have the support of 70% of the villagers, including non-party members. During his apprenticeship, however, Mr Xi has been wary of going too far with ballot-box politics. In a little-publicised speech in 2010 he attacked the notion of “choosing people simply on the basis of votes”. That is not a problem he will face at the party congress.
Source: www.economist.com
Friday, October 26, 2012
Food Technology-How Food Became Technology
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
How Food Became Technology [Excerpt]
Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness
By Frederick Kaufman | October 26, 2012
Image: Flickr.com / Antaean
Once upon a time, nymphs, sprites, and spirits ruled every cavern, tree, field, and brook, and a meal was plucked from a bush, scooped from the mud, or carved from the carcass of some unfortunate creature. Then everything changed. A tribe of infidels and heretics decided it could no longer leave something as important as breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the vagaries of chance and the whimsy of the gods. These revolutionaries drained lakes, rerouted rivers, chopped down forests, and slashed straight into the guts of Mother Earth. They were the first farmers.
Ten thousand years of meddling with food has not made the meddling any more popular, even if the history of civilization has hinged on the science of food. Assyrian bas-reliefs and Sumerian cuneiform tablets depict artificial pollination—and manipulating the sex life of plants was one of the first technological feats that enabled our world of abundant fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, and chocolate.
What set the earliest agriculturalists apart from the even earlier hunter-gatherers? As the first farmers denuded nature, hoarded seeds, and engineered crops, they most likely appeared to be mad scientists, coaxing mutant monsters from the black earth. Of course, we no longer think very much about the fact that almost everything we eat has been domesticated and that domestication implies a history of human intervention. In fact, most people are unaware that the typical supermarket and green market varieties of apples, oranges, lettuce, and raspberries are not at all the same as their wild cousins.
Domesticated fruits and vegetables are generally larger than their undomesticated counterparts. They are sweeter and more aromatic. Compared to their great-great-grandparents, modern fruits and vegetables have lost their fuzz, their fiber, their thorns, and their puberty. A modern tomato—heirloom, organic, process, vine-ripened, or otherwise—bears little resemblance to its puny, sour, undomesticated relations that sprout in the Peruvian Andes. Tomato breeding has changed tomatoes down to the DNA, and the successful varieties that have found their way into our supermarket carts have been cloned and cloned again.
The red jungle fowl of Thailand eventually became a Perdue chicken. The extinct aurochs of the Fertile Crescent eventually became Holstein cows. The primeval apples of Kazakhstan eventually became Gala and Red Delicious. Ancient tillers of the earth needed at least 300 years to domesticate corn and more than 1,000 years to domesticate wheat. But no one really knows how weeds first became crops.
Did mongrel grains serendipitously meld together and sprout from the sewage dumps of sedentary fishing tribes (a current theory), or was the domestication of wheat grasses, pomegranates, and fig trees a willful act of genius? The most ancient of these technologies created new forms of life. And our fear of Frankenstein predates Mary Shelley's monster. In The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare laced Perdita's voice with anxiety and disgust as she condemned "Nature's bastards," new varieties of flowers created by Elizabethan methods of artificial pollination. Not to worry, argued Polixenes, for "Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that mean; so over that art / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art / That Nature makes."
When we talk about the genetic alteration of plants and animals, we rehash the arguments of Perdita and Polixenes. Are molecular meddlings—from the man-made pig and the gene-whacked salmon to the genetically modified soy that hundreds of millions of us consume each day in cookies, crackers, candy bars, and sodas—are these transformations condoned by the tools nature itself has given us, or are they freaks and abominations? In producing as much food as possible for as many people as possible by creating superseeds that promise superharvests—seeds laced with DNA from other species of plants and animals—we may be redeeming the world. However, we may also be aiding and abetting the destruction of nature as we know it.
Biochemistry may be destiny. Once food DNA was discovered, perhaps it was only a matter of time before our daily bread would fall victim to our infatuation with technology. But now that we can take apart and put together the chemical puzzle blocks of food, we can't ignore the game. We can't bury molecular biology underground and move on. We have to figure out what to do with the technology. What we do with it matters.
The greatest U.S. food technologist was arguably Luther Burbank, who bred 30,000 new varieties of plums before he came up with his pitless prune and destroyed who knows how many thousands of failed seedlings before unveiling his white blackberry and his spineless cactus. In 1893 Burbank published New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, and few doubted that the book would assure him a place in the scientific pantheon. Journalists dubbed him a "seer," Henry Ford and Thomas Edison came to visit, and Lionel Barrymore portrayed him in the 1947 radio play The Man with Green Fingers. Today, the effects of Burbank's breeding may be appreciated at McDonald's, where every French fry descends from a variety he invented in the 1870s.
It was largely because of Burbank 's extraordinary achievements in food science that the Plant Patent Act of 1930 amended U.S. patent law to provide botanists with a set of financial motivations to create new plant varieties. (Burbank was posthumously awarded U.S. plant patent numbers twelve through sixteen.) All of a sudden, plant breeding promised more than a little fame and a lot of strange new foods. There was money in it.
The Plant Patent Act of 1930 pushed food science forward and helped power agribusiness into the second most gainful enterprise in the nation (after pharmaceuticals). Companies like Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Syngenta take enormous profits from their food patent operations, but the emergence of a custom-designed corn seed cannot be blamed on the modern world's seed giants. Hybrid corn appeared more than a century ago on the U.S. retail market, and the result back then was the same as the result today: general outrage. The reason: hybrid seeds lose their potency after a single generation.
For 10,000 years of agricultural history, seeds had been free for those who cared to gather them, a gift that ensured next year's harvest. But the newfangled scientific corn seeds of the 1880s and 1890s had to be cross-pollinated, packaged, and purchased anew every year. What farmer in his or her right mind would buy new seeds every year? Seeds could be gathered from the ground. Seeds were free. Seeds wanted to be free. But then the stalks of corn from high-priced hybrid seeds began to take home banners, medals, and ribbons at state fairs, and farmers recognized that these new products were packed with new genetic information and that agricultural information was not free.
For a while, the farmers complained that the new scientific seeds should be put in contests all by themselves. But after a few harvests, no one cared how the seeds had been produced, and no one cared that they were barren. No one had ever seen such beautiful corn. No one had ever seen such extraordinary yields. No one had ever made so much money.
Soon U.S. universities were constructing their own agriculture and livestock laboratories, and institutes of higher learning joined the new molecular science of food. In the 1920s, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin named Harry Steenbock exposed milk to ultraviolet radiation, which increased its level of vitamin D. Steenbock had figured out how to use radiation to alter the chemicals in food, and with $300 of his own money he patented his method—at which point one of the world's largest companies, Quaker Oats, offered Steenbock $1 million for the rights to use his technology to fortify its breakfast cereals.
Steenbock had created food's first killer app.
Excerpted from Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by Frederick Kaufman. With permission from the publisher, Wiley. Copyright © Frederick Kaufman, 2012.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com
How Food Became Technology [Excerpt]
Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness
By Frederick Kaufman | October 26, 2012
Image: Flickr.com / Antaean
Once upon a time, nymphs, sprites, and spirits ruled every cavern, tree, field, and brook, and a meal was plucked from a bush, scooped from the mud, or carved from the carcass of some unfortunate creature. Then everything changed. A tribe of infidels and heretics decided it could no longer leave something as important as breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the vagaries of chance and the whimsy of the gods. These revolutionaries drained lakes, rerouted rivers, chopped down forests, and slashed straight into the guts of Mother Earth. They were the first farmers.
Ten thousand years of meddling with food has not made the meddling any more popular, even if the history of civilization has hinged on the science of food. Assyrian bas-reliefs and Sumerian cuneiform tablets depict artificial pollination—and manipulating the sex life of plants was one of the first technological feats that enabled our world of abundant fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, and chocolate.
What set the earliest agriculturalists apart from the even earlier hunter-gatherers? As the first farmers denuded nature, hoarded seeds, and engineered crops, they most likely appeared to be mad scientists, coaxing mutant monsters from the black earth. Of course, we no longer think very much about the fact that almost everything we eat has been domesticated and that domestication implies a history of human intervention. In fact, most people are unaware that the typical supermarket and green market varieties of apples, oranges, lettuce, and raspberries are not at all the same as their wild cousins.
Domesticated fruits and vegetables are generally larger than their undomesticated counterparts. They are sweeter and more aromatic. Compared to their great-great-grandparents, modern fruits and vegetables have lost their fuzz, their fiber, their thorns, and their puberty. A modern tomato—heirloom, organic, process, vine-ripened, or otherwise—bears little resemblance to its puny, sour, undomesticated relations that sprout in the Peruvian Andes. Tomato breeding has changed tomatoes down to the DNA, and the successful varieties that have found their way into our supermarket carts have been cloned and cloned again.
The red jungle fowl of Thailand eventually became a Perdue chicken. The extinct aurochs of the Fertile Crescent eventually became Holstein cows. The primeval apples of Kazakhstan eventually became Gala and Red Delicious. Ancient tillers of the earth needed at least 300 years to domesticate corn and more than 1,000 years to domesticate wheat. But no one really knows how weeds first became crops.
Did mongrel grains serendipitously meld together and sprout from the sewage dumps of sedentary fishing tribes (a current theory), or was the domestication of wheat grasses, pomegranates, and fig trees a willful act of genius? The most ancient of these technologies created new forms of life. And our fear of Frankenstein predates Mary Shelley's monster. In The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare laced Perdita's voice with anxiety and disgust as she condemned "Nature's bastards," new varieties of flowers created by Elizabethan methods of artificial pollination. Not to worry, argued Polixenes, for "Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that mean; so over that art / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art / That Nature makes."
When we talk about the genetic alteration of plants and animals, we rehash the arguments of Perdita and Polixenes. Are molecular meddlings—from the man-made pig and the gene-whacked salmon to the genetically modified soy that hundreds of millions of us consume each day in cookies, crackers, candy bars, and sodas—are these transformations condoned by the tools nature itself has given us, or are they freaks and abominations? In producing as much food as possible for as many people as possible by creating superseeds that promise superharvests—seeds laced with DNA from other species of plants and animals—we may be redeeming the world. However, we may also be aiding and abetting the destruction of nature as we know it.
Biochemistry may be destiny. Once food DNA was discovered, perhaps it was only a matter of time before our daily bread would fall victim to our infatuation with technology. But now that we can take apart and put together the chemical puzzle blocks of food, we can't ignore the game. We can't bury molecular biology underground and move on. We have to figure out what to do with the technology. What we do with it matters.
The greatest U.S. food technologist was arguably Luther Burbank, who bred 30,000 new varieties of plums before he came up with his pitless prune and destroyed who knows how many thousands of failed seedlings before unveiling his white blackberry and his spineless cactus. In 1893 Burbank published New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, and few doubted that the book would assure him a place in the scientific pantheon. Journalists dubbed him a "seer," Henry Ford and Thomas Edison came to visit, and Lionel Barrymore portrayed him in the 1947 radio play The Man with Green Fingers. Today, the effects of Burbank's breeding may be appreciated at McDonald's, where every French fry descends from a variety he invented in the 1870s.
It was largely because of Burbank 's extraordinary achievements in food science that the Plant Patent Act of 1930 amended U.S. patent law to provide botanists with a set of financial motivations to create new plant varieties. (Burbank was posthumously awarded U.S. plant patent numbers twelve through sixteen.) All of a sudden, plant breeding promised more than a little fame and a lot of strange new foods. There was money in it.
The Plant Patent Act of 1930 pushed food science forward and helped power agribusiness into the second most gainful enterprise in the nation (after pharmaceuticals). Companies like Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Syngenta take enormous profits from their food patent operations, but the emergence of a custom-designed corn seed cannot be blamed on the modern world's seed giants. Hybrid corn appeared more than a century ago on the U.S. retail market, and the result back then was the same as the result today: general outrage. The reason: hybrid seeds lose their potency after a single generation.
For 10,000 years of agricultural history, seeds had been free for those who cared to gather them, a gift that ensured next year's harvest. But the newfangled scientific corn seeds of the 1880s and 1890s had to be cross-pollinated, packaged, and purchased anew every year. What farmer in his or her right mind would buy new seeds every year? Seeds could be gathered from the ground. Seeds were free. Seeds wanted to be free. But then the stalks of corn from high-priced hybrid seeds began to take home banners, medals, and ribbons at state fairs, and farmers recognized that these new products were packed with new genetic information and that agricultural information was not free.
For a while, the farmers complained that the new scientific seeds should be put in contests all by themselves. But after a few harvests, no one cared how the seeds had been produced, and no one cared that they were barren. No one had ever seen such beautiful corn. No one had ever seen such extraordinary yields. No one had ever made so much money.
Soon U.S. universities were constructing their own agriculture and livestock laboratories, and institutes of higher learning joined the new molecular science of food. In the 1920s, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin named Harry Steenbock exposed milk to ultraviolet radiation, which increased its level of vitamin D. Steenbock had figured out how to use radiation to alter the chemicals in food, and with $300 of his own money he patented his method—at which point one of the world's largest companies, Quaker Oats, offered Steenbock $1 million for the rights to use his technology to fortify its breakfast cereals.
Steenbock had created food's first killer app.
Excerpted from Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by Frederick Kaufman. With permission from the publisher, Wiley. Copyright © Frederick Kaufman, 2012.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com
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