天之聪教育 2013-11-20 天之聪教育 741次
本课程选自韩刚CATTI笔译课程,全程韩刚主讲,186课时
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第一篇
Paris Employs a Few Black Sheep to Tend, and Eat, a City FieldShaggy Lawn Mowers: Four black sheep are the new groundskeepers at the Paris municipa
l archives, where the grass is green and tasty.By SCOTT SAYAREPublished:
April 3, 2013
正文
PARIS - The archivists requested a donkey, but what they got from the mayor's office were four wary black sheep, which, as of Wednesday morning, were chewing away at a lumpy field of grass beside the municipal archives building as the City of Paris's newest, shaggiest lawn mowers.
Mayor Bertrand Delanoë; has made the environment a priority since his election in 2001, with popular bike- and car-sharing programs, an expanded network of designated lanes for bicycles and buses, and an enormous project to pedestrianize the banks along much of the Seine.
The sheep, which are to mow (and, not inconsequentially, fertilize) an airy half-acre patch in the 19th Arrondissementare intended in the same spirit. City Hall refers to the project as "eco-grazing," and it notes that the four ewes will prevent the use of noisy, gas-guzzling mowers and cut down on the use of herbicides.
Paris has plans for a slightly larger eco-grazing project not far from the archives building, assuming all goes well; similar projects have been under way in smaller towns in the region in recent years.
The sheep, from a rare, diminutive Breton breed called Ouessant, stand just about two feet high. Chosen for their hardiness, city officials said, they will pasture here until October inside a three-foot-high, yellow electrified fence.
"This is really not a one-shot deal," insisted René Dutrey, the adjunct mayor for the environment and sustainable development. Mr. Dutrey, a fast-talking man in orange-striped Adidas Samba sneakers, noted that the sheep had cost the city a total of just about $335, though no further economic projections have been drawn up for the time being.
Nor has the question of smell been much considered, officials said. (Though to judge by the aromas in the air on Wednesday morning, odor should not prove too problematic.)
Surprisingly, though, there are concerns that the sheep may in fact cause a drop in biodiversity. Municipal workers have discovered four distinct varieties of orchids on the patch of grass where the sheep graze, for instance, said Marcel Collet, the farmer overseeing the sheep for the city farm, the Ferme de Paris.
Scientists will monitor the mix of plant and animal species on hand, Mr. Collet said.
Biodiversity aside, the site, on a hilly, uncrowded edge of eastern Paris, is in some ways quite ideal for grazing sheep, he noted. A metal fence surrounds the grounds of the archives, and a security guard stands watch at the gate, so there is little risk that local predators - large, unleashed dogs, for instance - will be able to reach the ewes.
Curious humans, however, are encouraged to visit the sheep, and perhaps the archives, too. The eco-grazing project began as an initiative to attract the public to the archives, and informational panels have been put in place to explain what, exactly, the sheep are doing here.
"Myself, I wanted a donkey," said Agnès Masson, the director of the archives, an ultramodern 1990 edifice built of concrete and glass. Sheep, it was decided, would be more appropriate.
But the archivists have had to be trained to care for the animals. In the unlikely event that a ewe should flip onto her back, Ms. Masson said, someone must rush to put her back on her feet.
"Otherwise, it risks smothering itself," she said.
第二篇
N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 12, 2012
正文
The man on the beach that day was a mechanical-engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative stroke of his fingers — yielding a set of literal lines in the sand — Mr. Woodland, who died on Sunday at 91, conceived the modern bar code.
Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology, based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations, that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.
Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time, and the two men together made only $15,000 from it. But the curious round symbol they devised would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code (it graces tens of millions of different items) is officially known.
The bar code would never have developed as it did without a chain of events noteworthy even in the annals of invention etiology:
Had Mr. Woodland not been a Boy Scout, had he not logged hours on the beach, and had his father not been quite so afraid of organized crime, the code would very likely not have been invented in the form it was, if at all.
Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.
After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Mr. Woodland resumed his studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently. His system, which recorded 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film stock, was less cumbersome than existing methods, which relied on LPs and reel-to-reel tapes.
He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.
The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master’s degree. In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.
The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.
An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.
But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.
To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”
That consequential pass was merely the beginning. “Only seconds later,” Mr. Woodland continued, “I took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle.”
Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.
On Oct. 7, 1952, Mr. Woodland and Mr. Silver were awarded United States patent 2,612,994 for their invention — a variegated bull’s-eye of wide and narrow bands — on which they had bestowed the unromantic name “Classifying Apparatus and Method.”
But that method, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.
The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 — all they ever made from their invention.
By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.
Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland’s considerable input.
Thanks largely to the work of Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped select and popularize the rectangular bar code and who died in 2011, it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973.
Mr. Woodland, who earned a master’s in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University in the 1950s, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1992. Last year, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. (Mr. Silver, who died in 1963, was inducted posthumously along with him.)
Mr. Woodland’s death, at his home in Edgewater, N.J., was confirmed by his daughter Susan Woodland. He is also survived by his wife, the former Jacqueline Blumberg, whom he married in 1951; another daughter, Betsy Karpenkopf; a brother, David; and a granddaughter.
Today, bar codes sort the world, encapsulating the particulars of modern material culture — the wide and the narrow of things — in banded black and white.
In retail establishments worldwide they are scanned at the rate of more than five billion a day. They keep track of books in libraries, patients in hospitals and nearly anything else, animate or in-, that will serve as an affixable surface.
All because a bright young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand.
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