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可可英语听力训练：Television

Television-----the most pervasive and persuasive of modern technologies, marked by rapidchange and growth-is moving into a new era, an era of extraordinary sophistication andversatility, which promises to reshape our lives and our world. It is an electronic revolution ofsorts, made possible by the marriage of television and computer technologies.

The word "television", derived from its Greek (tele: distant) and Latin (visio: sight) roots, canliterally be interpreted as sight from a distance. Very simply put, it works in this way: through asophisticated system of electronics, television provides the capability of converting an image(focused on a special photoconductive plate within a camera) into electronic impulses, which canbe sent through a wire or cable. These impulses, when fed into a receiver (television set), canthen be electronically reconstituted into that same image.

Television is more than just an electronic system, however. It is a means of expression, as wellas a vehicle for communication, and as such becomes a powerful tool for reaching otherhuman beings.

The field of television can be divided into two categories determined by its means oftransmission. First, there is broadcast television, which reaches the masses through broad-based airwave transmission of television signals. Second, there is non broadcast television,which provides for the needs of individuals or specific interest groups through controlledtransmission techniques.

Traditionally, television has been a medium of the masses. We are most familiar with broadcasttelevision because it has been with us for about thirty-seven years in a form similar to whatexists today. During those years, it has been controlled, for the most part, by the broadcastnetworks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, who have been the major purveyors of news, information, andentertainment. These giants of broadcasting have actually shaped not only television but ourperception of it as well. We have come to look upon the picture tube as a source ofentertainment, placing our role in this dynamic medium as the passive viewer.

可可英语听力训练：Looking good by doing good

Finance and economics

Economics focus

Looking good by doing good

Jan 15th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Rewarding people for their generosity may be counterproductive

A LARGE plaque in the foyer of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), a museumhoused in a dramatic glass and metal building on the harbour’s edge, identifies its mostgenerous patrons. Visitors who stop to look will notice that some donors—including two whogave the ICA over $2.5m—have chosen not to reveal their names. Such reticence is unusual:less than 1% of private gifts to charity are anonymous. Most people (including the vastmajority of the ICA’s patrons) want their good deeds to be talked about. In “Richistan”, a bookon America’s new rich, Robert Frank writes of the several society publications in Florida’s PalmBeach which exist largely to publicise the charity of its well-heeled residents (at least beforeBernard Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme left some of them with little left to give).

As it turns out, the distinction between private and public generosity is helpful inunderstanding what motivates people to give money to charities or donate blood, acts whichare costly to the doer and primarily benefit others. Such actions are widespread, andgrowing. The $306 billion that Americans gave to charity in 2007 was more than triple theamount donated in 1965. And though a big chunk of this comes from plutocrats like Bill Gatesand Warren Buffett, whose philanthropy has attracted much attention, modest earners alsogive generously of their time and money. A 2001 survey found that 89% of Americanhouseholds gave to charity, and that 44% of adults volunteered the equivalent of 9m full-timejobs. Tax breaks explain some of the kindness of strangers. But by no means all.

Economists, who tend to think self-interest governs most actions of man, are intrigued, andhave identified several reasons to explain good deeds of this kind. Tax breaks are, of course,one of the main ones, but donors are also sometimes paid directly for their pains, and the merethought of a thank-you letter can be enough to persuade others to cough up. Some even actout of sheer altruism. But most interesting is another explanation, which is that people dogood in part because it makes them look good to those whose opinions they care about.Economists call this “image motivation”.

Dan Ariely of Duke University, Anat Bracha of Tel Aviv University, and Stephan Meier ofColumbia University sought, through experiments, to test the importance of image motivation,as well as to gain insights into how different motivating factors interact. Their results, whichthey report in a new paper*, suggest that image motivation matters a lot, at least in thelaboratory. Even more intriguingly, they find evidence that monetary incentives can actuallyreduce charitable giving when people are driven in part by a desire to look good in others’eyes.

The crucial thing about charity as a means of image building is, of course, that it can workonly if others know about it and think positively of the charity in question. So, the academicsargue, people should give more when their actions are public.

To test this, they conducted an experiment where the number of times participants clicked anawkward combination of computer keys determined how much money was donated on theirbehalf to the American Red Cross. Since 92% of participants thought highly of the Red Cross,giving to it could reasonably be assumed to make people look good to their peers. People wererandomly assigned to either a private group, where only the participant knew the amount ofthe donation, or a public group, where the participant had to stand up at the end of thesession and share this information with the group. Consistent with the hypothesis that imagemattered, participants exerted much greater effort in the public case: the average number ofclicks, at 900, was nearly double the average of 517 clicks in the private case.

However, the academics wanted to go a step further. In this, they were influenced by thetheoretical model of two economists, Roland Benabou, of Princeton University, and Jean Tirole,of Toulouse University’s Institut d’Economie Industrielle, who formalised the idea that if peopledo good to look good, introducing monetary or other rewards into the mix might complicatematters. An observer who sees someone getting paid for donating blood, for example, wouldfind it hard to differentiate between the donor’s intrinsic “goodness” and his greed.

Blood money

The idea that monetary incentives could be counterproductive has been around at least since1970, when Richard Titmuss, a British social scientist, hypothesised that paying people todonate blood would reduce the amount of blood that they gave. But Mr Ariely and hiscolleagues demonstrate a mechanism through which such confounding effects could operate.They presumed that the addition of a monetary incentive should have much less of animpact in public (where it muddles the image signal of an action) than in private (where theimage is not important). By adding a monetary reward for participants to their experiment, theacademics were able to confirm their hypothesis. In private, being paid to click increased effortfrom 548 clicks to 740, but in public, there was next to no effect.

The trio also raise the possibility that cleverly designed rewards could actually draw out moregenerosity by exploiting image motivation. Suppose, for example, that rewards were used toencourage people to support a certain cause with a minimum donation. If that cause thenpublicised those who were generous well beyond the minimum required of them, it would showthat they were not just “in it for the money”. Behavioural economics may yet provide charitieswith some creative new fund-raising techniques.

可可英语听力训练：Higher education

International

Higher education

The future is another country

Dec 30th 2008

From The Economist print edition

A world of colleges without borders should benefit everyone, including students who stay at home

JUST a few decades ago, students at universities outside their home countries formed a tiny elite. Some gained scholarships with famous names like Rhodes or Fulbright; others were sent by governments, grooming them for top jobs in academia or public service. A few were born to cosmopolitan parents who searched for the best schooling money could buy.

That picture has changed. The 20th century saw a surge in higher education; in the early 21st century, the idea of going abroad to study has become thinkable for ordinary students. In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, nearly 3m were enrolled in higher education institutions outside their own countries, a rise of more than 50% since 2000.

One reason is the growth of the global corporation; ambitious youngsters sense that a spell studying abroad will impress multinational employers. But for school-leavers in the developing world, the poor teaching and lack of places at home are stronger factors. China, the biggest “sending” country, with around 200,000 students currently in higher education abroad, has university places for less than a fifth of its 100m college-age youngsters. In June 2008 around 10m sat the gao kao, the state university entrance exam. There were places for two-thirds of them. That is despite huge growth; the number of places has risen almost fivefold in as many years.

The general level of China’s higher education remains low. In 1966 Mao Zedong closed the universities and scattered their teachers; when they re-opened they were short of cash, and a preference for rote learning still leaves many graduates ill-prepared. A 2006 study by McKinsey, a consultancy, found that of the country’s 1.6m young engineers only 10% were capable of working for multinational firms.

In the 1990s, China began pouring money into research at around 100 of its 1,800-odd higher-education institutions, hoping to create an elite tier of universities. But the country has yet to register on the global education scale: a ranking by Shanghai Jiao Tong University puts no Chinese institution in the world’s top 200 universities; Britain’s Times Higher Education magazine puts Peking University 50th and only six Chinese institutions in the top 200.

For Chinese youngsters who can raise the cash, study abroad looks attractive.

Students travel to help themselves, but universities and host countries gain too. Around a fifth of university students in Australia were born abroad, and international education is the country’s third-biggest export after coal and iron ore. Foreign students who work in their spare time plug gaps in Australia’s labour markets.

But some ideas risk succeeding too well. Since 2001 foreign students in Australia have been able to apply for residence; so the marketers of that country’s campuses have been touting an enticing deal—take a vocational course in a field where Australia needs expertise; work while studying; then settle for good.

According to Fiona Buffinton, head of Australian Education International, a government agency, about a third of the country’s foreign students are motivated mainly by the hope of gaining residence, and a third primarily by the education on offer, while also nursing hopes of staying on. Only a third plan to go home after their studies. She fears that if Australia does too well at attracting students seeking a back door to immigration, its position in the global education market—and its attractiveness to really serious students—will suffer.

Such worries are a reminder that in a global business, reputation is easily lost. In Britain, too, students from distant lands help to balance the universities’ books: fees for students from the European Union are capped at uneconomic rates. But a study by the Oxford-based Higher Education Policy Institute sounded a warning: Britain’s “quickie” masters degrees (doable in a year, and nice earners for colleges) are coming to be seen as substandard.

Meanwhile, a survey of Chinese students in Britain found that many felt their institutions valued them only for their fees.

Ideally, “sending” countries can benefit as much as those who take students. Taiwan urges its students to leave, although with 164 universities for a nation of 23m, there is no clear need. “We push them out, especially [doctoral] students,” says Ovid Tzeng, a government minister. “Otherwise everyone works on the same problems.”

A wise view—though the benefits of exporting brains can be slow to materialise. Once again, China’s history is instructive. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping decided to send 3,000 scientists to foreign universities each year for training. Even if 5% did not return, he said, the policy would be a success. In fact, only a quarter of the students who left China as a result ever returned.

So by 1990 China had a brain drain, and this prompted a row within the government, notesDavid Zweig, a Hong Kong-based scholar. Some wanted to make students return; others sawlittle point, since China lacked facilities to make use of the students’ training. Zhao Ziyang, theCommunist Party chief, said it would be more far-sighted to “store brain power overseas”. Hisideas prevailed: a new policy urged Chinese people living overseas to “serve their nation fromabroad” as consultants, investors or scholars.

The dream of bringing well-trained Chinese minds home is having some success. Some of thecash earmarked for elite universities is being used to lure scholars back to the motherland.Both the Academy of Sciences and private donors such as Li Ka-shing, a Hong Kong-basedbillionaire, are dishing out money to make conditions attractive for returning Chinese scholars.

This sort of global contest for grey matter certainly makes for a bracing environment. Bycontrast, when universities mostly recruit locally, well-known campuses can coast along,knowing they have a brand that can hardly be challenged. In a global market, cross-borderpartnerships can alter the scene, and create entirely new brand names, in very unexpectedways.

Here too, China offers interesting case studies. Under a law passed in 2003, foreign universitieswere permitted to set up campuses, or whole universities, inside China, if they partnered with alocal body. In the short period before the government called a halt to take stock, two Britishuniversities moved in.

Nottingham University opened a campus in Zhejiang province, in 2005; the British institutionrecruits students and faculty, sets course content, conducts exams and confers degrees. Ayear later Liverpool University, in partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong, one of China’s best colleges,opened a new university 100km (60 miles) from Shanghai. The first few cohorts will get degreesfrom Liverpool; the new university will soon award its own degrees. Neither British universityput up any capital; what is at risk in such ventures is mostly reputation. Both universities,respected in England, but not world-famous, have decided that risk is worth taking in the hopeof boosting their global profile.

Meanwhile, some campuses that already flourish in the global market want to go further.Spain’s IE business school ranks among the world’s top ten. It now plans to go intoundergraduate education—and, in the words of Santiago Iniguez, rector of IE’s new offshoot—to “re-invent the university”. All courses will have close ties with the hard school of real life.Would-be psychologists will see how organisations work; art students will learn how to runauctions; architects how to deliver on time and on budget. The ethos will be thoroughlyglobal, with teaching in English and up to 80% of students from outside Spain.

Masao Homma, vice-chancellor of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, thinks an influx of foreignstudents could help his country’s campuses: in a homogeneous land—which in his view isgrowing even more introvert—such exchanges could expose Japan’s young to the wider world.Academics, too, could be changed by the new arrivals. Japan’s tenured faculty members arehardly challenged by home students; foreign ones could do the trick. In Britain, Mr Hommanotes, a quarter of all students are over 25, while in his country the figure is only 2.7%.Japan’s timid young students rarely ask questions; outsiders might.

Like many of his counterparts in rich and not-so-rich countries, Mr Homma looks forward to aworld where educational shoppers take a hard look at what is on offer in the globalsupermarket before settling for a home-made product.