予測される最速のスピードで種がなくなっていくと、２２００年にはsixth mass extinctionが起きてしまようです。
March towards mass extinction Mass extinctions — loss of 75% of existing species — have happened 5 times in the planet’s history. If there are 5 million animal species and they are disappearing at rate of 0.72% per year (the upper end of estimates), a sixth mass extinction could happen by the year 2200. At the low end of the estimated range, a mass extinction would not happen for thousands of years.
１１月にWorld Parks Congressという国際会議が開かれたのに合わせて、先月は自然保護について特集を組んでいたようです。
PROTECTING THE PLANET As conservation scientists and practitioners converge on Sydney for the once-in-a-decade World Parks Congress, a Nature collection of news, comment, reviews and research explores priorities for protecting the planet.
Economics: Account for depreciation of natural capital Edward B. Barbier 05 November 2014 Economic indicators that omit the depletion and degradation of natural resources and ecosystems are misleading, warns Edward B. Barbier.
For the past year, academics and policy-makers have been discussing Thomas Piketty's 2013 economics best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century1. It documents the considerable rise over the past 40 years in national wealth relative to national income in eight of the richest economies — the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Australia. The national wealth of each of these countries increased from 2–3 times national income in 1970 to 4–6 times income in 2010.
Piketty relies on standard income conventions as prescribed in the United Nations national accounts. He includes natural resources such as fossil fuels, minerals and forests in his estimate of a country's capital. But his measures of national income and savings adjust only for depreciation of 'fixed capital' — buildings, equipment and so on.
We must also account for the depreciation of natural capital in appraising wealth. This is the value of net losses to natural resources, such as minerals, fossil fuels, forests and similar sources of material and energy inputs into our economy. If we use up more natural capital to produce economic output today, then we have less for production tomorrow.
自然の資本を計算してみたときに二つの傾向が顕著のようです。Two global trends are noticeable. First,…Second,…なんて書き方は参考にできます。
Two global trends are noticeable. First, the decline in natural capital has been five times greater on average in developing economies than in the eight richest countries. Second, natural capital depreciation in all countries has risen significantly since the 1990s. There was a dip during the global recession of 2008–09, but as the world economy has recovered, so has the rate of resource use. Ecological capital, too, is clearly endangered by current patterns of economic development. Over the past 50 years, ecosystems have been modified more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period in human history, largely to meet burgeoning demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel. According to the worldwide Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, approximately 60% of major global ecosystem services have been degraded or used unsustainably, including fresh water, wild fisheries, air and water purification, and the regulation of regional and local climate, natural hazards and pests.
Unfortunately, ecological capital, being unique, poorly understood and difficult to measure, tends to be undervalued. Consider the example of mangroves in Thailand from 1970 to 20092. Average annual mangrove loss in Thailand has fallen steadily in every decade since the 1970s. Yet cumulatively, Thailand is estimated to have lost around one-third of its mangroves since the 1970s, mainly to the expansion of shrimp farming and other coastal development.
Zoe O’Heir’s novel Hanalei Sunset experienced such success … that …
この部分だけを見てもso X that Y（文章）と同様のsuch X（名詞）that Y（文章）が登場しているな、動詞がexperience （名詞）のかたちの他動詞として用いられているが、successというポジティブな意味を持つ名詞を目的語にとることがあるのか、といった気づきがあります。
動詞experience （名詞）は辞書の例文にあるように、問題や困難などネガティブな意味を持つ名詞が続くことが多いです。TOEICでもexperience financial difficultyやexperience declines in revenueなどが登場しています。
（ケンブリッジ） experience if you experience something, it happens to you or affects you: experience a problem/difficulty We experienced a lot of difficulty in selling our house. New companies often experience a loss in their first few years. This family business has experienced steady growth and now employs 40 people.
（ロングマン） experience if you experience a problem, event, or situation, it happens to you or affects you experience problems/difficulties Many old people will experience problems as the result of retirement. Children need to experience things for themselves in order to learn from them.
This remote, two-mile crescent-shaped beach on Kauai where the emerald mountains meet the sparkling sea was selected No. 1 on “Dr. Beach” Stephen P. Leatherman's 2009 list of top 10 beaches, which was released Friday.
Hanalei beat out other shores stretching from San Diego to Cape Cod.
“The sheer beauty of Hanalei Bay is breathtaking,” said Leatherman, director of Florida International University's Laboratory for Coastal Research. “It's really an idyllic setting.”
Hanalei features postcard views from every angle and is untouched by the feverish development that has transformed the coastlines of other islands. It's cherished by both locals and tourists as the perfect spot to swim, surf, snorkel or simply escape and unwind.
最後のワーズワスの言葉はWritten In London - September, 1802 という詩の一節Plain living and high thinkingからです。タイトルをクリックしていただくと朗読してくれているサイトに飛びます
Written In London - September, 1802 by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Read by Christopher Hassall O Friend! I know not which way I must look For comfort, being, as I am, opprest, To think that now our life is only drest For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook, Or groom! — We must run glittering like a brook In the open sunshine, or we are unblest: The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.
（オックスフォード） SMS 1 [uncountable] the abbreviation for ‘short message service’ (a system for sending short written messages from one mobile/cell phone to another) 2 [countable] a message sent by SMS synonym - text, text message I'm trying to send an SMS.
（ケンブリッジ） text message a written message, often containing short forms of words, sent from one mobile phone or pager to another: He sent me a text message to say he would be late.
Internet discourse and text messages from English Grammar Today We commonly communicate by means of emails or by sending texts on mobile phones and other small devices. This type of communication is normally informal, and the messages are often written very quickly.
Emails We can write email messages like formal letters, but they are usually informal and involve shortened words and phrases. They often have ellipsis:
[Typical email] Hi, Jim. Just to say, I’m going to be late for the meeting tomorrow but will send the report to you before the end of today. Cheers, Geoff. (Hi = informal version of dear; Just to say = ellipsis of I just want to say/I’m just writing to say; will send = I will send)
Text messages Text messages are even more informal and can involve a lot of abbreviations: [Typical text message] Sara will b l8 4 the party 2nite. F, xx (Sara, [I] will be late for the party tonight. Francis)
Answers to some of your questions about text messaging on your Samsung Galaxy S 4 What's the difference between text messaging and multimedia messaging? A text message has a limit of 160 characters. For longer text messages, your Samsung Galaxy S® 4 splits the message into multiple messages. With multimedia messaging you can combine images, video, and audio with text in a single message. Note: Other devices either split long texts into 160-character messages or convert them into a multimedia message. Multimedia messages require a data connection; text messages don't.
Send or receive a text Step 1: From the home screen, tap Messaging. Note: If the shortcut is no longer on the home screen, tap Apps and tap Messaging. Messages sent or received without a messaging add-on or messaging included plan will incur an additional charge. Step 2: Tap the New Message icon.
Step 3: Enter the contact name or 10-digit number. Tap the preferred contact in the drop down menu.
Step 4: Tap the message field and enter the preferred message. When finished, tap the Send icon.
Step 5: The text message is now sent. To exit the messaging application, press the Home key.
Step 6: To open a received text message, from the home screen, tap Messaging.
Dora Bruder（邦題『1941年。パリの尋ね人』）の英訳がさっそく図書館にあったので借りて読み始めました。ちょうどノーベル賞のサイトで冒頭を朗読してくれています。フランス語ですが。。。
Excerpt from Dora Bruder/The Search Warrant Eight years ago, in an old copy of Paris Soir dated 31 December 1941, a heading on page three caught my eye: "From Day to Day".* Below this, I read:
PARIS Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy-blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M. and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.
I had long been familiar with the area around the Boulevard Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea markets. We would get off the bus either at the Porte de Clignancourt or, occasionally, outside the 18th arrondissement Town Hall. Always, it was a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge, but to keep going. It is a little like driving a car at night, in winter, on ice, with zero visibility. You have no choice, you cannot go into reverse, you must keep going forward while telling yourself that all will be well when the road becomes more stable and the fog lifts. （書くというのは、奇妙で孤独な作業です。小説の最初の数ページを書き始める時には落ち込みます。毎日、道を間違っているのではという気がします。このため、引き返して別の道を行こうという衝動に駆られます。大切なのは、この衝動に負けることなく続けることなのです。これに少しばかり似ているのが、夜中に車を運転することです。しかも冬の凍った道で視界ゼロ。選択の余地はなく、戻ることもできないので、前に進み続けないといけないのです。すべてうまくいく、道は安定したものとなり、霧も晴れるだろうからと、自分に言い聞かせながら。）
The phrase that stood out for me in the declaration following the announcement of this Nobel Prize was an allusion to World War II: 'he uncovered the life-world of the occupation'. Like everyone else born in 1945, I was a child of the war and more precisely, because I was born in Paris, a child who owed his birth to the Paris of the occupation. Those who lived in that Paris wanted to forget it very quickly or at least only remember the day-to-day details, the ones which presented the illusion that everyday life was after all not so very different from the life they led in normal times. It was all a bad dream, with vague remorse for having been in some sense survivors. Later on, when their children asked them questions about that period and that Paris, their answers were evasive. Or else they remained silent as if they wanted to rub out those dark years from their memory and keep something hidden from us. But faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.
That Paris of the occupation was a strange place. On the surface, life went on 'as before' – the theatres, cinemas, music halls and restaurants were open for business. There were songs playing on the radio. Theatre and cinema attendances were in fact much higher than before the war, as if these places were shelters where people gathered and huddled next to each other for reassurance. But there are bizarre details indicating that Paris was not at all the same as before. The lack of cars made it a silent city – a silence that revealed the rustling of trees, the clip-clopping of horses' hooves, the noise of the crowd's footsteps and the hum of voices. In the silence of the streets and of the black-out imposed at around five o'clock in winter, during which the slightest light from windows was forbidden, this city seemed to be absent from itself – the city 'without eyes' as the Nazi occupiers used to say. Adults and children could disappear without trace from one moment to the next, and even among friends, nothing was ever really spelled out and conversations were never frank because of the feeling of menace in the air.
In this Paris from a bad dream, where anyone could be denounced or picked up in a round-up at a Métro station exit, chance meetings took place between people whose paths would never have crossed during peace time, fragile love affairs were born in the gloom of the curfew, with no certainty of meeting again in the days that followed. Later, as a consequence of these often short-lived and sometimes shabby encounters, children were born. That is why for me, the Paris of the occupation was always a kind of primordial darkness. Without it I would never have been born. That Paris never stopped haunting me, and my books are sometimes bathed in its veiled light.
And here is proof that a writer is indelibly marked with the date of his birth and by his time, even if he was not directly involved in political action, even if he gives the impression of being a recluse shut away in what people call his 'ivory tower'. If he writes poems, they reflect the time he is living in and could never have been written in a different era.
This is especially true in a poem by Yeats, the great Irish writer, which I have always found deeply moving: The Wild Swans at Coole. In a park, Yeats is watching some swans glide on the water:
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings.
But now they drift on the still water Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day To find they have flown away?
Swans often appear in 19th century poetry – in Baudelaire or Mallarmé. But this poem by Yeats could not have been written in the 19th century. It has a particular rhythm and a melancholy which places it in the 20th century and even in the year in which it was written.
A writer of the 20th century may also, on occasion, feel imprisoned by his time, and reading the great 19th century novelists – Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – may bring on a certain nostalgia. In those days, time passed more slowly than today, and this slowness suited the work of the novelist because it allowed him to marshal his energy and his attention. Time has speeded up since then and moves forward in fits and starts – explaining the difference between the towering literary edifices of the past, with their cathedral-like architectures, and the disjointed and fragmented works of today. From this point of view, my own generation is a transitional one, and I would be curious to know how the next generations, born with the Internet, mobile phones, emails and tweets, will express through literature this world in which everyone is permanently 'connected' and where 'social networks' are eating into that part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our own domain until quite recently – the secrecy that gave depth to individuals and could become a major theme in a novel. But I will remain optimistic about the future of literature and I am convinced that the writers of the future will safeguard the succession just as every generation has done since Homer ...
ポーの『群衆の人』にも触れています。彼は都市への関心が強いようです。
In his short story 'The Man of the Crowd', Edgar Allen Poe was among the first to evoke the waves of humanity he observes outside a café window, walking the pavements in endless succession. He picks out an old man with an unusual appearance and follows him overnight into different parts of London in order to find out more about him. But the unknown person is a 'man of the crowd' and it is pointless following him because he will always remain anonymous and it will never be possible to find out anything about him. He does not have an individual existence, he is simply part of the mass of passers-by walking in serried ranks or jostling and losing themselves in the streets.
都市と小説家で東京は永井荷風が例として挙げられています。21世紀に入りメガ都市になるにつれ小説のかたちも変わるのではと述べていますが、it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible againと小説家の役割は変わらないとしてしめています。
You can lose yourself or disappear in a big city. You can even change your identity and live a new life. You can indulge in a very long investigation to find a trace of malice, starting only with one or two addresses in an isolated neighbourhood. I have always been fascinated by the short note that sometimes appears on search records: Last known address. Themes of disappearance, identity and the passing of time are closely bound up with the topography of cities. That is why since the 19th century, cities have been the territory of novelists, and some of the greatest of them are linked to a single city: Balzac and Paris, Dickens and London, Dostoyevsky and Saint Petersburg, Tokyo and Nagai Kafū, Stockholm and Hjalmar Söderberg.
I am of the generation which was influenced by these novelists, and which wanted in turn to explore what Baudelaire called the 'sinuous folds of the old capital cities'. Of course, fifty years ago – in other words when adolescents of my age were experiencing powerful sensations by discovering their city – cities were changing. Some of them, in America and what people call the third world, became 'megacities' reaching disturbing dimensions. The inhabitants are divided up into often neglected neighbourhoods, living in a climate of social warfare. Slums are increasing in number and becoming ever more sprawling. Until the 20th century, novelists maintained a more or less 'romantic' vision of the city, not so different from Dickens' or Baudelaire's. That is why I would like to know how the novelists of the future will evoke these gigantic urban concentrations in works of fiction.
Concerning my books, you were kind enough to allude to 'the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies'. But this compliment is about more than just me. It is about a peculiar kind of memory, which attempts to collect bits and pieces from the past and the few traces left on earth of the anonymous and the unknown. And this, too, is bound up with my year of birth: 1945. Being born in 1945, after the cities had been destroyed and entire populations had disappeared, must have made me, like others of my age, more sensitive to the themes of memory and oblivion.
Unfortunately I do not think that the remembrance of things past can be done any longer with Marcel Proust's power and candidness. The society he was describing was still stable, a 19th century society. Proust's memory causes the past to reappear in all its detail, like a tableau vivant. Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.
Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.
最後の締めの部分は別のところではもう少し具体的に語られていました。
The work of a novelist must travel in the same direction. His imagination, far from distorting reality, must get to the bottom of it, revealing this reality to itself, using the power of infrared and ultraviolet to detect what is hidden behind appearances. I could almost believe that the novelist, at his best, is a kind of clairvoyant or even visionary. He is also a seismograph, standing by to pick up barely perceptible movements.
Dec. 28, 2014 This week, Alan Riding discusses Patrick Modiano’s “Suspended Sentences”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Judith Newman talks about Ruth Goodman’s “How to Be a Victorian”; and best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.
The Swedish Academy honored him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” But if “memory” and “occupation” are useful tags for his writing, it is another word — “father” — that provides the real key to his unfinished exploration of the German occupation of France. In his late teens, Modiano deduced that his Jewish-Italian father, Albert, spent the war years as a black marketeer associated with the notorious and brutal Rue Lauriston gang, also known as the French Gestapo. And since his father revealed nothing before his death in 1977, not even who ordered his release from a Jewish detention center in Paris in 1943, Modiano became obsessed with knowing more.
His first novel, “La Place de l’Étoile,” published in 1968 and still not translated into English, is arguably his most explosive. As if directly confronting his father, Modiano’s narrator, Raphaël Schlemilovitch, is an amoral Jew who hangs out with the most renowned French collaborators. Modiano’s father was outraged, and the two became even more estranged.
In most of Modiano’s other books, in which the occupation is more of a past trauma than a continuing tragedy, he sets out to fill the gaps of memory, to discover what really happened. In the 1997 novel “Dora Bruder,” for example, he tries to unravel the mystery of why a 15-year-old Jewish girl fled the safety of a convent in late 1941, only to be recorded months later on a train carrying Jews to Auschwitz.
Twenty-six percent of France’s pre-war Jewish population died in the Holocaust. That compares with 75 percent in the Netherlands and 60 percent in Belgium. In Western Europe, only Italy was hurt less, with 20 percent. Over 25,000 French people were executed for being members of the Resistance and another 27,000 died in prison camps in Germany.
‘Broad Phenomenon’ The curators set the tone for the exhibition with a welcoming note asking the question: “All collaborators? No. But it was a broad phenomenon.”
For decades, the official French line was that the Vichy regime was an aberration imposed by the Germans while the “true” France was represented by Charles de Gaulle, who carried out the good fight from exile in London.
That image has eroded over the years.
In July 1995, a newly elected President Jacques Chirac broke with the increasingly discredited view when he recognized the responsibility of the “French state” in the deportation of Jews. About 76,000 Jews were deported from France, only 3,000 of whom returned from concentration camps.
Exhibitions and books have explored some aspects of the period, like the 2011 display that showed the intellectual and artistic life in France during the occupation.
Petain’s Call The exhibition includes Petain’s call to his countrymen to “enter the path of collaboration.”
Peschanski said he and the other curators wanted to show the “diversity” of collaborators. The ones in Vichy obeyed the German enemy. Those in Paris, dubbed “Les Collaborationistes,” embraced the fascist system of the Nazis and often were ahead of them in rounding up Jews.
Then there was the man in the street who did business with the Germans or just didn’t turn it down. There were also those who joined militias to chase Jews, Communists or Freemasons and many different other profiles.
The exhibition carries objects such as the desk of the hardliner fascist Jacques Doriot and two large maps of the camps for Jews in France in 1940 and 1942, showing the train routes used to move them around.
ニューヨークタイムズでも記事として書いています。こちらは二つの違いを以下のように定義しています。
Collaborationists: those who were entirely allied with the occupier Collaborators: those who accommodated to the circumstances
Mr. Peschanski said the exhibition distinguishes between collaborationists and collaborators — “between those who were entirely allied with the occupier and those who accommodated to the circumstances.” The collaborationists did not merely assist the Germans by following orders from Vichy or by seeking personal profit, but rather sought to achieve France’s resurgence through Nazi rule, he said.
The exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the leaders, violent propaganda and rhetoric of collaboration. The collections include insignia, leaflets, letters and other items that belonged to openly fascist politicians, including Jacques Doriot, who founded the ultranationalist French Popular Party; Joseph Darnand, who later joined the Waffen-SS; and Marcel Déat, who believed in a Nazi-dominated Europe and wanted the Vichy regime to go further in embracing fascist ideology.
Visitors can see Déat’s diary, where he related his encounter with Paul Marion, then Vichy’s general secretary for information. “Mr. Marion wants to treat the French like sick people, and carry out psychiatric propaganda,” Déat wrote. “He is a true collaborationist, and a very anti-British one. In short, he has good intentions.”
Another room has the trunk that Doriot took to the Eastern Front after he joined the French unit of the German Army.
The historian Tal Bruttmann said the exhibition’s strength was its insights into the importance of ideology in collaboration.
Word of the Yearはいろいろなところが発表しているのですね。それぞれ独自の選択基準で選んでいるようです。Websterは下記のプレスリリースの書き出しにあるとおり、検索数の多かった語をまず選び、そして、その中から昨年との検索数の差が最も大きかった語が今年の語になるようです。自社で辞書サイトを運営しているからこそできる選定方法ですね。検索数をベースに選んでいることで、Data-drivenと動画ニュースでは説明しています。そこでの一位はcultureでした。STAP細胞に関しても独特のcultureがあったのではと見ることもできるので、同じような問題意識を見出すこともできそうです。
SPRINGFIELD, MASS., December 15, 2014—Merriam-Webster Inc., America's leading dictionary publisher, has announced its top ten Words of the Year for 2014. This year's list was compiled by analyzing the top lookups in the online dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com and focusing on the words that showed the greatest increase in lookups this year as compared to last year. The results, based on approximately 100 million lookups a month, shed light on topics and ideas that sparked the nation's interest in 2014.
Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year for 2014: 1 Culture 2 Nostalgia 3 Insidious 4 Legacy 5 Feminism 6 Je ne sais quoi 7 Innovation 8 Surreptitious 9 Autonomy 10 Morbidity
To choose the word, the editors started scouring headlines in September, using Google Trends (which shows volumes of searches for certain words or phrases over time) and mining their own data to see which words spiked into the public consciousness. This “year end exercise,” the editors say, helps their lexicographers decide which words need to be updated and provides a pool of candidates for word of the year. But in the end, the winner that goes in the word-of-the-year envelope is an editorial choice, unlike outlets like Merriam-Webster, which bases their yet-to-be-announced “WOTY” almost exclusively on lookup statistics.
（プログレッシブ） Je ne sais quoi [名]言葉では言い表せないもの［こと］. ［フランス語＝I don't know what］
（オックスフォード） Je ne sais quoi [uncountable] (from French, often humorous) a good quality that is difficult to describe He has that je ne sais quoi that distinguishes a professional from an amateur.
Man, these boneless chicken wings are great. Yeah, I know-- I finally found myself a wingman. You're gonna use the wing as your wingman. Yeah, for the ladies. How is that gonna help you at all? It's gonna make me irresistable! Oh, right, yeah. Gonna give you that certain "je ne sais quoi." Jenna said what? Jenna...?! Did she mention me by name or was it just, kind of like, was she just talking in general? I said, "Je ne sais quoi." I know but what did she say? Be a wingman-- with new, all-white-meat, boneless chicken wings in three flavors. And save room for creamy cheesecake bites. This is how you SONIC.
Websterでの説明は以下です。Je ne sais quoiの意味を知らない視聴者も多かったということですよね。
6: Je ne sais quoi A television commercial shows two men eating Sonic chicken wings, one of whom states that the delicious wings will become his new "wingman" for dating, making him irresistible. His friend is skeptical: "Oh, right, gonna give you that certain je ne sais quoi?" The first man misunderstands and demands: "Jenna said what?" Je ne sais quoi is an expression that means "a pleasant quality that is hard to describe." In French, the phrase literally means "I know not what." It's used as a noun in English, and, as is often the case with French phrases, is a fancy way of saying what one wants to say.
"Jenna said what?"との空耳が面白いようですが、この男性二人のやりとりがイマイチ理解できない方は以下に丁寧に説明してくれています。
Not all lookup spikes are quite that complex. The reason “je ne sais quoi” landed at No. 6, for instance, is “dead simple,” he said. The fast-food drive-in chain Sonic, known for TV spots featuring two goofy dudes eating in a car, had them munching on boneless chicken wings in September. “I’ve finally found myself a wingman,” goofy guy No. 1 says of the wings he hopes will make him a chick magnet. “Oh right,” sneers goofy guy No. 2, “gonna give you that certain je ne sais quoi.” Responds No. 1: “Jenna said what?” They mine the word play a couple more times, but you get the picture. “Since September when this ad came out this word has been close to the Top 10 or in the Top 10 of our lookups almost every single day,” Sokolowski said. Fast-food aside, he called this year’s list a relatively sober one.
TIMEやNew York Timesだとどうしても日本発、東京発のニュースが捉えられないので、NHK WorldやJapan Timesの存在はありがたいですが、Fergusonのデモが東京でも１２月６日に行われたそうですが、Japan Timesなどは取り上げていませんでした。今回のデモはMetropolisがカバーしてくれていました。規模が小さいのでニュースバリューが小さいと判断されたのでしょうが、こういう動きが日本でもあったんですね。デモ参加を呼びかけるポスターを見るとDress Code: ALL BLACKとありますので、ほとんどの人が黒づくめの服装なのでしょう
The fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager accused of burglary, by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, this August continues to spark global outrage. Furthermore, the grand jury’s decision in November not to persecute Wilson was met with nationwide protests that brought to the forefront the issue of police brutality and violence against black people in the United States.
On December 6, Tokyo-based African American Youth Travel Program (AAYTP), a non-profit organization providing underprivileged African American youth new experiences and opportunities through travel, responded to the verdict by organizing a peaceful demonstration, with the support of the Tokyo community. Participants rallied to show support for the Ferguson protests and raise awareness for prejudice faced by black people stateside at the hands of law enforcement.
“The initial incidents themselves did not gain much attention in Japanese media, and also the fact that the history of discrimination is something that is not necessarily talked about in Japan,” she states, explaining that Japanese coverage of Ferguson was minimal until the verdict of Wilson’s non-indictment. “Most people who are unaware of the cultural differences are shocked that we still suffer discrimination in the USA.” （中略） However, Harper expresses appreciation for the amount of support coming from the community in Japan. “I am grateful for all the people around the world who are bringing to light the injustice that we as African Americans face on a daily basis. It is also very admiring to know that, in Japan, people can openly feel and understand these issues—and want to also help to make a change.”
（Wikipedia） "Hands up" as a metaphor and a movement Witness accounts differ whether Michael Brown actually had his hands up or uttered the words "don't shoot." Among some who support the gesture as means of expressing opposition to police violence, "hands up, don't shoot" has a symbolic meaning, independent of whether Brown's hands were raised. As one protester remarked, "Even if you don't find that it's true, it's a valid rallying cry... it's just a metaphor." Speaking to the Daily Mail, Elizabeth Brondolo, a psychology professor at St. John's University in New York, said "The truth always really matters, but it's important to recognize that past experience to stereotypes also influences the perception of hands being raised."
ハートマークの絵文字をWord of the Yearに選んだGlobal Language Monitorは“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”をTop Phrase of 2014にしていました。
“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “No Justice, No Peace” and are the Top Trending Phrases of the Year New Haven, CT August 22, 2014 — “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “No Justice, No Peace” are the Top Trending Phrases of 2014, according to the Global Language Monitor, which has been tracking major shifts in English language word usage since 2003. The phrases emanate from the Ferguson, MO, shooting death of the unarmed Michael Brown. Over the last ten days, protesters shouting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “No Justice, No Peace” while holding up their hands in the universal position of surrender, have appeared in cities across the nation, in NFL stadiums, on university and college campuses, and other venues.
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “No Justice, No Peace” have melded into any number of memes as the power of memes has demonstrated an ever larger effect on global communication”, said Paul JJ Payack, president and Chief Word Analyst for GLM.
Yale Law School's libraryは"I can't breathe!"を１位に"Hands up! Don't shoot!"を３位に選んでいます。
Fred Shapiro, an associate director at Yale Law School's library who annually updates the Yale Book of Quotations, named "Hands up, don't shoot" the year's third most important quote. Shapiro says he chooses quotes that are famous, culturally important or reflective of the spirit of the times.
Another protest rallying cry referencing police brutality and race in America took the No. 1 spot. "I can't breathe," repeated by Eric Garner while he was being choke-held to death by a police officer in New York, tops the quote list.
1. "I can't breathe!" - Eric Garner, videotaped exclamation while being held by a policeman in New York, July 17. 2. "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." - Bridget Anne Kelly, an aide to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, in an email to David Wildstein quoted in the New York Times, January 9. 3. "Hands up! Don't shoot!" - Chant of demonstrators protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, August. 4. "Mr. Commissioner, we found out by one phone call. You guys have a whole legal department. Can you explain that?" - TMZ reporter Adam Glyn questioning NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on why the NFL had not been able to view video of the Ray Rice incident, at a news conference on September 19. 5. "It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people." - Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, in a remark to V. Stiviano on an audio recording quoted in the Los Angeles Times, April 27.
（オックスフォード） Kwanzaa a cultural festival that is celebrated in the US by some African Americans from December 26 to January 1
（Wikipedia） Kwanzaa is a week-long celebration held in the United States and also celebrated in the Western African diaspora in other nations of the Americas. The celebration honors African heritage in African-American culture, and is observed from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a feast and gift-giving.[1] Kwanzaa has seven core principles (Nguzo Saba). It was created by Maulana Karenga, and was first celebrated in 1966–67.
（オックスフォード） Hanukkah an eight-day Jewish festival and holiday in November or December when Jews remember the occasion when the Temple in Jerusalem was dedicated again in 165 BC
ホーキング博士の意思伝達システムは「オープンソース」：四肢麻痺の患者に応用できる仕組み インテルはホーキング博士のために、効率的に意思伝達ができる新しいシステムを開発した。オープンソースのソフトを利用しているので、同様の障害を持つ多くの人に応用が可能だ。 TEXT BY KATIE COLLINS PHOTO BY INTEL TRANSLATION BY MAYUMI HIRAI/GALILEO WIRED NEWS (UK)
NEWS HIGHLIGHTS Replacing Professor Hawking's decades-old communications system, he can better communicate, has increased ease of use for his daily routine, empowered with continued independence. By January 2015, Intel will provide customizable solution to researchers and technologists. The Intel-created advanced communications platform can be adapted for 3 million people afflicted with motor neuron diseases and quadriplegia.
LONDON, Dec. 2, 2014 - Today Intel demonstrated for the first time with Professor Stephen Hawking a new Intel-created communications platform to replace his decades-old system, dramatically improving his ability to communicate with the world. The customizable platform will be available to research and technology communities by January of next year.
By studying the acute needs of Hawking, and the very specific relationship between this man and his machine, Intel has delivered a tailored solution - called ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit) - that results in improved communication for Hawking with the world. It has the potential to become the backbone of a modern, customizable system other researchers and technologists can use to benefit those who have motor neuron diseases (MND) and quadriplegia.
Hawking has an MND related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS), a condition that has progressed over the years. He is almost entirely paralyzed and communicates through technology.
"Medicine has not been able to cure me, so I rely on technology to help me communicate and live," said Hawking. "Intel has been supporting me for almost 20 years, allowing me to do what I love every day. The development of this system has the potential to improve the lives of disabled people around the world and is leading the way in terms of human interaction and the ability to overcome communication boundaries that once stood in the way."
Stephen Hawking Wants to Be a James Bond Villain Renowned scientists jokes that his wheelchair and digital voice would make him perfect fit for the part By Jon Blistein | December 2, 2014 Renowned scientist and author Stephen Hawking has made numerous TV and movie cameos and was recently the subject of the critically acclaimed biopic, The Theory of Everything. But the theoretical physicist has big ambitions for his future in film: "My ideal role would be a baddie in a James Bond film," Hawking joked during an interview with Wired's U.K. edition. "I think the wheelchair and the computer voice would fit the part."
インテルのシステムについて語っていた時も、脳波によるシステムはうまくいかなかったようで、I have not had much success with brain-computer interfaces. My carers say it’s because I have no brainwaves.と冗談を言っていました。
Intel has created a writing program for me using predictive text which allows me to write faster. The program is activated by a small sensor on my glasses. I'm writing these answers using it. Intel is going to open source it, to make it available to other disabled people. Intel has also tried facial recognition, though the range of messages that can be conveyed is limited. I have not had much success with brain-computer interfaces. My carers say it’s because I have no brainwaves.
Exclusive: Giving Stephen Hawking a voice 2 December 2014 JOAO MEDEIROS Science Editor This exclusive article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
A study that has been heavily discussed over the past week or so focuses on the bottom step in the news chain described above: the information that universities give to reporters about published research (P. Sumner et al. Br. Med. J. 349, g7015; 2014). The details appear on page 291 of this issue, but can be summarized as follows: exaggeration in press reports of published medical-research papers is also present in press releases sent out by universities to promote those papers.
To conflate, briefly, correlation and causation (which the study counts as exaggeration), it seems that blame for media hype of medical research can be placed as firmly at the door of university press offices as on the headline-hungry keyboards of journalists.
（オックスフォード） spin on information 5 [singular, uncountable] (informal) a way of presenting information or a situation in a particular way, especially one that makes you or your ideas seem good Politicians put their own spin on the economic situation.
Study points to press releases as sources of hype Scientists, press officers and journalists online are pointing fingers in light of a paper that traces the origins of exaggerated claims in health news. Chris Woolston 12 December 2014
The study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), examined 462 press releases produced by the leading 20 UK research institutions in 2011. Overall, 40% of those releases contained health advice that was more explicit than anything found in the actual article. One-third emphasized possible cause and effects when the paper merely reported correlations. And 36% of releases about studies of cells or animals over-inflated the relevance to humans.
Those exaggerations seemed to spread to the media. The study found that when news releases took liberties with the science, 58% of the resulting news stories overstated health advice; 81% highlighted cause and effects and 86% overplayed human relevance. By comparison, when news reports were based on straightforward, unembellished press releases, only 10–18% ended up stretching the truth. The authors conclude that “improving the accuracy of academic press releases could represent a key opportunity for reducing misleading health related news”.
メディアは出されたプレスリリースを検証せずにそのまま記事にしてしまう傾向があるようで、“Many reporters don’t get beyond the news release. And many more don’t get beyond the abstract. That’s simply not good enough.”と書かれています。
I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven't got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both. It all happened like this: one very windy day last November my hood blew off and went and stuck on the top of the North Pole. I told him not to, but the N.P.Bear climbed up to the thin top to get it down — and he did. The pole broke in the middle and fell on the roof of my house, and the N.P.Bear fell through the hole it made into the dining room with my hood over his nose, and all the snow fell off the roof into the house and melted and put out all the fires and ran down into the cellars where I was collecting this year's presents, and the N.P.Bear's leg got broken. He is well again now, but I was so cross with him that he says he won't try to help me again. I expect his temper is hurt, and will be mended by next Christmas. I send you a picture of the accident, and of my new house on the cliffs above the N.P. (with beautiful cellars in the cliffs). If John can't read my old shaky writing (1925 years old) he must get his father to. When is Michael going to learn to read, and write his own letters to me? Lots of love to you both and Christopher, whose name is rather like mine.
Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.
Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.
It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.
I know that when two wayfarers take shelter under the same tree and slake their thirst in the same river it has all been determined by their karma from a previous life. For the past few years you and I have shared the same pillow as man and wife who had intended to live and grow old together, and I have become as attached to you as your own shadow. This is what I believed, and I think this is what you have also thought about us.
But now I have learnt about the final enterprise on which you have decided and, though I cannot be with you to share the grand moment, I rejoice in the knowledge of it. It is said that on the eve of his final battle, the Chinese general, Hsiang Yü, valiant warrior though he was, grieved deeply about leaving Lady Yü, and that (in our own country) Kiso Yoshinaka lamented his parting from Lady Matsudono. I have now abandoned all hope about our future together in this world, and, mindful of their example, I have resolved to take the ultimate step while you are still alive. I shall be waiting for you at the end of what they call the road to death.
I pray that you may never, never forget the great bounty, deep as the ocean, high as the mountains, that has been bestowed upon us for so many years by our lord, Prince Hideyori.
この新書で、イザベラ・バードのUnbeaten Tracks in Japanの完全本の結論部分にThe Land of the Rising Sunが登場しているのを知りました。」
Of the shadows which hang upon the horizon of Japan, the darkest, to my thinking, arises from the fact that she is making the attempt, for the first time in history, to secure the fruits of Christianity without transplanting the tree from which they spring. The nation is sunk in immorality, the millstone of Orientalism hangs round her neck in the race on which she has started, and her progress is political and intellectual rather than moral; in other words, as regards the highest destiny of man, individually or collectively, it is at present a failure. The great hope for her is that she may grasp the truth and purity of primitive Christianity, as taught by the lips and life of our Lord Jesus Christ, as resolutely as she has grasped our arts and sciences; and that, in the reception of Christianity, with its true principles of manliness and national greatness, she may become, in the highest sense, " The Land of the Rising Sun " and the light of Eastern Asia.
Name: Donna Burke Age: 50 Nationality: Australian Occupation: Singer, voice actor, Tokyo Comedy store improvisor, business owner Likes: Cats Dislikes: People who don’t like cats
1. What first brought you to Japan? The chance to be a full-time singer and actor. 2. What’s keeping you here? I love Tokyo, the energy, people and the mountains nearby where I go to relax and recharge in our cabin in Minakami. There is no snow in Perth, Western Australia, and now I love skiing. 3. Who in Japan do you most admire? I admire parents who work, cook meals, clean up, plant gardens and care for pets without complaining or falling asleep at work. They are legends and superheroes who inspire me when I think I work too hard. I just think how exhausted I’d be if I was a parent. All you tired parents out there: you’re an inspiration! 5. What’s your favorite Japanese word or phrase? Ōhayō gozaimasu (good morning). I feel like a real J-hipster when I arrive at a studio saying ōhayō! It signifies that (a) I’m in the music biz, baby, and (b) you know that I know I’m in the music biz!
20. Do you have any words of advice for young people? Read lots of biographies and autobiographies. Don’t visit fortune tellers; write your own fortune. Look after your teeth — they can’t grow back. Early success is overrated — being a late bloomer is way better than peaking and burning out early in life.
“Selfie” has even inspired a family of words, including “belfie” (portrait of one’s own backside), “shelfie” (portrait of bookcase), and “nelfie” (a naked selfie, sometimes communicated through sexting, ie sexual texting, though sadly not often in my circles).
“LOL” (laugh out loud) is one of the family of abbreviations spawned by texting. Other popular ones include IDC (“I don’t care”) and YOLO (“you only live once”, as in, “☺ in Cancún YOLO”). Even French has adopted LOL and YOLO. The Académie française, custodian of the language, does not like either. It recommends replacing LOL with “MDR” (mort de rire, or “dying of laughter”). But try telling young people.
The global advance of tech and English is making languages more alike. One new international word — “nomophobia” in English, nomofobia in Italian, etc — denotes the fear of finding yourself with no mobile phone. “Vape” — to suck on an electronic cigarette — is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of 2014, while in the French vote the runner-up was vapoter, which means the same. Italians now say svapare. (Vaping, incidentally, has necessitated a new term for an old thing: “tobacco cigarette”.)
Texting and social media are particularly fertile grounds for new words, because they are the biggest forms of written mass communication ever, and they are dominated by young people. (By contrast, the over-thirties rule mainstream media.) The young are coining words faster than ever. Moreover, older people have become more open to these coinages, partly because of tech’s economic prestige. We discovered in 2012 that when the British prime minister David Cameron texted the tabloid newspaper editor Rebekah Brooks, he habitually signed off with “LOL”. He thought it meant “lots of love”. Here was the middle-aged ruling class debasing teen language.
If you think that’s a decline in standards, then hold tight: languages have begun to abandon alphabets altogether. The shortest correspondence in history was always said to be Victor Hugo’s with his publisher about sales of his book Les Miserables. “?” wrote Hugo. “!” replied the publisher. But that exchange would now be standard. The Global Language Monitor’s word of 2014 is ♥, the emoticon that denotes affection. Meanwhile the Swiss-German word of the year is #, the symbol used in a hashtag on social media. So fertile is tech-based language that Chambers now lists “bashtag” as “a hashtag used for critical or abusive comments”.
This phase of language too shall end. When voice-recognition technology improves, we won’t have to write any more. We’ll just speak into our devices. Already, the WhatsApp messaging app (new verb: “to whatsapp” or, in German, whatsappen) makes it easy to send video or audio rather than text. New tech will again create new language. Sit back and enjoy the fecundity, because YOLO☺.
YOLOが流行しているのをこの記事で知りました。。。Drakeという歌手がYou only live once. That’s the motto, ni - - a Yolo.と歌っています。
FTではThe Global Language Monitor’s word of 2014 is ♥, the emoticon that denotes affection.とemoticonを使っていましたが、当団体の発表ではemojiを使っています。
“Hands Up, No Shoot” is the Top Phrase of the Year of 2014 (see below)
AUSTIN, Texas, December 2014 — The Emoji ideograph for Heart (and Love) is the Top Word for 2014 according to the 15th Annual survey of the English language by the the Global Language Monitor. The Heart and Love emoji, emoticon, and variations thereof appear billions of times a day around the world — across languages and cultures. This is the first time an ideograph has captured Word of the Year honors.
The GLM Word, Phrase, and Names of the Year lists are intended to provide a history of each year since 2000 through English-language word usage.
” Each emoji represents an emotion, expression, or state of mind, or a person, place or thing, so much so, that we see the birth of the AlphaBorg or AlphaBit.” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor.
8:30 am ET Aug 17, 2012 SONJA CHEUNG The Land of the Rising Sun Shines on the Middle Kingdom Despite being East Asian neighbours, there has always been a very distinct divide between China and Japan. But in the venture capital world, differences can be a good thing–as Infinity Venture Partners can vouch.
The Japanese venture firm has carved out a niche where it embeds a Japanese business model into a Chinese company, then grows the business in the mainland, taking advantage of the more “scalable” market there, said Akio Tanaka, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity
韓国がLand of Morning Calmと言うのを今回初めて知りました（汗）観光ガイドや展覧会の案内で登場しています。ちなみにLand of the Long White Cloudの方はニュージラーンドでマオリ語のAoteraroa訳のようです。
From Land of the Morning Calm to the Land of the Long White Cloud exhibition at the Whangarei Art Museum showcases contemporary Korean artists in New Zealand, exploring the use of digital media, painting and sculpture by Hye Rim Lee, Joon-Hee Park , Jae Hoon Lee, Seung Yul Oh, Shin-Young Park, and Yona Lee.
Featuring past as well as the latest works from the artists, visitors to the art museum can explore the fantastical dream worlds of Hye Rim Lee and Joon-Hee Park, the sublimely poetic observations of Jae Hoon Lee, and Shin-Young Park, and the witty, playful encounters of Seung Yul Oh and Yona Lee.
Land of a million elephantsがラオスで、Land of Smilesがタイで、Land of the Pureがパキスタンだそうです。いろいろあるもんですね。
Laos — land of a million elephants by Richard Shally, Walnut Creek, CA. Photos by Henk Ten Dam, Netherlands Laos is known as “the land of a million elephants,” but are there really a million? To find out, I took a 17-day Small Group Discovery Tour with Carpe Diem Travel, a UK-based socially responsible tour company. The January ’07 tour started and ended in Bangkok. After our arrival, an introductory meeting was held by our tour leader, Marc Lansu, for the 12 world travelers who were about to begin this memorable journey to Laos, one of the least-visited and poorest of the Southeast Asian countries.
Thailand Was Never the Land of Smiles, Whatever the Guidebooks May Have Told You David Stout @david_m_stout Feb. 12, 2014 Welcome to the Land of Smiles. Thailand has never been the happy carefree place that many non-Thais have been led to believe Ornchai Kittiwongsakul / AFP / Getty Images The kingdom’s current political turmoil is not an aberration, but the norm
Anti-government protests in Thailand have claimed at least 10 lives and seen more than 600 people injured during shootings, bombings and vicious street fighting over the past three months. Snap elections have been disrupted and Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra may well be forced from office by either military or judicial intervention.
The true meaning of Pakistan Many writers translate the word ‘Pakistan’ as ‘Land of the Pure’; this is incorrect. The word Pakistan consists of two parts, i.e., Pak and Istan. While Pak is a Persian word, which mans holy/ pure/ clean, the word Istan is from the word isthan, which is a Hindi word meaning a place. For example ‘Janum Isthan’ means the place of birth. So the word Pakistan means a holy/ pure/ clean place (country) and not the ‘Land of the Pure’. The word Pak is an adjective which describes ‘Istan’ (Isthan), place and not its inhabitants. This is eulogized in the National Anthem; which begins as ‘Pak Sar Zamin Shad Baad’ As regards its inhabitants; all of them cannot be said to be pure as they have proved time and again. KHAWAJA MUHAMMAD BASHIR BUTT, Azad Kashmir, January 15.
land of milk and honeyに関しては下記のような辞書的な意味で「理想の場所」のように使われることもありますが、そのままイスラエルを指すこともあるようです。
（プログレッシブ） a land of milk and honey 乳と蜜の流れる地（▼聖書から）；実り豊かな土地；安楽の地.
（オックスフォード） the land of milk and honey a place where life is pleasant and easy and people are very happy He dreamed of emigrating to America—the land of milk and honey.
Weekend Report: 'Exodus' is Weak 'King' by Ray Subers December 14, 2014 Playing at 3,503 locations, Exodus: Gods and Kings opened to an estimated $24.1 million this weekend. That doesn't compare favorably to this year's previous Biblical movies, as its nearly $20 million lower than Noah's debut and roughly on par with the much-less-expensive Son of God.
That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, though, as opening weekends in December are historically muted. Still, Exodus doesn't look all that impressive against past December releases, either: it was roughly on par with The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ($24 million) and The Golden Compass ($25.8 million).
King James Version 14 And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you. 15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. 16 Go, and gather the elders of Israel together, and say unto them, The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt: 17 And I have said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, unto a land flowing with milk and honey. 18 And they shall hearken to thy voice: and thou shalt come, thou and the elders of Israel, unto the king of Egypt, and ye shall say unto him, The Lord God of the Hebrews hath met with us: and now let us go, we beseech thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.
Economistが年末に出すThe World Inの日本語翻訳が出ていました。英語のiPad版は900円なので買ってみました。日本についてはEconomistの東京支局長のTamzin Boothさんが以下の記事を書いていました。買った後に気づきましたがネットでも読めるのですね（涙）。ちょっと高いのですが日本語版を買って興味が持てた記事だけサイトで英語を読むという感じにすれば英語学習にも役立てられそうです。
During two lost decades, pundits have prophesied a string of new dawns and turning-points for Japan’s economy, and most have come to naught. Yet there is little doubt that 2015 will go on record as a crucial year. Three key events will test the three-part plan of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, to restore some vim to the economy.
First, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) will confront a rough deadline for its pledge to banish deflation. Most thought it would certainly miss its target, but its extra dose of quantitative easing announced in October 2014 gave more hope of reaching inflation of 2%. Second, a further rise in the consumption tax, Japan’s version of value-added tax (VAT), is due in October, 18 months after one in 2014. Given Japan’s parlous public finances, general wisdom holds that Mr Abe will have little choice but to go ahead. Yet another punch to consumer spending could floor a slowly recovering economy. Third, Mr Abe, who remained politically unassailable in 2014, could face a trickier run-up to the election for the presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in September. A less than stellar win in this contest, and for the LDP in a series of local elections in the spring, could erode his ability to get things done.
上記の部分はベーシックな書き方で主要ポイントを３つあげていますね。
Three key events will test the three-part plan of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, to restore some vim to the economy.
Second, a further rise in the consumption tax, Japan’s version of value-added tax (VAT), is due in October, 18 months after one in 2014.
サイトにいってもらうとわかりますが、記事の写真にはLand of the rising taxというキャプションがありました。もちろんこれは日本の別称としてメディアでよく使われるLand of the Rising Sunから来ています。英英辞典では載せていないものがほとんどですが、英和辞典は必ずといっていいほど載せています。こういったローカライズ対策も英和辞典が果たす役割でしょうね。
（ウィズダム） Land of the Rising Sun 〖the ～〗日出づる国〘日本のこと〙.
（Wikipedia） Nihon and Nippon[edit] The Japanese name for Japan, 日本, can be pronounced either Nihon or Nippon. Both readings come from the on'yomi.
日 (nichi) means "sun" or "day"; 本 (hon) means "base" or "origin". The compound means "base of the sun" or "sunrise" (from a Chinese point of view, the sun rises from Japan); it is of course a source for the popular Western description of Japan as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
The latest round of Abenomics in Japan boosted shares in the world’s third largest economy today, offsetting the impact of the first US fiscal shutdown for 17 years.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended months of speculation by raising the country’s sales tax from April next year in a move supporters believe is critical to tackling the country’s national debt.
Abe will also unveil an economic stimulus package to “ease the impact” of the rise, which others claim could derail Japan’s economic recovery. The package is expected to include benefits for low-income earners and incentives to boost investment and wages.
Tamzin Booth is The Economist's Tokyo bureau chief, writing on Japan's politics, business and economy. She previously covered European business for the newspaper, based in Paris. Before that she was media editor, based in London. She joined The Economist in 2001 as a writer on finance, having previously worked for the Wall Street Journal. Before pursuing a career in journalism, Ms Booth worked in equity research at Salomon Brothers in Hong Kong, specialising in banking, and prior to that she was a trainee chartered accountant at Coopers & Lybrand in London. She studied English literature at Oxford University.
Takata CEO Takes Out Newspaper Ads Amid Air-Bag Crisis By Craig Trudell and Masatsugu Horie Dec 18, 2014 8:29 PM GMT+0900 Takata Corp. (7312), the embattled air-bag maker, stepped up its response to a global auto-safety crisis by distributing an open letter from its chief executive officer in U.S. and German newspapers. Shigehisa Takada, Takata’s chairman and grandson of the company founder, wrote in the letter that the parts maker is tripling capacity to test its air-bag inflators. The devices have ruptured in five fatal accidents and have led to recalls of more than 20 million vehicles.
“Even one failure is unacceptable and we are truly and deeply saddened that five fatalities have been attributed to auto accidents where Takata air bags malfunctioned,” Takada, 48, wrote. “We understand the public’s concerns and we take them seriously.”
The advertisements in newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Detroit Free Press show Takata is intensifying efforts to defend itself amid a crisis that’s sent its shares plunging 56 percent this year. Takata hired public-relations firm Sard Verbinnen & Co. this month and said Alby Berman, vice president of global communications, is retiring while still consulting for the Tokyo-based company.
Since its founding, Takata’s number one priority has been the safety of the traveling public. Our airbags have deployed safely in more than two million auto accidents around the world since we began producing them in 1987, saving many thousands of lives. In 2014 alone, thousands of serious injuries and deaths have been prevented worldwide by Takata airbags.
Today we are as focused on our mission as ever. Even one failure is unacceptable and we are truly and deeply saddened that five fatalities have been attributed to auto accidents where Takata airbags malfunctioned. We understand the public’s concerns and we take them seriously.
There should be no mistaking Takata’s position on the recently announced expanded safety campaigns and recalls.
Takata will work with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the automakers to increase the production capacity for replacement airbags to support all safety campaigns or further recalls announced by the automakers. We are building on existing efforts, led by our most senior engineers, to address any and all safety issues — but we recognize more must be done, now.
以下の部分が死傷者を出してしまったことに対するタカタ側からの直接のコメントになります。 where Takata airbags malfunctioned.とmalfunctionがここでは動詞で使われています。品詞を柔軟に読み取っていきたいですね。
Even one failure is unacceptable and we are truly and deeply saddened that five fatalities have been attributed to auto accidents where Takata airbags malfunctioned. We understand the public’s concerns and we take them seriously.
「TOEICを学んでいたら間違えなかったのに。。。」と少し意地悪なタイトルをつけてしまったのは、最後の締めの大事な言葉でI am personally committed to do what is necessary for Takataとやらかしてしまっていたからです。。。TOEICkerならすぐにピンとくるものですね。
In tackling all these challenges, Takata will work in unison with automakers to advance our common goal of putting the safety of consumers first. I am personally committed to do what is necessary for Takata to regain the full confidence of the public and our customers. Sincerely,
Shigehisa Takada Chairman and CEO
TEX加藤さんの金フレは以下のように説明してくれています。
We are committed to providing quality service. 当社は質の高いサービスを提供することに熱心に取り組んでいます。
このtoは前置詞なので、後に名詞または動名詞が続く語法にも注意。
オックスフォードでもto doingと明記しています。
（オックスフォード） promise/say definitely 3 [transitive, often passive] to promise sincerely that you will definitely do something, keep to an agreement or arrangement, etc. commit someone/yourself (to something/to doing something) The President is committed to reforming health care. Borrowers should think carefully before committing themselves to taking out a loan.
（ネットで見つけた文章） We are here for the long term and I am personally committed to doing the best I can for our province.
I am personally committed to doing everything I can, to continue pursuing civil, peaceful and resolute means towards a way out of the national crisis and a new workable plan.
I am personally committed to doing my utmost to ensure that no OSCE activity contributes to any form of human trafficking.
Why don’t we have lunch together?とあったら、TOEICkerならすぐに「〜しよう」という意味の勧誘・提案表現だとわかるでしょう。Why don’t you ..?やWhy don’t we …?は定番表現と認知されていますね。
ではWhy don’t you lean from one crisis to another?とあればどうでしょう？「つぎつぎと起こる危機から学んでいきましょう」でしょうか。なんかピンとこないです。。。でもパラグラフ全体を読めば、この文章の意味を理解できます。今週のTIMEのPerson of the Yearで登場していた国境なき医師団のDr. Joanne Liuです。
動画でも国境なき医師団をフランス語の呼び名のママMédecins Sans Frontièresと紹介していますね。TIMEでもフランス語を併記しています。その場合は動画のようにメディサン・サン・フロンティエとフランス語っぽく読みたいです（笑）。
I remember very well the WHO saying the outbreak was under control, and it took us awhile to convince them that it was not. The wake-up call came when volunteers from Samaritan’s Purse were infected in late July. Suddenly, Ebola wasn’t such a distant reality for the Western world.
It’s uncomfortable to have the pressure of being the key responder to a crisis as great as Ebola. The most appalling thing from this epidemic is that when there’s a public-health emergency, no one feels responsible to tackle it or respond. Why don’t we learn from one crisis to another?
エボラのような大きな規模の危機に中心となって対応しなければいけないプレッシャーは大変なものです。エボラの流行で一番恐ろしいことは、公衆衛生の緊急事態で誰も自分が対応すべき、対策をとるべきだと責任を感じないことです。どうして次々と起こる危機から我々は学ばないのでしょうか。 Why don’t we .. .?が「どうして〜しないのか」と文字通りの意味で使われています。これは質問というわけではないので、声に出すとすれば最後は下り調子になるでしょう。
Why don’t we learn from one crisis to another? どうして次々と起こる危機から我々は学ばないのでしょうか。
幸い公式問題集でWhy don’t you ..?やWhy don’t we …?とあれば提案・勧誘表現の意味がほとんどですが、柔軟に意味をとれるようにしたいですね。このような文章の流れがあれば文意が取りやすいですが、パート2ではいきなりWhy don’t we learn from one crisis to another?だけで始まりますから、こういう流れを意識できないと意味がとれずにフリーズしてしまうことが起きます。このあたりがパート⒉の難しいところといえそうです。
今回のLiuさんの記事は雑誌とサイトでは長さが違っていました。ご紹介したのは短い雑誌記事の方です。サイトではWhy don’t we learn from one crisis to another?の後に以下の文章が続いていました。公的機関の不甲斐なさを批判しています。
I find it absolutely ridiculous and unreasonable to ask a private international organization like MSF to become the leader of this response. 全くばかげた理不尽なことだと思います。MSFのような、いち民間国際組織に率先して今回の対応に当たるよう依頼するのですから。
I remember very well the WHO saying the outbreak was under control, and it took us awhile to convince them that it was not. When WHO gives the signal, people cannot ignore it anymore. They cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. But the harsh reality is that, looking at the cold figures, there were around 2,000 people infected in early August. That’s less than the number of people dying in other crises such as in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Gaza. So it was hard to bring a sense of urgency. People asked, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I replied ‘Our teams are in those places too, including for Syria, Myanmar and Ukraine, we are stretched, yet we are also responding to the Ebola epidemic.’
The wake-up call came when volunteers from Samaritan’s Purse were infected in late July. Suddenly, Ebola wasn’t such a distant reality for the Western world. A few days after that, the WHO declared a health emergency of international concern.
公式問題集でも文字通りの「どうして〜しないのか」という意味でWhy didn’t you …?がありました。
Why didn't you ride your bicycle to work? どうして自転車通勤しなかったの？
（コリンズ） geoengineering the application of scientific processes to affect the global environment, esp in order to counter the effects of climate change
（アメリカンヘリテージ） geoengineering 1. Engineering that involves large-scale manipulation of the earth's environment, especially as applied to climate change caused by global warming, as in sequestering carbon or increasing the amount of solar radiation reflected from the earth back into space. 2. Engineering applied to geologic structures, as in building tunnels.
The irony in discussions about climate engineering is that, while society considers its merits, the process itself is already in full swing. With vast amounts of heat-trapping molecules released each day into the atmosphere, humans are deliberately altering the planet’s climate in unpredictable ways. The magnitude of the resulting climate change is worryingly uncertain. Even more uncertain are the physical, social and economic side effects of global warming. There is every reason to believe that, by and large, they will be harmful.
Why, then, is the idea that future generations could use a little science and engineering to deliberately cool the world so controversial? The answer, of course, is that the cure could be worse than the disease.
There are some aspects of geoengineering on which all can agree. It should not distract from efforts to curb emissions. An effective political agreement to radically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as that being discussed this week at the United Nations climate-change conference in Lima, must take priority over speculative notions to instead tinker with the atmosphere to meet climate goals.
In fact, geoengineering practices that do pose significant further risk to the environment must be prohibited, if necessary by international law. After all, no single nation — let alone any faction of science — can assume the right to deliberately modify the physical set-up of the planet.
Yet caving in to this opposition would raise, rather than reduce, the dangers to the planet. Geoengineering is not an alternative to mitigating climate change by cutting carbon emissions, but it may be needed as a complement to it. Although pressure for cuts in carbon emissions through negotiations such as those currently taking place in Lima is yielding results—witness the recent agreement by China and America on new reduction targets—it has so far been insufficient to the task, and emissions look set to rise for decades yet.
Even if emissions do eventually start to fall, the cuts will take decades to have any effect so temperatures are likely to go on going up for some time. Although they have not soared in the past couple of decades as they did in the 1980s and 1990s, there is a fair chance that this year will tie with the hottest on record. The planet is not getting cooler and the pressures on the climate are unlikely to go away. It is therefore not too hard to imagine a world, decades hence, in which emissions are falling but temperatures are rising steeply and the ability to adapt to them has been stretched too far. An additional way to stabilise temperatures might then seem in order. Geoengineering offers that possibility.
CLIMATE FEEDBACK Testing geoengineering: a catch 22 28 Jan 2010 | 19:04 GMT | Posted by Olive Heffernan | Category: Climate Policy, Geoengineering, Mason Inman, Opinion, Society Guest contribution by Mason Inman
Testing still presents a Catch-22. To get a real sense of how aerosol geoengineering would work, you need to do a full-scale test. But if you do a full-scale test, then there is a good chance of it having serious side-effects. So it’s not clear how we would get the evidence that King called for, to make sure that “the unintended consequences have been fully evaluated.” Building an international consensus, through a “broadly accessible, transparent, and international political process”, is the way to move forward, Blackstock and Long argue.
But to me, geoengineering with sulphate aerosols still seems like some new, experimental chemotherapy drug that has a chance of saving the patient, but that will probably have severe side-effects. Doctors only test these drugs on the sickest, most desperate of patients, those with few or no other options. How desperate, I wonder, will the world have to be to bring everyone to the table and hash out an agreement on geoengineering — or even just on regulating the trials?
ここでは、以下のように使われていますね。
Testing still presents a Catch-22. To get a real sense of how aerosol geoengineering would work, you need to do a full-scale test. But if you do a full-scale test, then there is a good chance of it having serious side-effects. テストは未だにCatch 22の状態である。実際のエアロゾルの地球工学の働きを知るには、本格的なテストが必要だが、本格的なテストをすれば、予期せぬ深刻な影響を引き起こす可能性がある。
（コウビルド） If you describe a situation as a Catch-22, you mean it is an impossible situation because you cannot do one thing until you do another thing, but you cannot do the second thing until you do the first thing. ⇒ “It's a Catch 22 situation here. Nobody wants to support you until you're successful, but without the support how can you ever be successful?”
（ロングマン） an impossible situation that you cannot solve because you need to do one thing in order to do a second thing, but you cannot do the second thing until you have done the first: It's a Catch-22 situation - without experience you can't get a job and without a job you can't get experience.
Nobody wants to support you until you're successful, but without the support how can you ever be successful?” 成功していないので誰もサポートしようとはしない。でもサポートなしにどうやったら成功できるのか。
without experience you can't get a job and without a job you can't get experience. 経験がないと仕事を得られないし、仕事がないと経験が得られない。
Unbroken Featurette: How Miyavi Became Watanabe Angelina Jolie discusses casting Japanese musician Miyavi as the vicious P.O.W. camp guard Watanabe—not because he would enjoy playing a villain, but the exact opposite.
先月のVanity FairはAngelina JolieをWoman of the Yearに選んでいました。4000語近くの記事で、Unbrokenの撮影とブラピとの結婚や家族のことを中心に描いています。
Woman of the Year She’s a newlywed mother of six, a superstar with little trace of the diva, a woman who bears witness to the terrible things people do even as she continues to celebrate the human spirit. Whether advocating for refugees or directing the forthcoming World War II survival epic, Unbroken, Angelina Jolie lets Janine Di Giovanni accompany her around the globe, discussing kids, marriage, war, and the hero she just lost. BY JANINE DI GIOVANNI NOVEMBER 17, 2014 11:23 AM
そんな記事でもMiyaviのことを結構大きく取り上げています。
Jolie is now shooting scenes that depict those brutal days. Given the grim realities that the film explores, the atmosphere on the set is subdued, even somber. The skinny guys look haunted. In their trailers, the lead actors are also deep into character. Louis Zamperini's real-life nemesis was a vicious sergeant named Mutsuhiro Watanabe. For this role, Jolie has cast Miyavi, a striking Japanese pop star (real name: Takamasa Ishihara). Miyavi, 33, recalls that Jolie encouraged him to delve into the mind-set of the guard, so much so that after one particularly intense scene—which required him to beat Zamperini—he says he felt such physical revulsion he ended up vomiting. “It was awful torture for me to hate the other actors—I had to have hatred for them. When I had to beat them, I had to think of protecting my family. At the same time I didn't want to be just a bad guy. I wanted to put humanity in this role. [Mutsuhiro] was both crazy and sadistic, but also weak and traumatized.”
When Miyavi met Jolie in Tokyo (“At a nightclub!” he says, as a joke), he was unconvinced he could take on the role. “It's a story that is still painful for my country. But she told me she wanted to make a bridge between all countries that had conflict. She was very persuasive.” Even so, he confides, after filming some of the more violent torture scenes, “I couldn't stop crying.”
Unbroken, as it turns out, is a $65 million movie, with Oscar ambitions, Universal's imprimatur, and a rarefied pedigree. (Joel and Ethan Coen worked extensively on the script.) It's an entirely different film from Jolie's last directorial effort, In the Land of Blood and Honey. That picture, from 2011—while startling and powerful—was much more low-key and way less Hollywood.
This set, in fact, looks like something Clint Eastwood might have devised for his World War II diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. (Eastwood directed Jolie in one of her most stunning performances, as a grieving mother, in Changeling.) Jolie, however, says she sought inspiration less from Eastwood than from Sidney Lumet's 1965 film The Hill, a gripping wartime drama with Sean Connery set in a British military prison in North Africa.
The Bekaa Valley, Lebanon February 2014 In February, she takes a break from editing Unbroken in L.A. and lands at the Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. Upon arriving, there is much hand-shaking, picture-taking, and government protocol. But she is unassuming, dressed in her standard field uniform: slim pants, ballerinas, and a loose blouse. She sticks to black, white, navy, and gray; they travel more easily.
She actually looks cheerful, despite the fact that she has just flown 7,500 miles—after logging long hours locked in an editing suite. She is a tight hugger. When I tell her she looks great, she shrugs and says, “It's good concealer.”
We head up to the Bekaa Valley. The refugee crisis here is dire, with more than two million (by this writing, in early fall, more than three million) people having fled the war in Syria for Jordan, Turkey, and elsewhere—many to Lebanon. Jolie spends the next day with children who have been displaced, seeking ways to cut through the red tape and helping to prioritize their needs for policymakers who are in a position to assist them. The following day, en route to a meeting with the prime minister of Lebanon, she makes a point of stopping off in the U.N.H.C.R. field office to have breakfast with the local personnel. One of the officers, who organizes the cars that shuttle between Beirut and the Bekaa, is longing for a photo of himself and Jolie—for his mother, he says. A sizable gathering of senior staff and local politicians is waiting to talk to her. But the moment she hears his request, she walks over, smiles brightly, and poses.
Just over a year ago, Brad Pitt was still her fiancé, starring in another World War II film, Fury, half a world away, in England. And the two would exchange handwritten notes—sending them off by regular mail—because that's what couples did during the war. Such details, and authenticity, are important to Jolie. In Bosnia, while shooting In the Land of Blood and Honey, she spoke to journalists who had reported on the war extensively to make sure that the radio reports in the film were portrayed accurately. She studied the history of the former Yugoslavia and conferred, on occasion, with veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who had served as President Clinton's envoy to the Balkans and, later, as special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, reporting to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In a similar way, Jolie preps thoroughly for her humanitarian missions, getting briefed by trusted advisers at the U.N., by foreign-policy experts, and by colleagues from the Council on Foreign Relations, of which she is a member. Not too many people in the Directors Guild of America can say that.
Especially provocative is a passage in the book that accuses the Japanese of engaging in the cannibalism of POWs. It is not clear how much of that will be in the movie, but in Japan that is too much for some. “There was absolutely no cannibalism,” claimed Mutsuhiro Takeuchi, a nationalist-leaning educator and Shinto priest. “That is not our custom.”
Takeuchi acknowledged Jolie is free to make whatever movie she wants, stressing that Shinto believes in forgive-and-forget. But he urged Jolie to study history, saying executed war criminals were charged with political crimes, not torture.
The release of “Unbroken” comes at a time when some in Japan are downplaying its colonization of its Asian neighbors and the war of aggression waged by the Imperial Japanese Army as it entered World War II.
For example, some politicians dispute the role played by Imperial Japanese soldiers in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which an estimated 300,000 Chinese were killed in a weekslong orgy of rape and murder. They say the tally is a vast overestimate.
Similarly, they reject historical studies that show women from several countries, especially Korea, were forced into prostitution by the Imperial Japanese military. Some oppose the term “sex slave,” which the U.N. uses, preferring the vague and euphemistic term “comfort women” instead.
In the acknowledgments of “The Audacity of Hope,” published while Obama was in the Senate, he wrote that Samantha Power “combed over each chapter as if it were hers.” At the time, she was a foreign-policy adviser in his office. Eight years later, many aides have left Obama’s Administration, but Power endures, in a role that is roughly equal parts envoy, protector, and, as she puts it, “pain in the ass.
Powerさんのすごいところは理想を声高に叫ぶだけでなく、現実的な実行力もあるところのようです。
Because of youth, gender, or disposition, Power has often been underestimated. Gérard Araud, the French Ambassador to Washington, who previously served at the U.N., told me, “I was expecting this sort of N.G.O. girl, considering her past, considering the book she wrote. Actually, she’s a nice mixture of liberal interventionism and Realpolitik.” A senior Administration official said, “It’s easy in some ways to dismiss someone like Samantha Power. Oh, she cares about the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed! But what she’s managed to do is link the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed to core national-security interests of the United States.”
*******
As Power has risen, she has acquired an eclectic range of contacts. “I don’t know if I will help her more by praising her or attacking her,” Henry Kissinger told me. He had classified her as “one of the liberals who know their emotions better than their analysis,” but, after a series of meals and a Yankees game, he has a different view. “She has an excellent analytical mind, and even on matters where I might have come to different conclusions I respected her analysis. Second, she knew the difference between being a professor and being a policymaker, so, when she analyzed contemporary problems, she and I didn’t differ all that much.”
The outlines of her legacy were becoming clear: she had influenced a range of issues outside the center ring, including Ebola and the Central African Republic, but on the most essential crises of her time—Syria and Iraq—she had been forced to accept the limits of her ability to shape events. Power rejects the facile narrative that presents itself—the education, the chastening. “The way that kind of story is told is ‘She wrote the book, she was critical because she didn’t really understand how hard it was,’ ” she said. “And then the assumption is Eliza Doolittle learned how hard it is, and then that makes her less critical, or more accepting of crummy outcomes.” She argued, “You learn in government what the obstacles are. But that’s not so you can go take a nap. It’s so you can figure out how to scale them or work around them. Does one get a better sense about context and about impediments and about trade-offs in government? Absolutely. But those are not alibis—those are problems to be solved.”
Eric Schmidt wants you to know that robots are your friend.
That makes sense, considering that as chairman and former CEO of Google, Schmidt has been heavily involved in the development of some of the the world’s most sophisticated artificially intelligent systems, from the self-driving car to Google’s predictive search engine. The company even recently launched its own internal robotics lab. But while Schmidt admits sitting shotgun in the self-driving car is not an “altogether happy” experience (read: it’s terrifying), he also believes that all the fear of machines stealing jobs and taking over the world is unwarranted.
WSJに寄稿していたのはThe Future of the Brainなども書いているGary Marcusという研究者でした。 ホーキング博士の”spell the end of the human race”やマスクの“summoning the demon”は今後も人工知能の脅威論で参照されそうなのでフレーズごと確認しておいて方がよさそうです。
Artificial Intelligence Isn’t a Threat—Yet Superintelligent machines are still a long way off, but we need to prepare for their future rise By GARY MARCUS Dec. 11, 2014 3:07 p.m. ET
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” —Stephen Hawking, Dec. 2
Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested? Is the development of AI like “summoning the demon,” as tech pioneer Elon Musk told an audience at MIT in October? Will smart machines supersede or even annihilate humankind?
As a cognitive scientist and founder of a new startup that focuses on “machine learning,” I think about these questions nearly every day.
But let’s not panic. “Superintelligent” machines won’t be arriving soon. Computers today are good at narrow tasks carefully engineered by programmers, like balancing checkbooks and landing airplanes, but after five decades of research, they are still weak at anything that looks remotely like genuine human intelligence.
But the alarmists have a point, too. The real problem isn’t that world domination automatically follows from sufficiently increased machine intelligence; it is that we have absolutely no way, so far, of predicting or regulating what comes next. Should we demand transparency in programs that control important resources? Fund advances in techniques for “program verification,” which tries to make sure that programs do what they are designed to do? Outlaw certain specific, risky applications?
For now, anyone can write virtually any program at any time, and we have scarcely any infrastructure in place to predict or control the results. And that is a real reason for worry.
The real threat, he believes, is that education systems around the world aren’t teaching their students the skills they need to work together with these increasingly intelligent machines. “The correct concern,” Schmidt explained, “is what we’re going to do to improve the education systems and incentive systems globally, in order to get people prepared for this new world, so they can maximize their income.”
新語では、オックスフォードが今年のWord of the Yearに選んだvape（電子タバコを吸う）も収載されているようです。
The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is… vape As 2014 draws to a close, it’s time to look back and see which words have been significant throughout the past twelve months, and to announce the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. Without further ado, we can exclusively reveal that the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2014 is…. vape
Although there is a shortlist of strong contenders, as you’ll see below, it was vape that emerged victorious as Word of the Year.
What does vape mean? So, what does vape mean? It originated as an abbreviation of vapour or vaporize. The OxfordDictionaries.com definition was added in August 2014: the verb means ‘to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device’, while both the device and the action can also be known as a vape. The associated noun vaping is also liste
(英辞郎) BlackBerry thumb 携帯親指炎症◆親指1本で繰り返し携帯端末のキーを押すことにより、親指の基部周辺に起きる筋肉と腱の炎症。
(urban dictionary) blackberry thumb Pain of the thumb from excessive use of a blackberry device keyboard I spent three hours a day checking email and now I've got a case of blackberry thumb by jeffw October 17, 2005
Notice regarding the temporary suspension of Telephone line 09/23/14 Please be informed that Service Centers might be temporarily unavailable due to system upgrade as belows(Excluding Korea Region). • Europe/CIS Region : September 28 10:00 P.M. ~ September 28 11:00 P.M. • Japan Region : September 29 10:00 P.M. ~ September 29 11:00 P.M. • U.S. Region : September 29 07:00 P.M. ~ September 29 08:00 P.M. • Other Region : September 25 07:00 P.M. ~ September 25 08:00 P.M. (Local Standard Time)
下記の６つの部分全てがあまりにもTOEIC的ですね。
Please be informed be temporarily unavailable due to system upgrade as bellows (Excluding Korea Region).
あえて一点指摘するならPlease be informedはTOEICならplease be advisedとなる可能性が高そうなことぐらいでしょうか。
Please be advised that due to engine trouble, departing Train 55 to Vermont is not yet ready to receive passengers.
ちょっと長めの告知もTOEICテイストばっちりです。
Notice of limited service at airport during New Passenger System transition period 09/18/14 Thank you for using our Korean Air website. Reservations/Ticketing related services may be limited at the airport for few months from September 21, 2014 due to the implementation of our new passenger system. For any services related to reservation/ticketing, please contact any of the Korean Air city branch office or service center or use our homepage and complete your needs prior to your departure date.
Also, please arrive at the airport with sufficient time as the Kiosk Check-in will be limited and check-in may take longer than usual. For international flights, seats can be conveniently pre-assigned using web check-in or mobile check-in.
SKYPASS Card Issue Information 11/04/14 Korean Air recommends the use of a mobile card to take part in the conservation of resources and environmental policies.
Korean Air does not issue tangible plastic cards at the time of registration.
You can use your SKYPASS by retrieving your ‘Mobile SKYPASS Card’ through the Korean Air Mobile Website or the smartphone application. The Mobile SKYPASS Card is convenient to carry, and you do not need to worry about losing your card. Its functions are identical to that of a tangible card for earning mileage and redeeming your bonus miles.
You may also print a copy of your SKYPASS Card image under the “My Page” menu found on the Korean Air homepage.
You can earn mileage without your SKYPASS card by providing your membership number at the time of booking your flight or at check-in.
However, when you become an Elite SKYPASS member (Morning Calm Club, Morning Calm Premium, Million Miler), a tangible, plastic membership card will be sent to your mailing address for you to take advantage of Korean Air and SkyTeam Elite Benefits. Please carry your Elite member card with you during your travels.
If you wish to acquire a tangible plastic card, you can submit your request at the Korean Air main branch, an airport (Incheon/Gimpo/Busan/Jeju in Korea), or the Service Center.
Important: Please print and keep the confirmation page for your records. Because no physical ticket will be issued, you must present this confirmation upon arrival.
大韓航空のナッツ問題はAirline Exec Literally Goes Nuts Over Nutsと英語ではうまいことからかわれてしまっていますが、謝罪の場面はTOEICをやっていればこわくないですね。
（ロングマン） go nuts spoken a) to become very excited because something good has just happened: The crowd went nuts after the third touchdown. b) to become very angry about something: Mom's going to go nuts if you don't clean this mess up.
apologize for （物事）とapologize to （人）の両方の形が使われていました。TOEICをやっていれば、基本的なシチュエーションの基本的な言い回しを学ぶことができます。英語教育のあるべき姿を追求するのはいいですが、実践に使えるかどうかという問題意識も教育現場の人にはもっていただきたいと思います。
"I sincerely apologize for causing trouble for everyone. I'm sorry,"
"I apologize to the people of this country as chairman of Korean Air and as a father for the trouble caused by my daughter's foolish conduct," said Cho, who bowed deeply in front of media crowded in the lobby of the airline's headquarters.
記事で"I will apologize sincerely... in person,"とあったように、個人的に従業員に謝りにいっているようです。offer a personal apologyという表現も学べます。
SEOUL, Dec. 14 (Yonhap) -- Former Korean Air Lines Co. Vice President Cho Hyun-ah apologized to a cabin crew chief Sunday for deplaning him for his alleged breach of snack-serving protocol, the company said.
Cho visited the home of the chief flight attendant to offer a personal apology, but failed to meet him since he was not home, leaving a short apology note, Korean Air said.
The eldest daughter of the Korean Air chairman also visited the residence of a female flight attendant who had served nuts to her, but she was away from home, so the former vice president left behind a similar letter, the company added.
So what is a chaebol? Imagine a sprawling conglomerate like General Electric, but run by and controlled by one family. In South Korea, chaebols are the very lifeblood of the country, with the five largest bringing in two-thirds of South Korea's gross domestic product.
Many of their names are familiar to Americans: Samsung, LG, Hyundai. But the inner workings of the chaebols are likely unfamiliar to many outside South Korea. Executives often hold less power than family members who are appointed to roles within the firms, and several family members have been involved in nepotism-tinged scandals.
The power of the chaebols and the strong culture of nepotism have South Koreans worried, according to a May poll from the Segye Times and the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. Nine out of 10 Koreans in their 20s said that nepotism will ruin the country, the poll found. While Korean Air chairman Cho Yang-ho apologized for his daughter's behavior, it's unclear whether the nut-rage scandal will lead to any greater soul-searching among the country's chaebol families. (It's also Korean tradition that parents take the blame for their kids' mistakes, the Korean Times notes.)
The media dubbed her a spoiled “princess” who had brought international shame on the country.とtelegraphは彼女の騒動を紹介していますが、財閥と甘やかされたバカ息子ならぬバカ娘というステレオタイプに当てはめて理解していいのか、という以下のコラムは考えさせられます。今回の件の真相はわかりませんが、フライトアテンダントがどうしようもなかった、そして上司の対応も悪かった可能性だってあり得たかもしれないのですから。
Which makes me automatically suspicious. To note, I am not necessarily suspicious of what actually went down on that flight. I am suspicious and wary of how we are interpreting what actually happened into an almost cathartic narrative of good vs. evil based on our stereotypes of who Cho represents, not who Cho really is as an individual. In a way, this incident has become a symbolic, moral fable that explains everything that’s wrong in Korean society, with Cho as the evil step mother. In the Korean Air incident, the stereotype that Cho represents is that of a super-elite with inherited wealth and power with an ingrained sense of over-blown entitlement.
And we know that stereotypes matter. These mostly unconscious socio-cultural beliefs and expectations over specific groups of people drive our reactions and behaviors, with serious and even lethal consequences. We have just seen how racist stereotypes led to the deaths of two black men and one black child recently in the U.S. precisely because they shape how the police behave when faced with a black male.
このコラムでは女性だから、生意気だと捉えられているのではとしています。
So, what if Cho were a man? Could a popular interpretation of the events be a bit more nuanced then? Could Cho’s actions be that of a passionate, decisive executive who saw a problem and made a front-line decision ― knowing full well of the consequences of such a decision ― because he was a perfectionist and truly cared about providing the highest quality passenger care to his customers, firmly believing that “everything was in the details,” even as trivial as macadamia nuts? Admittedly, his actions were over-the-top, but his intentions were good and instincts unerringly accurate. After all, this is the type of leadership that’s needed for Korean Air to catch up to Asiana in overall airline ranking in this highly competitive industry.
Contrast this to the popular narrative of an over-privileged woman with an inflated sense of importance losing her temper over some triviality and lashing out irrationally at everyone, not to mention turning spiteful and vindictive when people start calling her out.
Perhaps this is exactly what happened. Perhaps Cho is exactly how the current narrative describes her. After all, it’s difficult to defend what she did on that flight even if half of what’s reported is true. However, it’s also difficult not to notice strands of gender stereotyping in the popular narrative; that of a bitchy, irrational, manipulating, and overly-ambitious woman trying to climb the corporate ladder beyond her capability.
（ウィズダム）fried noodles; chow mein （プログレッシブ）chow mein; fried noodles （ルミナス）yaki-soba [U], noodles grilled with vegetables and meat.
'Excuse me, waiter, there's a bug in my noodles.' Japanese snackers have discovered some unsavory ingredients in their food lately, forcing one beloved noodle brand to suspend its entire production line. The creepy-crawly toppings could dent the industry's reputation.
Fried noodle fans in Japan were not amused when the "foreign objects" in their food turned out not to be specks of meat but bona fide cockroaches.
Maruka Foods confirmed it had suspended its entire production line and was recalling two types of instant fried noodles after a consumer said he had picked insect appendages out of his meal.
***** Maker of ‘Peyoung’ noodles halts sales of all items after insect complaint 8:38 pm, December 12, 2014 Jiji Press MAEBASHI (Jiji Press) — Maruka Foods Corp. said Thursday that it will halt production at its two plants and suspend sales of all its 24 products for the time being following a complaint after an insect was found in its “Peyoung” brand instant noodles. The company, based in Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture, announced on Dec. 4 a voluntary recall of some 46,000 packs of two Peyoung products following the complaint.
Two Japanese food companies have pulled products from store shelves and issued a recall after pieces of cockroaches were found in their noodle meals.
Maruka Foods Corp., based in Gunma prefecture, confirmed Thursday that cockroach pieces had been found in one of its packages of instant noodles, and that it “could not deny the possibility” that some products contaminated with foreign objects might have accidentally been shipped from its factory. The problem came to light after one consumer posted a photo online that showed pieces of an insect in Maruka’s peyoung brand instant noodles.
Myojo Ippei-chan Instant Yakisoba Noodles This Soupless Noodle, Yakisoba (Japanese style lo mein) has been one of the best instant noodles in Japan. The rich tasted sauce is moreish and the special Mayo comes with it is a superb one. Try this Japanese lo mein, but be careful, it is quite addictive...
テイクアウトのメニューとしても知られているので、Yakisoba (Japanese style lo mein)はわかりやすいんじゃないかと思います。
（Wikipedia） American Chinese cuisine[edit] In American Chinese restaurants, lo mein is a popular take-out food. In this setting, lo mein noodles are usually stirred with a sauce made from soy sauce and other seasonings. Vegetables such as bok choy and cabbage can be mixed in and meats like roast pork, beef or chicken are often added. Shrimp lo mein, lobster lo mein, vegetable lo mein, and "House" lo mein (more than one meat) are sometimes available.
A version sold in many places in western North America is sometimes labeled as chow mein. However, the two are prepared differently. Chow mein is fried to varying degrees of crispness, while lo mein is kept soft.[4]
（アメリカンヘリテージ） lo mein A dish of boiled wheat noodles stir-fried with vegetables, seasonings, and other ingredients, such as chicken. [Cantonese lou1 min6 : lou1, to stir, mix (akin to Mandarin lāo, to scoop out, from Middle Chinese law), Cantonese min6, noodle; see CHOW MEIN.]
chow mein A dish consisting of stewed vegetables, often with chopped meat or shrimp, served over fried noodles. [From a Chinese dialectal form akin to Cantonese caau2 min6 (equivalent to Mandarin chǎomián) : caau2, to stir-fry (from Middle Chinese tî?§haî?§w´) + min6, noodles (from Middle Chinese mjian`).]
Little House on the Prairie is celebrating its 40th anniversary as the one-time staple of prime-time television that ran from 1974 to 1983.
The television adventures of the 19th-century Ingalls family, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved book series, is being celebrated with a remastered edition of its first two seasons. The Blu-Ray/DVD package features a tribute to the show's star and director Michael Landon.
Landon starred as young stud 'Little Joe' Cartwright in 427 episodes of Bonanza before ruling the Little House roost as gentle patriarch Charles Ingalls. He died in 1991.
この作品は、オックスフォードやロングマンの学習辞典でも載っています。
Little House on the Prairie the title of a novel published in 1935 by the US writer Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), one of the series based on her childhood experiences travelling in the Mid-West. A popular television series (1974–84) was based on the novels.
Little House on the Prairie a book for children by the US writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, which describes her life as a child in the Midwest in the 19th century, when her family were among the first white people to live there. It is also the name of a popular US television programme of the 1970s, which was based on Wilder's books.
The autobiography predates Wilder's "Little House" series with seven novels that depict real moments of Wilder's life, but are mostly "dramatized and made up" with the help of her daughter and editor, Rose Wilder Lane.
Wilder and her daughter simply fabricated characters and events for the drama.
Actress Melissa Sue Anderson, left, who plays Mary for the television series " Little House on the Prairie" is escorted by actor Michael Landon, who plays her father, are shown during the taping of Mary's wedding scene in Los Angeles in 1978. One such false scene included her father, Charles Ingalls, confronting irate railroad workers with a gun.
But that's nowhere close to the factual liberties the 1974 NBC series starring Michael Landon took with Wilder's literature. Pa was depicted as a clean shaven pioneer with an adopted son.
In truth, "Pa had the ugliest beard," Koupal said.
The TV series also married Mary with another blind man in the town of Walnut Grove which never happened.
Pioneer Girl offers Wilder's story from her own word.
"She transports herself back to the prairie of her youth ... to that place that most people don't live in," Koupal added.
The small South Dakota town of her childhood, De Smet, remains with its loft stores even if it no longer is how Wilder remembered.
In describing the history of "Pioneer Girl" in her introductory essay, Hill also addresses the complex and much-speculated-about relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose as writers. William Holtz, author of a biography of Rose, is among those who argue that Rose did so much work on the "Little House" books she can be considered their ghostwriter. Rose was the more experienced writer and editor when her mother began writing her autobiography. Hill writes:
"Lane has been 'rewriting' or editing manuscripts for other writers, including Wilder, for about fifteen years when she took on 'Pioneer Girl.' Furthermore, based on Wilder's notes to Lane in the original 'Pioneer Girl' manuscript, it is clear that Wilder expected her daughter to review and edit it for publication."
However, Hill doesn't reach the same conclusion Holtz did.
Hill describes mother and daughter's editorial back-and-forth in as much detail as the historical record allows. She notes how Rose did a rewrite of a portion of "Pioneer Girl" with a juvenile audience in mind, a text that might be seen as a precursor of the first of Wilder's famed novels, "Little House in the Big Woods." But Wilder took her daughter's unauthorized rewrite, along with suggestions from an editor who wanted more details about the pioneering experience, and wrote the larger "Big Woods" book.
その前にFeinstein: ‘Torture doesn’t work’ is takeaway of CIA reportというNewshourをチェックしておきます。以前のブログ「英辞郎にも載っていないけど、要チェックの語」取り上げたようにtakeawayが使われていますね。
（ケンブリッジ） takeaway [C or U] something that you get or learn from an experience, activity, etc.: the takeaway from sth What's the key takeaway from this survey?
英語学習的にはMr. President, I want to thank the leader for his words and his support. They are extraordinarily welcomed and appreciated.と報告を始めていることを押さえておきたいです。
Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein gave an hourlong speech on the Senate floor Tuesday after her committee's release of a report detailing the CIA's interrogation of suspected terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. Her full remarks are below.
"Mr. President, I want to thank the leader for his words and his support. They are extraordinarily welcomed and appreciated.
"Today a 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's five and a half year review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program—which was conducted between 2002 and 2009—is being released publicly.
"The executive summary, which is going out today, is backed up by a 6,700 page classified and unredacted report (with 38,000 footnotes), which can be released if necessary at a later time. "The report released today examines the CIA's secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals and the use of coercive interrogation techniques—in some cases amounting to torture.
Foreword On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to send the Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final Study on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for declassification and subsequent public release. This action marked the culmination of a monumental effort that officially began with the Committee's decision to initiate the Study in March 2009, but which had its roots in an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes of CIA detainee interrogations that began in December 2007. The full Committee Study, which totals more than 6,700 pages, remains classified but is now an official Senatereport. The full report has been provided to the White House, the CIA, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the hopes that it will prevent future coercive interrogation practices and inform the management of other covert action programs. As the Chairman of the Committee since 2009,1 write to offer some additional views, context, and history. I began my service on the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2001. I remember testimony that summer from George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, that warned of a possible major terrorist event against the United States, but without specifics on the time, location, or method of attack. On September 11, 2001, the world learned the answers to those questions that had consumed the CIA and other parts of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
こういう前書きでは、関係者への感謝で閉めるのが通例です。授賞式で確認した動詞recognizeがI want to recognize the members of the staff who have endured years of long hoursのように使われています。
Finally, I want to recognize the members of the staff who have endured years of long hours poring through the difficult details of one of the lowest points in our nation's history. They have produced the most significant and comprehensive oversight report in the Committee's history, and perhaps in that of the U.S. Senate, and their contributions should be recognized and praised. （中略） Other Committee staff members have also assisted in the review and provided valuable contributions at the direction of our Committee Members. They include, among others, Jennifer Barrett, Nick Basciano, Michael Buchwald, Jim Catella, Eric Chapman, John Dickas, Lorenzo Goco, Andrew Grotto, Tressa Guenov, Clete Johnson, Michael Noblet, Michael Pevzner, Tonmiy Ross, Caroline Tess, and JamesWolfe. The Committee's Staff Director throughout the review, David Grannis, has played a central role in assisting me and guiding the Committee through this entire process. Without the expertise, patience, and work ethic of our able staff, our Members would not have been able to complete this most important work.
Dianne Feinstein Chairman Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
最後の部分の感謝の表現も自分から使えるようにしたいです。
Without the expertise, patience, and work ethic of our able staff, our Members would not have been able to complete this most important work.
work ethicを「労働倫理」と訳してしまうと場違いな感じがしますので、「仕事への取り組み姿勢」のように理解すればいいのではないでしょうか。ケンブリッジビジネスによるとwork ethicだけでも「仕事熱心な態度」を指すようですね。
（ケンブリッジビジネス） work ethic the way that someone feels about the importance of work, usually the belief that it is important to work hard: The aim of the program is to instil a work ethic and a sense of teamwork in young people. Managers often say that older workers are friendlier to customers and have a better work ethic than their younger counterparts. The unemployed are often criticized for having a poor work ethic.
２０個の結論があげられていましたが、とりあえず最初のものをみてみます。ニューズアワーの見出しでは‘Torture doesn’t work’ とありましたが、報告書ではThe CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.と表現しています。ここらあたりの語り口の違いを実際の素材にたくさん触れて感じていくようにしたいです。
The Committee makes the following findings and conclusions: #1: The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees. The Committee finds, based on a review of CIA interrogation records, that the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation. For example, according to CIA records, seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody.* CIAdetaineeswhoweresubjectedtotheCIA'senhancedinterrogationtechniques were usually subjected to the techniques immediately after being rendered to CIA custody. Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques. While being subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and afterwards, multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence. Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities. At numerous times thi'oughoutthe CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, CIA personnel assessed that the most effective method for acquiring intelligence from detainees, including from detainees the CIA considered to be the most "high-value," was to confront the detainees with information already acquired by the Intelligence Community. CIA officers regularly called into question whether the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of the techniques failed to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate intelligence.
